Sexual Desire by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

8

Love

The subject of this chapter is erotic love, which I shall attempt to describe, first in relation to desire, and later in relation to the moral life of the rational being. The second part of the discussion will be spread over the chapters which follow. Since the topic is delicate and obscure, I cannot hope to do more than to provide guidelines. And much of what I say will depend upon an understanding of a crucial question which almost all traditional accounts of sexuality have either failed to answer or failed to pose.

The question is this: what place has sexual desire in love, friendship and esteem? Either it is a part of love, in which case erotic love is too purposeful, and too narrowly focused, to be a form of friendship; or it is not, in which case love is never erotic. Each answer gives a reason for thinking that there can be no such thing as erotic love – no state of mind that is both a form of love (where love includes friendship) and a form of desire. At best the two states may be conjoined, like ham and peas on a single plate. In which case they may taste better, or be better for you, when taken independently. Such was the argument of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, and I shall call the question Plato’s question, in deference to the clever way in which Socrates first poses and then conceals it. I shall argue, against Plato, but in accordance with at least one neo-Platonic tradition, that erotic love is a form of desire and also a form of love. And I shall give reasons for thinking that the attempt to separate the two ‘components’ is ultimately destructive, not just of this love, but perhaps also of every love.

Discussion of the question is made especially difficult by the traditional misuse of the term ‘love’, in particular by those – the exponents of courtly love – who made it the name of their ruling divinity. Thus Andreas Capellanus, in his seminal work De arte honeste amandi, defines love thus:

Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by common desire to carry out all of love’s precepts in the other’s embrace.1

By ‘love’s precepts’ Capellanus means what I have called ‘the course of desire’, and the definition is in fact a definition of desire, which corresponds at almost every point to the definition that I have given. At the same time Capellanus uses it to introduce a discussion of love. Thus he arbitrarily introduces the element of desire into his account of courtly love, first by defining love in terms of it, and then by ignoring the definition.

Still more misleading are the authors (and again the principal offenders belong to the tradition of courtly love) who entirely leave out the reference to desire and

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