Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation Book

I shall argue that there is indeed a biological basis to our sexual conduct; but I shall reject the implication that it provides the core of sexual experience. The best way to understand the position for which I shall argue is in terms of an analogy. A tree grows in the soil, from which it takes its nourishment, and without which it would be nothing. And it could be almost nothing to us if it did not also spread itself in foliage, flower and fruit. In a similar way, human sexuality grows from the soil of the reproductive urge, from which it takes its life, and without which it would be nothing. Furthermore, it would be nothing for us, if it did not flourish in personal form, clothing itself in the flower and foliage of desire. When we understand each other as sexual beings, we see, not the soil which lies hidden beneath the leaves, but the leaves themselves, in which the matter of animality is intelligible, only because it has acquired a personal form. Animal and person are, in the end, inextricable, and just as the fact of sexual existence crucially qualifies our understanding of each other as persons, so does our personal existence make it impossible to understand sexuality in 'purely animal' terms.

Given the existence of gender, we can no longer assume that the sexual act between humans is the same act as that performed by animals. Every feature of the sexual act, down to its very physiology, is transformed by our conception of gender. When making love I am consciously being a man, and this enterprise involves my whole nature, and strives to realise itself in the motions of the act itself. Although the man who enters a woman, or the woman who encloses a man, are satisfying a primitive urge, and experiencing whatever sensations and palpitations may accompany the fulfilment of that urge, this is not a description of 'what they are doing' in the act of love. Even if they are acutely conscious of the process - and it is to be supposed that their thoughts abound in fantasies which direct them constantly to the source of their physical pleasure - it is not the physical process, described as such, which constitutes the object of their intention.
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Freud was wrong. This should be required reading.
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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 pleasure associated with those activities.

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.

Furthermore, the sexual organs do not appear, so to speak, neutrally to us, at times of arousal. The sexual organ undergoes a transformation which is essentially dramatic, and not merely physiological. Both in one's own eyes and in the eyes of the other the sexual organ becomes the self. To be penetrated by a man's penis is to be penetrated by him (to be enclosed by a woman's vagina is to be enclosed by her).

Although a pretty face surmounting a deformed or mutilated body may indeed fail to arouse sexual interest, it is well known that a pretty face may compensate for much bodily ugliness. A beautiful body, however, will always be rendered repulsive by an ugly face, and can certainly never compensate for it.

It is in the face that our life is revealed'and revealed precisely in what is most involuntary. Moreover, since facial beauty is to a great extent a matter of expression, its attractiveness is the attractiveness of life itself.

To see the orgasm as the aim of desire is as misguided as to see the exultation experienced by a player upon scoring a goal as the aim of football, rather than as a pleasurable offshoot of an aim fulfilled.

The lover for whom every hair on his beloved's head is of individual significance is like the aesthete who ponders every note of a score. This kind of lust for detail is an inevitable dramatic continuation of attentive interest which, because it regards everything as relevant, tries also to find nothing insignificant.

To say that desire is non-transferable is not to say that it is exclusive. Someone may desire several people: but not with the same desire.

As we ascend into the territory of love we shall see more clearly that this confrontation with our embodiment is inescapable, and that, besides renunciation, there is no other salve than love and desire.

The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.

Some welcome this fact, believing that we need to 'release' our pent-up animal spirits. But we must not assume that, because our sexual desires are constructed upon a foundation of animal impulse, that it is the animal impulse that we need, and seek, to gratify.

The person in love sees his beloved's personality in all his acts and gestures, and is, as we might express it, spellbound by them. The person who falls in love makes the reverse assimilation: he sees gestures and features which awaken his desire, and, in order that desire should justify the effort to which it at once commits him, he imagines a personality to fit what he sees. This is the 'idealisation' of the object of desire. Thereafter all is discovery and deception, or, if his imagination triumphs, confirmation of the initial wish.
Initially there is no distinction between love and 'infatuation': the difference is revealed when the lover is submitted to a 'trial''and that is why true love requires a period of courtship, and why Tamino's love for Pamina must be subjected to ordeal.
The person who falls in love wants the smile, the words, the acts of the other to be 'for him', in the sense of being done always in some measure for his sake. He feels, on perceiving the other, a premonition of 'home'.

The first feature of jealousy, therefore, is that it involves some degree of love. And the greater the love, the greater the jealousy. Jealousy is a catastrophe suffered only by those who have entered the condition of 'ontological dependence' that exists in erotic love'the dependence of one who has sought, in and through sexual desire, the consolations of a perfect intimacy. But the cause of the catastrophe is the discovery not that the beloved loves another, but that he desires another . . . It is possible to be jealous even of the most casual encounter (and indeed, especially of the most casual encounter) provided only that it was the occasion of desire.

It is true that the person in love wishes his beloved to want him as the unique irreplaceable individual that he is, and he wishes this to be the determining thought which underlies the movement of his beloved's desire. At the same time, however, he wants his beloved to focus on his body, and so to want him as a man, or as a woman, as an example of his sex

Because of this feature, jealous thoughts are frequently exciting. The jealous lover sees constantly unveiled before his imagination the scene of a sexual fantasy, in which the beloved is wrapped in desire and then given to another. He prostitutes his beloved in his thoughts, which are invaded, like Othello's, by a sense of the obscene - by the perception of the sexual act in its bodily terms, freed from the circumstance of love. The torment of jealousy is also an excitement. In order to heighten the fantasy, the jealous lover may become relentlessly curious. He may want to know every detail, even 'how it felt'.

