Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation

Contents

Preface

Advice to the reader

1 The problem

2 Arousal

3 Persons

4 Desire

5 The individual object

6 Sexual phenomena

7 The science of sex

8 Love

9 Sex and gender

10 Perversion

11 Sexual morality

12 The politics of sex

Epilogue

Appendix 1 The first person

Appendix 2 Intentionality

Notes

Footnotes

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

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, Féré 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 Ian 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 1.) 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 and sustains it.

Some concepts, therefore, including the concepts of natural science, have an explanatory function. Not only do they provide the terms in which explanations are formulated; they are themselves explanatory, in that to subsume an object under them is already to provide an explanation of its empirically discoverable character.⁹ Other concepts, including many concepts of common sense and intuitive understanding, are not (or not primarily) explanatory. Their function is to divide the world in accordance with our interests, to mark out possibilities of action, emotion and experience which may very well be hampered by too great an attention to the underlying order of things. Concepts of this kind often tend to give way before the pressure of scientific innovation. We feel this pressure in many ways, but most immediately as a kind of instability in our ordinary descriptions. It seems as though tables and chairs are not really as we describe them. They are not really coloured, not really solid, and so on. For the best explanation of these indelible appearances makes no mention of colour (at best only of the experience of colour), and postulates in place of the ‘solid’ table a discontinuous crowd of molecules, each separated from its neighbour by a distance greater than its own diameter.

There is no need for us here to enquire into the meaning of the word ‘really’ on the lips of the person who says that no table is really coloured. (I take up the point in Appendix 2.) What is important is the contrast between the ‘thinness’ of our ordinary descriptions and the ‘rock-hard’ solidity of the explanations which seem to threaten them, and which yield, if at all, only to better explanations than themselves. At the same time, the descriptions of ordinary thought and action cannot be forgone. Without them, we lack an essential instrument for the understanding of our world. The classification of stones as ornamental marbles indicates, not a structural, but a partly phenomenal, partly functional, similarity among the substances to which it is applied. And the purpose of marking this similarity is to enshrine in a classification the common purpose to which such objects may be put.

As our example shows, classification relative to purpose (classification in terms of ‘functional kinds’) is not the only example of the ‘thin’ descriptions generated by everyday human life. There is also classification relative to immediate sensory experience – the kind of classification that records ‘secondary qualities’.¹⁰ And there are more elusive examples: classifications relative to emotions (the fearful, the lovable, the disgusting), and classifications relative to aesthetic interest (the ornamental, the serene, the elegant and the harmonious). Such classifications record, not the varieties of material objects, but the varieties of human ‘intentionality’ – to borrow a useful technicality of the phenomenologists.

By ‘intentionality’ I mean the quality of ‘reference beyond’ which is contained in human consciousness: the quality of pointing to, and delineating, an object of thought. The ‘awareness of the world’ that lies at the heart of my experience, and which seems constantly to project my thoughts outwards on to a reality greater than myself, exists in many forms: belief, perception, imagination, emotion and desire. Each of these mental states marks out a space, as it were, before me – a gap into which an object may be fitted. My fear is fear of something, my perception perception of something, and so on. Sometimes I am myself the object of my thoughts; more normally, however, the object is something other than myself, something that belongs to the ‘surrounding world’ of my experience. (For an exact definition of the term ‘intentionality’, see Appendix 2.)

I shall describe this ‘surrounding world’ as the Lebenswelt (‘world of life’), using a term popular among phenomenologists, though not exclusive to them.¹¹ The Lebenswelt is not a world separate from the world of natural science, but a world differently described – described with the concepts that designate the intentional objects of human experience. Intentionality implies that my consciousness is also a form of representation: my consciousness shows me a world, and also places me in relation to it. But not all forms of representation are transparent. The descriptions employed by science suppose that the nature of the objects identified through them is to be discovered. The representation identifies an object: but its nature is to be determined by further enquiry. The same is not true of the Lebenswelt, whose objects are identified by descriptions that are, or aim to be, transparent to our experience and purposes. The objects of the Lebenswelt are conceived under classifications that reflect our own practical and contemplative interest in them. These classifications attempt to divide the world according to the requirements of everyday theoretical and practical reason.¹² The classifications which define the ‘phenomenological kinds’ of the Lebenswelt are only partly responsive to the enterprise of prediction. They sometimes dissolve under the impact of scientific explanation, not because they necessarily conflict with the scientific world-view, but because they have no staying power against the standpoint of the curious observer, who looks, not to the interests of people, but to the underlying structure of reality.

