This eminent philosophy professor at Cambridge University, Simon Blackburn, is proposing that lust shouldn’t be thought of as a sin after all. He says lust ought to be “reclaimed for humanity” as the life-affirming virtue that it is.
This new proposal got a write-up in the London Sunday Times. Blackburn told the Times that he wants to save lust “from the denunciations of old men of the deserts, to deliver it from the pallid and envious confessor, and the stocks and pillories of the Puritans, to drag it from the category of sin to that of virtue.”
First of all, how do you define lust? Here is Blackburn’s definition: “The enthusiastic desire for sexual activity and its pleasures for its own sake.” Where does this definition lead to? If lust is reciprocated, that leads to pleasure and “best flourishes when unencumbered by bad philosophy and ideology…which prevent its freedom of flow.”
I’m all for freedom of flow. Actually, I recognized Simon Blackburn’s name in the news report because I already have one of his books on my shelf: The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. How prestigious; this is no fly-by-night philosopher. He’s for real. I looked up lust in there and it said “See love, sex.” (Is Blackburn a Prince fan? Oh, wait, that was Lovesexy by Prince. A Cambridge don, Blackburn probably gets off on sexy classical music like Ravel’s Bolero.) Like many Dopers, I think the intellect is the sexiest thing about a person, and I find it a particularly sweet kink to indulge in intellectual lust. Hurrah for Professor Blackburn!
Well, I guess then that would leave only six deadly sins. The human nature has deeply ingrained in it to list things by sevens. That means if lust is taken off the list, we’ll need to come up with one more Deadly Sin. How about “Voting Republican”?
While I applaud his enthusiasm, I think he is wrong about the “best flourishes when unencumbered by bad philosophy and ideology…which prevent its freedom of flow”. If the philosophy prevents free flow, then maybe. But there is definately something to be said for “doing the nasty”.
That is, I think there is an esthetic centered around the taboo of sex. As in other things it can be taken too far. If you become sexually repressed, that is not a good thing. If, however, you enjoy the thrill of the forbidden, then, why not?
As the Marqui said, “Sex without pain and fear is like food without taste”.
All of the seven deadly sins could be reasonably tweaked into life affirming virtues.
Pride? If you pull off a difficult task, win a competition, create something beautiful, why shouldn’t you feel pride?
Anger? Why shouldn’t you feel anger at the myriad jerks and evil doers around the globe from UBL to pedophiles to rude people in general
Gluttony? Food is a wonderful thing and so is good drink. In fact I would give up sex rather than the pleasures of good food and strong drink.
Sloth? Who denies the pleasure of sleeping in on a rainy day?
Greed? A little harder to justify, but a reasonable enjoyment of the good things in life isn’t something to frown on.
Lust? this was covered in the OP and previous posts.
Envy? Ok, this one’s the hardest. But if you can be inspired to greater things by the success of those around you, that seems OK (I know that’s not really envy. Like I said it’s the hardest of the 7 to justify.)
I think a healthy approach is not to view any of these things as sin, but rather as part of being human. If Lust or pride or sloth lead you into behavior that’s bad for you or others; If they control you rather than vice versa, that’s a bad thing. But to view them all as dreadful “deadly sins” seems to me to be denying human nature. (Of course since christian doctrine emphasizes our inherent rotten-ness maybe that’s the point.)
Lust isn’t simply excessive sexual desire. It is the all consuming desire for physical or intellectual pleasure. Effectively, the suppression of the rational part of the mind to control the body’s appetites.
Think I’ll keep it out of the virtues list for the moment.
From a theological point of view, strictly speaking the “seven deadly sins” are not sins at all, but rather passions, which can be occasions of sin. Feeling angry, or lustful, or whatever, is not morally wrong; it’s what you do with the feeling that can cause a moral problem.
I suspect, but I don’t know, that this list of passions, and treating the passions as sinful, either originated with or was greatly popularised by puritan protestantism, since there is a strong strain in that particular religious culture which is distrustful of all emotions and passions and tends to regard them as “bad”. Certainly in my Irish Catholic high school education the seven deadly sins weren’t mentioned at all, except to point out that they weren’t actually sinful.
