Plato. - Pharmakon: Plato, drug culture, and identity in ancient Athens

Pharmakon

Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens

Michael A. Rinella

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rinella, Michael A. (Michael Anthony)

Pharmakon : Plato, drug culture, and identity in ancient Athens / Michael A. Rinella.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-7391-4686-6

1. Plato. 2. Drug abuseGreece. 3. Plato. Symposium. 4. GreeceCivilizationTo 146 B.C. I. Title.

B395.R56 2010

184--dc22 2010006940

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To my mother and father, for always believing in me.

I would like to thank Anthony Preus for his extensive comments on the original draft of the manuscript. His careful reading, both stimulating and challenging, has improved almost every page. I would like to also express my gratitude to my editor Jana Wilson at Lexington Books and for the comments of manuscript reviewer Carl A. P. Ruck. Finally, my thanks go to Sarah Skye Miles at Columbia College, South Carolina for proofreading the final indices.

Early versions of sections of the following chapters have been previously published. titled Platos Reformulation of the Symposion.

In an interview shortly before his death in 1984 the French philosopher Michel Foucault described the possibility of creating, in contrast to the history of ideas that has preoccupied much of Western philosophy, a history of thought based on the study of what one could call the element of problems, or more exactly, problemizations.

The Use of Pleasure, the second volume of Foucaults history of sexuality, mentions in passing that the connections between ancient Greek sexual ethics and what he calls alimentary ethicsthe use of food and intoxicants like wineonly gradually became disengaged or uncoupled, believing it would be interesting to trace the evolution of their respective importance and the gradual differentiation of their specific structure.

Plato, Foucault believed, was among those in ancient Greece who occasionally saw the victory of self-control over pleasure as characterized by the complete extirpation or expulsion of desire. But much more often, it was identified by the setting up of a solid and stable rule of the self over the self: the intensity of the desires did not disappear, but the moderate subject controlled it in an act of self-domination.

The question would seem to be begged: what forces, excessive how? I would agree with philosopher Martha Nussbaum when she writes that Foucaults assimilation of sex to eating and drinking can mislead us, but for very different reasons. Nussbaum accepts without question Foucaults preoccupation with the aphrodisia, writing that the ethical questions posed by sex, because they involve not only ones own self-mastery, but the well-being, happiness, and ethical goodness of another, are far more complicated than the ethical questions posed by food and drink, her reason being the glutton does no harm to food, nor the drunkard to wine. However true that may be, the question begged remains begged. The issue, as I shall argue, is not just ethical but also deeply psychological. The three appetites are not Platos real concern per se. They are not the cause and as such the source of the difficulty in need of being moderated. There is a common quality behind or beneath each of them, an indication of which lurks within Foucaults regular use of terms describing the psychology of these desires and their pleasures as strong, imperative, violent and intense. The concern with controlling appetites such as lust, gluttony, and intoxication that appears in ancient thought in general and the Platonic dialogues in particular are indications of a growing difficulty with something else. The continuing preoccupation with ancient sexuality at the expense of the alimentary appetites leads, I believe, to an obscuration of the general form of problemization that was occurring in ancient Greece. Sexuality and aphrodisia were but one locus of a number of suspect behaviors that a growing set of solutions was being proposed to deal with. That something else may be identified as psychological states of ecstasy, and their threat to identity.

Ecstasy may be thought of as a softening, diminishment, blurring or loss of the psychological boundaries or barriers that in a normal context define, sustain and preserve a singular, self-contained subjective identity. In this sense ecstasy may be said to involve an alteration of human cognitive capacity, the act or process of knowing, including both awareness and judgment. As a form of human experience the ecstatic is commonly described as being intensely pleasurable, but it is more than simply a type of pleasure. Ecstasy can be, alternately or simultaneously, a sense of wonder, sublimity, terror, hilarity, uncanniness and still other conditionalities. Part of its essence is precisely this nondefinability along any seemingly consistent set of descriptive parameters.

Although often misunderstood or misrepresented in contemporary discourse as a relinquishing of all reasoning capacity, ecstasy is not, in the strictest sense, reducible to such a loss. It is rather a temporary reduction, of variable intensity and duration, of the reasoning minds ability to patrol and defend the borders of identity from intrusions of otherness. Ecstasy sensitizes us to the contingency of identity and the in-dependence of the Other. It is a recognition that ones state, however personal or collective, is never an authentic or stable condition but a product of strange, contradictory and ever-changing forces. From this perspective, ekstasis liquidates the positivist boundaries of meaning, brings forth the experience of an extra dimension, an expansion of the human condition that entices the logos of the Other.

Intoxication is one manifestation of ecstasy and is the primary focus of this book. Popper misunderstands Plato, conflating the Platonic yearning for amiable homonoia in the politics of the polis with a proto-totalitarian anti-rational retreat or return to forms of tribal ecstasy. Quite the contrary: the valuation of identitarian thinking in Platos idealistic philosophy is virtually if not entirely absolute.

Foucaults excavation of ancient Greek sexual ethics in