Reason and Sexuality in Western Thought

This book traces the genealogy of ideas of reason, self and sexuality in the West, opening the way to a richer and more diverse understanding of sexual experience.

Western philosophy and religion have distorted and continue to distort our experience of sex and love through three far-reaching constellations of reason, self and sexuality. Thinkers like Plato, Aquinas and Kant helped to fashion an ascetic ideal of reason hostile to bodily pleasures and sexual diversity. By contrast, philosophical hedonism advocates a less demanding conception of rationality and defends sexual pleasure. But this approach of thinkers like Hume, Bentham, La Mettrie and de Sade is still one-sided and limiting. A third constellation, Romanticism avoids the limitations of both forms of rationalism, but in the name of a religion of love and passion that ultimately threatens the integrity of the self.

In Reason and Sexuality in Western Thought, a richer understanding of sexual experience is traced to a dissident philosophical tradition. In their different ways Montaigne, Spinoza, Hegel and Kierkegaard, Marcuse and Foucault contribute to a more holistic, multi-layered and open conception of reason, sexuality and the self. This book will be essential reading for all students of philosophy and gender studies.

West (political theory, Australian National U.) explores three major constellations regarding the relationship between reason and sexuality within the western tradition of philosophy. The first is the transcendent reason and ascetic idealism of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant. The second is the hedonist realism and conceptions of instrumental rationality in ancient Epicurianism, Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, La Mettrie, and Sade. The third encompasses a number of Romantic and post-Romantic approaches that subordinate reason or rationality to some manifestation of passionate love or sexual desire, most notable by Christian mystic St. Teresa of Avila, Rousseau, Friedrich von Schlegel, Schopenhauer, and Freud. He concludes with a series of alternative philosophical perspectives. Distributed in the US by Blackwell Publishing. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

David West, Reader in Political Theory, Australian National University