volume 5

no. 4 (2021)

DOI: 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0043 Marzenna Jakubczak

Institute of Philosophy and Sociology
Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0136-022X
[email protected]

Somaesthetics and the Cross-Cultural Dressing of Desire

Commentary: Richard Shusterman,
Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages.

Worldly pleasures have not been enjoyed by us, but we ourselves have been devoured… Desire is not
reduced in force, though we ourselves are reduced so senility.1

Somaesthetics, the field cultivated by Richard Shusterman since 1997,2 bore another juicy fruit for our enjoy-
ment. This time, his interdisciplinary research – integrating the theoretical, empirical, and practical disciplines
related to bodily perception, presentation, and performance – resulted in an excellent cross-cultural study of
the classical arts of love developed over centuries in such traditions as the Greco-Roman, Chinese, Indian,
Muslim, Medieval and European Renaissance. Somaesthetic methodology provides fertile ground for such
a comparative inquiry by encouraging new ways to understand the cultural dimension of human sexuality. It
complements the popular 4EC perspectives applied in cognitive science which explore cognition as embodied,

1) Vairāgya-Śatakam Bhartrihari, The Hundred Verses on Renunciation, trans. by Swami Madhvananda (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama,
2004), 11. According to Bhartrihari (fifth century), “man’s life is an intricate web of conflicting moments and attractions. It is beau-
tiful and pleasurable, but this beauty becomes bitter when he feels the weight of time and the caprice of fate upon him… Drunk with
the wine of a little wealth or some passing enjoyment, a man is deluded by the world – though he experiences the transience of life,
he cannot understand the real meaning of time and his own absurd position in existence.” Barbara Stoler Miller, trans., Bhartrihari:
Poems, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), “Introduction,” xxii.
2) Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life, (New York: Routledge, 1997).

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embedded, enactive, and expanded:3 emphasizing our bodily interaction with the physical and social envi-
ronment. Shusterman’s analysis of the classical arts of love as aesthetically refining sexual experience gives
due acknowledgement to our somatic and sensual, but also emotional and imagery engagement in the world,
commonly neglected in modern philosophy. Providing countless examples from a variety of cultures, the author
proves that when discussing the ways we satisfy our intimate erotic needs one cannot focus solely on the private
domain and disregard a wider context, such as extended family relationships, health and hygiene issues, level
of education, economic status, social hierarchy and discourses of power, as well as culturally defined forms of
artistic expression predominant in a given time.

Beauty and Eros

Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love4 grows out of Shusterman’s pragmatist assump-
tions and his meliorist belief that looking at other cultures and other times can provide ample resources for
a more complete erotic vision “to enrich the field of aesthetics and our art of living” (AE, 394). According to his
original thought-provoking diagnosis, the separation of beauty from eros (that is from love and desire), which
started soon after their flourishing union in Renaissance Neoplatonism, was one of the reasons for the birth
of aesthetics as a science for the “perfection of sensory cognition” (AE, 394) in the mid-eighteenth century.
As Shusterman persuasively argue, this change of perspective resulted from the growing power of materialist
philosophies as well as from new trends of philosophical sensualism and libertinism. This combination of views
made it more difficult to maintain “the traditional idea of eros as a physically expressed but spiritual, loving
desire that was distinct from lust” (AE, 393). The precursor to this view, which defined the pleasure of beauty
as “disinterested and distanced” by explicitly contrasting it to erotic feelings aroused by and in human bodies,
was Anthony Ashley Cooper (also known as Lord Shaftesbury). He was followed by Alexander Baumgarten and
other influential philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century who rejected from the aesthetic field
any activities associated with sexual activity either: by defining the aesthetic pleasure of beauty in opposition
to direct sensual satisfaction (Kant), or by identifying sexual experience with “the will-to-live” and opposing
it to the brain that represents knowledge (Schopenhauer), or by equating erotic vigor with animal instinct that
should be sacrificed “to the advantage of the work” of art (Nietzsche) (AE, 39–96).

Sex and Drama

Due to my research specialization, I will focus mainly on Indian contributions to ars erotica. Shusterman’s survey
is based on three quasi-scientific ancient Sanskrit texts; the Kamasutra, the Raitirahasya and the Anangaranga,

3) 4E Cognition perspectives, which have gained epistemic legitimacy during the last 2 years, go beyond the previously predomi-
nate perspective focused only on the functions of the brain. See for instance Francis Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleonor Rosch, The
Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Albert Newen, Leon de Bruin, and
Shaun Gallagher, eds., The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Shaun Gallagher, How the
Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 200).
4) Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2021). Hereafter referenced parenthetically in-text as AE followed by page numbers.
) As Shusterman explains elsewhere, “the idea of meliorism is that we can always change some things for the better and we should
pursue this possibility. If there is any basic principle of pragmatism, I think, it is just this idea of meliorism.” Richard Shusterman,
“Życie, sztuka i filozofia: Wyznania Richarda Shustermana wysłuchane przez Adama Chmielewskiego,” ed. and trans. Wojciech
Małecki, Odra 4, (2004): 44–3; (my translation). This is a Polish translation of an English interview published in 2004.

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 Marzenna Jakubczak, Somaesthetics and the Cross-Cultural Dressing of Desire

dated between 400 BCE and 300 CE, which are labelled kāmaśāstra literature. He also mentions the early Vedic
erotic allusions and summarizes some of the Puranic myths related to the topic. A slight inaccuracy has crept
in when the author characterizes the Upanishads as “austere” and locates them historically between the Vedas
and Puranas (AE, 20). In fact, the Upanishads did not follow the Vedic scripts since they constitute the most
recent and philosophically sophisticated part of the Vedas (c. 600 to 300 BCE),6 which deals with the value of
knowledge, meaning of yoga, and the key ontological questions. Also, it is hard to agree with the claim that
“it is not at all clear what exactly, for Hinduism, constitutes a god, and therefore how many gods there are”
(AE, 20). Well, neither size nor number seem to matter when we manage to go beyond a binary perspective of
monotheism versus polytheism. To capture the idea of god as it is conceptualized in India we need to embrace
the category of henotheism, first used in reference to Hinduism by Max Müller,7 to describe a form of devo-
tion focused on a single spiritual principle, the absolute (brahman), while accepting the existence of multiple
deities, gods or goddesses (devas, devīs), who come into being together with the world and who are no strangers
to desire (kāma), adequately proportional to their ontic status.
Yet, what Shusterman brilliantly illuminates is the aspiration of Indian erotology to combine the most
detailed, systematic, and practical methods with philosophical ideas, and to integrate erotic desires with
ascetic spiritualism (AE, 24, 220), as they both share “the power of generating focused energy and heat” (tapas)
(AE, 208). The aestheticization of the sexual act “through refining restraint and sublimation of raw sensuality”
(AE, 24) helps the lovers keep passion within manageable limits, and produce an attractively fashioned and
meaningful erotic performance, while providing some distanced reflection on one’s choices of partner, time, or
place. These remarks get us closer to the major paradox of Indian mentality, which is constituted by the tension
between two conflicting drives – a profound attraction to sensual beauty, on the one hand, and the yearning
for detachment from all worldly desires, on the other.
Shusterman also aptly grasps the unique character of Indian ars erotica modelled on the performing
arts (AE, 243). Undoubtedly, the art of lovemaking resembles the dynamics of drama with several comple-
mentary side threads situating human sexuality in a specific sociocultural, ethical, religious, and political
context. As Shusterman rightly observes, Indian erotic arts “drew most heavily on the fine arts and their
sensuous aesthetic pleasures” (AE, 202). They have deep roots in theatre and the classical art of dance. The
lover’s cravings and beliefs (likened to the mental states of a drama character) are not only essential to love-
making (just as they are crucial to stage a drama), but they need to be expressed through certain gestures,
sequenced body movements, or other codified signs – both explicit and suggested – which all together make
up a specific choreography of sexual performance. This distinctively aesthetic, drama-like character of India’s
eroticism makes it different from ars erotica developed in other cultures more focused on practical sexual
goals of procreation and health.
Incidentally, classical Sanskrit literature, being a vast source of examples of Hindu erotic imagination
strongly inspired by kāmaśāstras, is referred to in Shusterman’s study in one footnote only (AE, 223), although
the literary works of such authors as Kalisada (fourth – fifth centuries CE) and Jayadeva (twelfth century) had,
in turn, a huge impact on the way sexual scenes were depicted in the visual arts of the following centuries. This
omission is significant insofar as the iconic representations of sexuality have played a crucial role in popular-
izing Indian ars erotica among wider society. Naturally, the best means of educating folks, apart from drama
and dance performance, was sculpture – especially in ancient times – and the exquisite miniature erotic paint-

6) Gavin D. Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 40.
7) Max Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion: As Illustrated by the Religions of India, (London: Longmans, Green
and Co., 1878).

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ings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when illustrated editions of the Kamasutra grew in popularity.8
Here, at least one example of visual arts would be worth discussing a bit closer, namely a group of temples at
Khajuraho, often referred to as the “Kamasutra temples,” the exterior walls of which are saturated with sexu-
ally explicit imagery.9 The mystifying carvings, so called mithuna sculptures, depict men and women in various
lascivious sexual acts. The unclothed, sensual feminine figure (called apsarā or yaks.i) has always been one of
the most canonical motifs of medieval Hindu temple art and at Khajuraho, female nudity is interspersed with
portrayals of orgiastic sex. Scholars have tried to understand who sponsored these temples and why they did
so. Supposedly these sculptures, dated between 90 CE to 110 CE, depict tantric sexual practices that were
meditated upon.10 Surely, they show that for the people who erected these monuments sex was not a taboo, but
an integral, adorable, and spiritually significant part of their life. However, in largely prudish contemporary
Indian society, the Kamasutra’s graphic sculptures of Khajuraho look like a sexual extravaganza and are an
embarrassment for “traditional Hindu values.”
The reader of Ars Erotica may keep in mind that for Richard Shusterman one of the most pressing socio-
cultural problems of our time has been the legitimization of popular art, such as rock, country music, and rap.11
Now, he advocates for the aesthetic reappreciation of the erotic arts. But, have they ever really been popular
among people in the cultures that produced the most famous texts on the art of lovemaking? And, further,
were they accessible to people, regardless of their class, gender, and economic position? Richard Shusterman
argues for a positive answer to these questions, claiming that both the Natyaśastra and Kamasutra share “an
impulse toward democratic diversity” and, unlike the Vedas, they could be studied and practiced by all castes
(AE, 218). Some Indian scholars also believe that in early times, copies of kamaśastras were gifted to adoles-
cent daughters by their mothers, to intimidated wives by their newly wed husbands, and that the public meet-
ings were organized to debate on various issues related to the art of lovemaking.12 Certainly, sex was valued in
Indian society not only as a means to maintain family lineage but also as a key to a successful marriage and
stable society, but when discussing the social practices of the past we should avoid idealization and remember
that we deal with a tremendously varied (ethnically, linguistically, religiously) and strictly hierarchical society
where the literate elite always made up a very small percentage of the population.13 Therefore, one can hardly

8) See for instance Devangana Desai, “Art and Eroticism: Going beyond the Erotic at Khajuraho,” in Indian Art: Forms, Concerns
and Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Brijinder Nath Goswamy and K. Singh (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers,
2000), 91–109; Richard Burton, Forster F. Arbuthnot, trans., The Illustrated Kama Sutra, Ananga Ranga, Perfumed Garden – The Classic
Eastern Love Texts, (London: The Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd., 1987); Philip Rawson, Erotic Art of India, (New York: Gallery Books,
1983); and Devangana Desai, Erotic Sculpture of India: A Socio-Cultural Study, (New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., 197).
9) A group of monuments in Khajuraho was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986. Since then, it has gained inter-
national recognition and attracts huge attention of the tourists who visit this small town in central India just to watch the “oddly titil-
lating” figures covering the temple walls. See Swetha Vijayakumar, “The Sacred and the Sensual,” Via 11–12, (May 2017), Accessed
August 26, 2021, http://journals.openedition.org/viatourism/1792, https://doi.org/10.4000/viatourism.1792.
10) David G. White emphasizes that tantric sexual practices were not really about enjoying coitus or blissful states of conscious-
ness. They were rather part of sexualized rituals that entailed collecting, offering, and ingesting the male and female fluids. And
this was very different from the “ritualized sex” that is commonly mistaken for “Tantric Sex” in New Age guides. See David Gordon
White, Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 10.7208/chicago/
9780226027838.001.0001.
Another interpretation is offered by Devangana Desai who suggests that the erotic figures seem to conceal a mystical diagram (yantra),
which was believed to magically protect the building against obstacles. Devangana Desai, “Textual Tradition and the Temples of Khajuraho,”
in Archaeology and Text: The Temple in South Asia, ed. by Himanshu P. Ray (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), 66.
11) Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
12) Desai, Erotic Sculpture of India, 167–68.
13) In 2019 the adult literacy rate was at 73.2 percent, with overall gender gap (adult male literacy rate still surpasses the adult female

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imagine that ars erotica in the Indian context have ever belonged to popular culture, and that the Kamasutra
used to be circulating freely across all social strata.

Misogyny in Disguise
The positive pragmatist attitude of Shusterman allows him to turn a blind eye not only to the elitist char-
acter of Indian ars erotica, but also to the patriarchal and nicely dressed misogynist agenda of the Kamasutra
narrator. The lovers – that is by default a man and a woman – are seen as the protagonists of a drama, and the
dynamics of their intimate close-up is dictated by the man’s needs and man’s understanding of female sexu-
ality. What is more, both the role of screenwriter and director of the lovemaking drama belong exclusively to
males. Thus, speaking of the erotic pleasures we cannot forget that the sex performance inevitably involves
a gender-and-power struggle. As Shusterman rightly notices, “the Kamasutra explains how ars erotica is prag-
matically advantageous in giving a man greater power over women and more esteem among men” (AE, 240).
Women are basically reduced to a passive role, they are a “delicious” instrument to be “played upon artfully,”
designed for the pleasure of men (AE, 240). And this sheer objectification of a female is only seemingly miti-
gated by the advocacy that “women reciprocally play on male instruments, and sometimes even play the male
by taking on his coital positions and roles” (AE, 238). Well, does not a female moving body still remain just
a tool to please her lover? Besides, the practical hints on the specific ways of lovemaking are dictated by typical
patriarchal obsessions, such as vaginal orgasm14 (AE, 212), anxieties concerning erection, and preference for
male superiority in unequal unions (AE, 228).
We can also trace the misogynist bias of the Kamasutra in its comments on female sexuality, far more
promiscuous than men, and their innate propensity to “lechery” and “lust” which is to justify the need to fully
control and subordinate women (AE, 212). Likewise, it is hard to take for granted a remark on deflowering an
eight-year-old girl trained to become a king’s prostitute (AE, 21). Nowadays, ars erotica does not seem to be
a proper label for the dated social practices that involve harming little girls.

Power of Eros
Undoubtedly, Indian erotology demonstrates that there is something like “erotic expertise,” which means that
sex is definitely something we can learn, need to cultivate on regular basis, and eventually master to our own
satisfactory degree. When evaluating the contribution of Indian ars erotica, Shusterman aptly observes that it
“is designed to cultivate and refine sensorimotor mastery in terms of heightened awareness and skilled aesthetic
shaping of one’s erotic feelings and movements, and to do so in controlled attunement with one’s partner’s”
(AE, 213). The advanced sensorimotor skill of lovemaking is to make our life experience complete and joyful.

literacy rate by 17 percentage points). See Tanushree Chandra, “Literacy in India: The Gender and Age Dimension,” Observer Research
Foundation (ORF), no. 322 (October 2019): 1–18.
14) Apparently, androcentrism is not just a historical phenomenon typical for the ancient, sophisticated textbooks of ars erotica.
The modern scientific process, providing theories regarding human sexuality, has also been marked with misunderstanding and
manipulation. A spectacular example of such a process is discussed by Elisabeth A. Lloyd in her closely argued study on the history
of evolutionary explanations of the female orgasm. She persuasively demonstrates that what was presented as a “scientific account”
proved to be a culturally biased discourse based on two flawed assumptions: that the female orgasm evolved because it contributed to
reproductive success, and that female sexuality is like male sexuality. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the
Science of Evolution, (London – Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 201), 14–20.

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To become a master, “who has truly conquered his senses” (AE, 220), one needs to improve the ways he or she
manifests his or her sexual appetite and receives endearment from a well attuned lover.
Another lesson that the Indian tradition can teach us addresses the significance of the aesthetization of
sexual desire. It is the aesthetic imagination that empowers us to be passionate in a cultured or even admirable
way, and sensuous in a non-selfish way. Thanks to aesthetic rearrangement of lust, one can detach oneself from
particular spatiotemporal circumstances and lose oneself in “impersonal subjectivity and ownerless emotions,
when I consciously from inside get outside of my individuality.”1 Indeed, rearranged desires often get more
intense the more they are tempered with an unostentatious practice of postponement and selflessness. The
aesthetic relish we have when we watch subtle erotic drawings or listen to a sensuous lyric to rejoice at the
sensual rapture of the other human being, allows us to intimate the basic impersonality of subjective feelings.
In the aesthetic immersion accompanying the erotic performance, if realized with a focused mind’s molding
of lust into aesthetic form, the frontiers of the individual ego can provisionally melt away, revealing an inner
shared space of loving bliss: a foreshadow of liberation (moks.a). Thus, in the quest for erotic-via-aesthetic
fulfilment one may also lean toward spiritual or religious goals. This point is rightly articulated by Richard
Shusterman when he captures ars erotica “as aesthetic training toward religious fulfilment” (AE, 249). The
transformative power of “dressed desire,” exquisitely crafted in India, clearly supports his meliorist expecta-
tion that the beautiful can be truly enjoyed through embodied cognition and erotic love that embraces the
spiritual along with the carnal.
To conclude, let me share my hope that Shusterman’s monograph, which splendidly reveals the prag-
matically beneficial power of ars erotica, will also reach readers of the younger generations, who replace all
sources of knowledge about how to have sex with the Internet, and who regard dating apps as a handy tool in
search for their dream lover.

1) Arindam Chakrabarti, “Play, Pleasure, Pain: Ownerless Emotions in Rasa-Aesthetics,” in Science, Literature and Aesthetics, ed.
Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya and Amiya Dev, 189–202, Vol. 1 of Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture, (New
Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2009). The theory of aesthetic emotions that need not entail personal or individual owner-
ship is discussed by Arindam Chakrabarti in the context of rasa-aesthetics of Abhinavagupta (c. 90–1016 CE), a Kashmiri philoso-
pher, mystic, and aesthetician who authored Abhinavabhāratī, a commentary to Nāt.yaśāstra.