Catholic chiming in. A lot of the Catholic Church’s philosophy of what makes a sin is rooted in the concept of the “dignity of the human person.” The short of the concept of dignity is that people are people and are meant to be treated as such. An extreme example can be found in the example of slavery: we all agree that slavery wrong, to the point that we take for granted why it’s wrong beyond a sense that we wouldn’t like to experience it for ourselves. The Church would argue that it’s undignified because slavery treats the slave as an object, fulfilling the enslaver’s desire for cheap labor. A cursory analysis of any of the sins that cause harm to another person finds an explanation rooted in the dignity of man.
So let’s apply it to lust. Lust is considered wrong because it views the recipient of the lust as an object of desire. I desire sexual gratification, and you are the means by which I shall be gratified. I want to be clear that we’re not talking about mere physical attraction or aesthetic appreciation here; that’s an objective reality which is rooted in our nature as sexual, social beings, and appreciative of the beauty around us (which the theist would argue that God provided anyway). Lust is rather unilateral: it makes the person who lusts the center of his/her own universe, with the person being lusted after reduced to an object for gratification.
My suspicion is that Blackburn is blurring together the *eros[/] and the agape aspects of love together…and probably rightly so. We’re such a sexually schizophrenic society these days that too many Christians mistake attraction for lust, and too many others mistake lust for devotion. I agree with Blackburn’s definition in a certain sense: sex is a human good (IMHO, provided to us by God) which should be fully enjoyed. Believe me, when my fiancee and I are married this May, we don’t want to reduce ourselves to a clinical 1950’s sexual relationship. No…we plan to have all the fun that the human experience provides. I think, however, that we wouldn’t call it lust, because the denotation of lust assumes that my sexual experience is to gratify me (and she just happens to be involved in it), and hers to gratify her (in which I am just a hapless participant).
In sum: shared sexual pleasure between a couple is just dandy, because it’s part of what humans were made for. But it isn’t lust–that assumes that the sexual experience is there for one person only.
I have to agree that when they refer to the SDS, they mean the extremes of these acts. Being angry is one thing, but allowing it to take over my life becomes a sin.
Basically, just about anything in excess is probably not good.
Who cares what list lust belongs to? It’s a man-made construction, if you wanted to create another list of evil and good human traits then it would be just as valid as the catholic doctrine of seven deadly sins, which is a human concoction not found in the bible.
Firstly, it’s not so much a specifically “Catholic Doctrine” as a philosophical theory of various ancient Christian writers, that eventually got passed down to the various Christian traditions.
It is really more of a rhetorical Figure of Speech, that gets somewhat distorted by its rendering into Modern English as “Seven Deadly Sins”. The correct Latin phrase refers to “CAPITAL”, not “deadly”, where the word “capital” is NOT necessarily a reference to death (“capital punishment”) but to being “at the head” (capital city, capital ship) – as these were the Passions or Vices that can go to your head and take over your life and then lead you to wallow in sinfulness(*). They were meant to contrast with the “Capital Virtues” that were supposed to rule a Christian’s life. The numbering as “seven” is very likely to derive from pre-Christian mystical numerology.
(*Sect. 1876 of the RCC Catechism states “The repetition of sin – even venial – engenders vices, among which are the ‘capital sins’.”, i.e. the 7 Capitals become capital if you make a habit of them.)
Another problem we have also is the use of the term “Lust” which, as the English language evolves, comes to mean just plain desire or passion (and I just checked and alas, the English version of the RCC Catechism falls into just that trap). A more “classic” reference to that particular Capital Vice consistent of a morally disordered desire for selfish, uncaring carnal pleasures, was “lechery”. This happens to others – the CV that consists of being full of yourself and considering you are the Center of the Universe is probably closer to hubris than to that which English colloquially calls “pride”; “sloth” is also called “acedia” and refers to moral shiftlesness and shirking of doing what is right and good, not just sleeping 'til 2pm on Sunday; “envy” is more than mere jealousy, it involves resenting the other’s success and seeking his diminishment – the commandment is “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s ox”, not “thou shall not wish you had an ox like thy neighbor’s”. Y así por el estilo…
Also, I can recall Socrates’s ideas of virtue. He said, IIRC, that all things must be in moderation.
Between brashness and cowardice is bravery. Between greed for power and lethargy is healthy ambition. Between asceticism and hedonism is moderation. Between dogmatism and guillibility is reasoned conviction. And so on.
