The History of Sexuality, Volume 3 by Michel Foucault

Author:Michel Foucault [Foucault, Michel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-81926-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

* Rufus also notes that the standing position is tiring.

† Note, however, in Celsus, a moderate judgment: “Coition is neither to be desired overmuch, nor overmuch to be feared.”4

* It may be added that for Celsus, night is preferable “but care should be taken that by day it not be immediately followed by a meal, and at night not immediately followed by work and wakefulness.”29

4

The Work of the Soul

The regimen recommended for the sexual pleasures seems to be centered entirely on the body. Its condition, its balances, its ailments, the general or transitory dispositions in which it finds itself, function as the principal variables that ought to determine behavior. It is as if the body dictated to the body. And yet the soul has its part to play as well, and the physicians bring it into the scheme of things. For it is the soul that constantly risks carrying the body beyond its own mechanics and its elementary needs; it is the soul that prompts one to choose the times that are not suitable, to act in questionable circumstances, to contravene natural dispositions. If humans need a regimen that takes into account, with such meticulousness, all the elements of physiology, this is because they always tend to be led astray by their imaginings, their passions, and their loves. Even the proper age for beginning sexual intercourse gets confused in girls and boys alike; education and habits can cause desire to appear at the wrong time.1

The reasonable soul thus has a dual role to play: it needs to assign a regimen for the body that is actually determined by the latter’s nature, its tensions, the condition and circumstances in which it finds itself. But it will be able to assign this regimen correctly only provided it has done a good deal of work on itself: eliminated the errors, reduced the imaginings, mastered the desires, that cause it to misconstrue the sober law of the body. Athenaeus—on whom the Stoic influence is considerable—defines very clearly this labor of the soul on itself as a requisite condition of the good physical regimen. “What adults need is a complete regimen of the soul and the body … to try and calm its impulses [hormai], and to achieve a condition in which our desires [prothumiai] do not exceed our own particular powers.”2 This regimen does not require that one institute a struggle of the soul against the body, nor even that one establish means by which the soul might defend itself from the body. Rather, it is a matter of the soul’s correcting itself in order to be able to guide the body according to a law which is that of the body itself.

This work is described by the physicians in reference to three elements by which the subject risks being carried beyond the actual necessities of the organism: the movement of desire, the presence of images, the attachment to pleasure.

a. In the medical regimen it is not a question of eliminating desire. Nature herself

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