At the same time, science may provide no substitute for the concepts which order and direct our everyday experience. A sculptor armed with the theories of chemistry, geology and crystallography, but without the concept (foreign to those sciences) of an ornamental marble, will not have that immediate sense of similarity in use which enables his less erudite colleague spontaneously to relate onyx to porphyry. His very perceptions will be different, for they will be deprived of a concept in terms of which such stones would otherwise be seen.

It is arguable that scientific penetration into the depth of things may render the surface unintelligible – or at least intelligible only slowly and painfully, and with a hesitancy that undermines the immediate needs of human action. (Such is indeed the case, I shall argue, with the crucial phenomenon of human sexual desire.) As agents we belong to the surface of the world, and enter into immediate relation with it. The concepts through which we represent it form a vital link with reality, and without this link appropriate action and appropriate response could not emerge with the rapidity and competence that alone can ensure our happiness and survival. We cannot replace our most basic everyday concepts with anything better than themselves, for they have evolved precisely under the pressure of human circumstance and in answer to the needs of generations. Any ‘rational reconstruction’ – however obedient it may be to the underlying truth of things and to the requirements of scientific objectivity – runs the risk of severing the vital connection which links our response to the world, and the world to our response, in a chain of spontaneous human competence.¹³

Nevertheless, many of our everyday concepts waver precariously under the impact of scientific thinking, and one of them – the concept of the human agent, or person – will be the subject of much that follows. It is the duty of philosophy, as it is the need of religion, to sustain and validate such concepts and the human intentionality to which they give sense and direction. We are familiar enough with the dangers that attach to the scientific view of the human condition – the view which represents us, perhaps truly, as complex organisms, buffeted by the workings of a causality over which we exert no control. But it is important not to be hasty with remedies, not to seek either to deny the truths of science – taking refuge, for example, in some delusory metaphysic of human freedom – or to run impetuously to the protective sanctuary of religious faith, in order to provide dogmatic support for conceptions which are, in truth, our own invention, and which we alone have the obligation to repair. We need to show in detail that our spontaneous descriptions of the Lebenswelt – descriptions which make human agency into the most important feature of our surrounding world – are not displaced by the truths of science, that they have their own truth which, because it does not compete with the enterprise of ultimate explanation, is not rendered the less secure by the explanations which seem at first glance to conflict with it. Philosophy, which is the art of second glances, is burdened with a great task of restitution. Science has estranged us from the world, by causing us to mistrust the concepts through which we respond to it. I shall attempt to restore the concept of sexual desire to its rightful place in the description of the Lebenswelt, and to show in detail why a science of sex can neither displace that concept nor illuminate the human phenomenon that it describes.

The crucial concept for any philosophical attempt to provide the basis for human understanding is the concept of the person. It is a well-known thesis of philosophy – expressed in countless idioms and in countless tones of voice – that human beings may be described in two contrasting (and, for some, conflicting) ways: as organisms obedient to the laws of nature, and as persons, sometimes obedient, sometimes disobedient, to the moral law. Persons are moral agents; their actions have not only causes, but also reasons. They make decisions for the future, and so have intentions in addition to desires. They do not allow themselves always to be swept along by their impulses, but occasionally resist and subdue them. In everything the moral agent is both active and passive, and stands as a kind of legislator among his own emotions. He is also an object not only of affection and love (which we may extend to all of nature), but also of praise and blame, anger and esteem. In all such intuitive distinctions – between reason and cause, intention and desire, action and passion, esteem and affection – we find aspects of the vital distinction which underlies them and to the clarification of which Kant devoted some of his greatest chapters: the distinction between person and thing. Only a person has rights, duties and obligations; only a person acts for reasons in addition to causes; only a person merits our praise, blame or anger. And it is as persons that we perceive and act upon one another, so mediating all our mutual responses with the obscure but indispensable concept of the free moral agent.

