Sex and Philosophy

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.