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To Sex, With Love
| Article
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10154 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
4,191 Words |
| Author
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William James Earle
William James Earle, a former Woodrow Wilson and National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, teaches philosophy at
Baruch College, the City University of New York. He wrote an
Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on William James and,
included among his many papers published in profession
journals, "What Philosophers Talk About When They Talk About
Sex" in a recent issue of The Philosophical Forum. |
Roger Scruton's book, Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic, is interesting and important, but it is also annoying and disappointing. Intrinsically interesting are the passages of careful conceptual analysis, pages that show the author is aware of, and has fresh insight about, problems that the analytic, Anglo-American mainstream of philosophy has been worrying about for the past fifty years or so. Interesting as well, but more as a symptom of misplaced moral energy and dialectical skill, is Scruton's attempt (he would not call it an attempt) to glue together two existing pairs of things that these days are mostly thought to fall into quite separate logical categories. The first pair is constituted by "is" and "ought," or fact and norm, or description and recommendation. The prevailing tendency in philosophy, at least since David Hume, is to deny that we can correctly derive statements about how we ought to act from any description of how things are. Scruton returns us to an older tradition, associated with Aristotle, in which a description of human nature yields a rationally defensible set of recommendations about how humans should live. The second pair of things Scruton wishes to glue together is constituted by sexual desire and erotic love. They are presented as two phases of a single complex process or two aspects of what is at bottom (and "normatively") a single piece of human business. This is, evidently, a major theme, one that we shall have to consider carefully.
Scruton's book is important because also no one with a commitment to careful analysis and to clarity of statement has tackled the problem of sexual desire and written about it at such length. Existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and other "continentals" tackled the topic, but they wrote dramatically and darkly. Analytic philosophers up to the present have simply avoided the problem, despite - some would say because of - its human interest and importance. Why should philosophers have something important to say about sexuality? Scruton certainly assumes that philosophers do have something important to say about it. Can that idea be challenged?
Problems of Method
It is much more difficult to say in a few words why the book is annoying and disappointing. Perhaps a good place to start is with the question of method. Discussions of method and methodology, particularly in the social sciences, are famously abstract, formalistic, and - in a word - arid. Nevertheless, we are all methodologists, even if we don't all know it. When someone utters, "It is raining," we believe him partly because we have adopted the perfectly reasonable policy of
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