In this extract from Roger Scruton’s Book, Sexual Desire (1986) the author argues that Plato has left us with a n unhelpful dualism between the animal and the rational which still infects our discussions of sexual desire. To gain the summits of love, however, Plato argues we need to strip away the erotic and the passionate and find Platonic love – love without desire. For Scruton, sexual desire should be located in the rational pat of our natures, and can only find its ultimate fulfilment in commitment and intimacy of a heterosexual kind.

Perhaps the most famous of those thinkers was Plato, who introduced (in his own terms)
a distinction that has caused considerable confusion in subsequent debate: the distinction
between erotic love and sexual desire. Plato is the intellectual ancestor of a view which
persists to this day and which conditions much of our moral thinking. According to this
view, our animal nature is the principal vehicle of sexual desire, and provides its
overriding motive. In desire we act and feel as animals; indeed, desire is a motive which
all sexual beings — including the majority of animals — share. In erotic love, however, it
is our nature as rational beings that is primarily engaged, and, in the exercise of this
passion, altogether finer and more durable impulses seek recognition and fulfilment.

To Plato, it seemed that the two impulses are so radically opposed that they could not
happily coexist in a single consciousness. Hence, in order to permit the full flowering of
erotic love, it is necessary to refine away, and eventually to discard, the element of desire.
The resulting love — ‘Platonic’ love — would be both intrinsically rational and morally
pure. This pure love has, for Plato, a distinctive value, comparable to the value of
philosophy itself. It provides a link with transcendent reality, a stage on the way to
spiritual fulfilment and emancipation, which occurs only with the final release of the soul
into that world of Ideas from which it descended and in which it has its eternal home. The
subject of the erotic thus acquired, for Plato, a seriousness, and a pathos, rarely expressed
in the writings of later philosophers. So seriously, indeed, did he regard it that he could
permit his characters to discuss it fully only when drunk, in a dialogue which is rightly
regarded as one of the great literary achievements of antiquity.

Remnants of the Platonic view can be found in many subsequent thinkers – in the neoPlatonists,
in St Augustine, in Aquinas and in the Roman philosopher-poet Boethius,
whose philosophy of love was to have such a profound effect on the literature of
medieval Europe and in particular on Chaucer, the Troubadours, Cavalcanti, Boccaccio
and Dante.

It survives in the popular idea — itself founded in the most dubious of
metaphysical distinctions – that sexual desire is primarily ‘physical’, while love always
has a ‘spiritual’ side. It survives, too, in the theory of Kant, despite the enormous moral
and emotional distance that separates Kant from Plato, and despite Kant’s remorseless
pessimism about the erotic life of mankind. It is one major purpose of this work to
combat the Platonic theory. I shall argue, not against the distinction between the animal
and the rational (indeed, I shall uphold that distinction as crucial to the understanding of
our condition), but against the moral and philosophical impulse that leads us to assign
sexual desire to the animal part of human nature.