I do not believe that we can accept Kant’s majestic theory, which ascribes to persons a metaphysical core, the ‘transcendental self, lying beyond nature and eternally free from its constraints. Nevertheless, his theory was derived persuasively from insights into human agency that we must not reject, and one of my major concerns in what follows will be to defend what is defensible in Kant’s outlook, while avoiding the intolerable metaphysic which he – and, following him, Husserl, Heidegger, Patočka and many others – made into the central proposition of a theory of man. At the same time I shall reject any attempt to give a theory of human nature in merely scientific terms: in terms of the ‘best explanation’ of what we are. For we are mere appearances, and the best explanation of our nature will probably not employ the concept of the person, even though that concept defines what we are for one another and for ourselves. If this idea seems paradoxical, I hope that it will seem less paradoxical later – or at least, no more paradoxical than human experience itself.

I shall contrast two modes of understanding: scientific understanding, which aims to explain the world, and ‘intentional understanding’, as I shall call it, which aims to describe, to criticise and to justify the Lebenswelt. The second is an attempt to understand the world in terms of the concepts through which we experience and act on it: these concepts identify the ‘intentional object’ of our everyday states of mind. An intentional understanding, therefore, fills the world with the meanings implicit in our aims and emotions. The idea of such an understanding is a familiar donnée of Kantian sociology, underlying the view that the social world in which we act must be understood differently from the world of the disengaged observer, by means of an act of Verstehen.¹⁴ Not only is this ‘intentional understanding’ indispensable to us as rational agents; it may also be irreplaceable by any understanding derived from natural science. Intentional understanding is concerned not to explain the world so much as to be ‘at home’ in it, recognising the occasions for action, the objects of sympathy and the places of rest.

Inevitably our intentional understanding must contain large explanatory elements – for you cannot act successfully without a system of belief. And to possess a belief is to be committed to the pursuit of truth, and hence to the construction of scientific theories, and to the consequent classification of the world in terms of natural kinds. Yet there is no reason to suppose that such a classification will provide sufficient basis for our rational conduct, just as there is no reason to think that the chemical classification of stones will provide a basis for the activity of the sculptor. In particular, this neutral, scientific view of things may be well adapted to describe the means to fulfil our purposes, but it must remain for ever incapable of describing the ends to which we aspire. The ends of life are also the meanings of our personal experiences, and the world of science is a world without meaning.¹⁵

Consider the most elementary human relations. The individual people I encounter are members of a natural kind – the kind ‘human being’ – and behave according to the laws of that kind. Yet I subsume people and their actions under concepts that will not figure in the formulation of those laws. Indeed, the hallucination of those laws (for so it must be described in our present state of ignorance) seems often to distract people from genuine human intercourse. If the fundamental facts about John are, for me, his biological constitution, his scientific essence, his neurological structure, then I shall find it difficult to respond to him with affection, anger, love, contempt or grief. So described, he becomes mysterious to me, since those classifications do not capture the intentional object of interpersonal emotion.

The point is a general one: the scientific attempt to penetrate to ‘the depths’ of human things is accompanied almost universally by a loss of response to the ‘surface’. Yet it is on the surface that we live and act: it is there that we are created, as complex appearances sustained by the social interaction which we, as appearances, also create. The very same ‘mystery’ that veils the human person from the neurophysiologist veils human history from the Marxian determinist and human morality from the sociobiologist. The charm of those sciences is a charm of demystification; but they end by mystifying more profoundly what they intend to explain, precisely by enabling us to forget the purpose of explaining it. (As Wittgenstein put it, ‘what is hidden is of no interest to us.’)

