Readings
Texts
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Introduction (from last time)
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 1 (from last time)
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 2 (from last time)
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 3 (from last time)
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 4 (from last time)
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 5 (from last time)
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 6 (from last time)
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 7
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 8
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 9
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Chapter 10
- Simon Blackburn, "Lust", Notes
Videos
Quiz Questions
- What is the Christian Panic according to Blackburn?
- Why is it illegal to own more than six dildos and to even use the term 'dildo' in Texas?
- What is Hobbesian Unity?
Synopsis
Today we began where we left off last time, with Blackburn's provisional definition of lust:
Lust is the felt, whole-body, enthusiastic desire for the pleasures of sexual activity for their own sake.
To be sure, there is much to unpack here. For one thing, what precisely do we mean by "the pleasures of sexual activity"? Why might someone desire them, but not for their own sake? Why must lust be so peculiarly an enthusiastic desire?
Today, we set out to answer these (and other) questions. Consider first the intensity of the desire. Blackburn himself admits it is not merely a passing want of the sort one expresses when one says, "I'd like a drink of water", or even when one exclaims, "I'd quite like a drink of water!".
Does the intensity of the desire lend itself to a charge of excess? Blackburn argues not: Claiming that lust is essentially an excessive desire for sexual activity is analogous, he thinks, to confusing hunger with gluttony, or thirst with drunkenness. It is clear from his argument that he thinks lust earns a charge of excess only when it necessarily leads to something like sexual addiction. I argued in class that we can, perhaps, agree with Blackburn in this regard, but there is another sense of 'excess' which is both at the heart of the Christian Panic Blackburn dismisses and essential to lust in a way that comparing it to mere hunger or thirst misses entirely. My goal today was to point to this other sense of 'excess' I think Blackburn mistakenly elides from consideration so as make better sense of the Christian Panic while leading, hopefully, into a clearer understanding of why lust matters.
Consider Blackburn's own description of lust:
When we talk of lust it might seem clear enough what we are talking about: sexual desire. And it might seem equally obvious what that is. The boy and girl back from the bar, stumbling and stripping in the hall, tongues lolling and panting for "it," know what they want. It's simple enough. They want sex.
Do they want "it" in the same way a person with a passing thirst calmly takes a drink of water, or the same way a hungry person quietly tucks in to a sandwich? Surely not. Theirs is, as Blackburn himself describes, a consuming desire, one felt throughout the body, an urgent desire. In lusting, one does not merely want sexual activity in the same way one would prefer a sandwich to a pastry. Think rather of the famished person desperate for sustenance or the dehydrated person yearning for libation. Lust is never merely a desire, a passing fancy, for sexual activity--and adding "for its own sake" only serves to underscore the point! The friends-with-benefits who get together for a night of "Netflix and chill" presumably desire sex, to be sure, but more as a distraction or fun way to pass the time than what we would attribute to lust. In attempting to excise excess from lust, I argued, Blackburn misses the essential distinction between mere desire for sexual activity and the urgent, whole-body, one might almost say raging desire that transports us when we lust and as the couple described above demonstrate.
We begin to make better sense of the special Christian Panic over lust (as compared to the other so-called deadly sins) when we appreciate the sense in which lust is excessive insofar as it is a strongly-felt, and thereby strongly-compelling, desire for sexual activity. So if, as I suggested in class, we are to fully understand and decisively answer the Christian Panic, we have to explain what these sexual activities are such that they at once bring us to lust and also cause the Christian such consternation.
And here, I suggested in class, Blackburn hits on an insightful answer: Hobbesian Unity.
Here things are going well. A pleases B. B is pleased at what A is doing, and A is pleased at B's pleasure. This should please B, and a feedback loop is set up, since that in turn pleases A. The ascent does not go on forever: we cannot separate A being pleased at B being pleased at A being pleased at B being pleased...for very long without losing track. But we can get quite a long way. I desire you, and desire your desire for me. I hope that you desire my desire for your desire and if things are going well, you do. There are no cross-purposes, hidden agendas, mistakes, or deceptions. Lust here is like making music together, a joint symphony of pleasure and response. There is a pure mutuality, or what I shall call a Hobbesian unity.
Pleasures here are not just bodily sensations, although the body will be playing its part. The "delights of the mind" are pleasures atdoing something. These pleasures involve the idea of oneself, but they are not properly called narcissistic. The subject is not centrally pleased at himself or herself, but at the excitement of the other. Admittedly, it is not just at that, but also at the fact that the other is excited by the self; but this is to be secondary to the perceived state of the other. The mutual awarenesses increase as the body takes over, as it becomes flooded with desire. The involuntary nature of sexual arousal is here part of the pleasure, the signal that the other is beginning the process of involuntary surrender to desire. As Thomas Nagel puts it,
These reactions are perceived, and the perception of them is perceived, and that perception is in turn perceived; at each step the domination of the person by his body is reinforced, and the sexual partner becomes more possessible by physical contact, penetration, and envelopment.
Hobbes helps to answer the question we posed early on, of why the ecstatic finale can be an experience of communion or being at one with someone else. It is so in the same way that successful music-making is a communion. When the string quartet comes to a triumphant end, the players have been responding and adjusting to each other delicately for the entire performance. No wonder there is a sense of communion on completion. Some philosophers have thought of sex as if it were something like an excited conversation, but that implies more control than should be expected. In conversations we can branch out in all directions, and we devote conscious thought to what we say. Such a model misses out the domination by the body. So in general, a better comparison is to music-making, where the reciprocal sensitivities can be more or less unconscious, and also for that matter where difficulties such as timing are perhaps more salient.
Note that, as Blackburn describes it, Hobbesian Unity contains within it the possibility at least of transcendence. Our mutual pleasures become indistinguishable one from the other, transporting us outside our selves, in a manner of speaking, in the ecstatic finale. This kind of communion is, I submit, the challenge the panicking Christian feels most threatens the communion they believe one should have with the divine, particularly when one realizes that losing control of oneself--'letting go', as it were--is essential to Hobbesian Unity, which is antithetical to the stern self-control a will ridgidly obedient to God's will demands. Yet where the religious communion is with something we know not what (for the agnostic) or with nothing whatsoever (for the atheist), this communion is tremendously real and transparently possible. Why, though, does it matter so much to us?
I argued today that the notion of sexual pleasures at play here, echoing Pausanius' point of the virtuous lovers gratifying one another virtuously, constitute a transcendent experience in the sense that our inability at the apex to distinguish pleasures is as close to unity our confining subjective experience can permit. That is, hobbesian unity permits us, however briefly, to mingle our subjective experience with another. One can understand why this is seen as a threat by the religious given the early identification of the platonic Good with God. Indeed, the pervasive, strong, and enduring nature of the Christian (really, Abrahamic) Panic testifies to the power and importance of lust in our lives.
Rescuing lust from the pearl-clutching of the major Abrahamic religions is, however, not the most difficult task Blackburn set himself. Lust may be problematic in quite non-religious ways. We explore those issues next time.
That is to say, we concluded our discussion of Blackburn's attempt at rescuing lust from the clutches of panicked Christians by noting that it is not just panicked Christians who might find find lust, suitably understood in terms of Hobbesian Unity, as problematic. For in desiring someone else, are we not taking them as an object of desire?