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 volume 5
no. 4 (2021)

DOI: 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0044 Max Ryynänen

Department of Art
Aalto University, Finland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1446-0230
[email protected]

Updating Artes Vulgares

Commentary: Richard Shusterman,
Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages.

I think “it is official” now. Ars Erotica will become some sort of classic. There are several reasons why. Some
(even adult philosophers, as I have seen when Richard Shusterman has spoken on the topic at a conference), just
cannot stop giggling when they hear the word sex. Many will grab the book out of curiosity, and maybe some,
although I do not believe that many, will even do it for camp reasons. Many of these readers have a neurotic
and/or complicated relationship to sexuality, and hopefully at least some of them will find the book helpful, as
they reflect on themselves and their sexual lives through the text.
On the other hand, I cannot imagine anyone in aesthetics or with a scholarly interest in sexuality who
would not find the book helpful. Nothing comparable on the relationship of aesthetics and sexuality has been
done and the book embraces the topic globally – featuring Shusterman’s vast and deep knowledge – about not
just Western philosophy and culture, but also Chinese and Japanese thinking among others.
The name of the book is also ingenious. It sounds great. The mongrel Ars Erotica was borrowed from
Michel Foucault, who distinguished between “scientia sexualis and non-Western sexual knowledge in the form
of ars erotica,” and was chosen (the author says), because the Greek eros, which accentuates better physical love
and lovemaking, is more suitable as a term than the Latin amor, which is more ambiguous, and favors romantic
“milder forms” of affection and friendship liking (AE, 3). Ars, the Latin derivative term from Greek tekhne, in
other words making and doing something, referring to a skill, is at the very heart of sexual practice and culture.
Shusterman writes that the hybrid “combines the advantages of both languages” (AE, 4), but a curious reader

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could of course ask: “Why not Tekhne Erotica?” “What did the Latin Ars add to the existing Greek concept that
was needed for the book?” First of all, ars has an educational extension and the concept refers to disciplines
that gained more identity during the Middle Ages (e.g., mathematics, grammar). The Medieval artes liberales
(the free “arts,” based on the lack of physicality) and the artes vulgares (the practical “arts,” added later to the
system, where the body was involved) might actually be a good framing to think of when one reads Ars Erotica.
It is definitely about artes vulgares – practical knowledge which, in another situation, could have a role in our
education; in fact, it could be a discipline we could learn through mainstream education. The book discusses
how this has been done (marginally) here and there in different ages and includes philosophical and theological
reflections on the topic.
The historical work provided in the book traces the history of philosophy and body practices in sex through
religion – Shusterman notes that for example the Kamasutra was written by a religious scholar (AE, 17) – with
literature so extensive that one understands why it took such a long time to finish it (the book has been in the
making for as long as I remember).
I do not know if this has been a common experience, but I did not think that I was into the topic. However,
when I read the book, I realized that I had read my Ovid, Al-Nafzawi’s The Perfumed Garden (AE, 18), and many
of the mentioned Asian classics followed my studies in tantra, Chinese, Japanese, and Hindi (language studies
often lead you to classics related to the culture of the language, although you would never reach a competent
stage in your studies); in addition, cheap erotic classics have always been widely available. While highbrow
culture has taken care of other forms of classical literature, we needed the popular press to keep up with erotic
civilization. The impressive sales of erotic classics probably has a lot to do with the same gigglers that cannot
take up the topic without feeling nervous. Sexuality interests people because they have related complexes, unfin-
ished business, and probably for the same reasons one could always find Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Decamerone,
Canterbury Tales, and Salò among video rentals, it was natural that the Kamasutra could suddenly be found in
a pile of books on the shelf of a kiosk one visited on the way to the train in the last year in high school. As the
socialist theorist Antonio Gramsci once asked about Dostoyevsky, “How do workers read Dostoyevsky when
they buy his book on the way to the train?” We could of course ask what kind of interpretations did less educated
readers gain from reading these classics, which in the end might have functioned a bit like women’s magazines
for some. It would be too much for this book, but the lowbrow life of the ancient classics of ars erotica could be
a great topic of research for someone into popular literature. Following this, it is interesting how today we have
countless self-help books on sexuality; this too might be beyond the scope for Ars Erotica, but it would definitely
reward future studies. Some of them continue, in an interesting way, to distribute the somaesthetic practices of
ancient forms of ars erotica. For those who have not been able to participate in tantra teaching, Sexual Secrets:
The Alchemy of Ecstasy by Nick Douglas and Penny Slinger teaches all the somatic practices from training the
PC muscles to preventing ejaculation; which can be supported with yoga exercises – Shusterman mentions
Chinese non-ejaculation sex and its history (AE, 152–54) and thus developing richer and more nuanced male
orgasms – without forgetting the female side of the training, which I cannot, of course, be familiar with. Also,
one could think that today’s popular culture is full of “perfumed gardens,” from films like Mira Nair’s Kama
Sutra: A Tale of Love to even banal TV series like Sex and the City (without forgetting Candance Bushnell’s novel
of the same title). They teach, help to reflect, and give ideas to people about their sexual practices, and perhaps
to a slightly lesser degree than The Perfumed Garden, turn into philosophical reflection. The same applies to
“airport literature,” for example The Soul of Sex by Thomas Moore, which explains, describes, and celebrates
contemporary religious celibacy: a phenomenon that probably developed from the times when the first religious
appraisals (and practices) of celibacy and virginity were written (AE, 126). Ars Erotica covers Paul’s interest in
Christian celibacy and discusses the way people viewed it as a method for living and becoming closer to God

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(AE, 122, 12). I had no idea that some (e.g., Cassian) believed that Christian virgins were true athletes of Christ
(AE, 129). These are good reminders of sometimes idealistic and practical somaesthetic history which today we
easily see as nothing more than conservative culture. Knowledge of the history of sex could be useful for any
radical who attacks all forms of religious and conservative culture.
As aesthetics has its role here, it is natural that Shusterman asks the “big question” at the very beginning.
Can ars erotica be considered art? In response to the question of the counterpart of an artwork he suggests
a long lovemaking session with dinner (AE, 5). Shusterman mentions the interesting side story of how high-
class Chinese courtesans included the practice of various arts in their work which made the sexual upbringing
of the educated upper-class male quite interesting artistically (AE, 178). More importantly, Shusterman also
asks about the aesthetic principles that govern the erotic arts (AE, 178).
In the introductory pages, Shusterman discusses countless aspects of sexuality that have an aesthetic side
to them, for example performativity through looks and costumes (AE, 6), stylization with the human soma as
the key (artistic) medium (AE, 7), and the symbolic richness of sexuality, where knowledge, imagination, and
context changes the acts and situations as much as in conceptual art (AE, 8). What is missing is the classical
folk philosophical tale, that sex is better when the partners are in love. In general, the book does not discuss
this, which is understandable, as the practice of sex has taken up so many pages. The book also delves into the
legal and moral constraints (AE, 12) that make up the context of sex more than our engagement with art.
Shusterman, mentions at the outset (AE, 15) that erotic arts, where they were taught and practiced, were
mostly for privileged males. The book does not only take the easy path. It presents radical violent acts of Japan (AE
16, and chpt. 7) and its high-class seventeenth century courtesan culture (AE, 26), ancient forms of Mediterranean
pederasty (AE, 36), and Spartan eugenic ideas about older brides (it was believed that by being more mature, they
would give birth to stronger children) (AE, 37), which can be considered as one of the strengths of the book. The
topic can quite easily lead to controversy, but it is not rewarding if one does not go all the way.
The book gives a good basic understanding of the history of ars erotica and is a great introductory
companion for a global understanding of the topic. For someone who just remembers a couple of acts with “jade
stalks” from his youth (spent with popular literature), it is absolutely great to find easy taxonomies of where
to start with Chinese ars erotica. Shusterman presents Chinese books on the topic as 1) medically oriented,
2) guides for the householder, and includes the 3) radical Daoist aims for paranormal longevity. Not surpris-
ingly, this is mixed together in self-help books and contemporary tantra schools today. Still, the same spirit of
self-cultivation stressed by Shusterman (AE, 177) has remained, which I find interesting.
Shusterman criticizes Foucault for not understanding how the Chinese actually worked for more pleasure
and not against it with their ars erotica, and claims that Foucault lacked a holistic understanding of Chinese
culture (AE, 150, 152, and 161), which might be true. One could add that Foucault, like Walter Benjamin, was
experimental, and tested out many things in practice, but failed to realize that he might have needed to take
some tantra classes to understand what preventing ejaculation (and training unknown muscles to be able to
do it) could do for orgasms.
A critical reader might ask if the book differentiates between too few literary stories (The Perfumed
Garden), philosophical analysis (e.g., Al-Ghazali’s defence of sex as a spiritual path that combines asceticism
and pleasure) (AE, 25), and maybe even education in sexuality (e.g., the Chinese models) in its search for ancient
knowledge and practice. On the other hand, it always makes clear the textual nature of the discussed classics,
while still inquiring into the hints on the ancient forms of somaesthetics in them, which is the aim of the book.
It is true that Ovid’s Ars amatoria is a strategic manual in the fashion of Machiavelli (AE, 21). It focuses on
rivalry and is quite misogynistic, for example in its wish that females do not destroy their bodies by getting
pregnant (AE, 95–96). This type of analysis is valuable for the reader.

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The history of ars erotica is quite male and upper class, but understanding it is important for all of us.
When it comes to the hidden artes of females, the working class, and other groups, Ars Erotica forms a good
base for further study. It does not dive deep into an ethical discussion of power relations, but they are obvious
for any reader, and Shusterman is of course not shy to note them. The book does not contain, though, any notion
about the way ordinary (i.e., not very educated nor privileged) people have known things and shared knowledge
about sexual practices. These might be less documented, but for sure people have always helped each other and
shared “tricks” for the bedroom, and even philosophized about these issues vernacularly.
In the end of the book Shusterman writes;

To the extent that our modern philosophical tradition continues to define the aesthetic in oppo-
sition to the erotic, it will remain difficult to do proper justice to the beautiful aspects of sensual
desire and to the rewarding arts of sexual fulfilment. A look at the other cultures and other times
can provide, as this book suggests, ample resources for a broader, deeper erotic vision to enrich
the field of aesthetics and our art of living. (AE, 396)

The book really fulfils this promise.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send
a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA.

132
 volume 5
no. 4 (2021)

DOI: 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.004 Ellen Y. Zhang

Faculty of Arts
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7282-942
[email protected]

The Somaesthetic Dimension of the Chinese Qi Erotics

Commentary: Richard Shusterman,
Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages.

Richard Shusterman is the not the first scholar in the West who introduces sex and sexuality in the Chinese
tradition. Other scholars engaged in this theme include Robert van Gulik,1 Michel Foucault,2 Douglas Wile,3 and
Fang Fu Ruan.4 Nevertheless, Shusterman is the first one who brings the topic from the perspective of somaes-
thetics and within a bigger context: the classical arts of love in different cultures. It should be noted that sex
or sexuality has received little attention in the history of Western philosophy, and it is still not an easy topic to
address in philosophical discourse today in the face of “the somatic turn” in recent decades.
In contrast, sexual representation with reference to body consciousness has always been an important
part of the Chinese philosophical and religious tradition, and Daoism in particular, as remarkably presented by
Shusterman in the chapter “Chinese Qi Erotics: The Beauty of Health and the Passion for Virtue” (AE, 150–94).

1) Robert H. van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca 1500 B.C. till 1644
A.D. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003).
2) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 of the History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books,
1978), 59–60.
3) Douglas Wile, Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics Including Women’s Solo Meditation Texts (Albany, NY:
SUNY, 1992).
4) Fang Fu Ruan, Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1991).

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 Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture vol 5: no. 4 (2021)

The term “qi-erotics” coined by Shusterman reflects well the unique nature of Chinese cultural interpreta-
tions of sexual practice in terms of a lived experience that combines ars erotica with a sexological science of
health. In the Daoist context, for example, sexuality is never just sex; it is an integral part of physical, mental,
and spiritual cultivation and perfection. Practitioners believe that by performing these sexual arts, one can
stay in good health, attain longevity, and spiritual advancement. This is the reason why early sex manuals in
China are often related to the practice of the “internal alchemy” (neidan 內丹), where the human body is said
to become a ding 鼎 or cauldron in which what is called “the three treasures” or the ”three primal pneumas,”
that is to say: essence, (jing 精) life breaths (qi 氣), and spirit or somatic/spiritual soul (shen 神) are cultivated
and transformed. According to Daoist sexology, jing is connected to the kidney, thus influences the reposito-
ries of sexual and reproductive energy. Shen or “spirit” in Daoism should not be understood as “soul” that is
separated from the body; instead, it is more like an “unconscious quasi-body” linked to the meridian system
and the Daoist physiological alchemy.
In Daoist meditative practice, the “three treasures” are regarded as the procreative power, life-sustaining
power, and spiritual power respectively. Although the flow of the qi-energy in meditation does not always
correspond to the body’s physiological dimensions, it still can influence them and direct them towards the
external world. Accordingly, instead of encouraging instinctual impulses or sensual pleasures, Daoists speak
more of controlling one’s sexual desires and cultivating and harmonizing that energy for the sake of longevity
and spiritual well-being. Sex practices are also known as “joining energy” or “the joining of the essences.” The
harmonization of sexuality is called heqi 合氣 meaning the “unification of qi-energies” or he yinyang 合陰陽
(meaning the unification of yin or earth and yang or heaven), which harmonizes all aspects of internal energy
flow, and by which the body is used as a site to achieve a cosmological balance. Sexual union as such is viewed
as the commencement: the beginning of nature as well as human society which is, for Daoists, a prerequisite
for attaining the Dao/Way with the greater scale of life.
It has been well-known to the readers in the West that Daoism is closely associated with the Chinese
ars erotica tradition and the works by van Gulik reflects this point well.5 Yet, the “art of bedchamber” (fang-
zhongshu 房中術), as Shusterman indicates, concerns the “technique” or “skill” rather than “art” in a distinc-
tive aesthetic sense (AE, 153). The Chinese word shu 術 denotes the meaning of “techniques,” “skills,” or
“methods,” and thus the “art of bedchamber” is usually put in the genre of medical books. For example, the
“Health Benefits of the Bedchamber” (<房中補益>), an essay written by Sun Simiao (孫思邈, 581 AD–682 AD)
– a famous physician and Daoist practitioner in the Tang dynasty – links the sex act to health and wellbeing. It
is included later in the Daoist canon. Van Gulik’s Erotic Color Prints of the Ming has also cited some chapters
from the essay.6 Another sex manual, the Record of Nourishing Nature and Extending Life (《養性延命錄》)
written by Tao Hongjing (陶弘景, 456 AD–536 AD), a Daoist master and pharmacologist of Northern and
Southern dynasties (420 AD–589 AD), also emphasizes the importance of health in sexual intercourse like the
practice of coitus reservatus or a deferral of “pleasure” (i.e., enjoyment in orgasm). Therefore, sexual pleasure,
says Shusterman, “cannot be the highest goal in lovemaking, since health interests clearly outweigh it” (AE, 165).
This observation is also reflected in Shusterman’s earlier work on Chinese ars erotica where he points out that
“sexual pleasure should be used to regulate and refine one’s body, mind, and the character.”7 In other words,
the ancient Chinese sexual theories put sexual activities in the context of “the larger goals of health and good

5) Van Gulik’s works on the history of Chinese sexology have had a strong influence on the West. Some French postmodern thinkers
such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard are said to be inspired by his research on ars erotica.
6) See Wile, Art of the Bedchamber.
7) Richard Shusterman, Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetic, (London/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 275.

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 Ellen Y. Zhang, The Somaesthetic Dimension of the Chinese Qi Erotics

management (of self and household),” as Shusterman puts it, which means, again, “sexual pleasure should be
used to regulate and refine one’s body, mind, and the character.”8 Although Daoist teachings do not condemn
any non-reproductive sexual activities, they do not promote the idea that the pursuit of sensual desire is the
only goal of sexual activity.9
Therefore, Shusterman’s challenge to Foucault’s interpretation of Chinese ars erotica is insightful, speci-
fying that Foucault’s misunderstanding is based on his study on ancient Greek and Roman literature and
erotic arts (AE, 150–152). In his History of Sexuality, Foucault makes a distinction between scientia sexualis
(or science of sexuality) and ars erotica (or erotic art), through which Foucault attempts to conceptualize the
differences between Western and Eastern discourses of desire and pleasure.10 With this distinction in mind,
Foucault categorizes the Daoist sexual practice in the class of ars erotica. However, Daoist sex practice is not
about the “pleasure-seeking hypothesis” vis-à-vis the “repressive hypothesis” as mentioned earlier. Despite the
fact that the Daoist view of sex may not fit into the Western and modern definition of science or the scientifica-
tion of sex, it is not just ars erotica as Foucault sees it. Foucault ignores the holistic understanding of the body
in Daoism with its emphasis on dietetics, drugs, meditation, and so forth. Shusterman has made an excellent
point when he says that it is very misleading to “characterize the classical Chinese texts of ars erotica in sharp
contrast to sexual science and the medical approach to sex” (AE, 152). “[Foucault] is confused in thinking that
pleasure, for them [the Chinese], is more important than the sexual act because it is pleasure that they seek to
prolong by delaying and even abstaining from the act. Instead, it is the act itself that the Chinese male seeks to
prolong so as to magnify his yin and yang powers and the salutary benefits these bring.”11 Moreover, Foucault’s
distinction between scientia sexualis and ars erotica would be problematic for the Chinese tradition, for the
latter would reject a dualistic distinction between the scientific and the erotic, or between the objective and the
subjective. As a matter of fact, the Chinese tradition recognizes two aspects of the body, namely, the objective
aspect of the body when observing the body from outside and the subjective aspect of the body when feeling
one’s own body from within.
Shusterman has correctly pointed out the polyvalent meaning of the Chinese word “body” (shen 身): apart
from the physical body, it also indicates self, self-identity, and person. “Sex is thus inscribed in the very notion
of the human self” (AE, 163). Therefore, while somatic sensation is important, it is not the ultimate concern at
hand. In a sexual meditative act, practitioners learn to prevent the sexual energy from falling into the state in
which shen or spiritual energy latent in the mind-body cannot be activated due to the reason that one’s impul-
sive desires/pleasures fail to go through a kind of qi-transformation (qihua 氣化), that is, the purification of
sexual impulses. In the Secret of Golden flower (Taiyi Jinhua zongzhi 太乙金華宗旨), a book of Daoist medita-
tion, the concept of shen or the spiritual power is called the “heavenly mind” or the “celestial mind” (tianxin
天心) which is also another name for the Dao.12 For Daoists, the cosmic Dao is also the primordial nature of

8) Ibid.
9) In fact, Daoist sexual practice entails two forms of practice: One is called “spiritual intercourse without physical intercourse”
(shenjiao xingbujiao 神交形不交) and another is called “physical intercourse without spiritual intercourse” (xingjiao shenbujiao
形交神不交). Both forms are performances of “joining energy” that enables one to attain “peaceful bliss” (anle 安樂).
10) Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I, 59–60.
11) Richard Shusterman, “Asian Ars Erotica and the Question of Sexual Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1:
59–60.
12) For the English translation of the Secret of the Golden Flower, see the version by Thomas Cleary, trans., Secret of the Golden
Flower, Reprint Edition, (San Francisco, CA: Harper One; Reprint edition, 1993).

