Sex and Philosophy

Is philosophy a sexy subject? That is my question, but I won’t get to it for a while. First, we must talk about biology and psychology. It is a little-known fact that Charles Darwin put sex at the heart of biology. I don’t mean people didn’t know sex existed before Darwin, in man and animals and even plants. I mean that he made sex the main engine of evolutionary change not just something that organisms do in order to reproduce. For sex (genetic mixing) is what mainly leads to individual variation and hence the variety of species. The origin of species lies in the facts of sexual life, particularly genetic and phenotypic variation. Breeds result from human intervention in patterns of copulation, thus producing variations; mutation and natural selection do the same. Copulation between the sexes is what leads to most of the variation we see in nature; it thus explains the emergence of new species. Creationism postulates asexual generation, presupposing variation ab initio. Sex is what produces the diversity traditionally attributed to God. We might say that sex is God, or plays the biological role of God. It lies at the center of the whole process of speciation. It is also what animals seek to do as a matter of instinct—what motivates them. They live to reproduce, and sex is the mechanism of reproduction. In addition, Darwin spotted sexual selection—selection based on sexual attractiveness. Modern evolutionary biology is built around the idea that genes are the agents of sexual behavior: they program organisms to act sexually and thus reproduce their kind. It is probably the most powerful biological force in existence, even stronger than the urge for food. Biology is the science of sex, in effect. It is the science of reproduction, and reproduction is overwhelmingly sexual. We may not know much about how it started, or why it is so prevalent, but we do know it is ubiquitous and undeniable—a fact of life on Earth.

It is a well-known fact Freud introduced sex into the heart of psychology. I do not need to argue this. No doubt he was influenced by Darwin; he put sex at the epicenter of the human psyche. It is a question how much of his theoretical structure holds up, but he was surely right to stress the ubiquity of sex in human life. Child development, libido, the id, the superego, repression, neurosis, dreams, jokes—all were interpreted sexually. Putting aside the details of his theories, I think we can say that Freud taught us that sex is an important fact of human life, seeping into apparently remote corners, exercising a considerable hold on human emotion and behavior. The human mind is a sexual mind. A lot of human motivation has a sexual origin (sublimation etc.). Instead of seeing human psychology as consisting of a bunch of asexual “impressions” and “ideas”, it consists rather of erotic drives and their effects on behavior. Sex is pervasive, potent, protean, and paradigmatic, according to Freud. The science of psychology should thus recognize the centrality and scope of sex in the human psyche.

Meanwhile sex was finding its way into art and literature. Again, I need not dilate. Painting and fiction turned blue, so to speak; sex was everywhere, causing eruptions and scandals. It wasn’t left in the shadows but visible in human existence. We might say that during this time period sex came out of the closet and from under the sheets. Sex was suddenly everywhere. Then we had the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the rise of pornography and frank discussion of the subject. We are now awash in sex, practically and theoretically. It’s everywhere you look. But not in philosophy: philosophy is a humanistic discipline, one of the humanities, though also allied with the sciences of biology and psychology, but it is not sexually saturated, or even much tinged. Darwin’s sexual revolution, aided and abetted by later revolutions, has not led to the sexualization of philosophy: it’s still as dry and asexual as dust. What are we to make of this? You might say I am exaggerating: philosophy does deal with sex and love—there are whole courses devoted to it. True, I reply, and symptomatic of the age, but it doesn’t compare with the other subjects I have mentioned; it is a small part of the total subject. Philosophy as a whole has not undergone a sexual revolution analogous to Darwin’s and Freud’s (the good part of it). We certainly don’t think that sex lies at the beating heart of philosophy, its foundation, its subject matter. Philosophy is more like physics and mathematics in this respect, and they are not humanistic at all (not about the human being). Some may say this shows the folly and frivolity of contemporary academic philosophy; it needs to get with the program and get busy with the topic of sex. Didn’t Nietzsche already do some of that? What about Sartre? We need to get physical, philosophically. Others may contend that this is just the way philosophy is and has to be—it is like physics and mathematics. Aridity is its natural condition. Let’s not vulgarize and popularize it. Not everything is about sex. Should there be an “erotic turn” or should philosophy remain sexually innocent? Both options are interesting and would tell us something about the nature of philosophy.