But we should notice here that a man's jealousy of lesbian relations, precisely because it does not involve 'phallic' thoughts, escapes much of the wounding affliction of normal jealousy. It is often easier to live with the fact of your wife's desire for a woman than with the fact of her desire for a man. The former, unlike the latter, does not afflict you with the thought that precisely you are dispensable in your sexual part.

As Kierkegaard argues (following Mozart), the character of Don Juan is genuinely erotic, not because he transfers his attentions from individual to individual, but, on the contrary, because he concentrates them completely upon the present individual whom he is attempting to seduce. His character is concentrated into the act of seduction, and this is what gives him the charm which awakens desire . . . Don Juanism is therefore the most time-consuming and indeed debilitating of all sexual addictions; it requires the constant re-creation of passion, and with it the strategies of seduction, towards an unlimited number of objects . . . although he in a sense desires all womanhood, desires womanhood only as and when concentrated into the form and personality of each irreplaceable woman.

Man's destiny is to transcend the erotic, discarding in this act of transcendence the element of desire. However, to love is to love an individual. It is only in his embodiment that the individual is revealed, and only in his embodiment that he may be individually known.

The experience of 'love at first sight' is really nothing more nor less than the experience of an intense desire, which commands through the physical embodiment of the other.

In kissing him, I imprint on his flesh the sign of my own good feelings for him, and the pleasure lies in the immediate sense that he perceives me thus. For a moment, during the glance, caress or kiss of love, our separateness is extinguished, and our perspectives invaded by the sense of another's desire.

She is impressed less by his youth than by his power. Everything that promises security is capable of arousing her affections, and even a far older man may excite her, provided there is, in his look, his smell, his conversation or his social manner, the necessary virtues of a father. The authoritative glance, the resolute action, the confident enjoyment of social pre-eminence: all such qualities will be as important in the woman's eyes as her youth, freshness and vitality are important in the eyes of a man.

Men and women develop separate characters, separate virtues, separate vices and separate social roles. The modern consciousness is less disposed to admit those facts than was Aristotle, say, or Hume .

In the final surrender to desire, we experience our incarnate nature; we know, then, the 'truth' of gender: which is that, as embodied creatures, we are inseparable from our sex.

The distinction between man and woman is a distinction of sphere, of activity, of role and of responses; it is also a distinction within the structure of desire. We may fight against these distinctions; we may wish to remodel them, even to destroy them altogether. But they exist, and not a few philosophers have drawn extraordinary conclusions which depend, for their plausibility, upon our acceptance of the given gender identities as natural.

Fashion is a cooperative activity, whereby men and women'and especially women'attempt to make gender new and surprising . . . Fashion displays what is common to every woman, so as to permit her individuality to shine forth from the frame of her gender, as the thing that is truly desired in it.

The sex-change patient undertakes this hazardous operation, not in order to change his 'real sex', but in order to change his body, to the sex that is really his. In other words, he identifies his sex through his gender, and his gender not through his body but through his conception of himself. His body, he feels, belongs to a kind to which he himself does not belong. It is on this ground that sex-change operations are both desired by those who undergo them and justified by those who perform them.

The universality in question is, however, not that of sex, but that of gender. The other appears to me, even in the sexual act, not as the naked animal, but as a person, clothed in the moral attributes of his gender. In desiring him I see him as essentially embodied, and his body as essentially ensouled; the gap between soul and body is closed for me by my desire. It is hard to imagine this utter unity in the intentional object arising from a non-sexual motive. Interpersonal union which culminates in swimming together, walking together, talking together, does not focus upon the reality of the other's body in quite the way of the sexual act. It is only when kisses and caresses become part of the aim of interpersonal union, and the true source of pleasure, that we are forced to see the other's body as truly him, and contact with his body as contact with him. Sexual desire must therefore involve such activities as kissing and caressing if it is to fulfil its fundamental aim. It is surely obvious, therefore, that the natural culmination of these activities ' the sexual act ' should become incorporated into the intentional content of desire. Desire both exploits and confirms our concept of gender, by refusing to countenance the separation between a person and his body. The sexual act is, both biologically and intentionally, the culmination of a process of physical intimacy, in which a person is joined to another through his body. None of our bodily functions is so well fitted to this union as is the sexual function, provided that sex is perceived under the aspect of gender ' perceived, in other words, as a personal attribute, rather than as a merely biological fact.

The other sex is forever to some extent a mystery to us, with a dimension of experience that we can imagine but never inwardly know. In desiring to unite with it, we are desiring to mingle with something that is deeply ' perhaps essentially ' not ourselves, and which brings us to experience a character and inwardness that challenge us with their strangeness.

Fellatio, for example, and cunnilingus, both of which have immense symbolic significance, and neither of which can be excluded from the natural lyricism of the kiss.

As Nagel points out, however, a perversion is not an act but a disposition'in other words, a motive from which actions spring.