When an infatuated young man gazes at a young lady, what is he admiring? What should he admire? How does sexual consummation relate to one’s desire for another? Such questions demand answers, for while it is human nature to experience desire for another person, misconceptions about the nature of desire may lead some to experience or express desire in ways unconstructive or destructive to their actualization as a human. A misconception cannot be corrected until it is recognized; thus, this essay examines some of the philosophical issues that arise from interpersonal desire.
Roger Scruton, a philosopher who has written extensively about aesthetics, considers desire to be a manifestation of humanity’s attraction to Beauty. Along with many other philosophers, Scruton considers Beauty a transcendental, like Truth and Goodness (p. 2), and is thus considered intrinsically desirable. In resonance with Plato and Kant, Scruton states a rational person is one who understands the inherent value in the transendentals and makes practical conclusions and normative decisions based upon his or her pursuit of them. When we speak of human beauty, therefore, we speak of human interaction with Beauty through physical appearance or action, and how other humans respond.
With human beauty defined, the next step in our exploration of interpersonal desire is to examine the motive behind a person’s desire for a beautiful human. One common explanation draws upon Darwinian natural selection. Scientific aestheticism, as biologist Randy Thornhill calls the theory, suggests that human attraction coincides with sexual selection that defines animal mating habits. Sexual selection suggests a female is attracted to a male if he shows signs of healthy genetics. For example, male great bowerbirds “create and decorate a structure called a bower which is used only for attracting and mating with females” (Endler 2012, p. 282). Scientific aestheticians, then, argue that a woman is attracted to a man because his face, body, and artistic expressions indicate that his genetics would create healthy offspring.
Strictly physical analysis, however, falls short of explaining human desire for two reasons. First, human aesthetic expression is broader than the animal kingdom’s—far more, Scruton argues, than is necessary for sexual selection (p. 31-32). Artistic animals produce beauty for genetic survival, but humans predominantly create out of joy. Animal creativity is limited— bowerbirds build nests, fireflies glow, crickets chirp. Humans can sculpt statues, play the piano, paint, and create a plethora of other artworks. Scientific aestheticism ignores beauty’s connection with the capacity to sympathize and communicate, both of which humans exclusively can thoroughly accomplish (Kemal 1992, p. 116). While sexual selection is a plausible explanation for animal creativity, it cannot account for the immenseness of human creativity.
Second, human gender roles in attraction do not necessarily resonate with animal gender roles. For instance, men are as, if not more, interested in the sexual desirability of the female as women are in the male. Consider the popularity of the billion dollar “swimsuit edition” of Sports Illustrated magazine (Spector 2013), and compare it to Playgirl magazine, which ceased printing in 2009. Sexual selection assumes females are the judgers of the males’ beauty, but consumer interests indicate that this assumption is not normative. Additionally, women are as, if not more, artistically expressive as men. Consider that over 92% of art students in Princeton University’s class of 2016 are women (Shao 2014). Sexual selection assumes males are the creators of art, but examination of young people’s academic interests do not support this assumption.
Our exploration of human relations reveals that beauty and sex are not related on a utilitarian, “survival of the fittest” level. Desire, then, must be related to Beauty on a less sensual plane.
Plato believed that sexual desire was a distorted attraction to the abstract form of Beauty. While humans may think they desire intimacy with a beautiful person, according to Plato what they really desire is intimacy with the idea of Beauty itself. Platonic anthropology places beautiful humans in the same category as artworks—something to be contemplated for intrinsic value rather than something to be obtained or used. The human is to be appreciated in non-sensual manners, and sensual appreciation distracts one from finding satisfactory appreciation in the metaphysical realm of the Forms.
If scientific aestheticism may be criticized for overemphasizing desire’s sensuality, then Platonism may exaggerate desire’s metaphysical connections. Simple observation reveals that desire is inherently present in limerence. Judging art beautiful is distinct from desiring a beautiful person. As Scruton writes, “Someone, looking at the face of an old man… might describe the face as beautiful. But we understand that judgement in another way from ‘She’s beautiful!’ said by an eager youth of a girl. The youth is going after the girl” (p. 36, italics in original). By definition, desire demands action. One may be satisfied observing and pondering an artwork, but one is driven to interact with a beautiful person. Mere contemplation of a person’s beauty, therefore, insufficiently satisfies one’s desire.
