[z Foucault Reader interview]
Principal target of Stoic ethics was an aesthetic one.
It was a personal choice for a small elite.
The reason for making this choice was the will to live a beautiful life, and to leave to others memories of a beautiful existence.
Friendship is reciprocal, and sexual relations
are not reciprocal: in sexual relations, you can penetrate or you
are penetrated
Greek sexual
ethics: if you have friendship, it is difficult to have sexual relations.
between a man and a boy it is obvious that the
boy is only the spectator of the man’ s pleasure .
The
erection was, for the Greek of the fourth century, the sign of
activity, the main activity . But since, for Augustine and the
Christians, the erection is not something which is voluntary, it
is a sign of a passivity-it is a punishment for the first sin .
(So the Greeks were more concerned with health than with
pleasure)
sexual ethics for the Greeks:
not between people who prefer women or boys or have sex in
this way or another, but was a question of quantity and of activity
and passivity. Are you a slave of your own desires or their
master?
sexual austerity = sebekazen.
For Epictetus, you had to be able to look at a beautiful
girl or a beautiful boy without having any desire for her or him.
a philosophical movement coming from very cultivated people
in order to give to their life much more intensity, much more
beauty.
In the name of a beautiful life they were austere,
and now in the name of psychological science we seek self-fulfillment.
PRE WORKSHOP ?!
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has
become something which is related only to objects and not to
individuals, or to life . That art is something which is specialized
or which is done by experts who are artists . But couldn’t everyone’s
life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the
house be an art object, but not our life?
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Sartre: we have to create ourselves as a work of art. (studuje Baudelaira/Flauberta cez ich diela–su bud autenticki alebo nie)
MF: i say the contrary: we should not have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind
of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation
one has to oneself to a creative activity.
like Nietzsche in The Gay Science: one should create one’s life by giving style to it through long practice and daily work.
(to uz dlho riesim—-ako “prekladat” zivot/zivotne situacie do vystupov/”umenia”/”tvorby”)
(FB + last.fm + … social media’s “profiling” ??)
If, by sexual behavior, we understand the three poles—acts, pleasure, and desire-we
have the Greek “formula, ” which is the same at the first and at
the second stage. In this Greek formula what is underscored is
“acts, ” with pleasure and desire as subsidiary: ACTE-plaisir-[desir].
I have put desire in brackets because I think that in the
Stoic ethics you start a kind of elision of desire; desire begins to
be condemned.
The Chinese “formula” would be PLAISIR-desir-[acte] . Acts
are put aside because you have to restrain acts in order to get
the maximum duration and intensity of pleasure.
The Christian “formula” puts an accent on desire and tries
to eradicate it. Acts have to become something neutral;
you have to act only to produce children, or to fulfill your conjugal
duty. And pleasure is both practically and theoretically excluded:
[desir]-acte-[plaisir] . Desire is practically excluded you have to
eradicate your desire-but theoretically very important.
And I could say that the modern “formula” is desire, which
is theoretically underlined and practically accepted, since you
have to liberate your own desire . Acts are not very important,
and pleasure-nobody knows what it is!
=
22:30 < barak> o tuzbe ale zaujimavejsie rozpraval lacan (potom ho rozvija
zizek) – tu som kedysi davno spisal vycuc jeho ‘mirror stage’
teorie, ktora hovori o tuzbe (a tyka sa aj narcizmu)
http://kyberia.sk/id/982087
22:36 < barak> budhisti to vidia moc jednoducho :)
22:37 < gnd> lacan o tuzbe sa mi vobec nepaci
22:37 < gnd> psychoanalyza suxxx
22:45 < barak> psychoanalyzu zbastardil farmaceuticky priemysel na
predpisovanie pirul, ale je dnes podcenovana, i ked ponuka dobre
metafory.
22:55 < barak> henten foucaultov quote hovori o sexualnej tuzbe (neviem ci sa
da automaticky zovseobecnovat na tuzbu ako taku), a riesi to
nejak tak, ze na sex (a suvisiace obrady) sa da pozerat ako na
vykon (biologickej/reprodukcnej) aktivity; oddavanie sa pozitku;
a splnenie tuzby.
