Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

316 Pages·2006·1.26 MB·English

by  Roger Scruton

Sexual Desire
A Philosophical Investigation
By Roger Scruton

Sexual Desire
PREFACE
ADVICE TO THE READER
1 THE PROBLEM
NOTES
2 AROUSAL
NOTES
3 PERSONS
NOTES
4 DESIRE
Animals and persons
The first-person perspective and arousal
Involuntary revelation
Embodiment
Discarnate persons
The personal nature of the object of desire
The phenomenology of proper names
Individualising thought
The first-person perspective in desire
Kantian ethics — a digression
The course of desire
The aim of desire
NOTES
5 THE INDIVIDUAL OBJECT
Distinctions among attitudes
The formal features of desire
The 'subjective essence'
Individualising thoughts
Sartre's paradox
The aim of desire
Original sin
Animal and person
NOTES
6 SEXUAL PHENOMENA
Obscenity
Modesty and shame
The meaning of the sexual organs
Prostitution
Falling in love
Jealousy
Don Juanism
Tristanism
Sado-masochism
NOTES
7 THE SCIENCE OF SEX
Sociobiology
A note on Schopenhauer
The unconscious
Freudian psychology: the general problem
Freud: the specific theory
Criticism: the libido
Criticism: the erotogenic zone
The Freudian voice
NOTES
8 LOVE
Plato's question
Levels of friendship
Friendship and esteem
The intentionality of friendship
Love and friendship
Erotic love
Tensions in love
Love and indolence
The course of love
The expression of love in desire
Beauty
New problems
NOTES
9 SEX AND GENDER
Sex and gender
Gender construction
Kantian feminism
The role of gender
Man and woman
Embodiment
Embodiment and gender construction
Plato's question and the root of desire
Beauty and gender
Homosexuality and gender
NOTES
1O PERVERSION
Bestiality
Necrophilia
Paedophilia
Sado-masochism
Homosexuality
Incest
Fetishism
Masturbation
Chastity
NOTES
11 SEXUAL MORALITY
NOTES
12. THE POLITICS OF SEX
NOTES
EPILOGUE
NOTES
APPENDIX I THE FIRST PERSON
NOTES
APPENDIX 2 INTENTIONALITY
NOTES

PREFACE
The subject of sexual desire has been largely ignored by modern philosophy, and the
biographies of the great modern philosophers suggest that they have tended to avoid the
experience of desire as scrupulously as they have avoided its analysis. I leave it to others
to offer theories as to why this is so. But the subject requires that I make a general remark
concerning the trouble that philosophy encounters when it enters this domain.
Until the late nineteenth century it was almost impossible to discuss sexual desire, except
as part of erotic love, and even then convention required that the peculiarities of desire
remain unmentioned. This deliberate neglect also damaged the discussion of erotic love,
which was made to appear yet more mysterious than it is, precisely because it had been
deprived of its principal motive. When the interdiction was finally lifted - by such writers
as Krafft-Ebing, Fere and Havelock Ellis — it was by virtue of an allegedly 'scientific'
approach to a widespread natural phenomenon.
Such was the prestige of science that any investigation conducted in its name could call
upon powerful currents of social approval, which were sufficient to overcome the
otherwise crippling reluctance to face the realities of sexual experience. However, it was
precisely this dependence upon the prestige of science that led to the continued neglect of
the subject. It became necessary to assume that sexual conduct is an aspect of man's
'animal' condition - an 'instinct' whose expression exhibits the undiscovered laws of a
complex biological process. But, as I argue in the following pages, no biological
taxonomy could capture the lineaments of sexual desire. Desire is indeed a natural
phenomenon, but it is one that lies beyond the reach of any 'natural science' of man.
By the time that Freud had introduced his shocking revelations — disguised once again
as neutral, 'scientific' truths about a universal impulse - the language had been settled in
which the details of human sexuality are now habitually presented. Freud described the
aim of sexual desire as:
union of the genitals in the act known as copulation, which leads to a release of the
sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual instinct — a satisfaction
analogous to the sating of hunger.
