Sexuality: An essay in human dignity lifts its subject from the category of sin into that of virtue.
All right, calm down. It is true the book is called Lust, but the author is a philosopher. Indeed, he has been the Edna J. Doury distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina and a fellow of and tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford, is at present professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, and has produced The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. No titillation to be expected here, then. However, Simon Blackburn has also written two elegant, witty and, not incidentally, best-selling books of popular philosophy, Think and Being Good, and knows what life is like at a level below the dreaming spires.
Lust is one of a set of books based on lectures on each of the seven deadly sins, first delivered at the New York Public Library. The library is an enterprising organisation; other books that sprang from NYPL lectures include Robert Hughes's controversial and influential Culture of Complaint, while Colm Tóibín's recent novel, The Master, was partly the result of research on Henry James that Tóibín did during his sojourn as a visiting fellow at the library a few years ago. Although the general editor of the seven deadly sins series, Elda Rotor, writes that "Our purpose was to invite scholars and writers to chart the ways we have approached and understood evil, one deadly sin at a time", Simon Blackburn has a much more positive take on the subject. The task he has set himself in considering lust, he writes,
is to clean off some of the mud, to rescue it from the echoing denunciations of old men of the deserts, to deliver it from the pallid and envious confessors of Rome and the disgust of the Renaissance, to destroy the stocks and pillories of the Puritans, to separate it from other things that we know drag it down . . . and so to lift it from the category of sin into that of virtue.
Phew - a large programme, for such a little book. If in the end he does not succeed in knocking off all the accretions of the body-hating centuries, he still manages to offer a new slant on an old sin, and puts forward a liberal, though not libertine, defence of a natural urge without the agency of which, after all, none of us would be here.
In a show of modesty that is rare these days, Blackburn questions his suitability to write on the subject. Among a number of attributes that might disqualify him he lists his advanced years. "The sins of middle age," he wistfully writes, "are melancholy, envy, gluttony and anger. By the time you are of an age to give a public lecture on lust, lust may have lost a little of its lustre". On the other hand, he is in a position now when passion may be recollected in tranquillity: "Nobody would be asked to give a lecture on lust until of an age when time and experience have blunted its fierce prick". Quite.
He is candid in his acknowledgment of the disruptive force of the sexual drive: as he puts it, with his accustomed elegance and wit - and his abiding attachment to alliteration - "Living with lust is like living shackled to a lunatic". In this context he cites Schopenhauer's oft-quoted but always apposite characterisation of lust as that which "exerts an adverse influence on the most important affairs" and "has the knack of slipping its love-letters and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts". However, he does not make a sufficiently determined attempt to distinguish between sexual desire, which fuels the engine of procreation, and what might be called sexual greed; admittedly such a distinction is not easy, and in his first chapter he worries doggedly at the problem. He does separate lust off from love - "Love lasts, lust cloys" - but again without giving his definition of love, that difficult and elusive concept. Finally he settles for a rather vague formula to identify lust, and introduces another term, desire, "the enthusiastic desire, the desire that infuses the body, for sexual activity and its pleasures for their own sake". The significance here is in that last addendum, for their own sake. Lust - in the male, at least - cares nothing for procreation.
Blackburn is dismissive of self-appointed liberators who with "cheery complacency" insist that the old fears and phobias have been banished and that, in the West at least, we live today in a healthily sexualised culture. The pervasiveness of sex in commercial culture, he writes, "is only a fascination with something that we fear or find problematic in many ways", and notes among other instances of public anathematising of what is considered unseemly or downright dangerous the sobering fact that the American government spends a billion dollars annually on promoting abstinence-only programmes of sex education.
Those "old men of the desert" come in for some serious reprehension, but Blackburn is not as severe on the likes of Augustine and Aquinas as might have been expected of a 21st-century liberal. He gives the received idea that "Augustine's hatred of sexuality trickled down through the Christian church to infect all subsequent thought and feeling on the subject", but points out that the matter is not as simple as that. Augustine was more an inheritor than a generator of sexual angst: the great ones who had gone before him - the Prophets, Plato, the Manichaeans, St Paul - were less than relaxed in their attitudes to sexuality. He cites a number of authorities in the ancient world for whom sex was an abomination, albeit a necessary one, and concludes, "the association of lust with uncleanliness and disgust, as well as with the wiles of the devil, darkness, the animal, the body, and eventually death, damnation, and hell, was firmly in place. Augustine only had to breathe it in".
In all his considerations of history's long frown at the thought of what men and women get up to in the dark, Blackburn pays surprisingly scant attention to the fact that commentaries on sex and sexual desire have been almost exclusively the work of men. Indeed, from Periclean Athens to the Edinburgh of Hume and Adam Smith, the philosophical view of the world was predicated on the assumption that women are an inferior breed who are unfortunately necessary for the production of males. That a man, the epitome of God's handiwork, should through the weakest and most disorderly of his drives put himself in thrall to a mere woman was a thought to addle the head of the greatest of thinkers. Aquinas, for instance, so Blackburn informs us, "follows Aristotle in holding that women only arise because humid south winds and frequent downpours produce human beings with a greater water content".
Blackburn finds a surprising ally in his effort to recuperate lust in Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan and the philosopher who famously summed up human life as nasty, brutish and short. Hobbes pointed out that lust, as well as being a drive of the senses, is also "a delight of the mind: for it consisteth of two appetites together, to please, and to be pleased . . ." In this, Blackburn the optimist sees a liberal defence - one imagines Hobbes's eyebrows leaping up to the hairline in astonishment - of the human eagerness to make the beast with two backs. Comparing the sexual act to music-making, "where the reciprocal sensitivities can be more or less unconscious, and also for that matter where difficulties such as timing are perhaps more salient", he insists on the possibility of harmonic synthesis:
Hobbesian unity can be achieved, and if it cannot be achieved, it can at least be aimed at, and even if it cannot be aimed at, it can be imagined and dreamed. By understanding it for what it is, we can reclaim lust for humanity, and we can learn that lust best flourishes when it is unencumbered by bad philosophy and ideology, by falsities, by controls, by distortions, by corruptions and perversions and suspicions, which prevent its freedom to flow.
Lust is a stimulating and entertaining essay in defence ofhuman dignity. Blackburn writes with clarity and grace, neither condescending to his readers nor imagining that they have read everything he has. The book is peppered with throwaway arcana, for instance that Hippocrates believed sexual intercourse caused baldness in men, that Pliny the Elder thought the elephant the very model of sexual propriety, that a male lion has been recorded having sex 157 times in 55 hours and a female chimpanzee 84 times in eight days with seven different males, although "chimpanzee couplings are quick, and the male penis only two or three inches long". Many animals, he mildly concludes, "have far more sex than seems to be necessary for breeding". So relax.
John Banville's most recent book, Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City, was published last year by Bloomsbury
Lust. By Simon Blackburn, Oxford University Press, 151pp. £9.99