Love Analyzed by Roger E Lamb

Author:Roger E Lamb [Lamb, Roger E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429973116
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

A bleaker view of sexual love is hard to imagine. Sexual love is not really ‘human’ love at all—except in the sense that one might be prepared to describe the appetite of a cannibal as a love of human beings. Sexual love makes of the beloved an ‘object of appetite’. The beloved is consumed by it, sucked dry, reduced to an empty rind, and cast by the wayside. The lover is, in the end, alone, the appetite stilled, a sour taste in the mouth.

Sexual love is said to make of the loved person an ‘object of appetite’: but what does that mean? Given the moral character of Kant’s evident dismay, he appears to mean that in sexual love, or in merely sexual love, one treats people as things. Sexual love is not a remedy for solipsism at all, but forces solipsism upon us. Looking at passages like these, it can be hard to see how Kant imagines that sexual love is even compatible with the moral relations of friendship. That is why I said he goes too far by his own lights, if he suggests it ‘makes no significant difference’ whether a relationship is one of friendship or erotic love. His harsh words are modified, to be sure, by an attempt to allow their compa-tibility:

Sexual love can, of course, be combined with human love and so carry with it the characteristics of the latter, but taken by itself and for itself, it is nothing more than appetite. (LE 163)

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