Such language — which expresses a certain hatred of the sexual act and all that pertains
to it - cannot capture what is distinctive in sexual experience. Its universal adoption by
'sexologists' has led, however, to a remarkable 'science', which purports to explain that
which it has no language to describe. The Kinsey Report, like the pseudo-scientific
literature which has followed it, merely continues, in more vulgar and more spirited form,
the moralising enterprise of Krafft-Ebing: the enterprise of confronting our moral
sentiments with an allegedly 'scientific' description of the facts which threaten them. The
final outcome has been the establishment of the 'sexologist's report', as a new literary
genre. The style is exemplified by the Masters and Johnson Report, with its repeated
references to the 'effective functioning', 'adequacy' and 'frequency' of 'sexual
performance', and its pseudo-experimental approach to matters which we can see in
neutral terms only by misperceiving them: 'Subject C has vocalised a desire to return to
the program accompanied by his wife as a contributing family unit.' The effect of this
'demystification' of the sexual impulse has been the rise of novel and unprecedented
superstitions, and the growth of a new kind of pseudo-scientific mystery which it is one
of the aims of this book to dispel. Only occasionally has a writer addressed himself to the
crucial question which this 'scientific' literature has contrived to ignore: the question of
what a person experiences when he desires another. Desire is identical neither with the
'instinct' which is expressed in it nor with the love which fulfils it. It is, I shall argue, a
distinctively human phenomenon, and one that urges on us precisely that restricting sense
of 'decency' which once forbade its discussion. In this book I shall present a defence of
decency; but in doing so I illustrate the truth of Bernard Shaw's remark, that it is
impossible to explain decency without being indecent. I only hope that the benefit, in
terms of moral understanding, will outweigh the moral cost.
Earlier versions of the text were read by Joanna North, John Casey, Bill Newton-Smith,
Robert Grant, David Levy and Sally Shreir, and I am greatly indebted to all of them for
their many criticisms and suggestions. I am particularly grateful to lan McFetridge,
whose painstaking examination of the first draft provided the indispensable support
without which this book would not have been finished in its present form. Thanks to his
generosity, broad-mindedness and philosophical penetration, this work has been saved
from many errors and obscurities, and I only hope that he will not be too distressed by
those that remain.

ADVICE TO THE READER
1. In this book I follow traditional practice, in using the masculine pronoun to refer
indifferently to men and women, except where the context requires gender to be explicit.
There are two reasons for this: first, that it is stylistically correct; secondly, that it is the
most effective way of leaving sex out of it — as one must leave sex out of the discussion
of desire. What I mean by that second reason can be understood, however, only in the
course of my argument.
2. Because this is a work of philosophy it contains passages of difficult argument,
designed to provide foundations for the central discussion. Most of these passages occur
in Chapter 3 and in the two appendices. However, the reader who ignores these sections
will be able to understand the argument, and appreciate my main contentions. In
particular, anyone who finds himself obstructed by Chapter 3 should pass at once to
Chapter 4, where the discussion of sexual desire is continued.

1 THE PROBLEM
Modern philosophers have described sexual desire and erotic love in surprising and
paradoxical ways. For Kant, sexual desire can be understood only as part of the
'pathology' of the human condition.1 For Hegel, erotic love involves a contradiction; for
Sartre, the same contradiction is present in desire.2 Schopenhauer regarded sexual desire
as involving a delusion - the delusion, to put it simply, that it is the individual who is
subject and object in our sexual endeavours.3 Those romantic and post-romantic views
exhibit an equal pessimism, and each contrasts with the discussions of the subject that
have come down to us from ancient thinkers.
