Three Cheers for Swine
"Broad-minded though we take ourselves to be, lust gets a bad press. It is the fly in the ointment, the black sheep of the family, the ill-bred, trashy cousin. . . .
Love pursues the good of the other with self-control, reason and patience. Lust pursues its own gratification, headlong, impatient of any control, immune to reason. . . . Love grows with knowledge and time, courtship, truth and trust. Lust is a trail of clothing in the hallway. . . .
And judging from our actual choices rather than our moralizing, we like lust well enough. Advertising agencies fall over themselves to suggest that their products enable us to excite lust in others, but nobody ever made a fortune from prescribing ways of making ourselves repulsive. . . .
There is no such thing as a decorous or controlled ecstasy, so we should not persecute lust simply because of its issue in extremes of abandon. Indeed, such experiences are usually thought to be one of life's greatest goods, and a yardstick for others."
The NYTimes: An excerpt from a forthcoming book on lust, written by Simon Blackburn, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, appears in December's New Statesman magazine.
Love pursues the good of the other with self-control, reason and patience. Lust pursues its own gratification, headlong, impatient of any control, immune to reason. . . . Love grows with knowledge and time, courtship, truth and trust. Lust is a trail of clothing in the hallway. . . .
And judging from our actual choices rather than our moralizing, we like lust well enough. Advertising agencies fall over themselves to suggest that their products enable us to excite lust in others, but nobody ever made a fortune from prescribing ways of making ourselves repulsive. . . .
There is no such thing as a decorous or controlled ecstasy, so we should not persecute lust simply because of its issue in extremes of abandon. Indeed, such experiences are usually thought to be one of life's greatest goods, and a yardstick for others."
The NYTimes: An excerpt from a forthcoming book on lust, written by Simon Blackburn, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, appears in December's New Statesman magazine.