Because the contrary theories are both extreme, we may say scientific aestheticism and Platonism define the boundaries that the nature of human desirability must logically fit within. We know a desire for another person transcends mere survival instinct, yet it is not so transcendent that the yearning to interact with the person is lost. In one sense, the longing gaze is an appeal for knowledge, a call to the person to reveal him or herself as an embodied person, not merely a gene donor. The appeal, however, is rooted in the sensuality of that person—the boy wants to participate in the girl’s beauty in some way. Yet, the girl’s aesthetic is intangible; the boy cannot possess or do anything with her beauty. Yearning to attain the girl’s beauty for himself, the boy grasps for an unreachable value.
Interpersonal desires, then, may not be quenchable. If this conclusion is correct, it substantially impacts our understanding of sexual acts, even chaste touches of affection. What purposes do such actions serve if not for gratification? In the course of desire, what cases of admiration are honorable and what cases are demeaning?
With scientific aestheticism and Platonism established as the polar ends of our spectrum of explanations for interpersonal desire, and with both of them established as unreasonably radical, a search for common logical warrants between the two theories may be helpful; perhaps the two theories fail because they both rely on a faulty assumption.
While he acknowledges the obvious presence of a connection between beauty and desire, Scruton suggests naturalism and Platonism wrongly assume a causal relationship between them (p. 33). Under naturalistic assumptions, we assume every feeling and action is traceable back to a material explanation. With a Platonic framework, we assume distorted attractions to transcendentals are the root of all feelings and actions. What explanations might we find if we assume desire is not necessarily deterministic?
Writing in Liturgy as a Way of Life, Bruce Ellis Benson states that we respond to beauty and beautiful things creatively. Because humanity is created in the image of God, as written in Genesis 1, we possess a similar capacity to create, but our creativity is limited to improvising with that which God has already given. In other words, humans are designed to comprehend beautiful things and respond to them creatively. If God indeed made all things that are bright and beautiful, then God intentionally placed beauty in all that we find attractive, be it a mountainous landscape, a prairie of flowers, or another human. Indeed, natural beauty may be the closest category of beauty to human beauty since they both exist outside of human creativity. An examination of how we interact with other forms of natural beauty, then, may aid our search for understanding our response to human desire.
Suppose you finished a hike up a mountain. As you reach the peak, the beauty of the surrounding landscape astonishes you. The sight is too beautiful to forget and too glorious to leave, so you pull out your sketchbook and draw what you see—or take a picture with your cell phone, if you are less artistically inclined. Now imagine you are driving across the Great Plaines and come across a magnificent field of prairie flowers. Once again, the scene is too wonderful to leave behind, so you might draw another picture or snap another photograph, but you might also find the proper seeds and grow some of the flowers in your own garden so you can experience their beauty everyday just outside your house.
We are inclined to draw, photograph, and otherwise replicate the beauty that we see in nature. These responsive actions are not purposeless, though; we are attempting to harness nature’s beauty. By hanging up a picture of the mountain or by growing our own flowers, we are trying to frame or encompass the beauty into something we can have. Of course, we now face the same dilemma Scruton articulates—beauty cannot be owned, grasped, or possessed. Yet, the very pursuit of beauty satisfies us more than if we never strived for it, so we continue to draw, to plant, to write. While we cannot possess beauty, we can become more intimate with it, and that is what creative responses accomplish. Passing by a picture of the mountain that hangs in your house conduces more intimacy with the beauty of the mountain than if you never attempted to capture the mountain with your creativity. Keeping some flowers in a garden brings you closer to the beauty of the prairie than if you performed no reaction.
