Breasts Have Pink Capellaries

WHEN THE PHILOSOPHY IS SEXY. RESPONSE TO FOGLIA

Men wear their heart in their sex, women wear their sex in their heart.

Malcolm de Chazal

Gustave Courbet (1819-1877), The origin of the world (1866)
The first picture pornographic?

in his column Saturday, December 11, Pierre Foglia blames sex education at school. Columnist recalls a truism: sexuality has become a commodity, and the school does not become a conduit for the market. Basically, "the ass is in the head," says the columnist bluntly, "it" can not be learned not. Sex education courses designed as a "mechanical 101" passes right next to the plate "is the Pistion and cylinders," said Foglia nicely.

Foglia has both right and wrong. How so? It is perfectly true to say that sex has now become a commodity, and it is deplorable. Anyone living in society of ours hyperconsumption admit it willingly. It is wrong however to believe that sexuality can not be learned even if it is true, however, that sexuality has nothing mechanical because it "is only in the head." What do we mean exactly by saying that sexuality is "in the head? Foglia has nothing specific to say on it that can be an education precisely because sexuality, he says, is personal and subjective. "Science of sexuality" - sexology, in short - would be a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. Neurology is wrong in trying to explain the functioning of the human spirit. Just as there can not be any objective study of the human spirit, he can not Nor have scientists studying what we are most intimate, namely sexuality.

is recognized there, the distance dualism, the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) established at the dawn of the modern era. The objectivity of science, the philosopher believed, has never taken on the subjective world of thought. Yet, history has proved wrong the author of Discourse on Method since psychology became the science that we know.

A promising solution would be to leave the Cartesian dualism taking into sexuality as a human practice with a logic of its own. That's what I would like to show here. We ask, first: how different sexual pleasure he's happy there to eat and drink? Is this the same as the objective of relaxing in a hot bath? Or observe a child having fun?

Sexual pleasure has some similarities with these other pleasures mentioned, but it differs significantly. Experience sexual pleasure does not resemble that of the table in that, of course, it does not consume her partner! It also differs the pleasure of bathing in that sexual pleasure involves a partner (although one can speak properly of "solitary pleasure").

Sexual pleasure is, among other things to experience bodily sensations, to ignite the desire, which is not so fun seeing a child. In fact, like sexual pleasure, but not perfectly identical, to the pleasure experienced in watching something or someone. Philosophers call this an essential property of consciousness, namely intentionality . The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), has made the fundamental intentionality of phenomenology . Consciousness, in fact, is always aware of something. A rock is not conscious of anything, not even she is a rock. By cons, my fear of a spider is an act of consciousness as it is directed towards the spider in question. It may well be that the spider does not actually exist and that the emotion is therefore moot, that is to say false or fictitious. Still, my feelings of fear, as a state of consciousness directed to one (so called) spider does exist. That is what the intentionality of human consciousness. The quote highlighted is literally false, but a phenomenological point of view, it summarizes the "essence" of our sexual practices. Husserl suspend all belief in the truth value of intentionality to describe the content "core" of consciousness. That is the purpose of phenomenology, who subsequently had a considerable impact, mainly in the philosophy known as "continental."

is however a British, Roger Scruton, that we owe a phenomenological study of human sexuality. In Sexual Desire (1986), Scruton states that sexual pleasure is not a pleasant sensation, even tickling. Sexual pleasure has a thought directed at anyone real or imaginary. Like any thought, sexual pleasure has therefore an intentionality in that it is directed at persons . That's what writing means Foglia commonly as "the ass is in the head."

Scruton writes:

[sexual pleasure] is the desire of a person: I say a person, not his body, conceived as a physical object, but the person seen as Incarnate a subject from which emanates a sense of self facing me, staring into the eyes, an ego to me. The real desire is also a kind of demand: it commands reciprocity, sharing and mutual abandonment. It's embarrassing and compromising. However, in this sense, a feeling is neither incriminating nor threatening.