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 Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture vol 5: no. 4 (2021)

the human heart-mind. Accordingly, sexual practice is also part of the practice of cultivating one’s emotions
and thought.13
It is also worth noticing that Shusterman’s discussion on the Chinese ars erotica touches on the issue
concerning gendered sex and women such as the role of the foreplay for the female partner, female attractive-
ness, female experts in ars erotica, and the mystical female deities like Su Nü. In fact, one of the earliest Chinese
sex manuals is called Su Nü Jing (《素女經》The Classic of Su Nü). The text consists of a dialogue between the
Yellow Emperor and a mystical female deity by the name of Su Nü (literally means “the white girl” or “immac-
ulate girl”). What is interesting about this text is that it is Su Nü, a female, who offers sexual instruction to the
Yellow Emperor, a male, where gendering sexual pleasures are implied.
Despite that the Daoist claims that sex was not just about pleasing a man, we can easily find the texts
that emphasize the benefits enjoyed by male practitioners or shows a manipulative exploitation of women, such
as the notion of having sex with multiple virgins as sexual partners in order to gather women’s yin to nourish
a man’s yang. Such degradation of women into subordinate roles became more noticeable due to the increasing
influence of Neo-Confucianism (which is “notorious for endorsing male privilege”) after the Song dynasty. For
example, in Instruction in Physiological Alchemy (《張三豐內丹養生修煉秘法》) written by Zhang Sanfeng
(張三豐, fourteenth century CE), a legendary Daoist master who was well-known for creating the Taiji quan
(a moving meditation based on the dynamic relationship between yin and yang), the woman’s role as a sexual
partner is seen as a ding or furnace upon which a man cultivates his sexual drive and vital energy.14 In fact,
desirability of multiple female partners is explicitly expressed in many Daoist sex manuals. Nevertheless, such
a view was also challenged within the Daoist tradition itself. For instance, female Daoists of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries rejected the practice of “nurturing the yang at the expense of the yin” by shifting sex
practice to what is called nudan 女丹 (an inner alchemy specially designed for women) with its focus on gender-
specific practices of breath meditation and visualization for the purpose of longevity and immortality. I hoped
that Shusterman would have said more on sexual representation in light of this gender issue.
Was ars erotica considered art in ancient China? The answer is yes. In fact, the Daoist ars erotica played
an important role in the development of Chinese literature, especially during the Tang dynasty (618 AD–907
AD), the golden age of Daoist philosophy and religion. For example, a new literary genre known as Tang chuanqi
唐傳奇 (“fantastical fiction” about the scholar-beauty romance) was created, which offers an elaborate account
of sex, passion, and desire. One of the representative works is a romantic story entitled Poetic Essay on Great
Bliss of the Sexual Union of Heaven and Earth and Yin and Yang (The Great Bliss; Tiandi yinyang jiaohuan dale
fu《天地陰陽交歡大樂賦》). It was written by Bai Xingjian (776 AD–826 AD), depicting sexual acts committed
in various settings by persons involved in various relationships. This story is also mentioned in van Gulik’s
A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B.C. Till 1644 A.D. Another text of Tang erotica

13) Sex is viewed as the ritual of the union of the qi-energy that involves all the physical and spiritual faculties of the partners. In
fact, early Daoism (i.e., the Celestial Master Daoism) had a sexual initiation rite, that is, ritualized intercourse in the name of merging
primordial pneumas or qi. This practice was discontinued later due to criticism from both inside and outside of Daoism. In The Way
of the Yellow and the Red: Re-examining the Sexual Initiation Rite of Celestial Master Daoism, Gil Raz argues that “the procedure [of
the initiation ritual] is not emulation of the procreative coupling of yin and yang, but rather an ascent through this binary stage of
emergent cosmogony to the primordial stage of the three primal pneumas [i.e., jing, qi, and shen] within the undifferentiated unity of
the Dao.” For a detailed discussion of Daoist sexual ritual, see Gil Raz, The Way of the Yellow and the Red: Re-examining the Sexual
Initiation Rite of Celestial Master Daoism, (Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers, 2008), 86–120.
14) A female ding is classified in three ranks: The lower rank comprises women between the ages of 21 and 25. The middle rank
comprises virgins between the ages of 16 and 20 years old who have not reached maturity. The highest rank comprises virgins of 14
years old. See Ruan, Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture.

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 Ellen Y. Zhang, The Somaesthetic Dimension of the Chinese Qi Erotics

is You xianku 遊仙窟 (Merrymaking in a Transcendent Dwelling) by Zhang Zhuo 張鷟 (660 AD–740 AD), an
eminent Tang literati-official. The story tells of a sexual encounter between a literati-official and a mystical widow.
It was not recorded in any post-Tang bibliographies in China but attained popularity in Japan and played an
important role in the development of Japanese literature. Both stories express the idea that passion and sexual
satisfaction for both men and women are central to many aspects of human life.
How about the relation of sexuality to the passion for virtue? Shusterman discusses the concept of de 德
(meaning special excellence or qualitative power) and its connection to the idea of mei 美 (beauty) as well as
the combined term meide 美德 (meaning “beautiful virtue”). In The Analects 9:18, Confucius says, “I have yet
to meet a man who loves virtue as much as he loves sex” (se 色; also translated as “the beauty of women”). It is
quite intriguing that Confucius connects virtues directly to the erotic play of sex or beauty. I think that what
Confucius means here is that he hopes that our passion for virtuous excellence could be something natural
and spontaneous and thus virtues truly become part of our inner power. We may consider it as a Confucian
way of thinking with the body. Meanwhile, to see virtue as something “beautiful,” there is clearly an aesthetic
dimension in Confucian ethics, as Shusterman has observed (AE, 175).
One more thing I would like to mention is about the aestheticization of sexual activities via the use of
euphemized metaphors with regard to the Chinese ars erotica, including the description of genital organs (in fact,
they are never addressed directly), such as “the cloud and rain” (referring to the sexual act), “fishes touching”/
“dragon twisting”/“intwined silkworm” (referring to different sexual postures), “the jade gate” (referring to the
female organ), “the jade stalk” or “the lonely steep mountain” (referring to the male organ), and so forth. Sexual
metaphors are widely used in other cultures such as the use of baseball metaphors in American culture today.
But the metaphors used in ancient China offer a more nuanced and poetic representation of eroticism. For the
Chinese, sexual pleasure can be amplified by the enjoyment of nature, music, words, and mutual affection.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send
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 volume 5
no. 4 (2021)

DOI: 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0046 Matthew Sharpe

Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University, Australia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-816-77
[email protected]

“Bringin’ Sexy Back” (and With it, Women):

Shusterman Beyond Foucault on the Greeks
Commentary: Richard Shusterman,
Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages.

“I’m bringin’ sexy back (Yeah) / Them other boys don’t know how to act (Yeah)”
Justin Timberlake and Timbaland.

Like other contributors, I would like to begin by expressing my respect and admiration for the scale and scope
of Richard Shusterman’s achievement in Ars Erotica. The Preface acknowledges “the vast amount of material”
involved in this project of charting “the history of erotic theory in the world’s most influential premodern
cultures,” with each chapter on a different cultural tradition potentially meriting its own monograph (AE, x,
xi). As a scholar who has worked in depth on the work of Pierre Hadot, as well as Michel Foucault’s works on
the practices of philosophy conceived as an art or craft (technê) of living in the Western tradition,1 my response
will necessarily be more limited. It will address in detail just the first major chapter of the book – especially
as I note with appreciation the piece in this symposium by Marta Faustino on the relations between the ars
vivendi and ars erotica.

1) Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

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 Matthew Sharpe , “Bringin’ Sexy Back” (and With it, Women)

I take some comfort in accepting these limitations from the statement of a particular debt that Shusterman
proffers in his Preface to Foucault’s works in the finally-not-completed History of Sexuality series. The author
notes both what he owes to Foucault on sexuality, particularly in his studies on the ancient Greeks and Romans,
as well as his differences from Foucault’s work. It is these differences that I want to examine here in some detail,
by first (I) returning especially to History of Sexuality II, The Use of Pleasure, Foucault’s great study of “sexuality”
amongst the Greeks. Reading Foucault again, after many years, but also after spending time on Ars Erotica,
has been an enlightening experience, and I think also allows us (II) to mark out the extent of Shusterman’s
contribution, when it comes to understanding the ancient Mediterranean pagans’ experiences and discourses,
surrounding sex, its practices, and its pleasures.

I
Firstly, then, to Foucault and History of Sexuality II: The Use of Pleasure.2 To return to this text after many years
is to be first of all struck by the immense power of Foucault’s mind, and his ability to encompass vast bodies of
material into discrete, neatly-schematized, enumerated categories. So, famously, in Use of Pleasure we have the
three axes which constitute “sexuality” (the formation of scientia sexualis, forms of power regulating it, and the
ways in which subjects recognize themselves as sexual subjects) (HS II, 4). Then there are the four topoi to study
different cultures of ethical self-formation (HS II, 26–28): that of the ethical substance, which for Foucault’s
Greeks was the aphrodisia, pleasures of touch (food, drink, sex) (HS II, chapter 1); the mode of subjectivation
(assujettissement), involving for the Greeks questions surrounding the chrêsis aphrodisian, which Foucault
will then divide into three strategies (those of need, timing, and status) (HS II, chapter 2); the forms of ethical
work involved in shaping oneself as a sexual subject, implicating for the Greeks what Foucault will elsewhere
calls technologies of the self (HS II, chapter 3); and finally, the goal or telos (HS II, chapter 4), which Foucault
famously claims in the Greek world was a certain “aesthetics of existence” (HS II, 11–12, 89, 92, 104, 253) in
ways which Pierre Hadot, as we know, would question.3
If these four topoi structure Part Two of Use of Pleasures, the remainder of the text is shaped by a three-fold
divisio Foucault identifies in “the existing and recognized practices by which men (sic.) sought to shape their
conduct” (HS II, 93): between dietetics and the medical-physiological conception of sex in the ancient Greek
world (HS II, Part Two); “economics” or household management, including marriage (HS II, Part Three); and
– of especial concern for Shusterman, and therefore us here – the “erotics” of the sanctioned forms of homo-
sexual eros in the Greek world (HS II, Part Four). A final Part (HS II, Part Five), on “True love,” examines the
philosophical, notably Platonic discourses on homosexual love, and its sublimation in forms of philosophical
eros. It arguably sits as a kind of uneasy “supplement” to the preceding text.4
What next struck this prodigal reader of History of Sexuality II, were three things: (1) the tensions
that undergird Foucault’s project in writing this volume of History of Sexuality and also, guided squarely by
Shusterman’s achievement in Ars Erotica, several telling and significant subjects which are wholly omitted

2) Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality II: The Use of Pleasures, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1988). References to this
text are so frequent in what follows that they are cited parenthetically in text with the assigned abbreviation: HS II.
3) See Pierre Hadot, “An Interrupted Dialogue with Michel Foucault: Convergences and Divergences,” trans. Matthew Sharpe and
Federico Testa (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 227–34.
4) In fact, this final Part is introduced by reevoking a four-fold typology of “great austerity themes” whose substance and tonality
we will examine in due course. Introduced at the beginning of the text but then left idle until the opening of Part Five, it spans the
already-examined relations to the body (dietetics, Part Two), marital relationships (Part Three), and “the relation to boys” (Part Four),
but now adding “the relation to truth” (HS II, 229; cf. 23) at especial stake in philosophy.

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(2), as well as some surprising and disquieting points of emphasis in the text (3). Let me examine these three
topics in sequence. This will also allow us to set up the contrasts with Shusterman’s different depiction of the
sexual lives of the Greeks.
(1) In terms of the tensions in the project of History of Sexuality II: we know that Foucault returned to the
Greeks moved by a “curiosity” to “get free of oneself” – to discover “if one can think differently than one thinks
and perceive differently than one sees” – even to “free thought from what it silently thinks, and enable it to think
differently” (HS II, 8, 9). In this context, Foucault is aiming at locating a conception of sexuality and of subjectivity
which could provide a counterpoint, and possible form of escape, from the modern, normalizing, and biopolitical
conception of sexuality with its antecedents in the forms of “confessional” and “pastoral power” inaugurated in
the Christian tradition and examined in History of Sexuality I (cf. HS II, 20–24, 30–31, 62). In this light, in ways
whose clear debts to Nietzsche are nevertheless not directly announced, Foucault will return repeatedly to an
axiological contrast between Greek ethics: depicted as (a) a practice of self-subjectivation involving the free “styl-
ization” of one’s life and actions, and hence, (b) responsive to the manifold differences between individuals, times of
life, and genders; and Christian sexual mores: depicted as (a) “universal” and (b) “code-based,” hence all-levelling
and insensitive to differences (HS II, 21, 23, 25, 26, 29–31, 31, 32, 53, 54, 59–60, 62, 89, 91, 106, 150, 169, 182, 200,
209, 210, 251). It is the former, Greek conception of sexuality that we are being prompted to reconsider in Use of
Pleasure, under the heading of an “aesthetics of existence,” as less restrictive and “normalizing” than Christian
and modern conceptions; and hence, as potentially liberatory (HS II, 11–12, 89, 92, 104, 253).
On the other hand, from as early as the second chapter (“Forms of Problematization”), a second problem-
atic is introduced. It responds less to the desire to think differently from the modern-post-Christian yoking of
sexuality, to a sense of the hidden, potentially sinful or abnormal “truth” of oneself, than to Foucault’s genealog-
ical concern to understand how these later Western forms of “sexuality” could have emerged. If Greek thinking
about sexuality is to liberate us from ourselves, we need to reckon with the way that “already present at the
core of Greek and Greco-Roman thought,” one nevertheless does not find within it the invitation to a carnival
(HS II, 15). We are asked instead to come to terms with “the persistence of themes, anxieties, and exigencies that
no doubt marked the Christian ethic and the morality of modern European societies” (HS II, 15; cf. 249–54).5
If this already sounds somewhat unappetizing, Foucault goes on to immediately trace out (HS II, 20) what he
calls a “quadri-thematics of sexual austerity” in Greco-Roman culture (HS II, 21). This encompasses “fear”
about the effects of sexual enjoyment (in particular, the depletion of “virile” energies through the expulsion of
semen) (HS II, 130–33), a tendency to valorize forms of “austerity” in how often one engaged in actual physical
sex, or indeed a propensity to idealize complete sexual abstention (as in the case of Socrates, but also some
famed athletes): together with an anxiety and ongoing debates as to whether homosexuality was para physin,
in particular due to its “feminization” of the young eromenos (beloved) (HS II, 14–20, 21–23, 26).
Again, to be sure, Foucault will valorize the Greek discourses on Eros insofar as they take same-sex and
other-sex attraction to be in principle equally natural forms of attraction (HS II, 85, 189–90). Nevertheless,
what Foucault dubs “the antimony of the boy” (HS II, 221) sets up a tension between celebrating the attraction
of youthful males as objects of same-sex attraction, and a series of concerns that accepting the love of elder
suitors could be shameful, even potentially devastating for the youth’s reputation and, as such, his subsequent
political life. It is against this background, one in which the boy’s yielding or “gifting” of his sex to older suitors
could always tip over into scandal, that Greek “erotic” texts surrounding homosexual relationships are set up
(HS II, 204–14; cf. 19–20).

5) Which is not to say that their founding conceptions of the ethical substance, modes of subjectivation, means, and telos are “the
same” as the succeeding Christian culture. On the contrary (HS II, 20–24).

