Kant never married and apparently died a virgin. He is sometimes described as having had a low opinion of sex, on the basis of passages like this one from his Lectures on Ethics:
[S]exuality is not an inclination which one human being has for another as such, but is an inclination for the sex of another… The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires. Human nature is thus subordinated. Hence it comes that all men and women do their best to make not their human nature but their sex more alluring and direct their activities and lusts entirely towards sex. Human nature is thereby sacrificed to sex. (Louis Infield translation, p.164)
“Sexuality, therefore,” Kant concludes, “exposes mankind to the danger of equality with the beasts.” He qualifies the claim, but just barely:
Sexual love can, of course, be combined with human love and so carry with it the characteristics of the latter, but taken by itself and for itself, it is nothing more than appetite. Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature; for as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing… (p. 163)
I think the account of sexual desire implicit here is seriously wrong both metaphysically and phenomenologically -- that is to say, both in terms of what the natural end or telos of sexual desire actually is, and in terms of how this desire is typically felt and its end typically perceived. Kant is correct that sexual desire is not aimed at another human being merely quahuman. But it is wrong to say that the end is or is perceived to be merely the sexof the other as such. Kant makes it sound as if a man’s sexual desire is “aimed” at femaleness per se, and a woman’s sexual desire “aimed” at maleness per se -- as if it could in principle equally well be satisfied by a female or male of any species. That is definitely not the case where the natural end of human sexual desire is concerned. (Naturally, in affirming the existence of a “natural end” I’m looking at the subject from a Thomistic natural law point of view, which I’ve developed and defended elsewhere.) Nor is it true phenomenologically either, except in those rare individuals tempted to bestiality.
As I argued in an earlier post and a NCBQ article, a man’s sexual desire is aimed by nature toward a womanand a woman’s sexual desire is aimed by nature toward a man. And that is also how it is typically experienced, though of course as everywhere else in the natural order there are imperfections and aberrant cases. What a man wants, even when his intentions are not honorable, is not “a human being” but neither is it merely “a female.” He wants a woman, and a woman is of course simultaneously human and female. And what a woman wants is a man -- who is of course both human and male -- and neither “a human being” nor “a male.” Kant abstracts out “being human,” “being female,” and “being male,” and seems to think that if the object of sexual desire isn’t the first, then it can only be one of the latter. (For Kant, it seems, we’re all like George Michael.) But the true object of sexual desire is what you had before you abstracted these things out.
As I indicated in the earlier post, it is important to keep in mind how true this is even in most immoral sexual encounters. Conservative moralists often speak as if sexual immorality were essentially a matter of dehumanizing or animalizing the sexual act, but that is not quite right. Casanova and Don Draper are womanizers, not “femalizers.” Nor is it merely that they want females of the species Homo sapiens. They want their sexual partners to have the reason and volition that distinguish human beings from other animals. The womanizer wants a woman to admire and surrender to him, and only what can think and choose (as non-human animals cannot) can do that sort of thing. You can’t seducea non-human animal. That is not to say that there aren’t perverts who really do desire something non-human or formerly human (as in bestiality or necrophilia) but that is rare and so very far from the paradigm case that even many people otherwise unsympathetic to the natural law understanding of sex can see that there is something warped about it.
It is also just mistaken to say that “all men and women do their best to make not their human nature but their sex more alluring” and that the “Object of [sexual] appetite… becomes a thing.” It is true that men and women trying to attract members of the opposite sex do not try to enhance what they have in common as human beings, but neither do they try to reduce themselves merely to maleness or femaleness understood as that which they have in common with non-human animals. A man tries to enhance his masculinity and a woman her femininity. Non-human animals are male or female, but they are not masculine or feminine. To be masculine is to be (to that extent) an excellent specimen of a male human being, and to be feminine is to be (to that extent) an excellent specimen of a female human being. Humanness as such is not emphasized, but neither is it abstracted out. The man trying to attract a woman is not saying “Look at what a human being I am” but neither is he saying “Look at what a male animal I am”; he is saying “Look at what a man I am,” where a man is both human and male at once. Similarly, a woman trying to attract a man is saying “Look at what a woman I am,” where to be a woman is to be neither merely human nor merely female but both at once.