Perhaps the most famous of those thinkers was Plato, who introduced (in his own terms)
a distinction that has caused considerable confusion in subsequent debate: the distinction
between erotic love and sexual desire. Plato is the intellectual ancestor of a view which
persists to this day and which conditions much of our moral thinking. According to this
view, our animal nature is the principal vehicle of sexual desire, and provides its
overriding motive. In desire we act and feel as animals; indeed, desire is a motive which
all sexual beings — including the majority of animals — share. In erotic love, however, it
is our nature as rational beings that is primarily engaged, and, in the exercise of this
passion, altogether finer and more durable impulses seek recognition and fulfilment.
To Plato, it seemed that the two impulses are so radically opposed that they could not
happily coexist in a single consciousness. Hence, in order to permit the full flowering of
erotic love, it is necessary to refine away, and eventually to discard, the element of desire.
The resulting love — 'Platonic' love — would be both intrinsically rational and morally
pure. This pure love has, for Plato, a distinctive value, comparable to the value of
philosophy itself. It provides a link with transcendent reality, a stage on the way to
spiritual fulfilment and emancipation, which occurs only with the final release of the soul
into that world of Ideas from which it descended and in which it has its eternal home. The
subject of the erotic thus acquired, for Plato, a seriousness, and a pathos, rarely expressed
in the writings of later philosophers. So seriously, indeed, did he regard it that he could
permit his characters to discuss it fully only when drunk, in a dialogue which is rightly
regarded as one of the great literary achievements of antiquity.4
Remnants of the Platonic view can be found in many subsequent thinkers - in the neo-
Platonists, in St Augustine, in Aquinas and in the Roman philosopher-poet Boethius,
whose philosophy of love was to have such a profound effect on the literature of
medieval Europe and in particular on Chaucer, the Troubadours, Cavalcanti, Boccaccio
and Dante.5 It survives in the popular idea — itself founded in the most dubious of
metaphysical distinctions - that sexual desire is primarily 'physical', while love always
has a 'spiritual' side. It survives, too, in the theory of Kant, despite the enormous moral
and emotional distance that separates Kant from Plato, and despite Kant's remorseless
pessimism about the erotic life of mankind. It is one major purpose of this work to
combat the Platonic theory. I shall argue, not against the distinction between the animal
and the rational (indeed, I shall uphold that distinction as crucial to the understanding of
our condition), but against the moral and philosophical impulse that leads us to assign
sexual desire to the animal part of human nature.
In the course of my argument I shall try to explain why sexual desire has so often been
regarded as mysterious or paradoxical; and I shall show that there is more than a grain of
truth in these descriptions. I shall also give the philosophical grounding for a sexual
morality, and argue that moral consideration cannot be subtracted from the sexual act
without at the same time destroying its distinctive character. There is a modern prejudice
(although it is no more than a prejudice) that there cannot really be such a thing as a
specifically sexual morality. Morality, it is thought, attaches not to the sexual act, but
always to something else, with which it may be conjoined. We may reasonably forbid
sexual violence, say, but that is on account of the violence; considered in and for itself,
and detached from fortuitous circumstances, the sexual act is neither right nor wrong, but
merely 'natural'. Such a view may seem implausible when set beside the obvious
immorality of child molestation or rape — crimes which seem to threaten the very
existence of others as sexual beings, and to threaten also the sexual life of their
perpetrator. But the precise reason for rejecting the modern prejudice is hard to discover,
and it will not be before the end of this book that the reader will have my reasons for
thinking that the sexual act is, and must always be, limited by moral scruples. And,
although I shall be sparing in my moral conclusions — having neither the space nor the
inclination to consider all that must be considered in order to present a comprehensive
sexual ethic — I hope that at least some of the ideas of 'traditional' morality will no
longer seem as strange after reading this book as they have seemed to many of the
authors whom I have studied in the course of writing it. Whether or not the reader comes
to agree with my particular conclusions, he will, I hope, agree that it need not be absurd
to condemn homosexual intercourse, fornication, masturbation, or whatever, even though
we all have an urge to do these things, and even though there may be no God who forbids
them.
