In this regard, even Aristotle’s more specifically “moral” criticism appears much more inoffensive and much less specifically philosophical. His description is no less violent. Reflecting on the different causes of intemperance, he draws up a list in
Nichomachean Ethics
: “the habit of plucking out the hair or of gnawing the nails, or even coals or earth, not to mention homosexuality.…” But one cannot stop at the effect of this list alone. On one hand, because by “homosexual,” Aristotle means the
ubrizomenoi
, literally “those who were abused during childhood,” commonly the sodomites. On this, he does not distinguish himself from the common opinion of Greeks who often condemned sodomy; he does not invent any specifically philosophical homophobia. On the other hand, because through the violence of devalorization, a form of intemperance appears: the habit does not come from sodomites, as they have been “abused” as children and, as a result, “to have these various habits is beyond the limits of
vice
,” and thus, conversely, succeeding in mastering them is not a question of temperance as such. More brutally speaking, the Aristotelian fantasy of the
learning
of homosexuality seems less directly homophobic than the Platonic fantasy of the possible political “unlearning” of sodomites.
What then allows Aristotle, not to dissolve (since he fundamentally continues to subscribe to an “artificialist,” “against nature” conception of sodomy in regards to an alleged universality of desire), but to neutralize the violence of Plato’s legislative utopia? Precisely the emphasis placed on the allegedly unnatural (
paraphusin
) character of sodomy: by being beyond nature, homosexuals are also beyond the limits of vice and virtue, and thus on the periphery of politics rather than at its heart. The argument of homosexuality as “against nature,” thus “naturally” rare, reduces the risk (or the fantasy) of a (male) homosexuality that is so desirable that it would spread throughout society like wildfire. This does not totally exonerate Aristotle: at the price of reworking the universal idea (which no longer applies to everyone, but rather the greatest possible number), the specifically philosophical desire of the metaphysics of universal morality is maintained (or perhaps more accurately “the most universal as possible”), but this time rejecting the issue of particular sexualities in its shadows and examples in passing.
The desire of a morality that is as universal as possible would thus be maintained throughout all Hellenic philosophy, far from all empathic comprehension, but also far from all condemnation of “deviant” sexualities—to which Foucault would respond, “No, the Greeks were not so great”; that is to say, long after Aristotle, and in the name of the possibility of a common morality, the standard would become more problematic than exceptional, abandoning the
de facto
sodomites to the contingent violence of the common standard but protecting them all the same by the indifference granted to their specific sexuality.
Medieval Christian Philosophy: Homophobia “by Nature”
For lack of space, it is not possible to explore the twists and turns of a Christian philosophy weighed down by
theology
on one hand and strict politics on the other. To look at two great figures of medieval Christian philosophy, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas (if we arbitrarily accept that Augustine was a medieval philosopher), it seems, rather curiously, that everything gets overturned: it is no longer Platonism and its finicky universalism that will serve as the foundation for virulent homophobia, but Thomist Aristotelianism and its apparently more moderate conception of the universality of nature.
Certainly, when Augustine confronts the question of “impurity” (i.e. unnatural sexuality) head-on in
Confessions
(Book III), he is no miser with his condemnation: “The crimes
against nature
deserve everywhere and always detestation and punishment, as befalls Sodomites. When all peoples would commit them, they would fall, accusable in the same manner, under Divine law, which has not made men for such usage. In fact, it is to infringe upon the social order required by God and us, to dirty the natural institution, the work of God, by a perversion of
debauchery
.” But we can note at least two things. On one hand, there is a change in relation to Plato. The detestation ceases entirely to be based on a specifically political argument: it is “in the same way” as individuals that entire peoples could be accused of sodomy. In other words, sodomy is no longer dangerous to social and natural order. Certainly, it remained so, but at the same level as many other crimes like those against custom or the assaults described immediately following in the text. On the other hand, what is at stake here for Augustine is to search for “a time and a place” where it is possible to love God and God alone. In other words, the first and primary crime of sodomy is to turn us away from that love. For this reason, it can only be taken as part of a much more general criticism of sensual pleasure and sexuality itself. In this respect, all that remains is to compare this condemnation of sodomy with Augustinian descriptions of the sexual pleasure experienced in the legal relationship of
marriage
, and more so with descriptions of a pregnant woman in a union—identified in the matter, that is to say, by a Platonist, at the outer reaches of nothingness—to convince oneself that his problem is not at all homophobia, but sexuality in general, all the way down to its acceptable Christian forms, as historian Peter Brown so perfectly demonstrates.