However, the concepts of our intentional understanding are not easy to analyse. Their embeddedness in feeling and action makes it difficult to bring them into focus. The human world may not be ‘deep’ in the scientific meaning of that term, but it is dense.¹⁶ Hence it is often easier to speak of the intentionality of an emotion as though it were a matter of perception rather than thought: the object of hatred is perceived hatefully. To understand the concept of the person might similarly require us to understand a kind of perception: to understand what it is to see human beings as persons. And this perception in turn may not be easily disentangled from the culture that is built upon it, or from the ultimate ends of conduct which it serves to focus.

This does not mean that our intentional understanding generates ‘mere ideology’ in the Marxian sense – a system of beliefs with nothing to recommend it besides its capacity to mystify the world, in a manner supportive of our (‘bourgeois’) endeavours.¹⁷ The Marxists are indeed right to differentiate beliefs in terms of their explanation, and to point to the deviant epistemological status of a belief which is to be explained always in terms of some human interest other than the interest in truth. However, although many of our concepts are to be explained in functional terms, it does not follow that a functional explanation is appropriate for the beliefs in which those concepts figure. Thus the existence of the concept ‘ornamental marble’ is to be explained in terms of its utility in focusing our sculptural purposes. Nevertheless, the sculptor who judges some piece of stone to be an ornamental marble acquires this belief as a result of evidence. Such ‘thin’ beliefs are unscientific, since they employ concepts which are opaque to scientific method. But they may be true or false, and reasonable or unreasonable. For they are typically caused not by our needs but by our perception of how things are.

The same is true generally of the concepts which define the Lebenswelt. In particular, there are important concepts which inform our sexual experience, and which exist because they serve a human interest other than the interest in scientific truth (for example, the concepts of innocence and guilt, normality and perversion, sacred and profane). However, the functionality of those concepts does not imply the functionality of the beliefs which employ them. The objectivity of those beliefs may be as secure as the objectivity of science, even though they refer, not to the underlying structure of reality, but to the Lebenswelt. If the Lebenswelt is a bourgeois invention then we should praise and emulate the bourgeois mind, which is better fitted to perceive the human reality than the ordered consciousness of the ‘demystifying’ critic.

There are genuine, objective truths about the Lebenswelt, to be understood by philosophical analysis. Philosophy may therefore provide true illumination of the human condition, precisely through that ‘analysis of concepts’ which has seemed in recent years so often to deaden our human perceptions. An analysis of concepts is what is involved in the attempt to extend and deepen the realm of ‘intentional understanding’. Nothing can serve to illuminate the intentionality of our natural human responses, save analysis of the concepts which are involved in it. This attempt to deepen our intentional understanding is an attempt to explore the realm of the ‘given’, but not that of the subjectively given. We are concerned, not with first-person knowledge of experience, but with the shared practices whereby a public language is attached both to the world and to the life of those who describe it. This is the idea captured in Wittgenstein’s slogan, that ‘what is given is forms of life’, and in Husserl’s own recognition (which failed to persuade him to reject the disastrous ‘transcendental psychology’ with which he encumbered it) that the Lebenswelt is given ‘intersubjectively’.¹⁸

The foundation of our understanding of the human world lies in shared and publicly available practices, among which language – which defines the modes of representation through which we perceive the world – is the most important. Hence I shall make no further distinction in what follows between ‘phenomenological’ and ‘analytical’ conclusions. Two idioms are equally available to me, and neither need be thought to have a monopoly of the truth, since, as soon as we have accepted the import of the ‘private language’ argument (a version of which is given in Appendix 1), there can be no real conflict between them.