As we strive to develop intimacy with a natural object’s beauty, so we are also driven to develop intimacy with another person’s beauty. Human desire, thus, is a response to perceived beauty in another person—a response that demands intimacy. While we may perform the same creative activities that we may perform to develop intimacy with natural beauty, the human capacity to communicate through touch opens up a new avenue for intimacy. We therefore may consider both chaste and sexual touches of affection to be creative responses to natural beauty. Such actions may not be akin to framing a landscape or planting a garden with beautiful natural objects, but both actions temporarily satisfy a desire to possess beauty. In both cases, we feel closer to the beauty to which we are attracted than we would otherwise, and this feeling satisfies us for a time. Parallels may also be drawn to a child who hears a song and experiences an urge to dance. The child recognizes beauty in the music and engages with it through his or her body. Similarly, a young man might see a beautiful young lady and wish to engage with that beauty. Like painting or dancing, the sexual act responds to beauty by engaging the senses, attempting to interact with the beauty.
At this point, some might challenge the validity of this analysis because it places interest upon beauty. Mainstream philosophy asserts beauty can only be observed through disinterested contemplation; consummation is fueled by interested desire to utilize the senses. Such a charge is rather arbitrary, however, as Nicholas Wolterstorff declares many times in his book Art in Action. Wolterstorff declares that viewing art, and beauty by implication, solely through the lens of contemplation is frivolous and unproductive. Instead, we should view art and beauty through the lens of purposiveness. Something may be beautiful in more than one context. Consequently, we need not worry about the integrity of transcendental beauty in our discussion.
While interpersonal desire is good in that it draws us closer to transcendental beauty, it can be abused. To understand the ethical limits of sexual desire, we must first recall the individuality of the human. Not much observation is required to observe that no two people are alike. You and I have different genetics, different cultural backgrounds, different family histories, and different academic experiences, just to name a few. When Person A desires Person B, therefore, Person B is the sole subject of that particular desire because nobody else has the capacity to fulfill a desire for Person B—not any more than, as Scruton says, “you can satisfy your desire to know how a novel ends by becoming unforeseeably engrossed in a movie.” For an illustration, Scruton contrasts this desire with the desire to quench thirst. If I am parched, I am indifferent to what water you give me or how you give it to me; I am only interested in having it so I can stop being thirsty. Desire for such things is indiscriminate; human desire directs interest.
The warrant of that conclusion may be challenged. Why must desire be individualized? Why do we not experience desire for all people whom we consider beautiful? Recall that interpersonal desire is an appeal for knowledge of another. Although knowledge of others is sought in most human relationships, desire intensifies this universal characteristic. We seek more knowledge of the person. We seek special knowledge, hidden knowledge. We seek an intimacy with that person which is unknown to the public. Because a person’s sensuality is veiled from the public, familiarizing ourselves with the sensuality of the desired person satisfies our desire for a time.
If desire is individualized, then what in a person triggers desire? Clearly not all people one meets produces desire. One might even consider another person beautiful without experiencing desire for them. In the first chapter of Art in Action, Wolterstorff analyzes beauty as a form of communication, which includes the medium with which beauty is communicated, the intention of the object, and the audience’s interpretation. The audience’s reaction depends on their familiarity and appreciation with the method of communication. One’s culture, religion, and tastes influence who might trigger desire.
We have established that “beauty, in a person, prompts desire” (Scruton p. 33), and that desire is a call for sensual knowledge of that person. In a culture that heavily emphasizes the desirability of the human body, though, it is helpful to examine the ethical limits of desire. Potential violations of proper human desire may be illustrated with a simple thought experiment. Suppose there are identical twin brothers; for the sake of simplicity, let’s call them Mike and Mark. The two of them share healthy genetics, eat well, and exercise regularly. They are, being identical twins, congruent in appearance and are therefore equally attractive. One would be outrageous, however, to claim that they were the same person. As previously stated, every person has his or her own set of formative experiences and values. Now consider the very plausible scenario of a young lady who finds Mike and Mark attractive. If the young lady comes to desire neither Mike nor Mark so long as she can “have” one of their bodies, then she reaches the point of reducing a man’s worth from being an embodied person to merely having the body of a person. By ignoring crucial aspects to what makes the twins human, she has objectified them and compromised their humanity. She now views or cares about them at a subhuman level.