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Nevertheless, and here I move into (2), the telling omissions in History of Sexuality II, certainly read in light
of Shusterman’s Ars Erotica: let us say that this “erotics” itself, as Foucault presents it, can seem fairly anerotic or
“unsexy,” whether the reader is hetero-, bi-, or homosexual in inclination. There is a good deal on the ways the
older erastes/eron must present himself as a respectful lover, from whose love the younger eromenos can expect
educational, social, or political advantages (cf. esp. HS II, 196–97). There is likewise much on how the boy should
conduct himself – albeit less to make himself more attractive, which was considered shameful, than to parry
and delay the ardor of his suitors, as in a “trial” or “test,” before yielding (HS II, 206–207). But then, we are also
told that the boy should not enjoy the sex, or even (per Xenophon, in a passage Shusterman also quotes) (AE,
44–45), turn away whilst his lover loses his head in aphrodisia (HS II, 223). Small wonder that a further anxiety
surrounding these erotic practices was that young men may come to hate their former lovers (HS II, 223, 231).
As for sex itself, Foucault several times has to state explicitly what his analysis makes clear: that there
is a “reticence” in the Greek texts to say almost anything about the physical act or acts (HS II, 39, 92–93, 209,
223) which a book like Shusterman’s shows us stands in stark contrast to the texts on the ars erotica in other
world cultures. This reticence, Foucault proposes, is shaped in part by the concern about preserving the good
names of young eromenoi who might partake in them, let alone be seen to have been “an object of pleasure and
to acknowledge oneself as such” (HS II, 221).
So, we are a long way from a carnival (!), and a good deal more could be said here on how, if there were
such a carnival, no one’s wives would have been invited. We will speak more of Foucault’s omissions, led by the
Courtesan Theodote of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and her like (AE, 53), when we turn to Shusterman. This all
brings us in the meanwhile to (3), the disquieting points of emphasis in Uses of Pleasures, relative to the liber-
ating ambition of Use of Pleasures in looking to Greek models to seek out other ways of experiencing sexuality
or ourselves today.
(3) First, critics and celebrants alike often hear Foucault’s talk of “stylization” (HS II, 92–93, 250–51)
and “aesthetics of existence” as liberatory, even in some sense libertarian. We do so presupposing a more or
less apolitical “classical” background, although these terms almost always appear in the texts in an axiological
contrast with the putatively needlessly levelling, anaesthetic “codes” of post-Christian ethico-moral thinking
(see HS II, 21, 23, 59–60, 62, 91, 106, 169, 182, 200, 250).6 Foucault’s text has the merit of frankly situating the
practices notably of the “economics” of marriage (HS II, 178–80) in the Greeks as a distinctly aristocratic prac-
tice, which survived the push to democratization in the sixth-fourth centuries. He examines also how the Greek
deliberations on eros are widely shaped by a deeply androcentric set of assumptions about activity and passivity
(HS II, 21, 46–47, 194, 211, 220–22), and reaching even into the conception of semen and its powers, and the
ways and why women enjoy sex (HS II, 127–28).
Foucault’s Nietzscheanism is evident in the stress he places on a contentiously “polemical” picturing of
the pursuit of enkrateia, “struggling” against the passions, and aiming at the securing of “victory” for a “leader-
ship principle” in the psyche presided over by the logos (HS II, 65–67, 212). Despite Part Two of Use of Pleasure
being on medical discourse, the ancient philosophers’ more frequent therapeutic metaphors (or the metaphors
concerning cultivation, framing the psyche as a garden – not a battlefield) are elided when the practical means
of ethical and sexual self-formation are mooted (HS II, 63–77).7 When it comes to the “strategies” involved in

6) “Universality” is always coded negatively in HS II, in each of these cases; and “codes” and “codification” are associated pejora-
tively with “Christianity,” and contrasted with a series of terms, themselves coded positively, surrounding “style,” and “stylization,”
(HS II, 23, 25, 26, 29–31, 31, 32, 53, 54, 89, 150, 209, 210, and 251).
7) See Matthew Sharpe, “There Is Not Just a War: Recalling the Therapeutic Metaphor in Western Metaphilosophy,” Sophia 55, no.
(2016): 31–54.

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making oneself a subject of the Aphrodisia, the third is directly sociopolitical: a strategy of status (HS II, 9–62)
in which Foucault’s celebration of the “multitude” of different possibilities present in the Greek world (“every-
thing was a matter of adjustment, circumstance, and personal position”) is not apolitical. It lists, via Plato,
“children, women, slaves, as well as the inferior majority” as some of the relevant possibilities, in contrast to
the “few people who are best by nature and by education” (HS II, 61–62). When it comes to his discussion of
moderation (sophrosynê), Foucault notes that the Greeks’ manly autokratia was figured as isomorphic with
the “enslaving” of lesser by “better men” (HS II, 80), and of course, the “aristocratic” and “inegalitarian justice
(justice inégalitaire)”8 of the male master presiding over his wife (HS II, 178).
We can well wonder, as we reread The Use of Pleasure with some temporal and critical distance, whether
wives and slaves might feel more attracted to universal moral codifications which happen to recognize, at least
in principle (usually not in fact), their equal rights and dignity. Certainly, if there was a “freedom” in Greek
sexual ethics as Foucault depicts these for us (HS II, 202), it was a freedom enjoyed only by elder men in charge
of their own estates, and one which was not shared with either their wives or the youths whom they desired. As
Shusterman suggests, we can also wonder about whether such a freedom, predicated on “status” differences which
are vertical and political – as well as horizontal and aesthetic (HS II, 59–62) – is one which we can look to with
more than historical curiosity in our attempts to free ourselves in our thinking and sexualities (AE, 27, 33, 60).

II
To turn from Foucault’s history of sexuality to Richard Shusterman’s Ars erotica is in some ways to risk
comparing apples with oranges. Erotics, as we have seen, is just one of the three “recognized practices” and
four “great austerity themes” which Uses of Pleasures covers. By contrast, we know that Shusterman’s book
takes as its subject:

The techniques and disciplines of traditional ars erotica [that] were designed not only to enhance
sexual satisfaction but also to provide distinctive aesthetic pleasures and to cultivate qualities of
understanding, sensibility, grace, skill, and self-mastery that go far beyond the limits of sexual
activity … that sought to provide an aesthetic education that, by developing character, sensitivity,
taste, and interpersonal awareness, could contribute to what many would consider the highest art
of all: the art of living. (AE, 1–2)

In this light, Shusterman’s examination of the ars erotica across different cultures, not limited to only the Greeks
and Romans, will consider the way fine arts (like music, dance, or poetry) can be incorporated into practices of
courtship and seduction, the way beauty itself is integrated into different understandings of sex and sexuality,
and the way different sexual experiences can refine and enhance peoples’ sensibilities and responsiveness to
others; and, not least, the way that different practices can be recommended which dramatize, enrich, prolong,
and intensify sexual acts themselves, or even imbue the act with larger religious, symbolic, or cosmological
significances (AE, 3–9). In short, this is a book not simply about the forms of education peoples have enshrined
about sex, its possibilities, and dangers, but education through sex itself:

8) Hurley gives this as “non-egalitarian.” This is softening, as against “inégalitaire,” in Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité
2: Usage des plaisirs, (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 198. One can even wonder what “non-egalitarian” means in English, if some contrast
with the political “inegalitarian” is intended.

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By this I mean an edification of self and other that uses the potent energy of sexual desire and
deploys the meliorative exercises of erotic skills, techniques, and forms of knowledge to render
the experience of this desire and the performative process of its fulfillment more richly enjoyable,
rewarding, and instructive, in cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical terms. (AE, 10)

Someone might protest here that much of this sounds very close to what Foucault wanted to explore, and what
he perhaps wished to find, by looking at the ancient Greek and Roman texts concerning sexuality. The “means”
of stylizing one’s experience of the Aphrodisia, he is after all clear, involve precisely those forms of “care of the
self” which would soon enough usurp the central place in his research, in lecture series led by Hermeneutics
of the Self (HS II, 73, 101, 103, 211).
We reply to this interlocutor by stressing the emphasis through History of Sexuality II, which Shusterman
notes (AE, 57; see below), on the “great austerity themes” (HS II, 229) and, in line with these, the “reticence” in
Greek texts to talk about sexual acts themselves (HS II, 39, 92–93, 209, 223). Given that sex itself is (as it were)
“off limits” as a subject of discourse, the means of training oneself as a (male, aristocratic) subject of Aphrodisia
(HS II, 72–77) hence principally involved forms, if not of asceticism, then an “askesis” (HS II, 72–73, 75–77)
and “dietetics” of pleasures which would restrict indulgence, lest one deplete oneself (HS II, 117–24), and gain
a reputation for lacking self-control with others – and, as it were, transmit it to one’s partners. There was of
course a certain “spiritualization” operating in this culture of noble self-restraint: one which runs from the
distinction, which Shusterman also notes, between the “base” love associated with Aphrodite Pandemos, and
the more spiritualized and pedagogical conceptions of a “noble” love paired with Aphrodite Ourania which
would be sublimated again in Platonic discourse (AE, 32). One defense of the superiority of homosexual love
proffered by its ancient defenders, against charges of being para physin, was precisely to stress how it was less
utilitarian, more elevated or “heavenly” than heterosexual coupling, since it could not result in physical repro-
duction (HS II, 221–23).
Nevertheless, foreclosed in this discursive space – since one could not, to put it delicately, talk about “doing
it” – was also the very possibility of any practices for using enflamed sexual desire as a means of self-training,9
for instance: training in self-control, patience, endurance, openness to another, generosity, even physical flex-
ibility, or mental tranquility. Plato in the Laws considered the possibility, only to dismiss it, rather suggesting
drunkenness as a better testing ground to teach people how to keep their heads, even when intoxicated (more
an ars dionysias then than an ars erotica) (Plato, Laws, 637d, 648b–649e; AE 72, 76–77; cf. HS II, 75). There
are no Greek ars erotica which talk about using the sexual act and its desires as a means, by itself, of attaining
greater self-mastery or happiness, certainly on Foucault’s telling.
Shusterman’s account of Greek culture, read alongside Foucault’s, can therefore be experienced as a case
of “bringing sexy back,” in the words of the American songster, Justin Timberlake. It is not that Shusterman
ignores the tensions between Greco-Roman philosophical conceptions of self-mastery, rooted in wider culture,
and the experiences of eros (although, like Foucault, he also sees Platonism in particular as operating a spiri-
tualization of eros worthy of note) (AE, 57–77; HS II, 233–46). But readers can find out, via Shusterman, in
ways they will not by reading Foucault, what the Greeks thought erotic desire felt like, and not simply under
the sign of the threat its chaotic power represented to virile self-mastery (AE, 53; cf. HS II, 64–69). There is
also its evaluation, as against other forms of pleasure, including the scandalous opinion of the androgynous,
blind prophet Tiresias, that women get nine times more pleasure from aphrodisia than the men (AE, 52–53).
The same readers will even find out about the three sexual positions most popular with the Greeks, and that

9) It is at this point that an exploration of Socrates’ claim to be a master of the art of love would need to be interposed.

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there were “sex manuals describing the various sex positions as well as methods of seduction” which have not
survived, including several written by famous women like Philaenis of Samos (AE, ), about whom and which
Foucault had nothing to say.
But let me illustrate this “Timberlakian” thesis more sufficiently by making four points here. (1) First of
all, in the opening section of Ars Erotica’s long chapter on the Greeks and Romans, Shusterman grounds his later
examination of the medical and philosophical traditions on the basis of an exploration of the – after all highly
sexualized – mythologies that shaped these cultures’ popular religions. Shusterman does not miss the oppor-
tunity to note the “instructive models of divine lovemaking inspired by beauty and pursued for pleasure rather
than procreation” that the Homeric and Hesiodic poets bequeathed to us. (Zeus was “a tough dog to keep on
the porch,” as Hilary Clinton is supposed to have said of Bill. But he was hardly alone amongst the Olympians,
male or female, in his fondness for the occasional sexual enjoyment of beautiful immortals and mortals.)
(2) Second, Shusterman stresses another subject which we can everywhere expect to find developed in
Foucault’s Use of Pleasure, yet which receives surprisingly scant attention there. This is the defining worship
of beauty which characterized Greek culture, which was indissolubly linked with ideas surrounding sexuality.
Shusterman by contrast stops to examine: the Greeks’ worship of bodily beauty (AE, 43–44), their emphasis on
vision and the gaze and their modalities (AE, 45–46; cf. HS II, 198–99), Greek practices of artful exposure and
concealment to incite curiosity or desire (AE, 46–47), the urge to artistic fecundity furnished by beauty and
sexual desire (AE, 48–49), the place of song and dance in inciting eros (AE, 49–50), and even the stylization of
postures considered most beautiful in sculptures (AE, 52–55). This philokalia was reflected everywhere from the
mythological identification of the Hellenes’ “twin gods of desire (Aphrodite) and love (Eros) with outstanding
beauty” (AE, 33) right through to the culminating vision which the philosophical lover is supposed to attain
of beauty herself in Plato’s Symposium (211c–212a): not to mention in the profusion of what we term “fine arts”
led by statuary, architecture, and poetry.
Foucault’s very language of an “aesthetics of existence” suggests a stress on this subject of beauty in the
context of a history of sexuality. We know that Foucault’s Greeks devoted their aristocratic leisure “to [giving]
one’s personal life a form that answers to criteria of brilliance, beauty, nobility, or perfection” (HS II, 27); “a life
… committed to the maintenance and reproduction of an ontological order (sic.) … [which] took on the bril-
liance of a beauty that was revealed to those able to behold it or keep its memory present in mind” (HS II, 90).
Nevertheless, if there is an aesthetics “of existence” at play in the History of Sexuality, it operates in almost complete
abstraction from any dedicated aesthetics of sex or sexuality. Although the beauty of boys is often mentioned in
examinations of specific texts (for instance, the Symposia of Xenophon and Plato), the reader waits until page
200 of the Hurley translation (219–20 in the original) for anything approaching a consideration of the Greeks’
sense for, and appreciation of the beauty of the youthful male body (HS II, 200). We are then only told that; “its
traits” were valued as “the signs and guarantees of a developing virility. Strength, endurance, and spirit also
formed part of this beauty”; in a passage which turns immediately to the value of physical exercises to maintain
this beauty, and which is ringed by disclaimers about the ambiguity of any feminine attributes, which were, “in
the classical period … something from which the boy needed to protect himself and be protected” (HS II, 200).
At issue is a matter of what Foucault calls a “moral aesthetics,” which is to say, hardly “erotic” in many of the
senses Shusterman’s book so richly explores (HS II, 200).
(3) Thirdly, despite Aphrodite’s status as proverbially beautiful – and despite the singular status of “Helen”
in the founding poem of a culture which called itself “Hellenic” – we can only note that Greek attitudes to
female beauty, and its place in erotic life, is never treated in a dedicated way by Foucault. In the context of Use
of Pleasure’s treatment of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, we are told that the beauty of wives was also valued quite
highly, and that household chores were valorised as a means of keeping her in good shape, but the same “discre-

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tion” about anything to do with intercourse applies in the texts on marriage as in those on relations between
elder men and male youths (HS II, 19–60). By contrast, Shusterman dedicates an informative passage to the
beauty and sexuality of the (likewise proverbially ravishing) Spartan women, including the admissibility of poly-
andry at certain historical moments, and an acceptance of lesbian relationships (AE 36–37, 0). Furthermore,
when Shusterman turns, as we all invariably do, to Athens, from which the bulk of extant writing comes, we
accompany him into venues, led by the symposia, and meet dramatis personae, led by the hetaerae (“higher-class
courtesans”) (AE, 39), either wholly absent from Foucault’s accounts, or else mentioned en passant as the settings
for different logoi concerning love.
(4) The preceding observation links my third to fourth points concerning Shusterman’s “bringing of
sexy back” into a reading of the Greeks on sexuality. Whereas Foucault does not treat this striking cultural
forum of the symposia, in its connections with sex and eros, Shusterman paints a picture of them as highly
erotically-charged environments. These were parties to which “sexually attractive and available females” were
typically invited (AE, 38). These woman were charged with entertaining the male guests with music (like the
flute girls whom the Platonic symposiasts take care to exclude at the beginning of Plato’s Symposium, but who
burst in anyways with the drunken Alcibiades), as well as with “sex acts at the end of the party,” especially in
cases of the kamos, “a conga of revellers that took the drinking party into the city on expeditions of riots and
debauch” (AE, 38).
Then there were the hetaerae, like the marvelous Theodote in Xenophon’s Memorabilia of Socrates
(AE, 53–54), or of course Aspasia, the companion of Pericles (and on some accounts, the brains behind him).
These “companions” were not simply prostitutes, but more like Japanese Geisha than working girls (cf. AE,
289–307). The Greek hetaerae were accomplished individuals. They were valued as companions to men, not
simply for their physical beauty, sexual desirability, and the possibility of their sexual enjoyment; but for their
cultural refinement, conversation, and education (AE, 39, 53). These female “companions” could bestow their
favors on whomever they chose and exercise the right to refuse suitors. The men would have to compete to court
them, and impress to seduce them, as they would with the boys (AE, 39). My point here is that, again, all this
is news to a reader of History of Sexuality II.

III
It might not be too much, if perhaps it is a little casual, to say (all in all) that reading Richard Shusterman’s Greeks
in Ars Erotica conveys the sense to a reader that they probably had a much better time than Foucault’s Greeks,
with their austere, aristocratic self-stylization, haunted by fears of a depletion of vital energies, the feminiza-
tion of passivity, the shame of excessive enjoyment, the subordination of wives, and the absence of courtesans,
let alone the conflicting norms facing the young boys at once courted and warned against giving in too soon,
too much, to the wrong suitors, in the wrong ways – let alone actually enjoying the experience. In perhaps the
decisive passage wherein Shusterman makes his own difference from Foucault clearest, he writes:

We can agree with Foucault that self-mastery served as an ‘aesthetic value’ for the Greeks because
it rendered a person ‘able to give one’s conduct the form that would assure one of a name meriting
remembrance’ (HS II, 93). But admirably memorable conduct can express itself in deeds or works
that are not distinctively aesthetic, such as acts of military heroism or political leadership. We
can, however, adopt Foucault’s general notion of formal principles to suggest an aesthetic feature
of Greek eroticism related to a classical principle of aesthetic form: unity in variety. If Foucault
emphasizes sexual moderation and restraint that points to unity and order, while likewise defining

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Greek ‘aesthetics of existence’ in terms of a diminution or ‘rarefaction of sexual activity’ (HS II, 92),
then we should conversely highlight also the rich pluralism of Greek erotic expression. Embracing
both heterosexual and homosexual love, marital and nonmarital sex, genital and nongenital love-
making, the Greeks endorsed a multiplicity of erotic venues (symposium, brothel, home, and street)
along with a variety of sexual positions. (AE, 7)

This commentator makes no claim, here as elsewhere, to a categorical normative assessment of whose Greeks,
Shusterman’s or Foucault’s, are therefore “best.” It is enough to have suggested that Shusterman’s seem better
rounded, as well as having been more roundly explored by their author. Nor am I able to make any claim, here,
about the complexities surrounding the relationships between ancient philosophy, the practices of philosophical
self-mastery, and eros, as he would have liked. Let me however finish by recommending warmly Shusterman’s
Ars Erotica for its contribution to the philosophical and wider understanding of classical Greek and Roman
culture, and thanking as warmly the Eidos. A Journal for the Philosophy of Culture editors for inviting me to
participate in this little symposium.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
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 volume 5
no. 4 (2021)

DOI: 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0047 Marta Faustino

Art of Living Research Group
IFILNOVA/ Nova University of Lisbon, Portugal
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-492-839
[email protected]

East and West on the Tension Between Ars Erotica and Ars Vivendi1
Commentary: Richard Shusterman,
Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages.

