Philosophical Chastity Symbols
(The School of Athens by Raphael)
Sex Symbols vs. Chastity Symbols in 20th-Century Hollywood
I’ve recently been reading a biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home by Gary Willis. I’ve always been fascinated by the the relationship between communication skills, academic and professional success, and career paths, and Ronald Reagan is an interesting study in how mastery of the art of communication can set one apart from the crowd.
In Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home, when discussing Reagan’s experience as a film actor in the golden age of Hollywood, Willis provides an important analysis of the culture and mores of the film industry, and how its stars and starlets were presented and perceived both on- and off-screen. Although one commonly thinks of film stars of Hollywood’s golden age as sex symbols, Willis claims that the stars we commonly think of as sex symbols were actually more like chastity symbols—presenting images both on and off-screen that were consistent with traditional family and cultural values but providing countless winks, nudges, and nods to sexuality on-screen that served to subvert the image of actors and actresses as models of bearers of traditional moral and family values—in turn subverting control of the dreaded censors of the 20th-century film and television industries.
Hollywood stars and starlets of the early- to mid-20th-century, on- and off-screen, reinforced traditional gender roles, modeled traditional family values, and remained free of sensual and sexual urges (or gave into them in bouts of socially acceptable moral lapses). Female film stars were presented as nubile but chaste and as pure as possible, regardless of the (sometimes great) extent to which their private lives different from their on-screen portrayals. Great pains were also taken by film studios to ensure that their film stars and starlets portrayed much the same image in the public perception of their private lives (with notable exceptions discussed in some detail by Willis in Reagan’s America).
Philosophical Chastity Symbols
The concept of a Hollywood chastity symbol got me thinking about whether the same has been true in the history of philosophy. Have there been philosophical chastity symbols, the public and philosophical perception of which has been carefully crafted to reinforce a particular moral view about what a philosopher should be—which moral, philosophical, and intellectual values a philosopher should hold, which so-called virtues they embrace and which so-called vices they avoid succumbing to, and so on. Have we built up an image of the ideal philosopher that is as phantasmic as the image of the Hollywood starlet of the 20th century? If so, how do we go about deconstructing this image of the ideal philosopher—this chimeric philosophical chastity symbol that is as far removed from reality as the public perception of Marilyn Monroe’s private life was from her actual one?
Ancient Philosophical Chastity Symbols: Socrates and Plato
A good place to start looking for philosophical chastity symbols is in the origin of philosophy itself, in the subsequent perception of Socrates set in motion by his student Plato, who used Socrates as the mouthpiece for Plato’s own views in his many dialogues. (Although it’s an interesting question itself which of Plato’s dialogues are more historically accurate and in which dialogues Plato is merely putting his own views in the mouth of Socrates—an open area of debate in Plato scholarship from Plato’s time to ours today). It seems clear to me that Plato is presenting Socrates himself as a type of philosophical chastity symbol—an idealized figure who embodies the Platonic values that neither Plato nor Socrates himself was able to live up to in their actual private lives.
Consider the following lines that Plato puts in Socrates’s mouth in his Phaedo dialogue—a bit of dialogue worthy of any 20th-century Hollywood chastity symbol described by Willis in Reagan’s America, with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, not-terribly-subtle allusion to the sexual desires and appetites of the body:
He would like to be freed from the dominion of bodily pleasures and of the senses, which are always perturbing his mental vision. He wants to get rid of eyes and ears, and with the light of the mind only to behold the light of truth. (Plato, Phaedo)
Elsewhere in the Phaedo dialogue, the question of sex is explicitly raised by Socrates in his discussion with his interlocutor, Simmias. Socrates asks the question on all of our minds when it comes to philosophy’s relation to the body, “What about the pleasures of sex?”
Socrates: Consider then, my good sir, whether you share my opinion, for this will lead us to a better knowledge of what we are investigating. Do you think it is the part of a philosopher to be concerned with such so-called pleasures as those of food and drink?
Simmias: By no means.
Socrates: What about the pleasures of sex?
Simmias: Not at all.
Socrates: What of the other pleasures concerned with the service of the body? Do you think such a man proves them greatly, the acquisition of distinguished clothes and shoes and the other bodily ornaments? Do you think he values these or despises them except insofar as one cannot do without them?
Simmias: I think the true philosopher despises them.