*

How then should we confront the problem of sexual desire? It needs little observation to recognise that our civilisation has suffered a profound crisis in sexual behaviour and in sexual morality. As I have already remarked, it seems to me inevitable that sexual conduct should be encumbered with moral scruples. I also believe that many of these scruples are justifiable, and that the failure to see this stems from a mistaken conception of the nature of desire. Hence my first task will be one of description: what is sexual desire as a phenomenon of human experience? I shall then try to sketch a sexual morality, whose basis will be located, not in religious belief, but in human nature, and I shall rely upon the general strategy explored by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, in order to pass from the facts of human nature to the morality which they imply. At many points in what follows, my discussion will make contact with religion, not only because – as has been frequently observed – erotic and religious sentiments show a peculiar isomorphism, but also because religious experience provides the securest everyday background to sexual morality. From the point of view of the subject, the complex and hardly manageable matter of sexual conduct is clarified and simplified by the root conceptions of religious faith, which give to the philosophical truths that I shall elaborate a concrete, immediate and practical reality. Religion rescues such concepts as those of the person, of freedom, of responsibility, of trust and commitment, of possession, surrender, personal union and personal separation, from all scepticism save that which attaches to God himself. Unfortunately that last scepticism is, for the philosopher, the hardest to vanquish. It is therefore a singular disadvantage of philosophy that it must bypass the appeal to faith, and so deprive itself of the most vivid symbols whereby our intentional understanding is focussed. Faith, which fills the world with meanings, leans too precariously upon an unjustifiable metaphysical claim. To justify those meanings the philosopher must pass beyond and behind faith, and look on the human condition with the uncommitted gaze of the philosophical anthropologist. He must attend, as the phenomenologists say, ‘to the things themselves’.

But what things? I shall consider the three basic phenomena of human sexual feeling: arousal, desire and love. I shall contend that all are purely human phenomena, or rather, that they belong to that realm of reciprocal response which is mediated by the concept of the person, and which is available only to beings who possess and are motivated by that concept. The implications of this will be seen to be enormous.

In addition to the basic phenomena, there is the condition from which they derive: the condition of sexual existence, with its associated distinction between man and woman. There is also what might be called a ‘realm of sexual experience’: a realm of emotions and perceptions which are available to us, only because of our susceptibility to sexual desire. Much of this realm is mysterious to us. Consider, for example, sexual jealousy. It is impossible to deny the catastrophic power of this emotion, which leads us into the most desperate behaviour, and yet which starts up from the smallest circumstance. How do we explain this catastrophe? What is it in jealousy that proves so destructive to the one who suffers it, and why is jealousy so difficult to overcome? We shall find that the answer to those questions touches upon one of the deepest and most astonishing of facts about our nature as rational agents.

I shall consider the important expressions of sexual feeling: glances, caresses and the act of love itself. I shall try to account for the place and value of those dispositions – chastity, modesty and shame – which have provided a uniquely human obstacle to sexual indulgence, and I shall also describe some of the variants of the human sexual endeavour: the various ‘perversions’ and the often remarkable goals and strategies of which sexual union may form a part. I shall explore the important differences between homosexual and heterosexual desire, and between the sexuality of men and that of women. In conclusion I shall attempt to say something about the institutions through which sexual desire finds its safe conduit, and whose construction is all-important in creating the conditions of sexual fulfilment. Sexual desire, like the human person, is a social artefact, and can be built in many ways. But if it is to be properly built, so that its fulfilment is available to those who experience its normal forms, then it must be given the institutional conditions that it demands intrinsically. The problem of sexual desire becomes, in the end, a political problem, and the somewhat conservative moral conclusions that I shall defend must be seen as part of the larger political conservatism which they already imply, and for which they provide, indeed, one of the deepest justifications – a justification that stems from the inner quality of the most private human experience.

2

Arousal

Human beings talk and cooperate, they build and produce, they work to accumulate and exchange, they form societies, laws and institutions, and in all these things the phenomenon of reason – as a distinct principle of activity – seems dominant. There are indeed theories of the human which describe this or that activity as central – speech, say, productive labour (Marx), or political existence (Aristotle). But we feel that the persuasiveness of such theories depends upon whether the activity in question is an expression of the deeper essence, reason itself, which all human behaviour displays.

We should not conclude, however, that it is only as an active being that man displays his distinctive causality. Men are distinguished equally by the quality of their experiences and by a receptiveness – displayed at its most complete in aesthetic experience – in which their nature may be wholly absorbed in attentive enjoyment. Those who see the distinctive marks of the human in activity may try to discover the root phenomena of human sexuality in the stratagems of desire. I believe, however, that we can understand desire only if we first display the outline of a more passive state of mind – the state of arousal, in which the body of one person awakens to the presence or thought of another. Arousal provides the underlying circumstance of sexual enjoyment, and it contains the seeds of all that is distinctive in the sexuality of the rational being.