Such degradation manifests itself in the expanding vice of pornography. Pornographic media encourages and feeds sexual desire indiscriminately; the actual person is irrelevant to the gaze. The body is all that matters. If considering identical twins interchangeable because of their equal attractiveness is dehumanizing, then pornography degrades humanity even more significantly because it manages models like interchangeable faces and bodies even when their appearances differ. True and good human desire is attracted to the entirety of a person.
Interpersonal desire is more than an animalistic trait or erroneous attraction to an abstract form. Desire is a response to the call of human beauty and is temporarily satisfied through sensual touch, but we hold an ethical responsibility to desire the whole person, not merely his or her body.
The above is an essay I finished in 2015 in response to Roger Scruton's Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. I shared this piece because I intend, at some point, to reflect on this essay in light of some things I've contemplated during the last year and offer some practical implications of these conclusions.
Benson, Bruce Ellis. Liturgy as a Way of Life: Embodying the Arts in Christian Worship. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. Print.
Endler, John A. "Bowerbirds, Art and Aesthetics: Are Bowerbirds Artists and Do They Have an Aesthetic Sense?" Communicative & Integrative Biology 5.3 (2012): 281-83. US Library of Medicine. National Institutes of Health. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3419115/>.
Kemal, Salim. Kant's Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. 116-118. Print.
Landau, Elizabeth. "Men See Bikini-clad Women as Objects, Psychologists Say." Cable News Network, 19 Feb. 2009. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.
Scruton, Roger. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.
Shao, Ruby. "Art, Psychology Class of 2016 Majors Overwhelmingly Female." The Daily Princetonian. 1 May 2014. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. <http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2014/05/art-psychology-class-of-2016-majors-overwhelmingly-female/>.
Spector, Dina. "The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue: A $1 Billion Empire." Business Insider. 12 Feb. 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. <http://www.businessinsider.com/business-facts-about-the-sports-illustrated-swimsuit-issue-2013-2#ixzz3SoM4N0u5>.
Thornhill, Randy. "Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics." Springer, 2003. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. <http://bit.ly/1zJ486J>.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980. Print.
What is the nature of desire?
Roger Scruton, a philosopher who has written extensively about aesthetics, considers desire to be a manifestation of humanity’s attraction to Beauty. Along with many other philosophers, Scruton considers Beauty a transcendental, like Truth and Goodness (p. 2), and is thus considered intrinsically desirable. In resonance with Plato and Kant, Scruton states a rational person is one who understands the inherent value in the transendentals and makes practical conclusions and normative decisions based upon his or her pursuit of them. When we speak of human beauty, therefore, we speak of human interaction with Beauty through physical appearance or action, and how other humans respond.
With human beauty defined, the next step in our exploration of interpersonal desire is to examine the motive behind a person’s desire for a beautiful human. One common explanation draws upon Darwinian natural selection. Scientific aestheticism, as biologist Randy Thornhill calls the theory, suggests that human attraction coincides with sexual selection that defines animal mating habits. Sexual selection suggests a female is attracted to a male if he shows signs of healthy genetics. For example, male great bowerbirds “create and decorate a structure called a bower which is used only for attracting and mating with females” (Endler 2012, p. 282). Scientific aestheticians, then, argue that a woman is attracted to a man because his face, body, and artistic expressions indicate that his genetics would create healthy offspring.
Strictly physical analysis, however, falls short of explaining human desire for two reasons. First, human aesthetic expression is broader than the animal kingdom’s—far more, Scruton argues, than is necessary for sexual selection (p. 31-32). Artistic animals produce beauty for genetic survival, but humans predominantly create out of joy. Animal creativity is limited— bowerbirds build nests, fireflies glow, crickets chirp. Humans can sculpt statues, play the piano, paint, and create a plethora of other artworks. Scientific aestheticism ignores beauty’s connection with the capacity to sympathize and communicate, both of which humans exclusively can thoroughly accomplish (Kemal 1992, p. 116). While sexual selection is a plausible explanation for animal creativity, it cannot account for the immenseness of human creativity.
