An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy

by Scruton, Roger

  If it is so difficult now to see the point of that morality, it is in part because human sexual conduct has been redescribed by the pseudo-science of sexology, and as a result not only robbed of its interpersonal intentionality, but also profoundly demoralized. In redescribing the human world in this way, we also change it. We introduce new forms of sexual feeling - shaped by the desire for an all-comprehending permission. The sexual sacrament gives way to a sexual market; and the result is a fetishism of the sexual commodity. Richard Posner, for example, in his worthless but influential book entitled Sex and Reason (but which should have been called Sex and Instrumental Reason), opens his first chapter with the following sentence: There is sexual behaviour, having to do mainly with excitation of the sexual organs.‘ In reality, of course, sexual behaviour has to do with courtship, desire, love, jealousy, marriage, grief, joy and intrigue. Such excitement as occurs is excitement of the whole person. As for the sexual organs, they can be as ‘excited’ (if that is the word) by a bus journey as by the object of desire. Nevertheless, Posner’s description of desire is necessary, if he is to fulfil his aim of deriving a morality of sexual conduct from the analysis of cost and benefit (which, apparently, is what is meant by ‘reason’). So what are the ‘costs’ of sexual gratification?

  One is the cost of search. It is zero for masturbation, considered as a solitary activity, which is why it is the cheapest of practices. (The qualification is important: ‘mutual masturbation’, heterosexual or homosexual, is a form of nonvaginal intercourse, and its search costs are positive.)

  Posner proceeds to consider hypothetical cases: for example, the case where a man sets a ‘value’ of ‘twenty’ on ‘sex’ with a ‘woman of average attractiveness‘, and a ‘value’ of ‘two’ on ‘sex’ with a ‘male substitute’. If you adopt such language, then you have made woman (and man too) into a sex object and sex into a commodity. You have redescribed the human world as a world of things; you have abolished the sacred, the prohibited and the protected, and presented sex as a relation between aliens: ‘Th’expence of spirit in a waste of shame’, in Shakespeare’s famous words. Posner’s language is opaque to what is wanted in sexual desire; it reduces the other person to an instrument of pleasure, a means of obtaining something that could have been provided equally by another person, by an animal, by a rubber doll or a piece of Kleenex.

  Well, you might say, why not, if people are happier that way? In whose interest is it, to retain the old form of desire, with its individualizing intentionality, its hopeless yearnings, its furies and jealousies, its lifelong commitments and lifelong griefs?

  Modern philosophers shy away from such questions, although they were much discussed in the ancient world. Rather than consider the long-term happiness and fulfilment of the individual, the modern philosopher tends to reduce the problem of sexual morality to one of rights - do we have a right to engage in, or to forbid, this or that sexual practice? From such a question liberal conclusions follow as a matter of course; but it is a question that leaves the ground of sexual morality unexplored. This ground is not to be discovered in the calculus of rights and duties, but in the theory of virtue. What matters in sexual morality is the distinction between virtuous and vicious dispositions. I have already touched on this distinction in the last chapter, when considering the basis of our moral thinking. I there emphasized the role of virtue in creating the foundations of moral order. But it is also necessary, if we are to give objective grounds for the pursuit of virtue, to show how the happiness and fulfilment of the person are furthered by virtue and jeopardized by vice. This, roughly speaking, is the task that Aristotle set himself in the Nicomachean Ethics, in which he tried to show that the deep questions of morality concern the education of the moral being, rather than the rules governing his adult conduct. Virtue belongs to character, rather than to the rules of social dialogue, and arises through an extended process of moral development. The virtuous person is disposed to choose those courses of action which contribute to his flourishing — his flourishing, not just as an animal, but as a rational being or person, as that which he essentially is. In educating a child I am educating his habits, and it is therefore clear that I shall always have a reason to inculcate virtuous habits, not only for my sake, but also for his own.

