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Lust by Simon Blackburn Oxford Univ. Press, 2004 144 pp., $17.95 |
Middle-aged male philosophers aren't, perhaps, the first persons one consults about sexual pleasures and pursuits, but they have certainly written a lot about the morality thereof. Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn's book Lust, a volume in Oxford University Press' series on the Seven Deadly Sins, is a self-consciously contrarian contribution to that venerable genre.
Blackburn is a prolific writer of both popular and professional philosophy, an outstanding essayist, and an insightful reviewer of books, whose sparkling prose customarily displays philosophical skill and evident wit. Lust doesn't lack in stylistic grace and wit, but its ground note is a smirking satisfaction with its own provocations, and its treatment of opposing views falls well below Blackburn's usual standard.
At least the reader is forewarned. Blackburn announces at the outset that he has no intention of writing a book about the sin of lust, an intention he admirably fulfills...which may be all to the good, since he appears to lack any developed notion of sin and, even if he has one, he doesn't think lust qualifies as a sin. He knows quite well, of course, what reputation religious tradition, common sense, and ordinary language have assigned to his subject: "Lust is furtive, ashamed, and embarrassed"; "Lust pursues its own gratification, headlong, impatient of any control, immune to reason"; "Lust looks sideways, inventing deceits and stratagems and seductions, sizing up opportunities"; "Lust subverts propriety" and is "like living shackled to a lunatic." Given this indictment, Blackburn says, it is his task "to speak up for lust," as a kind of attorney for the defense:
So the task I set myself is to clean off some of the mud, to rescue [lust] from the echoing denunciations of old men of the deserts, to deliver it from the pallid and envious confessors of Rome and the disgust of the Renaissance, to destroy the stock and pillories of the Puritans, to separate it from the other things that we know drag it down. … and so lift it from the category of sin to that of a virtue.
What exactly does Blackburn mean by lust, and why does he think it qualifies as a virtue? His formal account describes lust as "the active and excited desire for sexual activity." In fact, however, his discussion encompasses far more than this, ranging widely over the entire spectrum of matters pertaining to human sexuality, including ancient theories about the division of the sexes, courtship customs, birth control and, a little closer to the topic, sexual attraction, romantic ardor, sexual desire, sexual excitement and arousal, sexual pleasures, sexual acts, eros, and more. Indeed, the book is mistitled; it might more appropriately have been called something like "Philosophical Meditations on Sex" or "Simon Blackburn's Guide to Good Sex." The irony, of course, is that Blackburn thinks he is rescuing these pleasures from the Christians, when in fact most Christians don't see anything wrong with anything in the above list, when pursued appropriately. Christians don't think it was an accident that God created us male and female, with nerve-laden genitalia, and made most pleasurable our obedience to his command to "go forth and multiply."
While Blackburn claims that his book "is not a history of lust or even ideas about lust," the book's 15 chapters (which include photographs and color plates of erotic art) nevertheless unfold in roughly historical order, treating an array of views on various aspects of sexuality offered by Pre-Socratic Greeks, Plato, the Cynics, the Stoics, the Manichees, Augustine, various medieval views culminating in Aquinas, then on to Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Kant, before moving on to moderns such as Freud, Sartre, and Nussbaum. Blackburn is right to resist the label of history for his work, for a genuine history of lust would not be so unrepresentative in the passages it selects for comment nor so blatant in what it ignores. Blackburn's anti-religious treatment of the topic makes no mention of the Song of Solomon's erotic poetry, the sanctity of the marriage bed (Hebrews 13), or the biblical commands for husbands and wives not to deprive one another of sexual intimacy (1 Cor. 7). Had he made the least effort to read some of the Puritans he is so eager to denounce, he would have discovered that they were no prudes. Quite the contrary: with St. Paul's admonition in mind, they regarded a spouse's neglect of his partner's sexual needs as grounds for excommunication! References to contemporary Christian writing about sex are also signally absent.
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