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The Human Face of Sex
| Article
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10152 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
4,065 Words |
| Author
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Donald W. Livingston
Donald W. Livingston is associate professor of philosophy at
Emory University. He is the author of Hume's Philosophy of
Common Life and is working on a book-length study of the
nature of Hume's conservative political philosophy. |
It is perhaps not without significance that philosophers have written very little about sexual desire and its relation to erotic love, and that most of what has been written has been overwhelmingly disappointing. For the most part sexual desire has been treated as a problematic intrusion of our "lower" nature into the higher orders of consciousness, as in Plato, Augustine, Kant, and Schopenhauer. Sartre has written brilliantly about sexual desire as a structure of human consciousness, but in the end finds it to be a desire incapable of fulfillment and the mark of human isolation. With few exceptions, the philosophical tradition has been either silent, wooden, or pessimistic about the meaning of sexual desire and erotic love. It is something of a surprise, then, to find a philosophical study of sexual desire that covers (as much as one book can) the whole range of the subject and that not only affirms in the highest terms the value and dignity of erotic love but finds in an analysis of it clues for solving some of the most perplexing philosophical problems of human existence.
Roger Scruton's Sexual Desire is very much a philosopher's book, and only trained philosophers can get through the whole without difficulty. However, the book is also written for a wider audience. To this end, the technical discussions in the philosophy of the mind are placed in two long appendices and in Chapter 3, which can be passed over without loss. Scruton does a good job of simplifying and explaining philosophical notions and of framing them in a lively and engaging style that at times achieves eloquence.
The work is methodologically cosmopolitan. Using the linguistic analysis of the analytic tradition as well as the intentional analysis of the phenomenologists, Scruton examines three fundamental expressions of human sexual feeling: arousal, sexual desire, and erotic love. The discussion is carried out with illuminating references from the philosophical tradition as well as from Greek, Latin, medieval, renaissance, oriental, and modern European literature. He explores the gender-laden nature of sexual existence from which these feelings arise and explains the meaning of expressions of sexual feeling in glances, caresses, sexual intercourse, and in modesty and shame. He examines the meaning of sexual organs themselves as well as the meaning of sexual phenomena such as chastity, prostitution, falling in love, jealousy, Don Juanism, Tristanism, sadomasochism, homosexuality, and masturbation. A theory of perversion is worked out, and Scruton uncovers the intentions behind such acts as bestiality, pedophilia, necrophilia, incest, and
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