To begin a philosophical investigation into sexual desire is not easy. Not only is the
subject encumbered by a thousand conflicting prejudices; it is also uncertain which
method would enable us to broach it. Ought we to be engaged in 'conceptual analysis',
sorting out the intricate connections of usage, and the deep connections of meaning,
which link such terms as 'desire', 'arousal', 'love' and 'pleasure'? Or should we be engaged
in an exercise of 'phenomenology', trying to give a specification of 'what it is like' that
will fit the sexual experiences of those who have them? Or again, should we be
attempting to locate and to solve the specific puzzles, in ethics and the philosophy of
mind, to which reflection on our sexual experience gives rise? Finally, should we be
preparing the ground for science, removing the initial muddles that stand in the way of a
proper scientific account of one of the most important, and most misunderstood, of vital
phenomena?
I believe that it is necessary to do all of those things, and indeed that they are all parts of
a single philosophical enterprise. The main problem is one of description — description
at the shallowest possible level. It is necessary to locate the phenomenon of sexual desire,
to say what it is, as a human experience. It is this search for a shallow description that has
been called, at various times and for various purposes, both 'phenomenology' and 'the
analysis of concepts'.6
Like many 'analytical' philosophers, I am suspicious of phenomenology. I am suspicious,
in particular, of the 'Cartesian' method of Husserl: the assumption that experience should
be described from the first-person point of view. (My reasons for this suspicion are set
out in Appendix i.) At the same time, I am greatly indebted to another idea which has
been of supreme importance in phenomenology, and which is only belatedly gaining
recognition among the practitioners of 'conceptual analysis'. The idea is older than
phenomenology - perhaps as old as Aristotle, certainly as old as Kant. It holds that we
must distinguish the world of human experience from the world of scientific observation.
In the first we exist as agents, taking command of our destiny and relating to each other
through conceptions that have no place in the scientific view of the universe. In the
second we exist as organisms, driven by an arcane causality and relating to each other
through the laws of motion that govern us as they govern every other thing. Kant
described the first world as 'transcendental', the second as 'empirical', and steered a
brilliant course between two exhaustive, mutually incompatible and, for him, equally
impossible views of their relation. On one view the transcendental world is a separate
realm of being from the empirical world, so that objects belonging to the one are not to be
found in the other. On the other view, the two worlds are not distinct, but rather two
separate ways of viewing the same material: we can view it either from the
'transcendental' perspective of the human agent or from the 'empirical' perspective of the
scientific observer. In this book I shall defend a version of that second idea, in terms
which owe something to Kant's disciple Dilthey, something to Husserl, and something to
recent work in analytical philosophy of science, but which bear little direct relation to
Kant.7 I believe we must distinguish, not two worlds, but two ways of understanding the
world, and in particular two separate conceptual enterprises, by which our understanding
is formed.
The world is more than an object of scientific curiosity. It is compliant to our purposes:
everywhere we confront the occasion for action and the means whereby to accomplish it.
The world is also diverse, presenting variegated objects of desire and contrasting
obstacles to our will. As practical beings we instinctively develop categories that will
record and facilitate our commerce with our surroundings, and these categories bear the
double imprint of human purpose and material variety - corresponding in part to our uses
and in part to the natural condition of the objects described. Some categories do no more
than record the purpose to which an object may be put: categories like 'table', 'swing' and
'shelter'. Others describe some recurring feature of the environment, and perhaps at the
same time postulate an explanation of its unified appearance: such are categories like
'animal', 'vegetable' and 'rock'. Other categories seem to fit into either class, combining
functional significance and explanatory power. When we describe something as hard, we
situate it in the web of human purposes - it is something that will resist our attempts to
transform it, and perhaps also hurt us. At the same time, we attribute a physical character,
a constitution, that allies it to a host of kindred substances in the world of nature.
Philosophers have paid much attention in recent years to the existence of these
contrasting kinds of category, and in particular to the division between functional and
natural kinds.8 Given our dual existence, as active and as contemplative beings, it is
natural that we should avail ourselves of the two kinds of concept, and that there should
be so many notions situated in the hazy area occupied by 'hard' and 'soft'. We seek both to
understand the world and to alter it; and usually to do both. Hence we equip ourselves
with categories permeable to explanation (natural kinds) and categories permeable to
purpose (functional kinds). But our relation to the world is vastly more complex than that
implies: in addition to purpose and knowledge we have experiences, values, emotions
and religious belief. These too dictate their own conceptual trajectories, their separate
attempts to order the world as an object of our interests.
