Sexual Desire (book)
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Cover of the first edition, showing Pierre-Auguste Renoir's La Danse à Bougival
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| Author | Roger Scruton |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Subjects |
Philosophy of love Philosophy of sex |
| Publisher | Weidenfeld and Nicolson |
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Publication date
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1986 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 438 (first edition) 428 (1994 Phoenix edition) |
| ISBN | |
Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation, also published as Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic, is a 1986 book about the philosophy of sex by the philosopher Roger Scruton, in which the author discusses sexual desire and erotic love, and topics such as sexual morality and sexual perversion. Scruton argues that sexual desire is characterized by intentionality, and that sex is morally permissible only if it involves love and intimacy. He criticizes Sigmund Freud, questioning the scientific status of his theories.
Sexual Desire has received praise from reviewers, and has been seen as one of the most important works in the philosophy of sex, but has also been criticized for Scruton's treatment of topics such as homosexuality and sociobiology, as well as Freud's work, and his claim that sexual desire essentially aims at an individual person.
Scruton discusses the views that philosophers such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Jean-Paul Sartre have held of sexual desire and erotic love. He attributes to Plato the view that sexual desire is an expression of the animal part of human nature while erotic love is an expression of its rational side. Scruton argues against the view that sexual desire belongs to "the animal part of human nature", and attempts to develop a philosophical basis for sexual morality, and to defend traditional moral views. Scruton is influenced by Kant and Hegel. Citing The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), he summarizes Hegel as arguing that, "The final end of every rational being is the building of the self—of a recognisable personal entity, which flourishes according to its own autonomous nature, in a world which it partly creates." This process involves recognizing the other as an end in himself or herself.
Discussing sexual perversion, Scruton argues that its "major structural feature" is the "complete or partial failure to recognise, in and through desire, the personal existence of the other", which in turn is "an affront, both to him and oneself." Scruton calls perversion, "narcissistic, often solipsistic". In his chapter on perversion, Scruton considers masturbation, bestiality, necrophilia, pedophilia, sado-masochism, homosexuality, incest, and fetishism. Scruton argues that there are two forms of masturbation, and only one is perverted. Scruton argues that homosexuality is significantly different from heterosexuality, and that this helps to explain the traditional judgment that homosexuality is a perversion. Heterosexuality involves dealing with the different and complementary nature of the opposite sex, whereas homosexuality does not: "Desire directed towards the other gender elicits not its simulacrum but its complement." Scruton writes that, "In the heterosexual act, it might be said, I move out from my body towards the other, whose flesh is unknown to me; while in the homosexual act I remain locked within my body narcissistically contemplating in the other an excitement that is the mirror of my own." Scruton dismisses the classical scholar Kenneth Dover's Greek Homosexuality (1978) as "trivialising" and faults Michael Levin's arguments for the abnormality of homosexuality, calling them absurd. In Scruton's view, normal sexuality involves not only giving recognition to the other's person in and through desire for him or her, but also according them accountability and care in the process. Scruton argues that sex is morally permissible only if it involves love and intimacy.
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