Sexual arousal – considered, for example, in the terms favoured by the Kinsey Report¹, and by other such exercises in reduction – is often represented as a bodily state, common to man and animals, which so irritates those subject to it that they can find relief only in the sexual act. The sexual act, it is thought, ‘discharges’ or ‘releases’ the tensions of arousal, and so quietens it. On this view the erection of the penis or the softening of the vagina are the root phenomena of arousal, and are to be observed throughout the animal kingdom. Their function in stirring the animals to copulation is illustrated also by the human species. Sexual pleasure is then the pleasure, felt largely in the sexual organs, that accompanies the sexual act and which steadily accumulates to the point of discharge and release.

The attraction of that account is partly that it enables us to understand the localised nature of so much sexual pleasure. For sexual pleasure is not simply the pleasure of ‘obtaining what you desire’ – on the contrary, it is precisely a part of what you desire. And it is undeniable that similar physiological effects, and similar sensations, can occur in the act of masturbation and the act of love: perhaps they occur when riding a horse, or in all those chance circumstances of contact to which the Freudians draw attention in their theory of the ‘erotogenic zone’.² It might seem reasonable, therefore, to suggest that sexual pleasure is fundamentally a pleasure of sensation experienced in the sexual parts. On the other hand, if matters were so simple, we should have cause to wonder at the widespread occurrence of sexual frustration. For it would be natural, in this case, to assume that sexual desire is desire for sexual pleasure: a desire that could be as well satisfied by masturbation as by the time-consuming stratagems of courtship and seduction. (Thus Wilde’s ironical recommendation: ‘cleaner, more efficient, and you meet a better class of person’.)

Moreover, whatever we say about the pleasure of masturbation, it has to be recognised that there is much more to the sexual act than its final stage: there is a desire to kiss and caress, and pleasures associated with those activities. A passionate kiss is both an expression of desire and a source of sexual pleasure. Once again, someone might be tempted to say that the pleasure here is no more than pleasure in the lips or mouth – thus giving credence to the idea of the mouth as an ‘erotogenic zone’. But such a suggestion is, to say the least, incomplete. For only in certain circumstances is the pleasure ‘in’ the lips to be considered either as sexual pleasure or as part of such a pleasure. Consider two actors kissing – or in some other way going ‘part hog’, as Pinter might put it (‘Joey: I’ve been the whole hog plenty of times. Sometimes … you can be happy … and not go the whole hog. Now and again … you can be happy … without going any hog’ – The Homecoming). It is conceivable that these actors might feel pleasurable sensations in the affected parts – why not? To rule out the possibility would be culpable apriorism. But surely this would not be sexual pleasure. To be sexual pleasure it must be an integral part of sexual arousal. And that is precisely what is put in doubt by the supposition that the two participants are acting. What then is arousal, and what difference does it make to the kiss? We should compare the kissing actors with a person kissing his friend in affection. It is true that in such a case there are strong proprieties at work, derived from our sense of permitted sexual relations. In the societies to which I and my readers belong, kissing has become too much a symbol of the sexual act to be regarded easily in other terms. Consider, however, a strict Islamic society, in which any such display of sexual feeling would be shocking, and indeed so shocking as not to offer itself as a possible interpretation. In such a society, as we know, friends kiss each other freely, and with evident pleasure. And the pleasure has nothing to do with any ‘pleasurable sensation’ located in the mouth or on the cheek, hand or brow. Such localised pleasures have little significance beside the act of attention with which the kiss is performed. While we may think of the pleasure of the kiss as focused in the mouth, this is largely because the thoughts of the kisser are focused upon his gesture, upon its tender meaning, and therefore upon the mouth only in so far as it is itself represented within the kisser’s thoughts. The kiss is a recognition of the other’s dearness, and its pleasure lies in the other’s rejoicing in that. In such a case all idea of a ‘sensation of pleasure’ seems to evaporate. There may be such a thing, but it is of the least importance in explaining the act, or in accounting for its pleasurable quality.