It would thus appear that it is Augustine’s Platonism that, given his strict universalism, does not really dwell on the specific practices of each person in order to develop them all within the same repulsion, and which at the same time prevents a specific homophobia from developing during the first centuries of the Middle Ages (as much as we can believe in the causality of ideas).
On the contrary, it is in the Aristotelianism of Thomas Aquinas that the sin against nature (e.g., masturbation, sodomy, love for the same sex, or aberrant sexuality) once again becomes a specific issue. He dedicates the two last articles of his
Quaestio
on temperance, and refers to it again as an example in other problems. All of Aquinas’ issues, as a good Aristotelian, are in effect to classify the sins of intemperance and measure their various degrees of gravity. In this sense, it is no longer religion that is revealed but rather philosophy that will force Aquinas to classify sins against nature as the worst of the sins of intemperance, regardless of the arguments of authority (such as Augustine) that he invokes in his solutions to better support his thesis. It is a theory that is philosophical, not theological, to state: “The specific nature of the species is tightly bonded to each individual, bonds stronger than between individuals. Therefore, sins against the nature of the species are more grievous.” Similarly: “The gravity of a sin depends more on the abuse of a thing than on the omission of the right use.” More precisely, it is the re-using of a Christianized Aristotelianism that constitutes the politic on nature that is at play: to go against nature (i.e. as conceived as a work of God) is worse than going against God’s direct Commandments. In other words, it is not the Revelation that forces philosophy to submit itself to its “homophobic” commandments; on the contrary, it is philosophy that forces the specifically Christian revelation to harden its homophobia—here, the relation of philosophy to theology no longer appears as ancillary, regardless of what Aquinas might say, for the argument, in the strictly philosophical sense, appears quite leaden: if temperance supports itself on natural needs, these being linked to the reproduction of the species (the “good desires,” according to Aquinas), then sodomitical or homosexual desires (he makes a clear distinction between them, the first being the worst) must logically be the worst sins.
At the same time, we should not definitively condemn Aquinas. First of all, because it is
by his own action
that he allows his objections to be used against him: either religiously (only charity, and not the idea of nature, is a condition of faith), or rationally (if it happens in nature, how can it be qualified as unnatural?). Thus, we find the grandeur of rational, argumentative philosophy leaving the door open to criticism. Further, by supporting himself on a badly understood Aristotelianism in the details (for Aristotle, sodomy is not brutishness, but habit, and as far as he is concerned, it is not a vice), but well understood in the principle (nature, being the practice and opinion of the greatest number, is the only possible source of norms), Aquinas, despite himself, effectively shows the point to which arguments on homosexuality are reversible: an attack on desire in general (Platonism) can depict homosexuality as either the worst of plagues, for it is the most desirable (Plato), or as a sin that is as guilty, and thus innocent, as all others (Augustine). Even here, whereas Aristotle seems to calm Plato’s legislative fervor, it is to the contrary that Thomas the Aristotelian will help to launch the great systematic hunt for sodomites that will last at least until the Nazis. Certainly, it required a lot of philosophy, and not simply religion, to put so much work into such
violence
.