So, while it is understandable why Kant would be suspicious of sexual desire if it really had the teleology he seems to think it does, I think he just gets the teleology wrong. To be sure, Kant does not say that the gratification of sexual desire is inherently immoral. He allows that it is morally permissible in marriage. But the reasons he gives are instructive:
The sole condition on which we are free to make use of our sexual desire depends upon the right to dispose over the person as a whole... If I have the right over the whole person, I have also the right over the part and so I have the right to use that person’s organa sexualia for the satisfaction of sexual desire. But how am I to obtain these rights over the whole person? Only by giving that person the same rights over the whole of myself. This happens only in marriage… Matrimony is the only condition in which use can be made of one’s sexuality. If one devotes one’s person to another, one devotes not only sex but the whole person; the two cannot be separated. (pp. 166-67)
With sex as with everything else, morality for Kant boils down to respect for “the person.” It is because in marriage two “persons” are united -- not a man and a woman, mind you, but “one’s person” and “another [person]” -- that the gratification of sexual desire becomes morally permissible. (Whyis not clear. If sexual desire as such involves treating another person as a mere animal or as a thing, how can it ever be permissible on Kantian terms to gratify it? Why wouldn’t the ideal Kantian marriage be sexless?)
We seem to have implicit here a kind of Cartesianism. There’s the body, which is either male or female but as such a merely animal and inhuman sort of thing; and then there’s “the person,” which is a bloodless, sexless, rational and willing agent hidden behind the body. Menand women disappear. It’s as if for Kant, the ideal human beings would all be like the androgynous Pat and Chris from the old Saturday Night Live“It’s Pat” sketches.
Not (to be fair) that Kant explicitly says this or would want to say it. And Kant himself inadvertently gives the reason why this would be a mistaken view of human nature when he writes:
The body is part of the self; in its togetherness with the self it constitutes the person; a man cannot make of his person a thing… (p. 166)
Exactly right. But that means that since Harry’s body is part of himself and it is a man’s body, then being a man, specifically, is part of what it is to be Harry, and thus Harry’s being seen and sexually desired as a man is precisely notto be seen and desired as a thing. Similarly, since Sally’s body is part of herself and it is a woman’s body, then being a woman, specifically, is part of what it is to be Sally, and thus Sally’s being seen and sexually desired as a woman is precisely not to be seen and desired as a thing. Where real human beings (as opposed to angels and as opposed to SNL’s Pat) are concerned, to be a person just is to be either a man and thus male, or a woman and thus female. It just is to be of one sex or the other. And to desire someone sexually just is a way of desiring a kind of person, namely the human kind. Your sex is not contingent and extrinsic to you but rather intrinsic and essential to you. (That is why, for Aquinas, though sexual intercoursewill not exist in the hereafter, sex -- being a man or being a woman -- will exist forever.)
But then, Kant’s discussion of sexual morality in the Lecturesis not clear or carefully worked out in the first place. For example, his account of marriage makes crucial use of the notion of having mutual property rights in one another, yet just a couple of pages earlier (at p. 165) he had argued that a human being cannot properly be thought of as a kind of property, not even his own property. Presumably he would regard the “property” talk in the passage about marriage as metaphorical, but how exactly do we cash out the metaphor in a way that will preserve the force of the argument?
Given that he very strongly condemns homosexual behavior in the Lectures, Kant would no doubt have been horrified by the notion of “same-sex marriage.” Yet what he says about marriage could certainly be developed in a way that would allow for it. If marriage is essentially a union of human persons, and maleness and femaleness are extraneous to being human persons (as what he says about sexual desire seems to imply, whether or not he would want to draw the conclusion), then why couldn’t a marriage exist between any two human persons?
As I have noted before, while Kantian personalist talk has in recent decades become popular among some conservative Christian moralists, it is something of which they ought to be wary. It is conceptually sloppy and tends toward conclusions that are (at least from the point of view of the traditional natural law theorist) either too rigorist or too lax. Yes, human beings are persons, but so are angels. What is distinctive about human morality is what sets us apart from the angels. That is one reason why the traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of human beings as rational animals is superior to the Kantian approach. Our animality -- and thus our being either men or women, either male or female -- is as essential to us as our rationality, not something extraneous or tacked-on. For the Thomist, “It’s Patrick” or “It’s Patricia.” It ain’t“Pat.”