Second, human gender roles in attraction do not necessarily resonate with animal gender roles. For instance, men are as, if not more, interested in the sexual desirability of the female as women are in the male. Consider the popularity of the billion dollar “swimsuit edition” of Sports Illustrated magazine (Spector 2013), and compare it to Playgirl magazine, which ceased printing in 2009. Sexual selection assumes females are the judgers of the males’ beauty, but consumer interests indicate that this assumption is not normative. Additionally, women are as, if not more, artistically expressive as men. Consider that over 92% of art students in Princeton University’s class of 2016 are women (Shao 2014). Sexual selection assumes males are the creators of art, but examination of young people’s academic interests do not support this assumption.
Our exploration of human relations reveals that beauty and sex are not related on a utilitarian, “survival of the fittest” level. Desire, then, must be related to Beauty on a less sensual plane.
Plato believed that sexual desire was a distorted attraction to the abstract form of Beauty. While humans may think they desire intimacy with a beautiful person, according to Plato what they really desire is intimacy with the idea of Beauty itself. Platonic anthropology places beautiful humans in the same category as artworks—something to be contemplated for intrinsic value rather than something to be obtained or used. The human is to be appreciated in non-sensual manners, and sensual appreciation distracts one from finding satisfactory appreciation in the metaphysical realm of the Forms.
If scientific aestheticism may be criticized for overemphasizing desire’s sensuality, then Platonism may exaggerate desire’s metaphysical connections. Simple observation reveals that desire is inherently present in limerence. Judging art beautiful is distinct from desiring a beautiful person. As Scruton writes, “Someone, looking at the face of an old man… might describe the face as beautiful. But we understand that judgement in another way from ‘She’s beautiful!’ said by an eager youth of a girl. The youth is going after the girl” (p. 36, italics in original). By definition, desire demands action. One may be satisfied observing and pondering an artwork, but one is driven to interact with a beautiful person. Mere contemplation of a person’s beauty, therefore, insufficiently satisfies one’s desire.
Because the contrary theories are both extreme, we may say scientific aestheticism and Platonism define the boundaries that the nature of human desirability must logically fit within. We know a desire for another person transcends mere survival instinct, yet it is not so transcendent that the yearning to interact with the person is lost. In one sense, the longing gaze is an appeal for knowledge, a call to the person to reveal him or herself as an embodied person, not merely a gene donor. The appeal, however, is rooted in the sensuality of that person—the boy wants to participate in the girl’s beauty in some way. Yet, the girl’s aesthetic is intangible; the boy cannot possess or do anything with her beauty. Yearning to attain the girl’s beauty for himself, the boy grasps for an unreachable value.
Interpersonal desires, then, may not be quenchable. If this conclusion is correct, it substantially impacts our understanding of sexual acts, even chaste touches of affection. What purposes do such actions serve if not for gratification? In the course of desire, what cases of admiration are honorable and what cases are demeaning?
A response: Desiring the entire person
With scientific aestheticism and Platonism established as the polar ends of our spectrum of explanations for interpersonal desire, and with both of them established as unreasonably radical, a search for common logical warrants between the two theories may be helpful; perhaps the two theories fail because they both rely on a faulty assumption.
While he acknowledges the obvious presence of a connection between beauty and desire, Scruton suggests naturalism and Platonism wrongly assume a causal relationship between them (p. 33). Under naturalistic assumptions, we assume every feeling and action is traceable back to a material explanation. With a Platonic framework, we assume distorted attractions to transcendentals are the root of all feelings and actions. What explanations might we find if we assume desire is not necessarily deterministic?
Writing in Liturgy as a Way of Life, Bruce Ellis Benson states that we respond to beauty and beautiful things creatively. Because humanity is created in the image of God, as written in Genesis 1, we possess a similar capacity to create, but our creativity is limited to improvising with that which God has already given. In other words, humans are designed to comprehend beautiful things and respond to them creatively. If God indeed made all things that are bright and beautiful, then God intentionally placed beauty in all that we find attractive, be it a mountainous landscape, a prairie of flowers, or another human. Indeed, natural beauty may be the closest category of beauty to human beauty since they both exist outside of human creativity. An examination of how we interact with other forms of natural beauty, then, may aid our search for understanding our response to human desire.
