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Single Idea 7498

[filed under theme 22. Metaethics / C. The Good / 3. Pleasure / b. Types of pleasure ]

Full Idea

It is interesting to see the very slow move from the privileging of food, which was overwhelming in Greece, to interest in sex. Early Christians (and rules for monks) were more concerned with food. Sex only dominates from the seventeenth century.

Gist of Idea

Greeks and early Christians were much more concerned about food than about sex

Source

Michel Foucault (On the Genealogy of Ethics [1983], p.253)

Book Ref

Foucault,Michel: 'Essential Works 1954-1984 I: Ethics', ed/tr. Rabinow,Paul [Penguin 1994], p.253

A Reaction

Certainly the Greeks were obsessed with food, and the Sicilian Greeks were notorious for their love of it. Is it simply that food becomes more plentiful, or does female freedom lead to more sex? Puritanism hates the greatest pleasures the most.

The 31 ideas from Michel Foucault

7418 The idea of liberation suggests there is a human nature which has been repressed [Foucault]
7419 Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault]
7420 When logos controls our desires, we have actually become the logos [Foucault]
7422 A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations [Foucault]
7423 Philosophy and politics are fundamentally linked [Foucault]
7424 Saying games of truth were merely power relations would be a horrible exaggeration [Foucault]
7425 The aim is not to eliminate power relations, but to reduce domination [Foucault]
7426 Critical philosophy is what questions domination at every level [Foucault]
21947 Power is localised, so we either have totalitarian centralisation, or local politics [Foucault, by Gutting]
21946 Prisons gradually became our models for schools, hospitals and factories [Foucault, by Gutting]
7498 Greeks and early Christians were much more concerned about food than about sex [Foucault]
7500 Early Greeks cared about city and companions; later Greeks concentrated on the self [Foucault]
7501 Why couldn't a person's life become a work of art? [Foucault]
22235 Feelings are not unchanging, but have a history (especially if they are noble) [Foucault]
8991 Foucault can't accept that power is sometimes decent and benign [Foucault, by Scruton]
15045 The big issue since the eighteenth century has been: what is Reason? Its effect, limits and dangers? [Foucault]
15037 Why does knowledge appear in sudden bursts, and not in a smooth continuous development? [Foucault]
15038 Structuralism systematically abstracted the event from sciences, and even from history [Foucault]
15039 History lacks 'meaning', but it can be analysed in terms of its struggles [Foucault]
15040 Marxists denounced power as class domination, but never analysed its mechanics [Foucault]
15041 Power doesn't just repress, but entices us with pleasure, artefacts, knowledge and discourse [Foucault]
15042 Truth doesn't arise from solitary freedom, but from societies with constraints [Foucault]
15043 Every society has a politics of truth, concerning its values, functions, prestige and mechanisms [Foucault]
15044 'Truth' is the procedures for controlling which statements are acceptable [Foucault]
22236 The big question of the Renaissance was how to govern everything, from the state to children [Foucault]
21116 Power is used to create identities and ways of life for other people [Foucault, by Shorten]
21945 Foucault originally felt that liberating reason had become an instrument of domination [Foucault, by Gutting]
21942 Foucault challenges knowledge in psychology and sociology, not in the basic sciences [Foucault, by Gutting]
21941 Unlike Marxists, Foucault explains thought internally, without deference to conscious ideas [Foucault, by Gutting]
21939 The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting]
21940 Nature is not the basis of rights, but the willingness to risk death in asserting them [Foucault]