4 - The asymmetrical relationship

Summary

A crucial part of Foucault's ethics programme consists in looking at the forms of moral regulation which were involved in the behaviour of the husband towards his wife, and of the pederast towards his young beloved, in classical antiquity. Foucault has good reasons for thinking that the way in which the role of dominant partners in asymmetrical relationships is problematised should provide particularly revealing insights into moral attitudes to sexuality. According to Foucault, when moralists of the classical period prescribe sexual moderation for the husband or the pederast in spite of his dominant social position, then this is an act of disciplining which has little to do with respect for the interests of an equal partner in a relationship, i.e. with the adoption of a ‘moral position’ in the Kantian sense. Rather it is a question of demonstrating a self-control that gives one's life an aesthetic splendour and recommends one for a political career. ‘Govern yourself no less than your subjects and consider that you are in the highest sense a king when you are a slave to no pleasure, but rule over your desires more firmly than over your people’ is Isocrates' advice in a speech delivered to the young monarch Nicocles. Nicocles' own speech to his people (which Isocrates also wrote) is a detailed proof of his ‘self-mastery as a moral precondition for leading others’, as Foucault puts it: political leadership can and should be unhesitatingly entrusted to a monarch who can demonstrate that he is master of himself.