Richard Shusterman’s Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love is a masterpiece in a number
of respects. With its focus on erotic love and the aesthetics of lovemaking, the book is to be admired for having
the audacity to broach a topic that tends to be neglected – if not repressed – in contemporary academic schol-
arship. But Ars Erotica is far from being “simply” about sex and different arts of love. In exploring classical
erotic theories and ideals in Western, Chinese, Indian, Islamic and Japanese cultures, it reveals an impressive
amount of knowledge and erudition when analyzing, documenting, and contextualizing the various ars erotica
in their different social, cultural, political, philosophical, and religious milieus. Moreover, although Shusterman’s
guiding thread is the aesthetic dimension of classic ars erotica, the book also has an important ethical and
spiritual dimension, as it compellingly demonstrates how the cultivation of physical beauty and sensual plea-
sures was – at least in classical ancient traditions – indissociable from a wider concern with the cultivation of
one’s character and virtue, that is, with an art of living in which sexual practices and attitudes were strongly
embedded and from which they ultimately derived their deep symbolic meaning and relevance. In adopting
this interpretative trend, Shusterman draws on the pivotal works of Pierre Hadot and especially Michel Foucault

1) This essay was funded by national funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the Norma
Transitória – DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0042.

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– whose History of Sexuality he discusses and complements at several critical points – enhancing their influ-
ential interpretation of Western philosophy as a way of life or an aesthetics of existence, respectively, through
fruitful dialogue with the spirituality and somaesthetics of Eastern cultures.
If we read the eight chapters that compose the book with this fil rouge in mind, it becomes clear that not
only are the several ars erotica and corresponding ars vivendi very different from each other and even deeply
contrasting in many important respects, but the relation between the two varies in strength, intensity, and
reciprocal dependency according to the culture at stake – an interesting fact that would perhaps deserve further
development in the book. Given the impact of different cultures’ philosophical and religious views on their own
ars erotica, differences in the way philosophies and religions have conceived of the relation between spirituality
and eroticism, soul and body, and askesis and aesthetics have also shaped differences in the way the arts of
love have related to the corresponding arts of living: ranging from almost full identification between the two
to the near exclusion of one of the pairs. More concretely, if in some cultures the practice of ars erotica could
not only “constitute an important mode of self-cultivation” (AE, 2), but even work as its privileged vehicle, in
other cultures (as a whole or in particular periods) the requirement of spiritual cultivation instead implied the
repression of the body’s sexual impulses and practices, while in others still the ars erotica seemed to run inde-
pendently of any relevant spiritual dimension. As such, different cultures also established different relations
of subordination between their ars erotica and their ars vivendi, such that in some cases it is the latter that is
a means to the former, even though the inverted relation seems to prevail. When the art of living assumes the
leading role, cultures are distinguished by how they solve (or fail to solve) the conflict between sensual desire
and ascetic spirituality and how they (more or less) integrate the arts of love into the process of self-cultivation,
that is, via the (major or minor, if any) role and relevance they ascribe to practices of lovemaking in the context
of the ethical and aesthetic stylization of one’s existence.
Particularly impressive – even if not completely surprising – in this regard is the radical clash that we find
between the Western and the Asian appreciation of sex, sensual pleasures, and lovemaking practices in their
capacity to enhance spirituality and serve the ethical goal of self-cultivation. Foucault underscored this contrast
in the first volume of his History of Sexuality by distinguishing Western scientia sexualis from non-Western
ars erotica.2 According to Foucault, contrary to Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Arabo-Muslim societies, which
developed masterful erotic arts that “are said to transfigure the one fortunate enough to receive its privileges,”
Western society “in the face of it at least … possesses no ars erotica.”3 In this regard, it is also significant that
Pierre Hadot, who devoted a good part of his intellectual career to the study of ancient spiritual exercises and
practices of self-transformation in the context of the Greco-Roman art of living, is fairly silent about sexual
practices and rituals.4 While Shusterman does a splendid job of adding nuance to this perhaps overly narrow
perspective and correcting some of Foucault’s assumptions, including the very terms of his classification and his
opposition of Western and Asian erotic theories, when it comes to exploring the relations between ars erotica
and ars vivendi the book confirms, rather than dispels, the abovementioned clash.
Indeed, when one looks at the two paradigmatic erotic theories from China and India (complemented by
the derivative ars erotica of Japan and Islam), one is struck by the impressive blending and intertwining of their

2) Cf. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 57.
3) Ibid., 58.
4) When sex appears in his work, it is mainly in the form of advice against its practice or as techniques designed to control sexual
desire. See for example Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold Davidson,
trans. Michal Chase (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 128, 185–86, 284; and Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?,
trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 117 and 136.

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 Marta Faustino, East and West on the Tension Between Ars Erotica and Ars Vivendi

arts of living and their arts of love. China, bearer of the oldest surviving sexual theory, remains distinctive in
its celebration of sex not only in its pure immanence, as a powerful natural drive that contributes to physical
and mental health, promotes family and social union, and enables the very continuation of life, but also in
a cosmic, metaphysical, and religious dimension insofar as male-female copulation is seen as “embodying the
essential union of yin and yang that generates our universe of changing things” (AE, 161). Even though a good
part of Chinese sexual theory was concerned with the most appropriate means, conditions, and methods for
conceiving healthy offspring, sexual activity was also regarded as fundamental to enhancing the body’s vitality,
empowering the circulation of energies, and lengthening the lives of love-makers, which is why polygamy was
generally accepted and sexual abstinence strongly discouraged. Most importantly for our purposes, besides
its cosmic, social, physiological, and procreative relevance, lovemaking was also imbued with a strong ethical
and political significance, as part of a wider “project of aesthetic self-cultivation” (AE, 177) based on the core
ethical and aesthetic ideal of harmony. Due to the close intertwining of beauty and virtue, aesthetics and ethics,
and eroticism and spirituality in Chinese culture, to correctly practice its ars erotica was to cultivate the art
of living, such that the two arts reciprocally affected and enhanced one another. While cultivating one’s self,
character, and virtue or excellence (de) was essential to attracting a partner and engaging in proper, satisfying,
and harmonious lovemaking, China’s extremely rich and multifarious ars erotica was meant to bring erotic
success in order to promote harmony in one’s character and intimate relationships, while at the same time giving
beauty, pleasure, invigorating energy, and rejuvenating physical and mental health to its practitioners. Since
harmony (not only erotic, but also aesthetic and ethical) – together with self-knowledge, self-discipline, and
self-mastery – was to a great extent learnt and cultivated through sex, which provided “a model and training
ground for such balance” (AE, 198), China presents the most compelling example of a perfect coupling between
its ars erotica and its ars vivendi.
With a considerably different background, Indian erotic theory has an equally strong aesthetic dimen-
sion and a perhaps even deeper commitment to the project of ethical self-cultivation, from which it primarily
derives and to which it is ultimately subordinate. As the author underscores, the famous Kamasutra, popularly
known in the West as a manual of sex positions, was actually written for the purposes of “enhanced knowledge,
mastery of the senses, and self-control for general success in the art of living rather than the pursuit of passionate
pleasures” (AE, 24). In contrast to China, India’s ars erotica reveals a tension between erotic desire and ascetic
spirituality, which it nevertheless aims to combine, as expressed in Śiva, god of both sexual potency and ascetic
meditation. Even though both sexual desire and chaste renunciation are valued for their deeply creative force,
a violent and unrestrained sex drive can lead to conflict and instability, while at the same time distracting from
one’s uplifting spiritual path (AE, 206). The Indian ars erotica seeks to resolve this conflict by “reconciling
passion and self-restraint” (AE, 209) through aesthetic control and the ascetic discipline of one’s senses and
desire, together with the cultivation of practices of detached pleasure-taking through the artistic performance
of dramatic role-playing. By developing one’s capacity for self-knowledge, self-control, and self-mastery, and
encouraging lovers to acquire artistic skills in addition to the social and psychological knowledge required
for successful seduction and lovemaking, the Indian ars erotica might also be said to overlap with its art of
living, functioning as an important form of education through the senses and sexual practices. Even if at the
final stage of the Indian art of living (moksha) one is supposed to embrace a completely ascetic life, renouncing
the world and all its turmoil, including family and all kinds of sexual pleasure and sensual delight, it is also
through the ars erotica that one accomplishes this aim by achieving full sexual satisfaction and satiety in the
previous stages of one’s life, thus letting oneself be inspired to seek a more divine union. Thus, even if the art
of love must ultimately be sacrificed for the sake of the art of living, India is another illuminating example of
an almost perfect intermingling of the two.

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 Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture vol 5: no.  ()

If we now turn to the Western philosophical and religious tradition, we find neither the Chinese medical
legitimation of sex, nor the Indian aesthetic edification of lovemaking, nor a metaphysical or cosmic signifi-
cance that elevates sexual practice from the realm of mere immanence, nor the distinctive “education through
sex” that Shusterman ascribes to ars erotica (AE, 10) that we so clearly recognize in Asian cultures. Despite
the richness of Greek mythology in sexually charged gods – including Eros – and the “richly polymorphic
eroticism” that we find in the Greco-Roman socio-cultural and artistic atmosphere – with its multiple erotic
venues and “instructive models of divine lovemaking inspired by beauty and pursued for pleasure rather than
procreation” (AE, 32) –, none of this is reflected in the Greco-Roman philosophical discourse on sex, which is
instead distinguished by extreme asceticism, sublimation, and self-repressing restriction, or what Foucault has
called “austerity.”5 As Shusterman promptly acknowledges, there is a deep tension between Greek philosophy
and eros (AE, 57 ss.), such that when it comes to the theorization of the art of living – as the technical knowl-
edge (including skills, ethical precepts, and spiritual exercises), required to lead a good life – erotic practices
are basically excluded, while sexual desire assumes a completely sublimated or spiritualized form. It is true that
Greek philosophers were supreme admirers of beauty, including physical beauty as part of the deeply engrained
ideal of kalos kai agathos, and that eros was praised for its powerful creative force, not only in aesthetic produc-
tion but also as a “divinely inspired stimulus toward spiritual development” (AE, 61). As such, erotic desire
was, as in Asian cultures, an important means of cultivating certain character traits such as self-knowledge,
self-mastery, and self-control. But unlike the Asian ars erotica, which cultivated these virtues in and through
practices of lovemaking, in the Greco-Roman art(s) of living – from Plato and Aristotle to most of the Hellenistic
schools, including Stoicism and Epicureanism, and up to most Neoplatonic philosophers – these were rather
shaped through the spiritualization of sexual desire and the strict limitation of – if not full abstention from – its
satisfaction. With few exceptions, sensual pleasures and sexual practices have been consistently seen in clas-
sical Western philosophical thought as opposed to rationality and virtue, and as conflicting with the pursuit
of truth and happiness, such that, unlike the Indian ars erotica, Western ancient arts of living could not solve
this conflict except by suppressing (or sublimating) sexual desire and its physical manifestations – a tendency
that would be reinforced throughout Christianity (and beyond) with its condemnation of “unholy desires and
pleasures of the flesh” (AE, 121) and its ideal of celibate or virginal chastity, eventually expressed in forms of
asexual divine eroticism.
This suggests that the relations between Western classical ars erotica and ars vivendi are much looser,
sparser, and tenser than those found in Asian cultures. On the one hand, Western arts of living are too suspi-
cious of sensual pleasures and too hostile to sexual practices to constitute an ars erotica in any comparable way,
if by this we mean a set of “skilled methods or styles of lovemaking that are thereby elevated with the honorific
term ‘art’” (AE, 1). On the other hand, the Western ars erotica seems to have no significant role to play among
the spiritual exercises and practices of self-cultivation that compose the West’s art of living (whether in their
philosophical or their religious manifestations), except in the form of techniques of self-restraint devoted to
spiritual growth and uplifting through the control, repression, and sublimation of the very source and mate-
rial of an ars erotica.
While this sustained Western spiritualization of eros and beauty confirms Shusterman’s claim that
there is no essential contradiction between askesis and aesthetics (AE, 280), it also casts doubt on the book’s
concluding “speculative hypothesis” (AE, 391 ss.), according to which Kant’s definition of aesthetics as distanced

5) See especially Michael Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, Vintage
Books, 1990), 21 ss., and Michael Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Essential works of
Foucault 1954–1984, Volume 1: Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 254, 261, 270 ss.

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 Marta Faustino, East and West on the Tension Between Ars Erotica and Ars Vivendi

and disinterested contemplation marks a turning point in the history of Western philosophy through its unprec-
edented decoupling of eros from beauty. Even though the book compellingly shows that Western philosophical
discourse did consistently establish a close relationship between beauty and eros, its illuminative compara-
tive analysis between Western and Eastern ars erotica also makes clear that, unlike Asian cultures, Western
thought has always had a tendency to decouple physical from spiritual beauty, love, and desire, unequivocally
praising the latter while denigrating the former. Even if “both forms shared a common desire for beauty,” erotic
love was fundamentally valued only insofar as “there could be an ennobling movement from the carnal to the
more spiritual and virtuous love of souls” (AE, 392). This focus on spiritual beauty as the only worthy object
and source of noble desire, along with the condemnation of sensual pleasure symbolically expressed in Plato’s
“chaste gazing” (AE, 61), seems to have paved the way for – rather than standing in sharp opposition to – the
modern decoupling of beauty from erotic love and desire, which seems in fact to emerge as one of the multiple
manifestations of what Nietzsche called the “ascetic ideal” (with its “irritation and rancor against sensuality”)6
which has dominated our culture for more than twenty-five centuries. Be that as it may, this alternative and
equally tentative hypothesis only confirms and reinforces Shusterman’s intuition that augmenting our open-
ness to and knowledge of other cultures would fruitfully enhance, enrich, and refine both our art of loving and
our art of living. Insofar as it can be fruitfully used to broaden, enrich, and complement the already vast array
of Western spiritual exercises and technologies of the self, Shusterman’s insightful illustration of the way eroti-
cism and lovemaking practices can equally work as important means of askesis and self-cultivation is perhaps
one of the book’s most beautiful contributions to an art of living (and loving) today.

6) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 76.

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151
 volume 5
no. 4 (2021)

DOI: 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0048 Crispin Sartwell

Department of Philosophy
Dickinson College, USA
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0649-8949
[email protected]

The Erotic and the Political: The Somaesthetics of Sex in Social Context
Commentary: Richard Shusterman,
Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages.

I.
Richard Shusterman’s work is remarkable, among other things, for extending the range and power of the disci-
pline of aesthetics, conceived by him as fundamental to many dimensions of human experience. Indeed, he has
driven aesthetics into entirely new ranges of phenomena and strategies for research, and also perhaps returned
to an ancient sense of the centrality of aesthetic concepts such as beauty to virtually every human endeavor.
In many ways, I think, Shusterman is fulfilling John Dewey’s vision as expressed in Art as Experience, as well
as spelling out in detail the implications of his own early book Pragmatist Aesthetics, exploring the aesthetic
dimensions of all sorts of human activities. Schusterman’s somaesthetics, however, takes what we might call the
aesthetics, or ordinary experience, and centers it on the body in a way that Dewey could not have foreseen.
The book might have been titled The Aesthetics of Sex, and as soon as he broaches the topic it strikes one
that this subject has been remarkably neglected within philosophical aesthetics, or even in Western philosophy
as a whole. Considered as dimensions or arenas of human experience, the aesthetic and the erotic, as Shusterman
shows in replete multi-cultural detail, are bound up entirely and from the origins in many or even all cultures.
The conscious cultivation of sensual experience and the earliest conceptions of beauty, though these concep-
tions vary widely, had in some sense to be connected in every culture. If we are seeking pleasure in the senses,

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 Crispin Sartwell, The Erotic and the Political: The Somaesthetics of Sex in Social Context

trying to understand what we are doing and why and how – what we are pursuing, what we want – we are going
to need a telos that the West calls “beauty”; we’re going to need a sense of why we pursue this activity, and what
values it is called upon to realize. Shusterman is right, of course, to dwell among the Greeks, whose aesthetics
were so explicitly bound up with eroticism. Plato still surprises in this regard: though he bends erotic desire
toward, or transforms it into, or applies it to, a desire for abstract knowledge, he cannot conceive of a discussion
of beauty that does not originate in erotic desire and express it, as Shusterman shows so clearly. Plato’s vision
of beauty derives in part from Sappho, as he has Socrates acknowledge several times: his desire for knowledge
is erotic in a way that is at once inspiring and disturbing.
Shusterman also shows clearly in his “speculative” conclusion why it is that Plato is surprising (to “us”). Modern
aesthetics originates, Shusterman argues (too briefly! I would love to see this explored) that modern aesthetics
originates in part as an attempt to desexualize beauty, perhaps bound up with the Protestantism of Shaftesbury
and, especially, Kant. Or we might say with Shusterman that Kantian “disinterestedness,” a kind of hands-off
approach to beauty, is quite the opposite of the neo-Platonic conception of Ficino or Michelangelo, for example
which engages, cultivates, and applies erotic experience as an impetus for art and a source of transcendence, or
integrates our sensual and our intellectual lives, as certain forms of asceticism might seek to keep them separated.
Shusterman argues, I believe, that the experience of beauty cannot be separated from sex in the way Kant
insists it ought to be. Perhaps Shusterman thinks that Kantian disinterestedness in the erotic is both disingenuous
and profoundly unfortunate; perhaps somaesthetics is, among other things, intended as a cure for Kantianism,
insisting that we find beauty as the bodies we actually are. In that sense too, Shusterman’s aesthetics is still
connected to Dewey’s, which embodies an exquisite contrast to Kant’s. But as Dewey might remind us too, we
are definitely bodies, but we are not bodies that are fully distinct from one another or from our world. We are
bodies in social and environmental contexts: bodies are constructed in and given meaning by these contexts,
which we might broadly call political. I’m going to argue briefly below that the aesthetics of the body requires
an aesthetics of the body’s social and physical surround; there cannot be an aesthetics of the body in isolation.
I expect that Shusterman would agree with me about that, though I am curious about whether he would have
any reservations about taking somaesthetics in this direction.