The definition of the philosopher, almost from the very beginning, was someone who abstained from sexual passions and pleasures by setting his or her sights on the domain of the soul: Truth, Knowledge, Justice, Piety, Goodness, and the other Platonic forms central to nearly all of Plato’s dialogues. Thus Plato systematically styles Socrates into the ultimate and original chastity symbol for philosophy. The extent that a person’s driving impulse was sexual in nature was the extent to which a person would not be considered a true philosopher, however much sex Socrates had with his wife, Xanthippe, when he got home at night from his ambles around Athens in the name of philosophy by day—wink wink, nudge nudge. Arguably all of Platonism, and perhaps its predecessor Pythagoreanism, is a type of philosophical escapism arising from sexual dissatisfaction on the part of its founders and chiefest proponents.
Ancient Philosophical Chastity Symbols: Aristotle
Interestingly but predictably enough, Aristotle, being more pragmatic temperament than Plato, was much more open to the positive role sexual relations play in the development of the human person and in society. But with Aristotle’s emphasis on the merely pragmatic and functional role of sex, it’s little wonder that Aristotle became the favorite philosopher of the Christian era until the Renaissance and the rise of modernity. Although Aristotle embraces sex and sexual appetites as a natural function of animals in general, and of the human animal in particular, the virtuous use of sex for Aristotle lies in subduing sexual desire from its vice of excess, thus tempering our sexual desire in a way that is harmonious with Plato in spirit if not in practice.
Aristotle himself became a kind of philosophical chastity symbol for the Christian Era: We know everyone has sex (again, wink wink, nudge nudge) but real philosopher, lovers of wisdom, learn to rein in their sexual appetites from excess to moderation. Even though Aristotle seldom explicitly mentions sex in his extant philosophical works, if one reads Aristotle subtextual and esoterically in the spirit of Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur M. Melzer, it’s easy to see why Aristotle could be viewed as a type of philosophical chastity symbol as well when reading the following lines by Aristotle as a kind of wink-wink, nudge-nudge (even homoerotic) reference to sex and sexual desire:
To delight in such things, then, and to love them above all others, is brutish. For even of the pleasures of touch the most liberal have been eliminated, e.g. those produced in the gymnasium by rubbing and by the consequent heat; for the contact characteristic of the self-indulgent man does not affect the whole body but only certain parts. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, Chapter 10)
It’s enough to make one wonder how much purely pragmatic sex (is that even a thing?) Aristotle really had, or whether Aristotle was as horny as the rest of us are behind the closed doors of his Lyceum and at home.
Chastity Symbols in the Christian Era
The Christian Era itself had no shortage of chastity symbols, from the Virgin Mary to any number of virtuously chaste saints and popes, to Jesus himself, all of whom had set their sights, supposedly, on things of heaven instead of things of Earth or of the body, sexual or otherwise. The nubile depictions of the Virgin Mary, and even the almost-feminine depictions of Jesus in the history of Christian artwork are at odds with Mary the woman and Jesus the man. The more explicitly sexualized Mary Magdalene is naturally labeled a prostitute, at least according to the canonical Catholic interpretation, because of the inability to reconcile her sexuality with the supposed chastity of Jesus and his disciples. The subversion of Jesus’s chastity is what was so scandalous about The Da Vinci Code, the novel by Dan Brown and the motion picture based upon it, for many Christians, as it undercut the power of Jesus as the church’s chief chastity symbol—at least until the 20th century in the form of Mother Theresa, the very embodiment of 20th-century chastity and complete lack of sexual appetite and appeal.
Modern Philosophical Chastity Symbols: René Descartes
The world had to wait over 1,500 years for its next superstar chastity symbol in the form of René Descartes, the so-called father of modern philosophy. Descartes is well known for his substance-dualist philosophy of mind, in which the mind, as a nonphysical/immaterial substance—a res cogitans, or “thinking thing”—is distinct from the body or brain as a res extensa or “extended thing.” Descartes family claimed that he could not be identical with his body because the existence of the body is doubtable. (He might only be dreaming he has a body, or he might be insane, or he might be deceived by God as an evil deceiver into thinking he has a physical body, and so on—these sources of skepticism about the body are well understood, although still debated amongst Descartes scholars.)
As a rationalist, Descartes thought that real knowledge, with what we now refer to as “Cartesian certainty,” must come from the operations of pure reason alone, not from experience, not from the senses, and, most importantly for the purpose of this discussion of Descartes as a philosophical chastity symbol, not from the body. If we as human beings are to be identified with our nonphysical, disembodied minds or souls instead of the body with its physical pleasures, it’s easy to see why Descartes became a kind of philosophical chastity symbol in the history of philosophy, someone so motivated by the purely mental pursuits of human rationality that he himself never married, which of course made him even better suited to the role of chastity symbol and to his place in history as the “father” of modern philosophy. It’s easy to forget in this narrative, however, that Descartes was a father of another sort as well, not just of modern philosophy but of his illegitimate daughter, Francine, born in 1635 to a maid in the home at which was staying during his time in The Netherlands.