There is a third option: philosophy as it now exists is sexier than it looks; we just have to look more closely. The conceptual scheme of philosophy might be more colored by sex than we recognize. Here I must cite myself: the concept of knowledge is more sexually charged than people have recognized.[1] Sexual knowledge is the paradigm of knowledge. Sexual ethics is a big part of ethics in general. Action theory could easily turn to the study of sexual action; this subject is avoided largely because of prudishness not irrelevance. Couldn’t there be an erotic logic to be set beside deontic logic, erotetic logic, and epistemic logic? If you sexually desire an object, do you sexually desire all the parts of that object? If you sexually desire that p and you sexually desire that q, do you sexually desire that p and q? Is it logically possible to sexually desire oneself? If you sexually desire something, do you sexually desire that desire? Also, philosophy of mind: can we imagine an alien orgasm? Is lust a disposition or an occurrent phenomenon? Metaphysics: can there be disembodied sexual sensation? Are there panpsychist orgasmic particles? Are there any phallic symbols lurking in philosophy–the assertion sign, the arrow symbol for entailment, the Scheffer stroke? What is all the talk of rigid and flaccid designation, satisfaction by all sequences, the saturation of a function by an argument? What about the very idea of a “proposition”? Metaphors, to be sure, but metaphors can signal underlying conceptions. Maybe if we started to think in explicitly sexual terms, philosophy would reveal itself as more sexually permeated than we supposed. For it does seem odd that it should buck the trend I have outlined: why hasn’t it gone the sexual route? Why has this never even been attempted? Maybe if there were more women in the subject, sex would be more natural as a topic. There is obviously a taboo against sexualizing philosophy, so it might be a good idea to remove this taboo and let it all hang out. It has been too long in the cloister. The philosophy of sex was a move in the right direction, but we really need the sex of philosophy.[2]

[1] See my “Amatory Knowledge” and “Common Knowledge and Sex”.

[2] I expect that some people will be mightily offended by this idea, while others will gleefully jump on the bandwagon. I have tried to steer a judicious middle course. I admit that I find the whole idea quite amusing. We might call it “a puzzle about philosophy”—why isn’t it more sexual? Compare botany: the subject is replete with sexual concepts, though it is not exactly sexual. Physics and mathematics may be more sexually tinged than we naively suppose, so pervasive is sexual imagery. How can anything not be sexual for beings like us? I take this to be an insight of Freud’s. Cognitive science should recognize that the human brain is also subject to erotic science. There is seepage between modules, and the sexual module has its own peculiar potency. There is a very good Star Trek episode in which Spock’s vaunted rationality is severely challenged by the onset of the Vulcan mating season; his mind seethes with disruptive sex. We humans never have a non-sexual layoff period, so sex is on our mind constantly, especially when young(ish). It is amazing our philosophy is as asexual as it (apparently) is. It should be full of it.

Susan Haack Etc.

I recently learned that Susan Haack has just died. During my six years in the University of Miami philosophy department I never once set eyes on her. Nor did I have any communication with her. I did email her when I arrived to suggest a meeting, but got no reply. I was told she was alienated from the department and had as little to do with it as possible; the rupture occurred before I arrived and the nature of the dispute was never made clear to me. That was a shame as I would have been happy to get to know her. As it happens, I had met her in England years earlier when she gave a paper to my department there, and she had written to me when I was at Rutgers apropos of a review I’d written (warmly not critically). Not a good situation (I cast no aspersions). Anyway, this got me thinking: the department has lost most of its senior members since I was there—me, her, Risto Hilpenen, Harvey Siegel, and Ed Erwin (who was ostracized during his last years there, according to him). No one senior of comparable stature has been brought in to replace us. The only senior member that remains is Michael Slote, now 85 (according to Google). The people that remain are (what shall I say?) not exactly household names. The department wasn’t bad when I was there, though not top tier; now it’s…well, it is what it is. Is it dying? That remains to be seen, but it is hard to see how it can be very attractive to prospective graduate students. I don’t think there was any necessity about this, but my departure can’t have helped. It is not a department I would have joined from my previous post at Rutgers. I will leave my opinion of the philosophical abilities of the people now there unspoken. Suffice it to say that the label “star” does not spring to mind. What I will say is that the dearth of senior people does not bode well for the department. I see no solution to the problem and the prospects do not look good. There was already a problem about recruiting able graduate students in the good old days (there are many better places to go) and the situation cannot have improved. I don’t think things would have reached this point had I not left (unwillingly). Actions have consequences. I have no contact with anyone now in the UM philosophy department (their decision not mine), despite living only a mile away, and I am banned from the campus (no reason given). All round, it seems like a bad state of affairs, and entirely avoidable.