For Scruton, the language of intentionality of sexuality has changed considerably since other degrees between John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), who argued, in particular On Liberty (1859) that

The only purpose for which men are justified, individually and collectively, to interfere with freedom of action of any of them, is self-protection. The only legitimate reason to have a civilized community to use force against one of its members, against his own will, is to prevent harm being done to others. The force for its own good, either physical or moral, does not provide sufficient justification ... The individual is sovereign over himself, his own body and his own mind.

Since Mill, therefore, "anything goes" as we say in English. Anything goes, obviously, for Mill, to the extent that partners are consenting. With the rout of the morality of the Catholic Church, the liberal sexual morality reigns supreme. In Canada, Pierre Elliot Trudeau was fond of repeating that the State not to "put its nose into the bedrooms of citizens", thus establishing the private nature of sexuality. We understand that under these conditions of sex education is a kind of impossibility in the extent of the liberal perspective, sexuality is strictly the responsibility of each staff. Foglia merely restating the consensus liberal social applied today on sexuality: it is a private affair .

The liberal view of sexuality so empty consciousness in sexuality its intentionality. Foglia quite right to stress the fact that sexuality has become a commodity. Since intentionality has disappeared from our understanding of sexuality, it is no longer an object for science, that is to say nothing more than a mechanical fact .. . "Pistons and cylinders. The obscenity and perversion were once beautiful game and a free hand. Anything goes. Of necrophilia to bestiality. Pedophilia is always wrong, however, because the young child is not (yet) able to give consent . Liberal in the wonderful world we live in, everything is a matter of consent, choice, autonomy, etc.. The choice of each reign supreme.

In the now old and obsolete conception of sexuality, it recalls Scruton, consisted mainly in the encounter of the other. Also, if I realize that a special trick, the one (or he) is not that I caress my (my) but another joint, all the features of my (my) partner, my sexual pleasure ceases on the field. It is like raping me. Sexual pleasure has therefore clearly a dimension epistemic because sexual pleasure may be wrong in the sense that I may be wrong partner.

When I caress my (or my) partner, among other things I aim to answer him as I (or) recognizes as embodied person in a body. That intentionality of human sexuality. We exhibit as persons embodied in the body, and we enjoy, enjoy, to be recognized in this way. This consciousness of being of "embedded" is the real "G spot" of sexuality. When our partner does not recognize us not as embodied person, but simply as "meat", a "cylinder or a piston, a" doll ", an" ass, "we feel despised, degraded, and sexual pleasure quickly becomes obnoxious, guilty, shameful. Rape is not something else, so it may even lead to suicide. Indeed, popular usage, the "ass" to refer to sexuality, is degrading and demeaning, because it focuses solely on the sexual body parts, obliterating the time the beauty and greatness in human emanates.

Let us not think, however, that the degradation of sexuality that we see today's date. Already Cicero in his treatise De old age, wrote: "The [...] is the friction coupling of a hose and ejaculation, with a spasm, a little snot. "Instead, the thinker of the Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas - became" holy "- said - to the amazement of many today - that" No one can live body pleasure and without significant . "(Summa Theologica , II-II, q 168, art. 2). Moreover, even "holy" argues that our worst enemy is not the pleasure - sexual or otherwise - but fear - fear of pleasure, among other things, which most religious purists of once thundered.

Are we a soul in a body or a body without a soul? The metaphysical question does not arise from the perspective of phenomenological consciousness, because what matters is the "object" of consciousness, that this object exists or not, whatever. Sex education is in fact in education intentionality in sexual relations, that is to say, in the awareness of what makes us human beings in their own right, worthy of respect. I would sleep under the "chastity" is not so much in sexual abstinence in sexual enjoyment free of obscenity and perversion, where partners meet "physically and consciously" as as embodied persons in bodies exultant pleasure. Since all virtue is learned by practice, sex education lies in learning the "chastity" and understood.