This scandalous bit of Descartes’s biography is understandably left out of the story typically told about Descartes by philosophers who happily point to Descartes as the prototypical modern philosopher obsessed with rationality and certainty and having overcome the temptations and needs—again wink-wink, nudge-nudge—of the body. Descartes’s mind-body dualism is also in service of this perception of Descartes as a philosophical chastity symbol, for if Descartes the man is identified not with his body but with his mind or soul, and if the mind or soul is the domain of free will while the body operates deterministically according to purely natural or physical laws, then the purity of Descartes and of the human person as “thinking things” remains unblemished regardless of the sexual escapades of the human body. A similar argument has been made by ascetics everywhere, Christian or otherwise, in identifying themselves not with their bodies but with their souls or spirits, as a way of disassociating themselves from the sexual needs and acts of their bodies.
Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill: Chastity One-Upmanship
Although Descartes was arguably the chiefest of philosophical chastity symbols in the modern period, other modern philosophers served the role as well. Consider the debate between the two most well-known proponents of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Bentham was a proponent of what we now refer to as the pleasure principle, in which the goal of ethical action is to promote happiness and pleasure and to reduce unhappiness or pain/suffering for the greatest number of people. Of course, philosophers would like to think of themselves as being too modest, too enlightened, too Platonic to view Bentham’s argument as an argument for free love: the greatest sex for the greatest number of people. But viewing Bentham’s argument through the lens of philosophical chastity gives new meaning to John Stuart Mill’s objection that it’s better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a ping satisfied, a claim rife with sexual overtones but which perhaps gave Mills the even greater claim than Bentham to being a philosophical chastity symbol. Real philosophers, in other words, are too good to roll in the sexual mud all day like pigs—a type of philosophical dick-swinging contest that has gotten far too little attention in standard, by-the-book philosophical discussions of the debate between Bentham and Mill. The views of both philosophers are rife with sexual reference, but only subtextually, and both philosophers are duking it out to be the better philosophical chastity symbol.
Modern Philosophical Chastity Symbols: Immanuel Kant
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant was the culmination of the modern period with his unwavering quest for objectivity in epistemology, in science, and in morality. Kant is often stylized as living such a mechanical, disaffected life that the people of Königsberg were said to be able to set their clocks by the timing of Kant’s morning walks. Kant is well-known for his ethical theory in which the test for whether or not an action is moral is its universalizability, whether the principle or maxim behind your action could count as a universal law, the first formulation of what Kant calls the “Categorical Imperative.”
An interesting consequence of this first formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative is a fairly liberal-sounding pro-sex moral argument from procreation, which is similar in principle to Aristotle’s pragmatic view of sex and sexual desire described above. It could be argued that complete abstinence from sex is immoral according to the first formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative because it isn’t universalizable—that is, the human race would die out within a generation if every person everywhere abstained from indulging in sexual pleasure. Of course, extreme sexuality wouldn’t pass Kant’s test for morality either, as it would presumably prevent humanity from achieving other necessary ends that have equal or superior moral worth according to Kant. Thus it seems that, while there is a hidden sexual underbelly to Kant’s moral philosophy, bolstered by the fact that Kant himself was more of a wild-child party animal than he’s typically given credit for, the sexual morality of Kant seems to veer in the direction of Aristotelian moderation, no matter how Kant himself may have acted during the wild and alcohol-filled party nights of his youth.