Suppose you finished a hike up a mountain. As you reach the peak, the beauty of the surrounding landscape astonishes you. The sight is too beautiful to forget and too glorious to leave, so you pull out your sketchbook and draw what you see—or take a picture with your cell phone, if you are less artistically inclined. Now imagine you are driving across the Great Plaines and come across a magnificent field of prairie flowers. Once again, the scene is too wonderful to leave behind, so you might draw another picture or snap another photograph, but you might also find the proper seeds and grow some of the flowers in your own garden so you can experience their beauty everyday just outside your house.
We are inclined to draw, photograph, and otherwise replicate the beauty that we see in nature. These responsive actions are not purposeless, though; we are attempting to harness nature’s beauty. By hanging up a picture of the mountain or by growing our own flowers, we are trying to frame or encompass the beauty into something we can have. Of course, we now face the same dilemma Scruton articulates—beauty cannot be owned, grasped, or possessed. Yet, the very pursuit of beauty satisfies us more than if we never strived for it, so we continue to draw, to plant, to write. While we cannot possess beauty, we can become more intimate with it, and that is what creative responses accomplish. Passing by a picture of the mountain that hangs in your house conduces more intimacy with the beauty of the mountain than if you never attempted to capture the mountain with your creativity. Keeping some flowers in a garden brings you closer to the beauty of the prairie than if you performed no reaction.
As we strive to develop intimacy with a natural object’s beauty, so we are also driven to develop intimacy with another person’s beauty. Human desire, thus, is a response to perceived beauty in another person—a response that demands intimacy. While we may perform the same creative activities that we may perform to develop intimacy with natural beauty, the human capacity to communicate through touch opens up a new avenue for intimacy. We therefore may consider both chaste and sexual touches of affection to be creative responses to natural beauty. Such actions may not be akin to framing a landscape or planting a garden with beautiful natural objects, but both actions temporarily satisfy a desire to possess beauty. In both cases, we feel closer to the beauty to which we are attracted than we would otherwise, and this feeling satisfies us for a time. Parallels may also be drawn to a child who hears a song and experiences an urge to dance. The child recognizes beauty in the music and engages with it through his or her body. Similarly, a young man might see a beautiful young lady and wish to engage with that beauty. Like painting or dancing, the sexual act responds to beauty by engaging the senses, attempting to interact with the beauty.
At this point, some might challenge the validity of this analysis because it places interest upon beauty. Mainstream philosophy asserts beauty can only be observed through disinterested contemplation; consummation is fueled by interested desire to utilize the senses. Such a charge is rather arbitrary, however, as Nicholas Wolterstorff declares many times in his book Art in Action. Wolterstorff declares that viewing art, and beauty by implication, solely through the lens of contemplation is frivolous and unproductive. Instead, we should view art and beauty through the lens of purposiveness. Something may be beautiful in more than one context. Consequently, we need not worry about the integrity of transcendental beauty in our discussion.
While interpersonal desire is good in that it draws us closer to transcendental beauty, it can be abused. To understand the ethical limits of sexual desire, we must first recall the individuality of the human. Not much observation is required to observe that no two people are alike. You and I have different genetics, different cultural backgrounds, different family histories, and different academic experiences, just to name a few. When Person A desires Person B, therefore, Person B is the sole subject of that particular desire because nobody else has the capacity to fulfill a desire for Person B—not any more than, as Scruton says, “you can satisfy your desire to know how a novel ends by becoming unforeseeably engrossed in a movie.” For an illustration, Scruton contrasts this desire with the desire to quench thirst. If I am parched, I am indifferent to what water you give me or how you give it to me; I am only interested in having it so I can stop being thirsty. Desire for such things is indiscriminate; human desire directs interest.