Amatory Knowledge

We have heard a lot about different kinds of knowledge in epistemology courses; I want to add a new kind of knowledge and explore its contours and characteristics. I call it “amatory knowledge”, which belongs to the family including carnal knowledge, erotic knowledge, sexual knowledge, sensual knowledge, libidinal knowledge, romantic knowledge, and marital knowledge. It is the kind we associate with normal adult marriage-type relationships, or what can lead up to them. It involves knowledge of another person’s body, particularly the so-called erogenous zones, centering on the genitals. It includes many components: where, how, sensations, actions, foreplay, and aftermath. Sexual intercourse is the typical core of it. This kind of knowledge is acquired by having certain experiences of an individual of an intimate nature, not usually had by people in general. The five senses are crucially implicated—sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste. You know what I am talking about. I am especially concerned with the cognitive aspect of these kinds of relationship, not the affective and conative; not the drive but the steering, so to speak. It comprises knowledge of another person from a sexual point of view—knowing him or her sexually. And the question I am interested in is how this relates to knowledge in general—that is, general epistemology. How is amatory knowledge related to other types of knowledge, e.g., scientific knowledge?

Let’s start with my preferred definition of knowledge: does amatory knowledge fit this definition?[1] The definition is captured in a formula or slogan, which needs careful unpacking: knowledge consists in the world impinging on the soul. The world is just existing reality, including souls themselves; the soul is the mind or self or person or conscious subject or ego. The soul is the human being considered holistically and centrally—the I I care most about. Myself most deeply. But what is this impingement business—what is it for the world to impinge on the soul? The Concise OED gives us simply “have an effect, come into contact, encroach”. The Shorter OED expands on this slightly: “fasten or fix on forcibly, strike, come into forcible contact, collide”. Here the idea of force comes into play, accentuating the coercive aspect of the concept—to be impinged on is not to choose but to be compelled. Roget’s Thesaurus helpfully offers as synonyms, “disturb, encroach, intrude, invade, influence, make inroads, pry, touch, violate”. These strike the right note: to impinge on is to affect or impact from outside, invasively, intrusively, effecting a change within, possibly violating. To impinge on the soul the world must break down its boundaries, perturb it, alter it, shake it up, spear it, transform it. A bullet or arrow impinges on a target. A cold wind impinges on flesh. One person may impinge on another, for good or ill. The picture is that the soul is inherently empty, sealed off, untouched, innocent—and then the world imposes its imprint on it, shaping it, informing it. That is what knowledge essentially is, according to the definition. The theory is in the spirit of the causal theory of knowledge, though more generalized (it has nothing to do with physicalism or naturalism). It is intended to capture the way knowledge features in our lives as conscious subjects—what knowledge means to us. Then, we can ask how amatory knowledge fits this general conception. And the answer is obvious: like a glove. The body and soul of the other impinges big-time on my body and soul. Amatory knowledge is the effect of this strong impingement. The world of the other intrudes or encroaches on my world, the objective on the subjective: the body, obviously, but also the soul. And it reaches my soul, because it is experienced as deeply affecting—touching one to the core (even casual sex isn’t “casual”). The impingement is strong and deep, forcible, insistent, culminating in orgasm (itself a type of knowledge). The knowledge involved in this kind of relationship leaves a powerful mark; it can transform a person. People can change identity completely as a result. The knowledge isn’t like knowing it’s raining or who wrote Moby Dick. It is profound.