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment: The Reactive Homophobia of Sentiment
At last, the Enlightenment arrived. It is a cliché of a certain Republican philosophy which has not solved all of its problems with homophobia. But how can we think otherwise upon seeing the texts? First of all let us look at the Scottish Enlightenment. Nothing is stronger than David Hume’s criticism of nature, as well as of the idea that homosexuality could be unnatural: on one hand, we do not know what nature “wants,” as it is a simple principle of habit and convention; on the other, nothing can happen against nature (refer to Hume,
A Treatise of Human Nature
). Homophobia finds itself beforehand reduced either to its individual private character or to religious prejudice. It is nevertheless on this basis of
utilitarianism
that Jeremy Bentham’s essay entitled “Paederasty,” which expels homophobia from all rational philosophical discourse, could be constituted on philosophical grounds.
It is almost the same in France, notably with Diderot and Sade, but, importantly, with less convergent arguments. With Diderot, the essential argument rests in fact in the passage from a normative naturalism to a descriptive naturalism: the passage from one nature, understood as a unique and coherent form or as a law of the greatest number, to another nature, understood as a continuous but polymorphic unit, including the whole of its manifestations and its criticisms. Bordeu, a character in Diderot’s
Le Rêve de d’Alembert
(
D’Alembert’s Dream
), is quite clear on this point: “Life is aggregate, sensitivity is elemental.” From this perspective, one element could never reasonably judge another.
Conversely, Sade’s argument, in his political treatise
Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être republicains!
(French, try harder if you want to be republicans!), rests in a hyper-normative naturalism: nature is law, and law is prohibitive, but precisely like nature, that is to say as desire and liberty, and not as collective institution; therefore, few positive laws are needed if we wish to allow the laws of nature to speak. In this regard, since homosexuality exists despite the institution, it conforms to nature; not only is it not evil, but it is good. And to take up an argument similar to that of Phaedrus in
Symposium
, at the opposite extreme of clichés of revolutionary virility, Sade qualifies his argument by saying: “look at Sparta.”
Thus, what interests us in these two apparently contradictory arguments, is that they designate a common enemy: Rousseau and his naturalism of sentiment. To situate, in effect, nature in sentiment, and not in the aggregate or in an empirically natural law, is to revive the old argument of “against nature.” Certainly, in Book II of
Confessions
, it is at the sole level of private and personal sentiment that Rousseau tells his sad adolescent experience with seduction: “This adventure caused me to safeguard myself in the future from the enterprises of the Horsemen of the wrist, and the sight of those who appeared to be, reminding me of the air and the movements of my appalling Moor, has forever inspired in me so much horror, that I had difficulty in concealing it.” But it is not only that. This “horror” and “disgust,” as he mentions before, do not alone burden the whole of his supposedly more philosophical texts: it is also his frightening description of the children of the Swiss bourgeoisie in his
Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (Letter to Monsieur d’Alembert on the Theatre)
; it is the allusions to Lesbos in
Émile
as an example of totally corrupt morals in Book IV of
Confessions
. But mostly, with Rousseau, at the strictly conceptual level, the feeling of the voice of nature never remains simply private: it is on the contrary the very place for the expression of the principle for morality and education, the very place of the general will for politics. With Rousseau, this subjective, sincere truth is not discounted or second-rate, useful only for the margins of specifically philosophical discourse: it is the heart of all truth. In other words, it is not Rousseau’s particular, specifically aphilosophical and possibly painful, experience that sustains his homophobia; it is his own philosophy as a philosophy of nature which places the allegedly natural sentiment at the heart of political decision and moral education. During the century of Enlightenment, which finally sees a better situation for the “
chevaliers de la manchette
” (a French phrase for homosexuals at the time), Rousseau thus succeeds in unifying the political homophobia of the Ancients with the homophobia “by nature” of the Medievals under the aegis of the natural sentiment “that does not mislead”: “As if a natural hold was not necessary to form social ties: … as if it were not the good son, the good husband, the good father that make up the good citizen.” (Nietzsche called Rousseau a “moral tarantula.”)