The warrant of that conclusion may be challenged. Why must desire be individualized? Why do we not experience desire for all people whom we consider beautiful? Recall that interpersonal desire is an appeal for knowledge of another. Although knowledge of others is sought in most human relationships, desire intensifies this universal characteristic. We seek more knowledge of the person. We seek special knowledge, hidden knowledge. We seek an intimacy with that person which is unknown to the public. Because a person’s sensuality is veiled from the public, familiarizing ourselves with the sensuality of the desired person satisfies our desire for a time.
If desire is individualized, then what in a person triggers desire? Clearly not all people one meets produces desire. One might even consider another person beautiful without experiencing desire for them. In the first chapter of Art in Action, Wolterstorff analyzes beauty as a form of communication, which includes the medium with which beauty is communicated, the intention of the object, and the audience’s interpretation. The audience’s reaction depends on their familiarity and appreciation with the method of communication. One’s culture, religion, and tastes influence who might trigger desire.
We have established that “beauty, in a person, prompts desire” (Scruton p. 33), and that desire is a call for sensual knowledge of that person. In a culture that heavily emphasizes the desirability of the human body, though, it is helpful to examine the ethical limits of desire. Potential violations of proper human desire may be illustrated with a simple thought experiment. Suppose there are identical twin brothers; for the sake of simplicity, let’s call them Mike and Mark. The two of them share healthy genetics, eat well, and exercise regularly. They are, being identical twins, congruent in appearance and are therefore equally attractive. One would be outrageous, however, to claim that they were the same person. As previously stated, every person has his or her own set of formative experiences and values. Now consider the very plausible scenario of a young lady who finds Mike and Mark attractive. If the young lady comes to desire neither Mike nor Mark so long as she can “have” one of their bodies, then she reaches the point of reducing a man’s worth from being an embodied person to merely having the body of a person. By ignoring crucial aspects to what makes the twins human, she has objectified them and compromised their humanity. She now views or cares about them at a subhuman level.
Such degradation manifests itself in the expanding vice of pornography. Pornographic media encourages and feeds sexual desire indiscriminately; the actual person is irrelevant to the gaze. The body is all that matters. If considering identical twins interchangeable because of their equal attractiveness is dehumanizing, then pornography degrades humanity even more significantly because it manages models like interchangeable faces and bodies even when their appearances differ. True and good human desire is attracted to the entirety of a person.
Interpersonal desire is more than an animalistic trait or erroneous attraction to an abstract form. Desire is a response to the call of human beauty and is temporarily satisfied through sensual touch, but we hold an ethical responsibility to desire the whole person, not merely his or her body.
Postscript
The above is an essay I finished in 2015 in response to Roger Scruton's Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. I shared this piece because I intend, at some point, to reflect on this essay in light of some things I've contemplated during the last year and offer some practical implications of these conclusions.
References
Benson, Bruce Ellis. Liturgy as a Way of Life: Embodying the Arts in Christian Worship. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013. Print.
Endler, John A. "Bowerbirds, Art and Aesthetics: Are Bowerbirds Artists and Do They Have an Aesthetic Sense?" Communicative & Integrative Biology 5.3 (2012): 281-83. US Library of Medicine. National Institutes of Health. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3419115/>.
Kemal, Salim. Kant's Aesthetic Theory: An Introduction. 1st ed. New York: St. Martin's, 1992. 116-118. Print.
Landau, Elizabeth. "Men See Bikini-clad Women as Objects, Psychologists Say." Cable News Network, 19 Feb. 2009. Web. 18 Apr. 2015.
Scruton, Roger. Beauty: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. Print.
Shao, Ruby. "Art, Psychology Class of 2016 Majors Overwhelmingly Female." The Daily Princetonian. 1 May 2014. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. <http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2014/05/art-psychology-class-of-2016-majors-overwhelmingly-female/>.
Spector, Dina. "The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue: A $1 Billion Empire." Business Insider. 12 Feb. 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. <http://www.businessinsider.com/business-facts-about-the-sports-illustrated-swimsuit-issue-2013-2#ixzz3SoM4N0u5>.
Thornhill, Randy. "Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics." Springer, 2003. Web. 25 Feb. 2015. <http://bit.ly/1zJ486J>.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980. Print.
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