Classification may be compared to butchery, in which an object is divided, sometimes
according to its nature and sometimes in defiance of it. The English butcher, motivated
by a zealous disdain for the corpse before him, and also for the man who will eat it, chops
the creature savagely into rough-hewn blocks, having little more than a tradition of fair-
play to recommend them. An English 'joint' may consist of a scrap of dorsal muscle, a
piece of backbone, a fragment of kidney, some skin and marrow, a few hairs, and the
indelible mark with which Farmer Jones once branded his lamb. Sometimes — as in the
kidney chop — the resulting combination of flavours gives rise to an interesting
'gustatory kind'. But this was no part of the intention. The French butcher, prompted by a
native respect for les nourritures terrestres, endeavours to separate each natural texture
and flavour from its competitors, detaching a complete fillet from the bone, fat, kidney
and skin that encase it. He divides nature more nearly at the joints than does his English
colleague; but his truth to nature is the result of interests that have no necessary relation
to nature's laws. He still bears no comparison with the anatomist, who, forswearing all
interest in appearances, explores nature's secrets in the order in which nature conceived
them. For the anatomist, the real order of the carcase is that which explains, not only its
taste, but also its structure, its former movements, its passing away and its coming to be.
In classification, as in butchery, we are often more interested in the relation of objects to
ourselves than in their causality and constitution. For we seek, not merely for the causes
of events, but also for their meaning - even when they have no meaning. For example, we
group the stars into constellations according to fictions of our own, and in doing so we
commit astronomical outrage. For the astronomer our concept of a 'constellation' displays
nothing but the superstitious emotion of those who first devised it. For the astrologer it
conveys the deepest insight into the mystery of things. For the rest of us this classification
is a record of our familiarity with the world, a tribute to the human face which covers it.
Thomas Hardy awakens us to much sadness when he writes, of young drummer Hodge,
killed in the Boer war, that he 'never knew . . . / The meaning of the broad karoo': to die
in surroundings that are opaque to our quest for meaning is to die unconsoled. And hence
the bleakness of the 'strange-eyed constellations' that 'west / Each night above his mound'.
The example of constellations bears on matters to which I shall return in the final
chapter. More useful to us at present is a category predicated on our interest in beauty:
the category of the ornamental. Consider then the class of 'ornamental marbles'. The
purpose of this classification - of great importance to sculptors, masons and serious-
minded architects — is to assimilate stones that are the objects of a single aesthetic
concern. An ornamental marble can be polished; it has a grain, a colour, a depth and a
surface translucency which lend it to our decorative purposes. The classification includes
onyx, porphyry and marble itself. Scientifically speaking, the classification is an utter
nonsense. For onyx is an oxide, porphyry a silicate, marble a carbonate, while limestone -
an isotope of marble - is expressly excluded from the class. A science of stones must aim
to replace all such classifications — whose subservience to human purposes deprives
them of full explanatory power — with other and deeper classifications, designed to
capture the real similarities among the objects subsumed by them. Science aims, in other
words, to discover natural kinds. For only a division of the world into natural kinds can
enable us to penetrate below appearances, to the underlying 'laws of motion' which
explain them.
A science of stones would therefore classify marble and limestone together, as different
crystalline forms of calcium carbonate, generated by the decomposition under pressure of
living things. Such a science would probably find no single explanation for the fact that
the appearance and utility of marble approximates so closely to the appearance and utility
of onyx and porphyry. Hence it would in all probability contain no classification
corresponding to our idea of an ornamental marble. On the contrary, it is likely to
dispense with all such classifications, which tend to dissolve just as soon as we reach
below the surface of human experience to the underlying physical order which explains