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not want to claim that Kant’s views here are right— apart and untouchable has been defiled . . . [For the
they just form a useful starting point for reflection on jilted lover, what] was most beautiful to him has been
the concept of beauty (p. 33). This is all to the good: spoiled’ (pp. 52–53). And beauty involves, in the case
for the big picture has a lot to be said for it. In Scruton’s Scruton can write that ‘sexual interest, the sense of
case, the big picture involves, amongst other things, beauty and reverence for the sacred are proximate
the idea of the sacred and the desire to feel at home in states of mind, which feed into one another and grow
the world: from a common root’ (p. 57).
I suppose that it will be partly or evenly largely a
We can wander through this world alienated, re-
matter of temperament whether Scruton’s overall
sentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can
view looks plausible to you, or even whether you want
find our home here, coming to rest in harmony
it to look plausible. It is built partly on an understand-
with others and ourselves. The experience of
ing of sexual desire which is, in my view, false—or,
beauty guides us along the second path: it tells us
more exactly, confuses sexual desire with erotic love.
that we are at home in the world, that the world
For Scruton claims that sexual desire is determinate:
is already ordered in our perceptions as a place
fit for the lives of beings like us. But . . . beings [T]here is a particular person that you want. Peo-
like us become at home in the world only by ac- ple are not interchangeable as objects of desire,
knowledging our ‘fallen’ condition. . . . Hence even if they are equally attractive. You can desire
the experience of beauty also points us beyond one person, and then another—you can even de-
this world, to a ‘kingdom of ends’ in which our sire both at the same time. But your desire for
immortal longings and our desire for perfection John or Mary cannot be satisfied by Alfred or
are finally answered. . . . [T]herefore, the feeling Jane: each desire is a desire specific to its object,
for beauty is proximate to the religious frame of since it is a desire for that person as the individual
mind, arising from a humble sense of living with that he is. (p. 44)
imperfections, while aspiring towards the highest
But while that may be true of erotic love or a sexual
unity with the transcendental. (pp. 174–175)
desire which otherwise expresses a concern or care
It is not entirely clear how this view fits in with Scru- for the other, this is surely not true of all sexual desire:
ton’s earlier remark that beauty can be, amongst other someone looking at pornography wants one or other of
things, disturbing, profane, and chilling (p. ix), but let those people represented, as Scruton knows (p. 185).
us leave that aside. The connection between beauty If you say that even in such a case the person in ques-
and the religious had, in any case, already come out tion has a different desire for each person he sees, then
earlier in the book, through reflection on the relation you are surely missing part of what pornography is
between human beauty—the topic of chapter 2—and about and one of the things that makes it so troubling.
the sacred. Scruton’s thought here finds its root—or, In any case, Scruton seems to admit this point when he
Aquí encuentra
su raíz at any rate, one of its roots—in the experience of grants that ‘[t]here is a distinction, familiar to all of us,
sexual jealousy: the amante
jiltedabandonado
lover feels that his former between an interest in a person’s body and an interest
beloved has become ‘polluted or desecrated. . . . This in a person as embodied’ (p. 47) . But if you are inter-
phenomenon parallels the sense of desecration
profanación
that ested in a person’s body, as the consumer of pornog-
attaches to the misuse of holy things. Something held raphy is, then you are still experiencing sexual desire,
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of course, but one that precisely is not focused on this would not be better conveyed in some other way, a
individual. Further, cases such as the sex-starved pris- way in which the content did not come up against the
oner who longs for a woman surely cannot be accom- form or style so markedly. For one of the things with
the natural world in ‘bourgeois’ terms, and having interesting and profound remarks about the point of
made one or two remarks about the notion of the sub- art: ‘Art answers the riddle of existence: it tells us why
lime, Scruton again suggests a connection between the we exist by imbuing our lives with a sense of fitting-
Bach is greater than U2. It is to resist a philosophical and kitsch by which we are surrounded in modern
construal of what that is, which is, I think, little more culture, but also a sense that modern people love
than an intellectual enterprise on my part to convince desecrating their world. There is, beneath Scruton’s