We should note that animals also have this kind of knowledge; indeed, it is paramount in the life of most animals. They need to know who or what to mate with, how to do it, and what to do afterwards. This kind of knowledge clearly goes back millions of years. Our sexual knowledge (in the broad sense) no doubt evolved from it. Children don’t have it, save potentially, but every normal adult human has it, with any luck. It is vital to species survival (as well as human happiness). It exists deep inside us. We are sexual savants, amatory experts. We had better be. It is closely connected to pleasure, which should not surprise us. Freud postulated the oral, anal, and genital phases, each with its own characteristic type of pleasure; each also with its characteristic type of knowledge. The erotic is commingled with the epistemic. As the appetitive self develops and grows, so does the epistemic self. A steady state is reached, at which the organism is said to be mature, equipped with amatory know-how and know-that. The soul is ready to be impinged upon by the world in such a way as to produce knowledge of a certain sort (“This is a potential mate”). Such knowledge is primordial and primal. Freud and Piaget join hands in their theories of psychological development. There is a whole package. And all the senses are in on it: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. All are activated in the sexual act and its antecedents. The soul is well and truly impinged upon (happily for the most part, though sometimes not). Kissing is only the beginning of this epistemological expedition. Mutual body and soul impingement is the sought-after state, as if the barriers to the soul are breached.

A natural question arises: is all knowledge tacitly amatory? Do we see the general aptness of my definitional formula because we recognize the affinity of all knowledge with the amatory kind? Is all epistemology silently sexualized? Is the desire for knowledge an outgrowth of the desire for sex and its accompanying amatory knowledge? Such an idea is not unheard of—indeed, it is something of a cliché (Freud again). First, sexual knowledge; then, and derivatively, scientific knowledge. That’s where the underlying cognitive equipment originates. Not the science of sex but the sex of science. The imagination in general may owe its origins to the sexual imagination, and knowledge in general may owe its origins to sexual knowledge. The concept of knowledge gets its initial grip in coping with the facts of copulation, pair bonding, and cohabitation; and then it extends out to the rest of the world. We tacitly conceive the known world as a quasi-sexual world—the world of courtship and copulation. Our theories are thus like our babies. Our scientific partners are like our romantic partners. Our learned societies are like our families. The heady experience of romantic love prefigures our intellectual adventures and triumphs. Amatory knowledge is the paradigm case of knowledge—of soul-world impingement—and may be its progenitor. We open up our soul to the world (we can’t help it) because we opened it up to our mates. Sexual experience enables sexual knowledge and experience in general enables knowledge in general. This is a kind of sexual empiricism; and it is notable that a priori knowledge is the least sensuous of our knowledge systems (the most endogenous). According to this view, all knowledge derives fundamentally from sexual experience—putting it very roughly. It is like having sex with the world (think of the excited explorer). Not literally, but metaphorically; we have extended this way of thinking from its original home to the far reaches of knowledge. This explains why we value knowledge so highly: for we value amatory relations highly (the genes like it that way). Epistemology is thus the study of sex-based knowledge ultimately. Without sex our epistemology would be a very different animal (a pale simulacrum). Sex gives it its oomph.

As if I haven’t smashed enough taboos and shocked many an epistemological vicar, I must put in a word about masturbation, that much misunderstood form of education. Doesn’t masturbation produce (and require) sexual knowledge, albeit of a primitive and solitary kind? It calls upon knowledge of one’s own body sexually not someone else’s. How does that fit the impingent theory? Quite handily, in fact: it is your proprietary chunk of the physical world impinging on your own soul. Masturbatory knowledge is your own body impinging on your soul—self-impingement. You know that masturbation leads to orgasm precisely because your own body has told you so—inserted this piece of knowledge into you. It has made contact with your mind in order to inform it of something. The basic mechanism is the same as in partnered sex, or in sensing the environment. So, strictly, you don’t need interpersonal sex in order to get knowledge off the ground; self-impingement is possible solo.