22:57 < barak> o cinanoch tvrdi neviem preco ze chcu len sukat, takze im staci
jedna zena, ktora je tehotna max raz (ubermax dvakrat) za zivot
22:57 < barak> hah
22:57 < barak> takze neoplodnuju (acts) a netuzia (po inych zenach)….to ale
len tak smikol v rozhovore, by som to nebral nejak vazne
23:00 < barak> o sucasnych ludoch hovori ze idu za svojimi tuzbami, a ze
biologicka reprodukcia nie je az taka dolezita, a co znamena
pozitok nikto netusi
23:06 < barak> ale napisal trojdielnu buksu o historii sexuality, tak snad
nerozpraval do vetra
epimeleia heautou in ancient Greece:
The one who cared for himself had to choose among all the
things that you can know through scientific knowledge only
those kinds of things which were relative to him and important
to life .
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For the Stoics, the true self is
defined only by what I can be master of.
(why Greeks cared for the self?)
It was a question
of making one’ s life into an object for a sort of knowledge, for
a techne-for an art.
We have hardly any remnant of the idea in our society, that
the principal work of art which one has to take care of, the main
area to which one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, one’s
life, one’s existence . We find this in the Renaissance, but in a
slightly academic form, and yet again in nineteenth-century
dandyism, but those were only episodes.
In the Californian cult of the self,
one is supposed to discover one’s true self, to separate it from
that which might obscure or alienate it, to decipher its truth
thanks to psychological or psychoanalytic science, which is supposed
to be able to tell you what your true self is. Therefore,
not only do I not identify this ancient culture of the self with
what you might call the Californian cult of the self, I think they
are diametrically opposed .
What happened in between is precisely an overtuning of
the classical culture of the self. This took place when Christianity
substituted the idea of a self which one had to renounce, because
clinging to the self was opposed to God’s will, for the idea of a
self which had to be created as a work of art.
hypomnemata:
Precisely this type of notebook was coming
into vogue in Plato’s time for personal and adminIstrative
use. This new technology was as disrupting as the introduction
of the computer into private life today
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In the technical sense, the hypomnemata could be account
books, public registers, individual notebooks serving as memoranda
. Their use as books of life, guides for conduct, seems
to have become a current thing among a whole cultivated public.
Into them one entered quotations, fragments of works, examples,
and actions to which one had been witness or of which
one had read the account, reflections or reasonings which one
had heard or which had come to mind. They constituted a
material memory of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering
these as an accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation
. They also formed a raw material for the writing of more
systematic treatises in which were given arguments and means
by which to struggle against some defect (such as anger, envy,
gossip, flattery) or to overcome some difficult circumstance (a
mourning, an exile, downfall, disgrace) .
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Among all the forms this training
took (and which included abstinences, memorizations, examinations
of conscience, meditations, silence, and listening to
others), it seems that writing-the fact of writing for oneself and
for others—came quite late to play a sizable role .
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hypomnemata do not constitute an “account of oneself”; their objective is not to bring about
the confession of which-be it oral or written-has a purifying value.
The point is not to pursue
the indescribable, not to reveal the hidden, not to say the nonsaid,
but, on the contrary, to collect the already-said, to reassemble
that which one could hear or read, and this to an end
which is nothing less than the constitution of oneself.
for Christians, the self was no longer something
to be made but something to be renounced and deciphered
When grasping the mode of being of your soul, there is
no need to ask yourself what you have done, what you are
thinking, what the movements of your ideas or your representations
are, to what you are attached . That’s why you can perform
this technique of contemplation using as your object the
soul of an other. Plato never speaks of the examination of conscience-never!
among the Stoics,
where the experience of the self is not a discovering of a truth
hidden inside the self, but an attempt to determine what one
can and cannot do with one’s available freedom.
ja: greeks trained to master themselves, to be dependent on nothing; christianity teaches us that we are nothing
extraordinary thing in Descartes’s “Meditations” is
that he succeeded in substituting a subject as founder of practices
of knowledge, for a subject constituted through practices of the self
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the relationship to the self reveals to me the obvious truth of what
I see for me to apprehend that truth definitively. Thus, I can
be immoral and know the truth. I believe that this is an idea
which, more or less explicitly, was rejected by all previous culture (before Descartes).
With Descartes, direct evidence is enough.
After Descartes, we have a nonascetic subject of knowledge .
This change makes possible the institutionalization of modern
science.