Seriousness and Play, Sex and Death

[A] love that springs merely from sexual impulse cannot be love at all, but only appetite. Human love is good-will, affection, promoting the happiness of others and finding joy in their happiness. But it is clear that, when a person loves another purely from sexual desire, none of these factors enter into the love. Far from there being any concern for the happiness of the loved one, the love, in order to satisfy his desire and still his appetite, may even plunge the loved one into the depths of misery. Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. Sexual love can, of course, be combined with human love and so carry with it the characteristics of the latter, but taken by itseld and for itself, it is nothing for 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 and can be treated and used as such by every one.

- Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield

Just as there have been philosophers who are playful with the topic of death, there have been philosophers who were deadly serious about the topic of sex. Kant is chief among them. But this entry isn't about that, at least not precisely. Instead, I'd like to call into question the strict separation of seriousness and playfulness, of sex and death, love and alienation.

Play and Seriousness

I have a friend with whom I have sex. Or perhaps more accurately, I have a person with whom I have sex that I consider a friend. His mother recently passed away, and I have been thinking about the appropriate response (from both of us) to this event. I want to send a card (and I will), but other than that I'm also not sure how much care I should extend, how much I want to extend, how much he wants me to extend, and how much he expects me to extend. We had actually been having less sex and meeting less frequently because of the stress of his mother's ailing health. He would talk about it to some degree, but I think he is in general quite private about such things (though I could be wrong - he might just be private about those things with me). I do know that I do care, and I'm sad for him. I'm just not sure how much I should/can do. So far my plan is to send a card and just be available if he needs anything.

Sex and Death

In a time of death, in anticipation of death, one might want to have less sex or more. It's almost inconceivable that one would want to have the same amount of sex. Because of its oppositional quality (Eros vs. Thanatos - fight!), sex can either be an antidote to death's chilling promise or an inappropriate response to its somber demands. But of course, sex and death are inextricably linked in a chicken-egg, cause-effect way.

Evolutionarily speaking, in a way, as a species we have sex because we die (how could a queer person really get away with saying this, you ask? I'm not totally sure). To continue going, our genes had to get really good at making copies of themselves even though those frail vessels would one day decay. Reproduction turns out to be the solution to death's inevitable entropic mandate.

Practically, of course, most of us die because someone had sex. Life is a disease that only death can cure, and sex is the chief mode of transmission.

Love and Alienation

Half an American lifetime ago I attended a lecture by a visiting professor from France who argued that the traditional picture of romantic love entails alienation. Perhaps he was just playing around. Who knows? This was back when the French were charmingly rogueish, and not the cowardly America-haters that they apparently are today. So, to bring my interpretation up to date, for "playing around" read "refusing to commit to a real position, that flip-flopping cad."

To brutally summarize, the argument went something like this:

1) Love requires recognition of the will of another
2) Love requires making one's happiness dependent on fulfillment of that other's ends
3) In so doing, one subsume's one's own will into that of the other, and thus becomes profoundly alienated and unfree.

So there you have my hasty un-binarification of those things. I have more thoughts, but they aren't really coherent right now. I'm just going to skip to the questions.

1) Can anyone think of a good poem or poems about this stuff? So far I've got Thomas' The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives The Flower.

2) Thoughts on the contrast between "play" and a "serious" relationship. Can play be serious? Can relationships be playful? And if you get it, won't you tell me how?

3) What should I do for/about/with my friend?

4) Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. Other times you have to cry to keep from laughing. I read an interesting quote in an otherwise objectionable law review article today about how sometimes we are faced with a choice between tragic struggle and a pleasant trip to hell, and for the sake of our humanity, we have to pick tragedy (or something like that). How is this a question?