Kant’s emphasis on objectivity over subjectivity, the universal over the particular, his broadly rationalistic methodology over the consequences to one’s body or to others, makes him another ideal candidate for a philosophical chastity symbol, even if, like all true chastity symbols, his private life doesn’t square neatly with the philosophy he advocated. Kant’s role as a philosophical chastity symbol is referred to by the later German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who, although he doesn’t call Kant a philosophical chastity symbol by name, does so in spirit in his scathing critique of Kant’s moral philosophy as the culmination of Western philosophical and religious asceticism about which Nietzsche nothing positive to say:
A people perishes if it mistakes its own duty for the concept of duty in general. Nothing works more profound ruin than any ‘impersonal’ duty, any sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction. — Kant’s categorical imperative should have been felt as mortally dangerous! . . . The theologian instinct alone took it under its protection! An action compelled by the instinct of life has in the joy of performing it the proof it is a right action: and that a nihilist with Christian-dogmatic bowels understands joy as an objection. . . . What destroys more quickly than to work, to think, to feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice, without joy? as an automaton of ‘duty’? It is virtually a recipe for decadence, even for idiocy. . . . Kant became an idiot. — And that was the contemporary of Goethe! This fatal spider counted as the German philosopher — still does! . . . The erring instinct in all and everything, anti-naturalness as instinct, German decadence as philosophy — that is Kant! (Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, No. 11)
The Real Philosophical Sex Symbols
In 20th-century Hollywood, we’ve seen from Willis in his biography of Ronald Reagan, Regan’s America: Innocents at Home, that actresses we commonly cal “sex symbols” were actually more like chastity symbols, whereas the real sex symbols of Hollywood were more like Mae West, with her claim that “Too much of a good thing is wonderful” than like the carefully crafted, nubile-but-untouchable image of Marilyn Monroe. Real sex symbols, as opposed to chastity symbols, don’t even attempt to play the part of the chaste; they ooze sex regardless of their appearance and regardless of public perception.
So who are the real sex symbols of philosophy, as opposed to those who play the part of the chaste in their exoteric philosophies or in the public and historical perception of them in the history of philosophy? There are a few candidates:
The Epicureans, whom later philosophers love to snicker at but secretly envy for their philosophically sexual orgies, which have become the stuff of legend.
Friedrich Nietzsche, whom no one would accuse of being overtly obsessed with sex but whose writings about embodiment are thinly veiled references to sexual desires that have been oppressed philosophically and religiously from Socrates and Jesus onward.
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who, despite not being known for their attractiveness, oozed sex in their lives and philosophical writings.
Michel Foucault with his open homosexuality, at least later in his life, and with the sexiest book titles in the entire history of philosophy, The History of Sexuality, Volumes I, II, III, and IV.
Just as one can seemingly naturally divide Hollywood film and television stars of the 20th century into the category of chastity symbols or into the category of real sex symbols, it’s an interesting exercise to run through the list of philosophers—ancient, modern, and contemporary—attempting to classify them as philosophical chastity symbols or genuine philosophical sex symbols. Willis, in Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home, claims that Ronald Reagan himself was a kind of naive chastity symbol who believed the narrative he and others told about himself, whereas other film and television stars played the role of a chastity symbol but knowingly and subversively winked at the camera as a nod to their true selves, sexuality intact, and their private lives, and to those in the audience who were savvy enough to see through the chastity symbol acts to the hidden sex symbol lurking within.
Which philosophers in the history of philosophy were Reagan-esque in their naiveté and innocence, really believing in the chastity narrative of their own philosophies? And which philosophers in the history played the role of philosophical chastity symbol only outwardly while writing about sexuality subversively, subtextually, ironically, and with a fully conscious wink and a nod to their true beliefs about sexuality, which were plausibly as lusty and horny as the secret thoughts and desires of any philosopher, ascetic, priest, or pastor alive today? And who were the Mae Wests of philosophy who have been suppressed in the history of philosophy for not being true philosophers, in the Platonic sense, for their sexuality and their preference for all things embodied over things heavenly, mathematical, or pie-in-the-sky?
What lost threads of philosophy as it relates to sexuality are waiting to be discovered, or rediscovered, in an attempt to invert the relationship between philosophical chastity symbols and genuine philosophical sex symbols, just as moviegoers and television viewers had to clue into the fact that their so-called sex symbols were actually chastity symbols forcing a plasticine view of family values and human sexuality upon them by actors, directors, producers, and studio executives who knew better and didn’t walk the talk themselves, while winking slyly from in front of and behind the camera all the while? What revisions to the history of philosophy will be necessary when the countless winks and nudges about human sexuality and temperance in the history of philosophy are exposed for what they really are—an act?
As Arthur M. Melzer points out in Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, we’ve all become literalists culturally and as philosophers. As such, we have a hard time believing that the subtextual winks and nods to the camera about sexuality in the history of philosophy are anything but the genuine beliefs of the philosopher’s we’ve idolized as philosophical chastity symbols. But there is untold richness and nuance waiting to be discovered I the history of philosophy if we begin to read philosophers ironically and esoterically when they write explicitly about—or allude with a sly wink to—sex and sexual desire.