II.
Shusterman is particularly interested in matters of self-cultivation, in sensual “training” and “mastery,”
“perfecting one’s appeal as a lover,” and “methods . . . to maintain proper pacing to ensure endurance and self-
control” (AE, 14): these matters he finds discussed in one form or another all over the world, even in cases where
this sort of explicit vocabulary of the body and the senses would be rejected by certain authorities. Here to some
extent he follows Foucault, who was concerned with how selves, and identities, and persons (particularly male)
are formed out of cultural/sexual materials. These topics, as they pertain to philosophical aesthetics, are still so
underexplored as to suggest whole new lines of discourse of just the sort that Shusterman keeps opening up; he
really is refreshing the discipline, giving it something urgent to do. But I want to point out that such matters
do not at all exhaust the aesthetics of sex. Somaesthetics tends to focus on the individual body and its experi-
ences, but each such body is negotiating a social environment, and beauty is not only something each one of
us may cultivate (if at leisure), it is a political, spiritual, linguistic, and economic surround in which each body
is operating. Understandings of beauty and sexuality circulate through cultures and between them as systems
of signs, constellations of meanings, and taxonomies of identity.
Nothing in Shusterman’s treatment precludes this broadening of scope, and indeed he shows its necessity
again and again as he describes the history of cultural norms of beauty and sexual identity. But he returns always,

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 Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture vol 5: no. 4 (2021)

as he must given his themes, to the experience from inside the individual body as it negotiates this environ-
ment, seeking intense and meaningful experiences within it. In Ars Erotica, he describes somaesthetics as “the
critical study and meliorative cultivation of the body as a site of sensory appreciation or perception (aesthesis)
and of creative self-fashioning in which one uses one’s bodily appearance and conduct to express one’s values
and shape oneself” (AE, xi). What I want to emphasize here is that all this shaping and presenting of the self is
happening in a political context and is not fully comprehensible apart from that context.
Certainly, when Shusterman gives us his erudite erotic world tour, one thing that emerges immediately
is the cultural malleability of sexuality. His discussions of South Asian treatments of the erotic derived from
Hinduism in proximity to Islamic treatments, or the Greeks as opposed to the medievals, display almost entirely
distinct taxonomies of sexual identity, as well as conceptions of the purpose of sex, what is permitted and what
prohibited, who is authorized and who is taboo. The word “polymorphous” is difficult to avoid as one surveys
the whole terrain, nor does Shusterman avoid it. In his treatment, he is necessarily as attentive to the cultural,
political, and economic differences in the ways the activity of erotic/aesthetic self-fashioning is expressed as
with the seeming universal task of self-fashioning.
Shusterman recognizes perfectly well that many or all the cultures he discusses are problematic as
regards gender politics. Many of the texts he quotes are straightforwardly male supremacist, for example; he
tends to note that and then go on to focus on the aesthetics of bodily self-fashioning on which the texts also,
but connectedly, focus. Perhaps the directly oppressive interpersonal implications are not sufficiently incor-
porated into the discussion: not ignored or merely glossed over, but also not the direct focus except perhaps
in the most egregious cases. I understand these decisions: if the book were a litany of sexual oppressions and
their condemnation, it would be dreary and not suited to do what Shusterman wants most to do: explore how
the materials bear on the aesthetics of the body. He wants to understand the individual body as something like
a work of art, created from inside. The point of view he takes up is the body as self-fashioning subject, not, for
example, as abjected, as object, though so many of the erotic disciplines Shusterman discusses lean in various
ways on the depersonalization of the people with whom one practices whatever erotic self-fashioning or mastery
a particular culture might prescribe at a particular moment. He does explicitly reject the oppressions endemic
to the material he discusses, but his initial stance is to accept each culture’s sexual representations and distri-
bution of roles on its own terms, at least long enough to explore them.

III.
Nevertheless, I think that the somaesthetics of sex is going to need a political aesthetics of sex. Judith Butler
shows one way that these themes could be widened and also politicized: how a society thinks about gender
roles, including directly about roles in sex, articulates the way each person experiences her own embodiment.
Perhaps in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, for example, as Butler generated these ideas, there was a general
sense that each person was either straight or gay. The polymorphous possibilities seemed to be narrowed to
two, with everyone suspicious of anyone’s claim to be bisexual, for example, or asexual. If so, this was a cultural
interlude (with immensely oppressive implications), not some sort of biological truth, said Butler. Here she was
herself working from Foucault, showing how sexual identities, while experienced as such from inside, or even
experienced or cultivated as one’s authentic or inmost self, circulated publicly as a system of signs, in a system
of signs, which in turn takes up a place, for example, in the forms of economic exchange. She immediately
widened the focus: the bodies are operating in a cultural imaginary; their public identities and their self-under-
standings are made within economic and political purposes and institutions. They have to be seen not only as
ways of being oneself, but as ways of serving or resisting power.

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 Crispin Sartwell, The Erotic and the Political: The Somaesthetics of Sex in Social Context

What connects Butler’s work to Shusterman’s in a useful way is that Butler, too, is talking about the
aesthetics of embodiment, or at least that is the way I would like to read her. Gender, she famously says, is
performative, usefully conceived by analogy to the theatre. And this bears directly, every day in every way,
on the public presentation of the body. We express our gender identities and our sexual orientations above all
aesthetically: in the ways we adorn our bodies, the way we move, and the rhythms of our speech, but also the
way we arrange our rooms, or our tastes in music or cars. Particularly key in relation to somaesthetics is that
the ways each of us experiences ourselves – what we find ourselves taking pleasure in, for example – can only
be understood as we emerge from and into the representations which embody the system of sexual possibili-
ties articulated in public space, in the public language, and in a political-economic situation which tries to tell
us what we can possibly be or do, or what we must transgress against to be free.
I think we ought to consider the gender system of a given culture at a given time, for example, as a power-
saturated system of aesthetics. And it is a system: the bodies and the roles and the transgressions between the
various actors and concepts are interlinked; they mutate in correlation with one another and with real volatility.
So, for example, one might consider the aesthetic presentation of masculinity in the American south over the
last, let us say, sixty years. In 1967, having long hair, for example, or wearing an earring, might have caused
you to get sort-of gay-bashed, or have drawn a series of slurs intended to impugn one’s masculinity. A real man
had a sort of military mien and haircut, and wore no body adornment but a decent shirt and perhaps a tattoo
of an anchor or one that said “Mom.” “We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy, like the hippies out in San
Francisco do,” sang Merle Haggard. But by 1980, the most macho country stars (Waylon Jennings, for instance)
were longhairs. By 201, the most macho country stars (Kane Brown, e.g.) were wearing all sorts of jewelry as
well: a pair of earrings and a number of necklaces and finger-rings, for example. This read effortlessly as mascu-
line by then, even as the signs of femininity likewise shifted radically. Indeed, a lot of the way heterosexual men
style themselves is an attempt to convey the message “I’m not gay.” So how heterosexual men are presenting their
bodies varies inversely with how gay men are presenting themselves (for example, with neat hair and tailored
suits, or something like the way Merle Haggard was presenting himself in 1967).
I think that the ways we are each experiencing our own bodies and those of others, the means and meaning
of sex and more widely of erotic desire, is varying as the taxonomy of sexual roles and their aesthetic presentation
in public space varies. And that is happening, say, in a capitalist economic context in which people are marketing
beauty and sexuality to you, or in a social media context in which millions of images are barraging each of us,
calling on us to desire or to imitate or to reject. Embodiment, I am saying, is as irrevocably political and economic
as it is fundamentally aesthetic. Eventually, the aesthetics of the body is going to have to broaden to the collective
bodies we are constituting together, with all their exclusions, but also with all their possibilities.
I don’t think there’s anything in Shusterman’s work that makes this sort of contextualization of somaes-
thetics impossible; indeed, there is much that requires it, if our self-fashioning cannot be detached from its
social context. It seems to me – and the richness of the cultural descriptions Shusterman constructs around
the erotic texts on which he focuses suggests – that even beginning on an aesthetics of the particular body as
experienced from inside requires placing this body in wider political/aesthetic systems that make its under-
standing of itself possible even as they constrain it.

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License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send
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 volume 5
no. 4 (2021)

DOI: 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0049 Richard Shusterman

Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
Florida Atlantic University, USA
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0467-9781
[email protected]

Ennobling Love and Erotic Elevation:

A Response to Six Readings of Ars Erotica

Das Unbeschreibliche, hier ist’s getan

Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.

[The indescribable, here it is done

The eternal feminine draws us upward and on.]- Goethe1

I. Introduction: Somaesthetics as an Uplifting Approach to Erotic Love

The famous “eternal feminine” of my epigraph comes from the very last lines of Faust, Part Two. Uttered by
the Mystic Chorus as Faust makes his heavenly ascent, miraculously freed from his bond to Mephistopheles
and redeemed from damnation, these lines evoke the elevating power of love. Crucial to his redemptive ascent
is the loving forgiveness Faust receives from Gretchen, the innocent maiden whom Faust passionately desired,
seduced, and impregnated, thus leading her to kill both her mother and her newborn child and be sentenced
to execution. Gretchen’s lovingly penitent soul successfully pleads to the Virgin Mary (“Glorious Mother”) to
save the damned Faust. At Mary’s instruction, Gretchen soars to the higher realm of Heaven in order to bring

1) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, last updated May 14, 2012, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/
epub/2230/pg2230.html.

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 Richard Shusterman, Ennobling Love and Erotic Elevation: A Response to Six Readings of Ars Erotica

Faust further upwards, since he is drawn by love even in heaven as on earth. This divinely spiritual elevation
through feminine attraction provides a poetically transcendent parallel to the carnal physiology of phallic
erection that we crudely describe in erotic vernacular as “getting it up” through desire (and which Faust must
have earlier experienced to impregnate Gretchen). The very word “erect” implies elevation, and its adjectival
meaning as “upright” includes positive moral connotation.
Sharing this ambiguity between the carnal and the spiritual, the earthy and the transcendent, erotic love
displays a tension that is both problematic and productive. Philosophy generally focuses on the problematic
rather than highlighting the value of this blurring of physical desire and spiritual love. Ars erotica, as I under-
stand it in my eponymous book, embraces this ambiguity in ways that can serve human flourishing by appre-
ciating physical erotic desire (which is always more than merely physical) both for its intrinsic satisfactions
and for its instrumental energy in inspiring us upward to goals and pleasures associated with higher cultural
and spiritual levels of experience.2
This inspiring uplift from physical to spiritual desire finds its generative locus classicus in Plato’s ladder
of love as expounded in the Symposium, a dialogue devoted to eros but also to beauty, while expressing their
intrinsic connection, where beauty is defined as the object of erotic desire. Here Plato explains how one increas-
ingly cultivates oneself aesthetically, cognitively, ethically, and spiritually by engaging with ever higher beau-
tiful objects of desire, an ascent in beauty that is also an ascent in virtue and pleasure. The necessary first step
on this erotic ladder of cultivation is the desiring love for a beautiful body (which, in Plato’s pederastic model,
is a beautiful boy’s body). The highest level of beauty is that of the ideal, heavenly Form of Beauty itself, whose
vague reflection in the boy’s body is what makes that body beautiful and inflames the desire of the lover for that
particular body. That particularized desiring appreciation of beauty (which we should recognize is somaesthetic
not only in being directed toward the body of the beloved but also in being experienced by the lover in strongly
motivating, energizing somaesthetic terms) spurs the lover increasingly higher to appreciate and desire the
beauty of souls and of virtuous activities, laws, and customs, of beautiful ideas and theories, of wisdom, and
finally to a lovingly blissful vision of the ideal Form of Beauty.
In various guises and cultures, the theme of elevating, ennobling love is a recurrent topos in the premodern
erotic theory my book traces. Freed from Plato’s problematic dualistic denigration of the body as prison of the
soul and from the modern aesthetic prejudice of disinterestedness, Ars Erotica recaptures the valuable core
of ennobling desire by showing how a new somaesthetic approach to sex could channel the power of eros to
cultivate qualities of courtesy, grace, skill, self-mastery, and sensitivity to the feelings of others, thus evoking
a richer, more positive vision of sex education than we have today.
Contemporary sexual theory is dominantly negative in character. With Freud we have the negativity of
unhappy repression through the dialectic he describes in Civilization and its Discontents.3 The desire for sexual
pleasure brings people together to create family life, which in turn creates society, but the violent unruliness
of sexual desire conversely threatens to disrupt family and social life. Hence social peace and stability require
repressing sexual desire and pleasure, despite the dissatisfaction caused by this negation. In critiquing Freud’s
repressive hypothesis, Foucault offers a more convincingly subtle mechanism of control through biopolitics and
its scientia sexualis.4 This involves a scientifically endorsed power-knowledge network of discourse about sex
that identifies one’s sexual identity, proclivities, and desires in order to control individuals by classifying them

2) Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2021).
3) Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989).
4) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage 1980).

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in terms of sexual behavior norms. By determining what desires and behaviors are out of bounds and need to
be denied, discouraged, or outlawed, such norms serve heteronormativity. Individuals whose desires fall outside
the norms suffer the unhappiness of outsiders or pariahs, and feel pressure to conform. Insiders are troubled by
pressure to self-monitor to stay inside the accepted bounds. Such norms work as internal controls to police and
constrain sexual identity, thus negating sexual freedom rather than directing it to the pursuit of pleasure.
We could identify contemporary medicine as a related negative approach concerned with the health
of individuals engaging in varieties of sexual behavior and of the progeny that results from such behavior.
Although health is a positive value, the medical aims are dominantly focused on negativities: how to avoid or
abort unwanted pregnancies, how to elude or remedy sexually transmitted diseases, discomforts, injuries, or
addictions. Such negativity does not do justice to the positivity and benefits of erotic love. I therefore sought
a more positive approach to sex by exploring the field of ars erotica and highlighting its aesthetic dimensions
that involve also ethical, cognitive, and spiritual values. To do so, I focused on the ars erotica of seven premodern
cultures that significantly shaped our contemporary world: Greco-Roman, Biblical (Old Testament and Christian
Traditions), Chinese, Indian, Islamic, Japanese, and Medieval and Renaissance European culture.
Three reasons motivated this concentration on the distant past. First, like Foucault, I had the “curiosity”
to learn something unfamiliar that might help me see things differently “through the practice of a knowledge
that is foreign.” Beyond this personal askesis, I was curious whether contemporary intellectuals could think
differently about sex by looking at it through the very different lenses of the past that created the history of our
present: whether the study of those distant cultures could help “free thought from what it silently thinks, and
enable it to think differently.” Although it is impossible simply to return to their past erotic practices, studying
them is cognitively emancipatory in breaking our narrow preoccupation with the present by uncovering different
ideas and practices that could be applied to critique, explain, or even improve current sexual thought. Second,
most of those premodern cultures seem to have aesthetically richer, more positive forms of ars erotica that are
better integrated to the ethics of the art of living than we find in contemporary sexual theory.
A third reason is today’s increasing attention to the vast and horrible plague of predatory sexual behavior.
Highly justified and long overdue, this attention has made eroticism an explosively toxic topic, so that any posi-
tive discussion about the aesthetics or beauty of lovemaking today might be seen as insensitive beautification of
hideous behavior, a micro-aggression against the many victims of sexual abuse and those rightly empathetic with
them. The distant past seemed more suitable for a balanced critical analysis of ars erotica than the very vexed,
messy, and angry state of play of erotic experience today. However, as I (not surprisingly) discovered through
this symposium, even discussion of erotic ideas that are geographically, temporally, and culturally remote can
sometimes arouse moral outrage so vehement as to pervert the reader’s understanding of my views.

II. India: Elitism, Misogyny, and Misreading

Grateful as I am to all the six contributors that Eli Kramer invited to this symposium on Ars Erotica, I must
begin by noting some of these distortions in the paper focused on India.
Its author (understandably upset by the sexism that pervades traditional Indian sexual attitudes) writes,
“A positive pragmatist attitude of Shusterman allows him to turn a blind eye not only to the elitist character of
Indian ars erotica, but also to the patriarchal and nicely dressed misogynist agenda of the Kamasutra narrator.”
In fact, my book emphasizes the wealth and privilege of its paradigm practitioner: “a wealthy, tasteful, urbanite

) Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage 198), 8, 9.
The subsequent quotation in this paragraph is also from page 9.

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dandy … [whose] daily activities focus on aesthetic pursuits, with no mention of any work or family duties
but with great attention to the arts and attractive women, and to beautifying his own appearance” (AE, 222).
I also explicitly assert that the “preference for male superiority in unequal unions [in genital size] reflects the
power of patriarchal culture, [while] it conversely evokes woman’s greater sexual capacities that make patri-
archy a useful strategy for mitigating male performance anxieties. Such anxieties provide a major motivation
for ars erotica in India and elsewhere” (AE, 228).
As alleged evidence of my blind eye and indifference to brutal misogyny, the author alludes to my “tak[ing]
for granted a remark on deflowering an eight-year-old girl trained to become a king’s prostitute (AE, 21).”
Appalled to read this, I consulted my book and saw how horridly it had been distorted. In explaining how elite,
state-supported sex workers were prized “for their artistic talents, … [which] were carefully honed by the state,”
my text cited the Arthashastra’s instruction: “‘From the age of eight years, a prostitute shall hold musical perfor-
mance before the king,’ as part of her state-financed artistic training.” No child-abuse of deflowering was ever
mentioned or implied.6 To suggest that I am blind or indifferent to the sexism and misogyny of Indian sexual
culture and that I “forget that the sex performance inevitably involves gender-and-power struggle” is to ignore
what I do in fact write. In describing the Kamasutra’s account of violent styles in lovemaking (with reciprocal
biting, scratching, and smacking, and where women are urged to strike “twice as hard”), I elaborate:

The lovers’ battle of bites, blows, and nail marks evoke broad social and metaphysical themes:
lovemaking’s union involves a passionate struggle between the sexes where the coupling partners
strive to assert their own individual personality and preferences by leaving their marks on the
other. However intense its union, erotic coupling paradoxically underlines the impossibility of total
fusion and the conflictual nature of this most basic and necessary mode of human merging that
creates the further unity of a child born from such union. This model of creation through harmony
in conflictual tension purveys a still broader metaphysical vision of a universe constituted by such
discordia concors that includes violence and opposition, destruction with creation, as part of its
cosmic order. Śiva, the originator of Indian ars erotica, divinely embodies such discordia concors:
the potently procreative erotic ascetic is likewise the famous god of destruction, composing together
with Brahma (the creator) and Vishnu (the preserver) the great Hindu trinity or Trimurti. This
aesthetic and metaphysical understanding of India’s violent consensual love-play is not without
real risks. Even willing, well-intentioned couples may go too far. Moreover, it should never obscure
or excuse the horrible uses of violence in nonconsensual sex and domestic abuse that plague many
patriarchal societies, including India’s. (AE, 234)

The symposium paper on India misreads the book’s treatment of ars erotica as part of my well-known campaign
for the legitimation of popular art, advanced thirty years ago with my paper “Form and Funk: The Aesthetic
Challenge of Popular Art.”7 That campaign has already long been won through the work of many critics and
scholars, so in the last twenty years I turned to other projects, notably somaesthetics. I make no attempt to
present Indian ars erotica as a popular art that was widely practiced by all classes of society. In fact, the book

6) Indeed, the Arthashastra prescribed punishments against those who had sex with underage prostitutes in training, even if it
was with the girl’s consent (though, in that case, the punishment was lighter). See Rudrapatna Shamasastry, Kautilya’s Arthashastra,
(Mysore: Mysore Publishing, 1961), 176–77.
7) Richard Shusterman, “Form and Funk: The Aesthetic Challenge of Popular Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 31, no. 3 (July
1991): 203–13, https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/31/3/213/17310.

