When Chris Kelly '96, suggests in his column "Lessons to Learn From 'Spanking The Monkey'" (Jan. 30) that there should be more explicit and widespread campus discourse about sex, he champions a central, and deplorable, aspect of modernity: the replacement of the idea of love with the reality of sex.
Kelly is not the first to revolt against love in the name of sex. In fact, Kelly's column may now lack the power to shock or infuriate because his argument is so commonplace. We, the descendants of Freud and Kinsey, as well as the contemporaries of Madonna and Playboy, take for granted the primacy of sex.
Still, Kelly's column is a vivid example of how discussion even of sex has become so impoverished. When a college columnist wonders about "the connections between regular masturbation and good grades" and advocates a game of Truth or Dare before D.O.C. Trips, it is a sure sign that something is rotten in his mind -- as well as in his times.
Indeed, the modern preoccupation with sex has its origins in modern liberalism.
Liberalism, as articulated by thinkers like Hobbes and Locke, claims that man is merely an atom composed of selfish, bodily needs, and that the proper role of society is to ensure the satisfaction of those needs. Liberalism has no moral objectives: it merely allows each man to embark upon a solitary quest for physical fulfillment as an ultimate end of human life.
The liberal political science, then, naturally contributes to the belief that sex is the primary object of human life. Such a notion reduces all intimate relationships to purely solipsistic and mechanistic interractions, one that requires such profound knowledge as how to prolong orgasm, or how not to acquire venereal disease.
There is, however, another, and nobler, idea connected with sex.
This is an idea, tracing its pedigree from Aristophanes' magnificent speech in Plato's "Symposium" to Rousseau's "Emile," that views sex as a subsidiary aspect of a fuller and all-encompassing activity: love. It is also an idea that focuses more on the yearnings of the soul rather than the body.
The idea of love has its basis on the classical conception of man and society. The ancients, while agreeing with Hobbes and Locke that man shares with the beasts certain longings of the body, knew that man also possesses distinctive human traits.
Man, because he is a creature endowed with speech, suffers loneliness and craves human contact. In addition, since man is also a thinker, he has the ability to scorn his animalistic impulses and elevate human life by giving it beauty, dignity, and other metaphysical meaning. The classical political solution was thus to overcome man's lower nature by establishing his primeval impulse to society, and his reasoning faculty, as the basis of human virtue.
Among the chief means of directing man to virtue was the idea of love. Love, depicted as the longing to be united with the other splintered half in Aristophanes or as Emile's idealistic attraction for Sophie, is an awareness of man's incompleteness and the subsequent neediness to become whole.
By Aristophanes' and Rousseau's definition, love hence points man away from both his selfishness and his preoccupation with the earthly. First, while sex ends in the satiation of one's passions, love presupposes the permanent connection and kinship between two complementary halves that cannot exist without one another. Second, if love is rooted in the spiritual and intellectual dimension of man, it has the capacity to transcend the bodily and aid in the contemplation of the eternal and the majestic.
I would argue then, that the idea of love is an essential foundation of society, as well as the inspiration for the highest achievements of the human spirit, both aesthetic and intellectual.
This is why we must resist the temptation to hasten the degeneration of love into sex. Individuals who can easily satisfy their erotic desires and do not invest their emotions in exclusive relationships cannot form stable families, which is a prerequisite of a healthy society.
Moreover, man's imagination, his capacity to think sublime thoughts, is diminished when he regards all intimate relationships as vehicles to further his ignoble appetites. Kelly is, of course, right in glorifying the power of art. But consider, for example: Would Dante have been able to compose his "Divine Comedy" if his love for Beatrice were carnal?
