Summary of Michel Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The aphrodisia regime, defined in terms of marriage, procreation, and a disqualification of pleasure, was formulated by non-Christian philosophers and teachers, and their pagan society followed it. Christians did not follow this code of conduct, but they did follow the same principles.
#2 The work of Clement of Alexandria, at the end of the second century, offers a much ampler testimony concerning the aphrodisia regime as it seems to have been incorporated into Christian thought. The Paedagogus, though, has a different purpose: it is addressed to Christians after their conversion and their baptism, not to pagans still making their way toward the Church.
#3 The Paedagogus is a collection of rules for living a Christian life. It defines right behavior, but it also defines the right actions that lead to eternal life. The Logos, which is the principle of right action and the movement toward salvation, is the rationality of the real world and the word of God calling one to eternity.
#4 The second and third books of the Paedagogus are a code for living. Underneath the apparent disorder of the chapters, which discuss drinking, luxury in furnishings, and table manners, there is a depiction of regimen.

Sujets

• Sociology
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Social Science
• Social Theory

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669395171
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Michel Foucault's Confessions of the Flesh
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The aphrodisia regime, defined in terms of marriage, procreation, and a disqualification of pleasure, was formulated by non-Christian philosophers and teachers, and their pagan society followed it. Christians did not follow this code of conduct, but they did follow the same principles.

#2

The work of Clement of Alexandria, at the end of the second century, offers a much ampler testimony concerning the aphrodisia regime as it seems to have been incorporated into Christian thought. The Paedagogus, though, has a different purpose: it is addressed to Christians after their conversion and their baptism, not to pagans still making their way toward the Church.

#3

The Paedagogus is a collection of rules for living a Christian life. It defines right behavior, but it also defines the right actions that lead to eternal life. The Logos, which is the principle of right action and the movement toward salvation, is the rationality of the real world and the word of God calling one to eternity.

#4

The second and third books of the Paedagogus are a code for living. Underneath the apparent disorder of the chapters, which discuss drinking, luxury in furnishings, and table manners, there is a depiction of regimen.

#5

The Logos speaks through different voices in Clement’s work. It first speaks through the figures of nature, which explain Mosaic law. It then speaks through the human body and its natural impulses, and finally through God speaking to men directly.

#6

The Paedagogus is a book that deals with the rules of practical philosophy, and it is mainly concerned with the question of marriage. Clement defines the major ethical rules that should govern relations between spouses: the bond between them should not be owing to pleasure and sensuality, but to the Logos.

#7

The Paedagogus is a text that deals with the right economy of pleasures, and it defines marriage as a means of procreation. It also defines the right moment for sex between spouses. In Stoic terms, kairos refers to a set of conditions that make a merely permitted action into an action with a positive value.

#8

The Paedagogus is the first text in which marital sexual relations are considered in detail, and as a specific and important element of conduct. It treats sexual relations between marriage partners as an important and relatively autonomous object.

#9

The distinction between the goal and the end of an action is common in the Stoic literature. The goal of sexual relations is to produce children, while the end is to have a positive relationship with those children.

#10

The procreative act is not just a demonstration of man’s goodness, but also of God's. Man is not just imitating the capacities of the demiurgic act, but he is participating in the power and philanthropy of God.

#11

The second book of the Paedagogus is dedicated to the complex and fundamental relations between Creator and creatures. The content of the precepts Clement offers on the subject may be similar to the teachings of the pagan philosophers, but this does not mean that he has relinquished the regulation of sexual relations to a Stoic or Platonic wisdom.

#12

The lessons that Clement borrows from the logic of animals are negative ones. The hyena and the hare teach what not to do. The hyena’s bad reputation stemmed from an ancient belief that every animal of this species had two sexes and played the role alternately of male and female.

#13

The legend of the hyena’s transformation was meant to illustrate the idea that bodies cannot be changed. In the world to come, there will be no differences of sex. Everything will be the same for both men and women.

