Notes on “Good Health” (kalos kakon)

Good health is a beautiful evil. We know we are in good health if we forget we are in it. Disease makes the body unforgettable, and yet, like pleasure, disease also gives the body its own presence. Between health and its absence is the cause through which we forget everything but the effect. A state of health is compromised like the Greek notion of a woman. It is the silence of disease and the condition of pleasure through which we may excavate our health only to discover its absence. If so, being a healthy woman is to forget we are women to begin with, yet an ideal of health lies in a woman’s ability to be healthy “as” a woman. This manner of forgetfulness offers a concurrent cure to the other sex “as” the other sex too. King wrote (in 1983?) on the inheritance of silence as a “technical” problem: “women are less likely to speak,” to act as our sources” (King, 109). A woman needs a woman to act as a woman that she may have a source to speak from, but her speech comes by way of the last actor who faced the same conundrum that she would face herself. We are stalled by the adverb, though the adverb is reproductive. The concept of “woman” oscillates between a parthenos (“virgin”) and a gyne (“wife”) within and without its opposition to “man” (King, 110). Either the strength of a woman’s character may be located in a tragedy, or we may feel for her invisibility—the state of being “almost,” which is, also, a state of health—within the grieving words of Thucydides (King, 110). In Greek medical discourse, the construction of the maternal body centers fertility because the health of the female body is not an end in itself. The child, who may also become a woman, remains secondary to the very phenomenon of reproduction (King, X). Men are posed as the catalyst of reproduction, yet it is not pleasure but the prospect of immortality, through which the structure of reproduction may itself be reproduced, that maintains the value of the woman’s body. The prospect is, like women, and like the health of a man or a woman, a kalos kakon. “In short then,” Diotima says, “love is of the good’s being one’s own forever” (206a-b). Plato says through a woman’s voice that love’s function is reproduction: “Then, I’ll speak more clearly,” she said. “All human beings are pregnant, Socrates, both in body and soul, and when we come of age, we naturally desire to give birth. Yet, one cannot possibly give birth in ugliness, only in beauty, because the union of a man and woman, that is, birth, is a divine affair. Pregnancy and procreation instill immortality in a living, mortal being, and these things are impossible in what lacks harmony” (206d).

 The means are the end, and though every end—woman, child, man— retains the means of their origin, in their retainment is the fact that pleasure may be a sensation of health, but the strength of health is the very absence of its sensation. In the domain of pleasure are gendered differences of control “ranging from male control (rape) to female control (seduction)” (King, 111). In “The Seed and the Nature of the Child,” men and women are said to contain both male and female “sperm” (320). Hong cites the one-seed theory from Aeschylus’s Eumenides, in which Apollo says that a woman, once she is “called” a mother,” becomes “a stranger for a stranger,” to the household (Eumendes 658-661). I read passages 10 and 11 in the penumbra of the mother as a stranger, who, only later, based on the evidence of resemblance between mother and child, becomes visible as the other half to the origin of new life. The explanation for the deformity of children is likened to trees, “which have insufficient space in the earth, being obstructed by a stone or the like. They grow up twisted, or thick in some places and slender in others, and this is what happens to the child as well, if one part of the womb constricts some part of its body more than another” (323). It is as if the womb is speaking out against its own role, akin to Pandora opening the box and leaving hope inside. Although the man and woman contribute equally to the child, the woman and her health are the source of deformation. Meanwhile, a child born to “deformed” parents is “usually sound,” following the way of animals, which, though they could be deformed themselves, still have “exactly the same components as what is sound.” (That the deformity of the child parallels the deformity of trees reminds me of the myth of Daphne, who turns into a laurel tree while Apollo pursues her, which raises further tensions between the myth, and the Hippocratic corpus as both myth and a source of knowledge).

Bibliography

Hong, Yurie. “Collaboration and Conflict: Discourses of Maternity in Hippocratic Gynecology and Embryology.” Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome. Edited by Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell, University of Texas Press, 2012, 71-96.

King, Helen. “Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women.” Images of Women in Antiquity. Edited by Averil Cameron and Amelie Kuhrt, Wayne State University Press, 1983, 109-127.

Plato. Symposium. Translated by William S. Cobb, State University of New York Press, 1993, 11-59.