Some may find the amatory theory implausible—a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. Surely, there is no necessity connecting knowledge in general with this particular branch of knowledge—couldn’t we have knowledge of physics and be completely devoid of libido? But I am not claiming logical necessity, only biological probability. Probably, our concept of knowledge evolved in the way described (it wasn’t knowledge of physics ab initio); this is a promising hypothesis. The concept had to come from somewhere, and not all in one go (concepts evolve too). The naturalness of the impingement theory for amatory knowledge suggests that it is a prime candidate for that status, with other knowledge piggybacking on it. Let’s see if it can be refuted. Also, we can always fall back on a dual level theory of knowledge—distinguishing primary knowledge from secondary knowledge.[2] The primary types of knowledge include the sexual kind and those types very similar to it; the secondary types depart from the paradigm and earn the label only by loose analogy (e.g., knowledge of the future or speculative science). Knowledge is by definition the impingement of the world on the soul, and sexual knowledge fits that definition to a tee, so it is the basic case of knowledge—that to which all knowledge aspires. Let’s not reject the theory for distinguishing paradigmatic cases from peripheral cases. Sex, surely, is a central fact of biological nature (Freud wasn’t wrong about that and nor was Darwin); we are just catching up with them in our epistemology (hitherto far too mired in religious conceptions—knowledge is what God has a lot of). It is not too far-fetched to connect knowledge-as-a-biological-phenomenon with sex-as-a-biological-phenomenon. Sex is what makes the biological world go round—that’s why it is so prevalent—and knowledge feeds off that. Knowledge is the biological product that results from the world impinging on the organism in its mental compartment—as if world and soul were copulating. Knowledge formation is a kind of cosmic copulation. The world is the male and the soul is the female, in effect. At any rate, this is an agreeable image to ponder.[3]

[1] See my “A New Theory of Knowledge”.

[2] See my “Perceptual Knowledge” and “Non-Perceptual Knowledge”.

[3] Or not, as the case may be. If you prefer, think of a bee bringing pollen to a flower. I am well aware that the paradigm-shift in epistemology that I am advocating is more of an upheaval than a mere shift. Epistemology naturalized is one thing; epistemology sexualized is another. Knowledge is the sexual impingement of the world on the soul! Not necessarily human sex, you understand, but sex as a general biological category, including plants and platypuses. It is interesting to ask what epistemology would look like on another planet in which sex is implemented quite differently from on Earth, perhaps involving no soul impingement. What is true is that in the human case sexual psychology is uppermost in people’s minds, especially during their formative epistemic years, so that it wouldn’t be surprising if it colored their understanding of the concept of knowledge. Amatory knowledge is clearly important and salient to us; it might well set the standard for knowledge in general. Our knowledge is indelibly human.

Edward St Aubyn and Me

I met Edward St Aubyn, author of the Patrick Melrose Trilogy, at a conference on consciousness in Tucson about twenty years ago. He was writing a book centering on the problem of consciousness.  Tall, handsome, witty, refined—I took to him immediately. We became friends. I came to know him as Teddy. I knew nothing of his soon-to-be-famous first book Never Mind. We met later several times, in London and New York. On one occasion he gave me a copy of the trilogy—he actually threw it out of a window to me in the street because I’d forgotten it (rather symbolic). I read it and was astounded by its brilliance—the writing, the humor, the emotional depth. We kept in touch by phone. When the novel he was writing came out (A Clue to the Exit) I was tickled to find that I was in it, called simply “a man named McGinn”; evidently, I had solved the problem of consciousness so far as the author (and lead character) were concerned. Then, sometime later, the trilogy was dramatized with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role. It ran on Showtime and I watched it zealously, conveying my reactions to Teddy pari passu. Benedict was terrific and the whole series excellent, though I did have a couple of minor misgivings about some of the acting. More recently, I read his Double Blind in which science comes in for fictionalized treatment, and here again my imprint is felt in a couple of chapters (he sent me a copy of the book along with a thank you note). I think I have read all his books now, always with great enjoyment and admiration. If I had never gone to that conference, none of this would have happened. I thoroughly recommend his books.