Arousal transforms this pleasure into a sexual pleasure. But it is the pleasure of kissing – the pleasure which one person takes in another, when expressing his affection – that is transformed. It is not the ‘physical pleasure’ (whatever that may be) felt in the mouth or on the cheek, but what I shall call the) ‘intentional pleasure’ involved in the recognition of the meaning of another’s gesture. Arousal seems to affect, not so much the sensation of kissing, as its ‘intentional content’: although the sensation itself is by no means insulated from the thought which provides its context.

We must, indeed, always distinguish intentional from non-intentional pleasures. Some pleasures are essentially pleasures at or about an object; others (like the pleasure of a hot bath) are merely pleasures of sensation. It is not clear whether pleasures of the first kind can be attributed to the lower animals: perhaps they can. A dog may feel pleasure, we are apt to suppose, at the prospect of a walk or about his master’s return. There are of course highly intricate problems here, and it is not enough to be guided by our common habits of speech. Description of the mental life of animals must depend upon an overall theory of animal capacities, and it would be inappropriate at this stage to make any unwarranted assumptions. A lion dozing in the sun feels pleasure at the warmth of the sun, but the ‘at’ here means only ‘because of. Clearly the case is quite unlike the manifold pleasures which this situation can inspire in a human being. And it is evident that we could not begin to understand the structure of human pleasure if we did not recognise the predominance of the intentional component: of pleasure directed onto an object, about which the subject, in his pleasure, is concerned. Such is certainly the pleasure that expresses itself in the kiss of affection. Might the same be said of the pleasure which expresses itself, and the further pleasure which is anticipated, in the kiss of desire?

Non-intentional pleasures (‘pleasures of sensation’) share the defining properties of sensation: they are located in the body, at a particular place (even if that place may on occasion be the whole of the body). They have intensity and duration; they increase and decrease; and like sensations they lie outside the province of the will – a pleasure is never something that we do, even if we may do things in order to obtain it.³ As I noted above, the sexual act, and much that precedes it, involves such pleasures – or, at least, it does so in the normal case. And they form an important part of the experience; in particular their capacity to ‘overcome’ the subject, so that he is ‘mastered’ by them, acquires an important role in the intentionality of desire. For the Freudian, these pleasures are the true source of sexual delight, which is entirely focussed upon occurrences in the ‘erotogenic’ zones. And Freud’s attempt to base sexuality in sensation has an important philosophical motive: it is an attempt to incorporate the body into the stratagems of desire – to show exactly why our existence as embodied creatures is central to the phenomenon of sexuality. However, it is undeniably paradoxical to regard the localised pleasures of the sexual act as the aim or object of desire: so to regard them is to ignore the drama of sexual feeling, and in particular to ignore the fact of the other who is desired. Many pleasurable sensations accompany sneezing, for example, or, more appositely, raising one’s voice in anger and exerting oneself in the pursuit of a quarrel. In the latter case they clearly do not constitute the aim, or even the gratification, still less the fulfilment or resolution, of anger.⁴

Procopius, in his Secret History, has many scandalous things to say about the Empress Theodora, wife of Justinian. One particular incident is of interest to us. Theodora, according to Procopius, had the habit of lying naked upon a couch, with millet seed sprinkled over her thighs and sexual parts. Geese would be placed on her body, and the birds would nibble the seed with rough osculations from her flesh. The contact of their bills apparently sent Theodora into ecstasies (or at least pretended ecstasies – for she was on stage at the time).⁵ Suppose we were to say that Theodora felt intense pleasure at the pecking of the geese. This would surely imply that her pleasure depended in some way upon the thought that it was geese which were pecking her, rather than, say, carefully simulated automata, or any other device that could apply the gentle pressure of cartilage to her flesh. It could be so, but we should certainly find such a pleasure puzzling. Is she pleased at the pecking of the geese, or by it, or about it? (Those are not necessarily the same.) But then, why on earth? The correct description, I believe, is in