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makes it very clear that much of the population could not properly practice traditional ars erotica because that
required not only leisure for learning and perfecting through practice a wide variety of artistic skills, but also
a high enough level of economic power to secure the needed elements of stylish lovemaking (including attrac-
tive accoutrements and attractive partners). Yet this troubled contributor rhetorically asks about my account of
erotic arts: “But, have they ever been really popular among people in cultures that produced the most famous
texts on the art of lovemaking? And, were they accessible to people, regardless their class, gender and economic
position? Richard Shusterman argues for a positive answer to these questions.”8

III. Ars Erotica as a Practical, if not Popular, Art

In contrast to this misreading, Max Ryynänen correctly recognizes that my book is critically aware that the
classic theories of ars erotica were primarily written by and for privileged males and were products of patri-
archal cultures in which sexism and misogyny were rife.9 Realizing that I worked only from theoretical or
literary texts about erotic matters rather than from the historical record of actual facts of practice, he under-
stands how these theories reflect (and serve) power relations of class and wealth (the two categories not always
homologous in the cultures I consider). As a connoisseur and advocate of pop culture, Max would like to know
“the way ordinary (i.e., not very educated nor privileged) people have known things and shared knowledge
about sexual practices. These might be less documented, but for sure people have always helped each other and
shared ‘tricks’ for the bedroom, and even philosophized about these issues vernacularly.” I appreciate Max’s
curiosity. I too would like to know to what extent illiterate and poorer members of society managed to stylize
their lovemaking and in what ways they aesthetically stylized it and transmitted their erotic taste and knowl-
edge. Did they try to imitate the practices of the elite (which they may have witnessed to some degree during
their service to the wealthy), or did they develop their own distinctive popular erotic style–through preference
rather than necessity?
Alas, such fascinating questions go beyond the scope of my book, which is a philosophical study of erotic
theory through theoretical and literary texts, not a history of ars erotica as actually practiced in history. That
study of actual practice would require the work of an expert historian (or indeed a multilingual team of such
experts) consulting the actual historical record of laws, court cases, written testimonies, and material evidence
from archaeological findings, and so forth. I imagine that there must have been some exchange of erotic knowl-
edge between different levels of society, even if the communication was not explicitly verbal and pedagogical in
nature. When masters (or mistresses) made love to their servants or slaves, there must have been some commu-
nication of erotic knowledge (however repellent its conditions of transmission); and the learning may have
been reciprocal. If we include sex workers (such as prostitutes or courtesans) as part of the laboring class who

8) This false claim seeks support by noting that I found in the Kamasutra “an impulse toward democratic diversity” while omit-
ting my immediately subsequent words of qualification “albeit greatly constrained by India’s dominant patriarchy and cast system”
(AE, 218). That constrained diversity included acceptance of homosexual relations and oral sex, elsewhere rejected. The troubled
author likewise misreads my text by ignoring that I describe the Upanishads not as “austere” but simply as “more austere” than the
early Vedas I discuss, which indeed come before the Upanishads, the latter being often described as Vedanta (i.e., the end of Vedas)
because they are the latest of the Vedic texts.
9) As someone with a thorough knowledge of my work on popular art, Max may be aware of an earlier text of mine that, recog-
nizing that works like the Kamasutra were not meant for the common people, raised the question of whether ars erotica could become
a popular art in a society where education, wealth, and leisure (so key to ars erotica) could be the privilege of the people at large rather
than being confined to a narrow elite. See Richard Shusterman, “Ars erotica – eine populäre Kunst?,” in Die Schönheiten Des Populären,
ed. Kaspar Maase (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2008), 21–68.

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constitute “the people,” then ars erotica was not totally foreign to popular culture, because sex workers must
have acquired substantial knowledge of ars erotica that they could transmit to members of higher classes and
to lovers of their own social rank. One of Aretino’s humorously bawdy dialogues even “portrays in saucy detail
how the successful courtesan ‘Nanna teaches her daughter, Pippa, the whore’s trade’” (AE, 385).
One point in Max’s affable text requires correction. He writes: “In response to the question of the coun-
terpart of an art work [for ars erotica, Shusterman] suggests a long lovemaking session with dinner (AE, 5).”
I instead maintained that there is no clear answer to the question, because there are a number of possible coun-
terparts. Here is the passage from the book.

What, for example, would be the counterpart of an artwork in ars erotica? Could it be an isolated
coital coupling; a long session of lovemaking with multiple coital episodes; a whole night of court-
ship and consummation perhaps starting with drinks and dinner, a concert, and extended foreplay
and then finishing with a conjugal bath and breakfast? Could an erotic artwork be construed even
in terms of an entire love affair that could extend over weeks or longer? (AE, 5)

Besides a concern for exploring the relation of ars erotica to lowbrow culture, the other key theme I discern
in Max’s breezily informal and wide-ranging commentary is an emphasis on the practical. More significant
than his directing us to texts instructing how to exercise the pubococcygeal muscles to control ejaculation is
his defining ars erotica as a practical art in the sense of artes vulgares and in contrast to the traditional seven
liberal arts (artes liberales). I certainly emphasize that ars erotica is much concerned with practical knowledge,
but I would not like to compartmentalize it as exclusively practical in a way that opposes it to the traditional
liberal arts because ars erotica involves in crucial ways some of those liberal arts. Even in its concrete practice
it often includes music (a liberal art from the quadrivium) and rhetoric (a liberal art from the trivium). Like
somaesthetics, ars erotica seems to be a transdisciplinary field of theory and practice.
Max’s focus on the practical includes the suggestion (perhaps ironic?) that flaws in Foucault’s sexual theo-
rizing about China derive from his limits of sexual practice, more specifically that Foucault “failed to realize
that he might have needed to take some tantra classes to understand what preventing ejaculation (and training
unknown muscles to be able to do it) could do for orgasms.”10

IV. Poetry, Visualization, and Gender in Chinese Qi Erotics

Ellen Zhang’s instructive essay on the somaesthetics of Chinese qi erotics confirms with her specialist expertise
my critique of Foucault’s account of Chinese ars erotica and my emphasis on the crucial health and medical
dimensions of China’s traditional approach to sex, along with its significant ethical and aesthetic dimensions.
Zhang makes an excellent point about “the aestheticization of sexual activities via the use of euphemized meta-
phors with regard to the Chinese ars erotica, including the description of genital organs” (such as “jade gate”
and “jade stalk”) and sexual postures (such as “fishes touching” or “dragon twisting”). I would like to elaborate
the point by suggesting that this “poetic representation of eroticism” enhances not only the verbal aesthetics of
sex but also its imaginative intensity in the actual experience of the sexual act. Language’s power to affect the

10) To correct a possible misunderstanding that may arise from Max’s text, I do not criticize Foucault for thinking that the Chinese
worked against pleasure, but rather for ignoring the essential medical dimension and aims of health in their ars erotica, and further
for identifying sexual pleasure essentially with orgasm while China’s economy of pleasure highlighted abstaining from orgasm in
order to enjoy the pleasure (and power) of repeatedly approaching and then controlling the coming of orgasm’s climax.

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imagination can add an aura of experienced imaginative beauty to somatic actions which would be experienced
far less aesthetically when perceived simply in terms of cold, anatomical details. Imaginatively perceiving their
genitals as beautiful works of jade rather than fleshy organs (that are also involved in excretion) intensifies the
partners’ experiential appreciation of the beauty of their union in real time while they make love, not only their
pleasure in the verbal description or reminiscence of it.11
Imaginative visualization is a topic worth elaborating more generally in Chinese eroticism. To respond
to Zhang’s “hope that Shusterman could say more on sexual representations in the light of the gender issue,”
let me add some brief remarks on visualization and women in the Daoist erotic tradition. My chapter on China
underlined the exploitative vampirish ways that men could absorb, through intercourse, young women’s sexual
energy to magnify their own energies so as to remain vigorously healthy, youthful, or even immortal, although
I did mention that women (who were anyway endowed with superior sexual power) could conversely rejuvenate
themselves by sexually absorbing men’s energy. In that context I noted how the legendary Queen Mother of the
West was said to be “fond of intercourse with young boys” (AE, 169). Zhang mentions how “female Daoists of 18th
and 19th centuries rejected the practice of ‘nurturing the yang at the expense of the yin’ by shifting sex practice
to what is called nudan 女丹 (an inner alchemy specially designed for women) with its focus on gender-specific
practices of breath meditation and visualization for the purpose of longevity and immortality.”
Rather than such solo practices from those later centuries, it seems more appropriate here to note some
interesting manifestations of female gender power vis-à-vis men in the classical Tang period, when “Daoist
priestesses emerged as a gendered religio-social group with its own distinct identity … [and] … in turn signifi-
cantly influenced the reshaping of gender relations.”12 Daoist Highest Clarity masters had already created an
idea of divine marriage “which entailed beautiful goddesses descending from heaven to have encounters with
selected men. The goddesses composed poems to express their affections toward these men, offered to marry
them, revealed to them sacred texts, instructed them in various Daoist practices, and finally took them by the
hand to ascend to heaven.”13 These goddesses clearly had the superior role in such encounters, and mystical
visualization was how Daoist practitioners could initiate a connection with them.

Visualizing a specific goddess, the practitioner imagined various kinds of intimate contact with
her… . In all these divine marriages and visualizations, the goddesses overpowered male Daoists
with their sexual attraction, religious knowledge, and divine force, thereby also presenting a concep-
tual change in gender relations and power structure in the religious tradition.14

During the Tang dynasty, “about twenty-eight royal princesses became ordained Daoist priestesses, along with
numerous other royal women and palace ladies,” creating a trend of highly educated Daoist priestesses actively
influential “in both religious life and social affairs” as well as in literature, where both their love poetry and their

11) In contrast, conceiving the sexual act and organs with negative imagery has been used as a method of killing desire by destroying
the aesthetic appeal of lovemaking. Consider the recommendation of Marcus Aurelius to think of “sex … [as] the rubbing together of
pieces of gut, followed by the spasmodic secretion of a little bit of slime.” I cite the passage (Meditations, Book 6, section 13) as rendered
in Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell,
199), 18. The English translation by Maxwell Staniforth is more neutral, but still unpoetically uninviting: “copulation is friction of the
members and an ejaculatory discharge,” in Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth (London: Penguin, 1964), 92.
12) Jinhua Jia, Gender, Power, and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China, (New York: Columbia University Press,
2018), 12.
13) Ibid., 9.
14) Ibid., 9–10.

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affairs with “priests or literati-officials were openly celebrated.”15 Thus, “the popular cult of erotic goddesses
was extended to include Daoist priestesses, who were regarded as ‘female immortals’ or ‘semi-goddesses,’…
and they were portrayed as passionate lovers, often taking the initiative in courtship.”16
I am grateful that Zhang’s remarks have given me an opportunity to highlight this historical mani-
festation of Chinese female gender power in sexual relations with men, which complements my emphasis on
China’s recognition of women’s superior sexual powers and the Daoist valorization of the female principle.
I was worried, in writing the book, that highlighting such female gender power might look like an effort to
whitewash the dominant patriarchal and sexist thrust of Chinese erotic theory in its Confucian and Daoist
expression. I remain sadly aware of how tempting it is for careless or inimical readers to accuse my book of
disregarding the sexism of the premodern erotic theories I studied, when my efforts instead were to rescue some
of their theoretical insights while exposing problems deriving from their framing patriarchal ideologies and
dominant binary gender hierarchies. My brief discussion of Chinese Buddhism focused on Guanyin who, as
Zhang confirms, provides a fascinating case of gender-bending through multiple identities (male and female),
evocatively emblematic of the Buddhist principle of non-duality. Similarly, my book’s chapter on Japan sought
to undermine the simple gender binaries with its discussion of nanshoku, but the point could have been further
developed through more extensive discussion of the handsome boy actors in Kabuki culture, including the
onnagata or “female impersonators,” who despite their male sex came to embody “ideal femininity.”17

V. Greek Eroticism and the Austere Philosophical Habitus

The same pluralistic, gender-sensitive, pleasure-appreciative somaesthetic approach characterizes my study of
Greek sexuality, which Matthew Sharpe expertly compares to Foucault’s. Sharpe’s essay cogently articulates
how my account is richer than Foucault’s in two ways: by bringing out more fully the dimensions of beauty
and sexual (as well as other sensual and sensory) pleasures in the aesthetics of Greek eroticism; and by high-
lighting the important function of women (in a variety of gender roles) in those pleasures. While recognizing,
like Foucault, the central role of austerity in Greek erotic theory, my study also attends to the polymorphic,
pleasure-seeking, beauty-loving, artistic-related expressions of Greek erotic thought and practice. Sharpe’s
argument is so impressively researched and cogently articulated that I find nothing in it to question or supple-
ment. However, because his excellent essay surely merits a response of more than praise and gratitude, I offer
some speculative remarks on why Foucault’s account of the Greek’s aesthetics of existence is so austerely
unaesthetic and his account of sex in The Use of Pleasure is (in Sharpe’s words) so “anerotic or ‘unsexy’” and
unappreciative of pleasure.
Consider three possible reasons for this austerity. The first is a feature of Foucault’s personal style, though
hardly idiosyncratic to him. Foucault’s style of expression in his books (which were carefully composed and
critically revised scholarly writing) was always far more austere and judicious than his expressive style in inter-
views. The latter was typically more unrestrained, provocatively playful (sometimes interrupted by jokes or
laughter), and sexually explicit (as for example in his discussion of contemporary gay sexual practices, including

1) Ibid., 12, 1–16.

16) Ibid., 16–17.
17) Maki Isaka Morinaga, “The Gender of Onnagata as the Imitating of the Imitated: Its Historicity, Performativity, and Involvement
in the Circulation of Femininity,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 10, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 24–84. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/28013:
quote from page 246. In terms of gender pluralism, we should also recall the significant presence of eunuchs in some premodern
cultures, including China’s.

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fist fucking, in his interview entitled “Le gai savoir,” which he asked not to be published and was only published
in full after his death).18 Part of the charm and value of the face-to-face interview is its generating more direct,
immediate responses to questions, which typically results in less guarded and more outspoken replies, as the
interviewee cannot chose the question to be answered or evade or postpone his answer without losing face.
A second reason for Foucault’s austere treatment of the Greeks could be his historical subject matter
and context of research. He was essentially a novice in the scholarly study of ancient thought when he plunged
into it to try to think differently “through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign.” An important influence
in his study was Pierre Hadot, the renowned historian of ancient philosophy whose work Foucault so much
admired that he recruited him to be his colleague at the Collège de France. Foucault’s research into ancient
Greco-Roman sexuality and its eventual transformation and replacement by Christian sexual attitudes was
closely linked to his interest in Hadot’s idea of philosophy as a way of life in which one took distinctive, critical
care of oneself (epimelia heatou) as an ethical project for better, more virtuous living. For Foucault this meant
stylizing oneself into a distinctive subject, one that was worthy of admiration through its striking “aesthetics
of existence.” It would be perfectly natural and reasonable for Foucault’s treatment of ancient Greek philosophy
and sexuality to respect the scholarly views and academic sensibilities of Hadot (his mentor in this field), even
when diverging from some aspects of Hadot’s vision of the philosophical life.
For Foucault and Hadot, as for me, this ancient idea, though long neglected, still had value for philo-
sophical living today. In my book Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life, I articulated my
pragmatist vision of such a life by examining some contemporary philosophical exemplars (including Foucault).19
For Foucault, as for me, one’s care with respect to sexual behavior formed part of that self-stylization in one’s art
of living, of realizing or reshaping one’s identity through one’s relation to sex. The question of how erotic expe-
rience could figure positively in philosophy as an art of living was what motivated my research in Ars Erotica.
Indeed, the idea of philosophy as a critical, reflective art of living aimed at meliorative self-cultivation is what
generated the whole pragmatist project of somaesthetics that aims to heighten somatic consciousness so that
we can better appreciate and manage the perceptions and actions of our somatic subjectivities, and thus better
realize our connections to the world (natural and social) that shapes us. In contrast, Hadot’s understanding of
the philosophical way of life, with its hallmark focus on spiritual exercises and ascetic restraint, showed little
interest or sympathy for the somatic and the aesthetic. In fact, Hadot explicitly criticized Foucault’s vision of
the philosophical life as “care of the self” and as “aesthetics of existence,” for being “too aesthetic,” for courting
“a new form of Dandyism, late twentieth-century style.”20 Given Hadot’s ascetic approach to the body and sexu-
ality in his account of the philosophical life (one deeply influenced by Plato and Plotinus),21 it is understand-
able that Foucault’s account of Greek sexuality would be more austere than sexy, more concerned with ascetic
control than aesthetic and sensual pleasures.

18) Michel Foucault, “The Gay Science,” trans. Nicolae Morar and Daniel W. Smith, Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 38–403.
https://doi.org/10.1086/6931. On its circuitous path to publication, see David Halperin, “Michel Foucault, Jean Le Bitoux and the
Gay Science Lost and Found: An Introduction,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 371–80, https://doi.org/10.1086/69349.
19) Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life, (New York: Routledge, 1997).
20) See Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 211. Instead, Hadot insisted on spiritual exercises that took the ascetic aim of spiritually
“separating oneself from the body, its passions, and its desires [in a way that] purifies the soul from all these superfluous additions”
(ibid.103). Hadot explicitly distances the ancient Greek philosophical life from Christian asceticism, however the general ascetic
orientation of his account of the philosophical life (i.e., desire-conquering and pleasure-denying) is evident and well recognized.
21) According to his biographer Porphyry, “Plotinus … seemed ashamed of being in the body.” Porphyry, “On the Life of Plotinus
and the Order of His Books,” in Ennead, Volume 1: Porphyry on the Life of Plotinus. Ennead 1, trans. Arthur H. Armstrong (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1969), 3.