#14

The example of the hyena is used by Clement to explain how humans can be misled by the appearance of two sexes on the same animal. The hyena’s body is arranged in an odd way because of a defect, and this is what leads to their excessive inclinations.

#15

Clement’s excursion through the lessons of the naturalists is unique, and it is in contrast to the Epistle of Barnabas, which only mentions the cases of the hare and the hyena. He instead brings out the core of his argumentation: that the same Logos that was transmitted concisely as law is manifested in detail by nature.

#16

Clement placed his next exposition under the sign of nature, but this time of man’s nature as a rational being. He explained that the soul’s control over the body is a natural prescription, since it is the nature of the soul to be superior and the nature of the body to be inferior as indicated by the location of the belly.

#17

The first principle of restriction is that of abstaining from sexual relations during menstruation. The Paedagogus explains that this is to avoid polluting the most fertile part of the sperm with the impurities of the body.

#18

The prohibition of relations during pregnancy is the reciprocal of the preceding principle. For if it’s necessary to protect semen from any impure evacuation, it is likewise necessary to protect the womb once it has received the semen and begun its activity.

#19

The position of the man is also dictated by history. The long series of medical ailments, diseases, and weaknesses that can be caused by the too frequent use of love’s pleasures can be linked to the material reasons for forming another man like the one it comes from.

#20

Clement’s teachings on sexual relations are similar to those of the pagan philosophers. He advises his students to remain in control of their desires, not to be carried away by them, and to respect the soul that must prevail over the body and the conscience that must keep involuntary impulses in check.

#21

The last section of the text is much shorter than the others. It opens with the final recommendations concerning temperate marriage: the more tenuous, more demanding ones that surround the major prohibitions. No obscene remarks, no relations with prostitutes, and also remember that one commits an adultery when one acts with one’s wife as if she were a courtesan.

#22

The life of intemperance corrupts because it obliges the light to abandon the body to its mortal destiny. The intemperate body will rot because in abandoning it, God leaves it in its corpse state. But the temperate body will be incorruptible, and God will dwell within it.

#23

The concept of purity and the requirement of a virgin heart were important in the third and fourth centuries, when monastic asceticism began to take root. But Clement did not refer to these themes, nor advocate a total renunciation of sexual relations, in his work on the natural law.

#24

The act of human procreation is linked to the power of Creation within which it is inscribed and from which it draws its own power. But Clement also views it in relation to what constitutes the replica of the Creation by the Father: the regeneration through Christ, by means of his Incarnation, sacrifice, and teaching.

#25

The Paedagogus, as a teaching from Christ, gives us the right moment for procreation. It places the economy of generation squarely within the great movement from Creation to Deliverance, from Genesis to Regeneration.

#26

The code of laws and morals in Christianity was not very strict. It was only in the second half of the second century that penitential discipline and monastic asceticism were established, which defined and developed a certain mode of relation with oneself and a certain relation between the wrongful and the true.

#27

The practice of penance and the exercises of the ascetic life organize relations between wrong-doing and truth-telling; they bundle together relations to oneself, to evil, and to truth, in a way that is much more innovative and determinant than simply adding or subtracting severity from the code.

#28

The flesh is a mode of subjectification. According to Stoic logic, the end of something is what makes it a good. In other words, the purpose of procreation is to create citizens for your homeland.

#29

Until the second century, baptism was the only ecclesiastical act that could ensure the remission of sins. It was also a new birth, a regeneration, and an illumination. It granted access to a life free of evil and a life of truth.

#30

The link between the remission of sins and access to the truth is strong in the age of the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists. It is a direct link, since the same effects of baptism erase sins and bring the light. It is an immediate link, since it is not once the sins are forgiven that the light is then additionally granted.

#31

The penitence required in baptism is not a developed and regulated practice. It is not a set of acts obliging the subject to take precise stock of his sins and transgressions, and to undertake a long labor to cure himself of them.

#32

The