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Beyond the specific academic context of the Hadot connection, a third possible explanation for Foucault’s
more austere treatment of Greek sexuality relates to the broader disciplinary context of philosophy and the
writing of its history. For whatever reason (and the long abiding influence of Christian religious thought is
surely one factor), philosophies that emphasized idealism and spirituality (while disregarding or disrespecting
somatic pleasures) have long dominated philosophical attention. Even today when few philosophers maintain
idealist metaphysics or advocate disembodied spirituality, the austere idealist or dualist philosophers of the
past still get far more attention than earthy materialist philosophies. In contemporary philosophy seminars,
conferences, and publications, we hear little of pleasure-advocating materialists like Diderot or La Mettrie or
even of sensual dualists like Montaigne, whose essays offer a powerful picture of a philosophical art of living
that took issue with the dominant Platonic topos that the life of philosophy is simply learning how to die by
separating the soul from its somatic desires and pleasures.
Very few ancient philosophers seem to have advocated sensuous pleasures as part of philosophy’s art
of living. Besides the outrageous examples of Diogenes the Cynic and his followers, Aristippus (Socrates’
disciple and founder of the Cyrenaic School) is perhaps the only significant ancient philosopher to defend
and practice an art of living rich in sensual and sexual enjoyment. He obviously took the somatic pleasures
of food and drink quite seriously, and justified them philosophically, offering a more nuanced notion of
mastering desires than simply repressing them. For Aristippus, the virtue of moderation in critical care of
the self is not the denial of pleasure but rather its effective management of use. Criticized for enjoying the
sexual favors of the famous courtesan Laïs, Aristippus replied: “I have Laïs, not she me; and it is not absti-
nence from pleasures that is best, but mastery over them without ever being worsted.” Such mastery involved
knowing how to enjoy one’s pleasures without becoming dependent upon them. “One day, as he entered the
house of a courtesan, one of the lads with him blushed, whereupon he remarked, ‘It is not going in that is
dangerous, but being unable to go out’.” This masterful management of pleasures also meant being able to
forego them at will. Thus, when Dionysius, ruler of Syracuse, “gave [Aristippus] his choice of three cour-
tesans, he carried off all three, saying, ‘Paris paid dearly for giving the preference to one out of three.’ And
when he had brought them as far as the porch, he let them go. To such lengths did he go both in choosing
and in disdaining” pleasures.22
There is another aspect to the disciplinary constraint of philosophy: a focus on philosophical texts in
contrast to a more generous attention to the broad range of literature relating to eroticism, which in Greco-Roman
culture includes a rich trove of poetry, drama, and mythological tales. Such literature, in Foucault’s study, does
not receive the detailed interpretive analysis that it deserves. Introducing it would have added more of the sexy,
female, and aesthetic dimensions that Sharpe finds lacking in Foucault. This implicit disciplinary constraint
of philosophy, which tends to go unnoticed because it belongs to the philosopher’s habitus (even when doing
history) is surely reasonable, given Foucault’s interests. It remains a limitation nonetheless, such that Foucault’s
project might be better described as a history of the philosophy of sexuality rather than the history of sexuality
simpliciter. I here confess that despite the care (and pleasure) I took to include more of this non-philosophical
literature, my Ars Erotica still has a clear philosophical bias and its history is of erotic theory rather than of
actual erotic practice.

22) Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Vol. 1, trans. Robert D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991),
197, 199, 203–20. Foucault cites the first of these quotations; see Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 70. But he occludes the context of
Aristippus’s defense of his frequenting courtesans.

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VI. Ars Erotica and Ars Vivendi

The idea that we philosophers have an implicit, justifiable bias to construe things from a philosophical stand-
point, and more particularly from philosophy’s dominant orientation, provides a useful way of engaging Marta
Faustino’s deeply insightful and well-argued paper. Firmly grasping my book’s key ethical and spiritual aims
– as pursued through the somaesthetic ladder of desiring love for beauty in the quest of renewing contemporary
philosophy as an embodied art of living, she deftly introduces a conceptual dyad (ars erotica/ars vivendi) for
aptly comparing the past cultures I studied while also exposing the fundamental question my project faces today.
Assessing those cultures in terms of the extent to which the field of ars erotica formed part of their ars vivendi,
we can ask to what extent could the reflective, critical practice of ars erotica improve our contemporary art of
living? Faustino generously commends my suggestions for this erotic “means of askesis and self-cultivation”
(that is essentially also other-oriented) as “one of the book’s most beautiful contributions to an art of living (and
loving) today.” Those suggestions emerge from exploring the insights and errors of past cultures, and Faustino
compellingly interprets the book’s analyses as showing that Asian cultures far more thoroughly integrated ars
erotica into their ars vivendi than did our Western cultures. That indeed is why I took the trouble to study those
Asian erotic cultures with far more detail and care than I found in Foucault.
What I find less compelling is Faustino’s view that “Western thought has always had a tendency to
decouple physical from spiritual beauty, desire from love, unequivocally praising the latter while denigrating
the former” and that therefore “Western arts of living are too suspicious of sensual pleasures and too hostile to
sexual practices to constitute an ars erotica in any comparable way, if by this we mean a set of ‘skilled methods
or styles of lovemaking that are thereby elevated with the honorific term ‘art’ ’.” Here again I detect the implicit
bias of the philosopher’s habitus: a tacit but persistent conflation of ars vivendi with philosophical ars vivendi,
as if only philosophers had a reflective, meliorative way of life worthy of being recognized as an art of living.23
If we consider Western arts of living as a whole rather than the dominant model of philosophy’s art of living,
we could hardly conclude they are too suspicious of sensual pleasures and too hostile to sexual practices for
ars erotica to find expression. In the wealthy societies of Europe and America, contemporary culture seems
more sensual than austere; haute cuisine and high fashion flourish, as do sexual encounters of increasing diver-
sity. Even in ancient times, pleasure-seeking was not alien to Western culture. Think of the typical Athenian
symposia (rather than Plato’s purified version of it) or of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria that depicts a Rome deeply
devoted to erotic pursuits.
I would also resist the claim that Western thought has univocally denigrated physical beauty and regarded
it as decoupled from the spiritual, because I regard Western thought as including far more than its influen-
tial philosophical tradition. Consider the love of physical beauty expressed by poets, ancient and modern,
and portrayed by artists (who are also thinkers in other media than words). My book describes many cases of
Western culture’s appreciation of bodily beauty, even in the poetry of monks. Courtly love prized good looks,
albeit less than valued eloquence and virtue. Even philosophers were often not loath to praise physical beauty.

23) Indeed, one might detect a further conflation of narrowly identifying philosophy as a way of life with the life advocated by austere
philosophers. Aristippus was a philosopher who rejected austerity with respect to sensual pleasures, though he trained himself also
to master them or do without them without denigrating them. Does this lack of austerity disqualify him as a philosopher? Hadot is
surely right that the abidingly influential philosophical schools advocated a philosophical life that was austere rather than welcoming
of sensual pleasures, but this does not preclude that there could be more pleasure-friendly versions of philosophical life. If philosophy,
as an intellectual response to the conditions of life, evolves as life conditions change, then the idea of philosophy as a way of life can
also evolve. An aim I share with Foucault is developing a more somatically friendly and aesthetic appreciative notion of philosophical
living.

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Peter Abelard, certainly a serious thinker worthy of the title “philosopher,” admired Heloise for her looks as
well as her learning. Montaigne, who prized bodily beauty as “a great recommendation” and “prime means
of conciliation” between people, insisted “I cannot say often enough how much I consider beauty a powerful
and advantageous quality… . We have no quality that surpasses it in credit. It holds the first place in human
relations.”24 Even Socrates passionately admired physical beauty, while Plato’s ladder of love, though aimed at
moving beyond physical beauty does not seek to denigrate it because such bodily beauty nonetheless reflects
the ideal Form of Beauty itself. Renaissance Neoplatonists shared an appreciation of the beauty that pervades
God’s physical creation. Moreover, Western thought often connected between physical and moral virtue. Stoics
like Zeno and Cleanthes held “that a man’s character could be known from his looks” and described “visible
beauty … as the bloom or flower of virtue” (AE, 6).2 Even Christian advocates of virginity sometimes insisted
on its value in beautifying the body as well as the soul (AE, 132).
Faustino, however, makes a very good point in highlighting that philosophy’s traditions of privileging
spiritual over physical beauty and of disregarding sensual pleasure provided fertile ground for the invention
of philosophical aesthetics as a new discourse of beauty, in which beauty was divorced from its conceptual
connection with love but instead defined in terms of disinterested, dispassionate (yet pleasurable) appreciation
of form. Faustino’s point helps explain (rather than refute) my speculative hypothesis concerning the rise of
aesthetics. Reacting to the rise of materialism, libertinism, and the sensual appreciation of beauty in the seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries, the austere, anti-sensual philosophical tradition sought to create, through
the concept of aesthetics, a more purified discourse of beauty that would be free of the traditional ladder that
linked physical and spiritual beauty through beauty’s inherent connection to the passion of love.26 Maintaining
that elevating link is important, I argue, because once the erotic is excluded from the field of beauty, physical
love is consigned to the ugliness of mere lust and pornography. Aesthetic philosophy’s pursuit of spiritual tran-
scendence, by rejecting beauty’s connection to bodily love, ultimately corrupts more than it purifies our art of
living. Rather than elevating men into angels, it lowers them to the level of beasts.

VII. Sexual Self-Styling and Sociopolitical Context

I now turn to Crispin Sartwell, distinguished author of The Art of Living and of Six Names of Beauty, whose
contribution to this symposium appreciates my aesthetic hypothesis and demonstrates more generally a profound
understanding of the book’s essential aims and methods. He grasps its pragmatic logic of critiquing the oppres-
sions endemic to the erotic cultures I discuss, without letting that critique prevent us from understanding the
functioning and values of those cultures so that we can see what useful insights we might extract from them.
Those insights sometimes emerge from problems discovered through a careful critique of those cultures’ ars
erotica, but such critique requires initially taking those cultures on their own terms, while not forgetting or

24) Michel Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 198), 484, 810.
2) Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Vol. 2, trans. Robert D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991),
23, 279.
26) Not only hedonists and libertines but even the eighteenth-century conservative Edmund Burke still maintained the close
connected of beauty with sensual pleasure and the passion of love, including its sexual experience through “the society of sex.”
Affirming that beauty is the object of the “passion which we call love,” which often takes as its object “the beauty of the sex” (appre-
ciated through the beloved’s “personal beauty”), Burke claims that love’s sexual pleasure is “the highest pleasure of sense.” Edmund
Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, (London: Penguin, 1998), 87, 89, 97. For more
on Burke’s physiological theory of beauty and the sublime, see Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and Burke’s Sublime,” The British
Journal of Aesthetics 4, no. 4, (October 200): 323–41, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayi047.

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excusing the injustice of those terms. This interpretive stance finds pithy expression in the Talmudic motto of
“respect and suspect.”27 Crispin cogently argues that “there cannot be an aesthetics of the body in isolation”
because we need to consider the body’s social and physical environment, and then wonders “whether [I] would
have any reservations about taking somaesthetics in that direction.” My response is that somaesthetics has
always been moving in that direction.
The soma was introduced to express the idea of a living, sentient, purposeful body that is significantly
shaped (through experience, habits, and opportunities for action) by the physical and social space it inhabits.
Moreover, the aims of somaesthetics were also defined in terms of that embeddedness in an environment that
is physical, social, and cultural. Consider this description of somaesthetics:

As an ameliorative discipline of both theory and practice, it aims to enrich not only our abstract,
discursive knowledge of the body, but also our lived somatic experience and performance, seeking
to enhance the meaning, understanding, efficacy, and beauty of our movements and of the envi-
ronments to which our movements contribute and from which they also draw their energies and
significance. Somaesthetics therefore involves a wide range of knowledge forms and disciplines
that structure such somatic care or can improve it. Recognizing that body, mind, and culture are
deeply co-dependent, somaesthetics comprises an interdisciplinary research program to integrate
their study.28

Rather than a retreat into the subjective experience of the isolated body alone, somaesthetics insists that truly
somaesthetic “body consciousness is always more than consciousness of one’s own body alone.” As I elaborate
and insist (italics in my original text), “A pure feeling of one’s body alone is an abstraction. One cannot really feel
oneself somatically without also feeling something of the external world. If I lie down, close my eyes, and care-
fully attend to scanning my body itself, I will also feel the way it makes contact with the floor.”29 I very much
appreciate Crispin’s point that even one’s personal erotic experiences “can only be understood as they emerge
from and into the representations which embody the system of sexual possibilities articulated in public space,
in the public language, in a political-economic situation, and which try to tell us what we can possibly be or
do, or what we must transgress against to be free.”
I also agree with his further point that “we ought to consider the gender system of a given culture at
a given time, for example, as a power-saturated system of aesthetics.” As Crispin notes, my book insists on this
socio-political embeddedness in many ways, for example in the legal and sociopolitical differences between
Athens and Sparta or Athens and Rome; or of the change of sexual options through changed social conditions
that mark the development of Indian erotics from the Kamasutra to the Ananga Ranga. Perhaps the most
interesting example of a complex system of power-saturated, erotic gender relations is in the defining text on
courtly love whose first and longest of its three books is almost entirely devoted to dialogues structured on
gender and class relations. It features eight love-seeking conversations involving men and women of different
classes (commoners, nobility, or higher nobility), each dialogue having a man of one class attempting to win

27) The Hebrew expression is ‫“( והדשחו והדבכ‬kabdehu v’hashdehu,” meaning “respect him/it and suspect him/it”); the expression
derives from chapter  of Derech Eretz Rabba, a minor Talmud tractate.
28) Richard Shusterman, “Thinking Through the Body, Educating for the Humanities: A Plea for Somaesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetic
Education 40, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 1–21, https://www.jstor.org/stable/414021.
29) Richard Shusterman, Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), xi, 70.

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the love of a woman of either his own or a higher or lower class. Through these dialogues issues of class and
gender privilege clearly emerge. The last, longest, and most intricately interesting dialogue is between a man
and woman of the higher nobility, and this dialogue is followed by brief comments on other class and gender
options. Love with nuns and harlots is proscribed; love of peasants is deprecated because they are too crude
to rise to the level of courtly love, while clerics form the highest gendered class of possible lovers because their
aristocracy comes from God.
Recognizing the book’s polymorphous sociocultural terrain, Crispin astutely remarks that it is “necessarily as
attentive to the cultural, political, and economic differences in the ways the activity of erotic/aesthetic self-fashioning
is expressed as with the seeming universal task of self-fashioning.” But some readers (perhaps even Crispin) might
desire a more synthetic overview of this diversity. Are there not some important sociopolitical commonalities
that these different cultures share and that shape the dominant gender-power aesthetics of their eroticism? Let me
tentatively suggest four interconnected factors that together weave a powerful sociopolitical framework for erotic
expression. These interrelated factors are patriarchy, progeny, possession, and penetration.30
Although patriarchy may have evolved for many reasons, it would make far less sense if there were no
progeny or no knowledge of paternity as causing progeny. Because knowledge of the seed-giving father’s identity
was always far less certain than knowing the birth-giving mother, paternity was a significant source of male
anxiety closely connected with the anxiety of female infidelity. Patriarchy served as a structure to establish well-
defined, stable, socially endorsed, and biologically-grounded paternity for progeny by means of greater control of
women through male authority.31 Paternity was a matter not only of knowledge but also of social and economic
power through the patriarchal possession of one’s progeny-producing wives or concubines and of one’s children
(whose labor and obedience the husband and father possessed). Sexually, possession was understood as penetra-
tion, because penetration by the male genitals of the female’s genitals was required for conception of progeny,
unlike the spawning of fish, as Diderot’s dreaming D’Alembert laments.32 We speak of the male as possessing,
“having” or “taking” the female by penetrating her body through the vagina or, by extension, through another
orifice. But topographically, it makes equal or more sense to say that the male organ is possessed, contained,
held, or taken within the female’s enveloping flesh. This notion of penetration-possession as active piercing that
is necessary for producing progeny essentially promotes the patriarchal principle of heteronormativity and helps
shape the masculine notions of potency and erotic action as conquest through stabbing-like violence.
If, in past cultures, the demand for progeny prescribed heteronormativity, which in turn fostered gender
binarism, today’s new technologies of fertilization refute the claim that producing offspring requires hetero-
sexual coitus and thus weaken the gender binarism that heterosexuality implies. Although premodern cultures
included identities beyond gender binarism and had practices that flouted heteronormativity, today’s new
technologies of reproduction and sexual reassignment surgery could significantly transform what Crispin
describes as our complex and changing “taxonomy of sexual roles and their aesthetic presentation in public

30) I introduce this four-factor framework in Richard Shusterman, “Sex, Emancipation, and Aesthetics: Ars Erotica and the Cage
of Eurocentric Modernity,” Foucault Studies, no. 31 (December 2021): 44–60, which is my contribution to a prior symposium on Ars
Erotica. The following paragraphs draw on that prior account.
31) The anthropologist Malinowski alleged that the matrilineal, non-patriarchal Trobriand society of Melanesia were “ignorant of
physical fatherhood,” that is, they failed to recognize the father’s coital act of inserting semen as having a role in conception. “The
father is … not a recognized kinsman of the children… Real kinship … exists only through the mother,” and the “mother’s brother
represents the principle of discipline, authority, and executive power within the family.” See Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression
in Savage Society, (London: Routledge, 2001), 9–10.
32) Denis Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” in Rameau’s Nephew/D’Alembert’s Dream, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin,
1966), 17.

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space.” He is also right to suggest that our “capitalist economic context” tends to encourage such pluralism to
reap greater profits. Because we live in a time of complex, bedazzling changes in the options we have to mani-
fest and realize our sexual desires, it seems all the more useful to study the diverse ars erotica traditions and
learn from their errors as well as their insights. Thinking through these matters in critical dialogue is much
better than doing it alone. I therefore thank the gifted contributors to this symposium and its organizer Eli
Kramer most sincerely for the attention they have given to my ideas in Ars Erotica and for stimulating me to
new thinking beyond that book.

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