  At the same time, we should not think of virtue as a means only. The virtuous person is the one who has the right choice of ends. Virtue is the disposition to want, and therefore to choose, certain things for their own sakes, despite the warring tendency of appetite. Courage, for example, is the disposition to choose the honourable course of action, in face of danger. It is the disposition to overcome fear, for the sake of that judged to be right. All rational beings have an interest in acquiring courage, since without it they can achieve what they really want only by luck, and only in the absence of adversity. Sexual virtue is similar: the disposition to choose the course of action judged to be right, despite temptation. Education should be directed towards the special kind of temperance which shows itself, sometimes as chastity, sometimes as fidelity, sometimes as passionate desire, according to the ‘right judgement’ of the subject. The virtuous person desires the person whom he may also love, who can and will return his desire, and to whom he may commit himself. In the consummation of such a desire there is neither shame nor humiliation, and the ‘nuptuality’ of the erotic impulse finds the space that it needs in order to flourish.

  The most important feature of traditional sexual education is summarized in anthropological language as the ‘ethic of pollution and taboo’. The child was taught to regard his body as sacred, and as subject to pollution by misperception or misuse. The sense of pollution is by no means a trivial side-effect of the ‘bad sexual encounter’: it may involve a penetrating disgust, at oneself, one’s body, one’s situation, such as is experienced by the victim of rape. Those sentiments express the tension contained within our experience of embodiment. At any moment we can become ‘mere body’, the self driven from its incarnation, and its habitation ransacked. The most important root idea of sexual morality is that I am in my body, not as a ‘ghost in the machine’, but as an incarnate self. My body is identical with me: subject and object are merely two aspects of a single thing, and sexual purity is the guarantee of this. Sexual virtue does not forbid desire: it simply ensures the status of desire as an interpersonal feeling. The child who learns ‘dirty habits’ detaches his sex from himself, sets it outside himself as something curious and alien in the world of objects. His fascinated enslavement to the body is also a withering of desire, a scattering of erotic energy and a loss of union with the other. Sexual virtue sustains the subject of desire, making him present as a self in the very act which overcomes him.

  Traditional sexual education also involved a sustained war against fantasy. Fantasy plays an important part in our sexual doings, and even the most passionate and faithful lover may, in the act of love, rehearse to himself other scenes of sexual abandon than the one in which he is engaged. Nevertheless, there is truth in the Freudian contrast between fantasy and reality, and in the belief that the first is in some way destructive of the second. Fantasy replaces the real, resistant, objective world with a pliant substitute - and that, indeed, is its purpose. Life in the actual world is difficult and embarrassing. Most of all it is difficult and embarrassing in our confrontation with other people who, by their very existence as subjects, rearrange things in defiance of our will. It requires a great force, such as the force of sexual desire, to overcome the self-protection that shields us from intimate encounters. It is tempting to take refuge in substitutes, which neither embarrass us nor resist the impulse of our spontaneous cravings. The habit grows of creating a compliant world of desire, in which unreal objects become the focus of real emotions, and the emotions themselves are rendered incompetent to participate in the building of personal relations. The fantasy blocks the passage to reality, which becomes inaccessible to the will. In this process the fantasy Other, since he is entirely the instrument
of my will, becomes an object for me, one among many substitutes defined purely in terms of a sexual use. The sexual world of the fantasist is a world without subjects, in which others appear as objects only. And should the fantasy take possession of him so far as to require that another person submit to it, the result is invariably indecent, tending to rape. The words that I quoted from Richard Posner are indecent in just the way that one must expect, when people no longer see the object of desire as a subject, wanted as such.

  Sexual morality returns us, then, to the great conundrum around which these chapters have revolved: the conundrum of the subject, and his relation to the world of space and time. Can we go further along the road to the unsayable? And if so, by what means of transport?

  11

  MUSIC

  Rilke hints at an answer to our question. ‘Being,’ he wrote in Sonnets to Orpheus, ‘is still enchanted for us’:Words still go softly out towards the unsayable. And music, always new, from palpitating stones Builds in useless space its godly home.

  What exactly is music, and why do we locate it in a space - however useless - of its own?

  Music is, or resides in, sound. But that is not a helpful thing to say, if we do not know what sound is. It is tempting to divide the world into things (tables, chairs, animals, people) and their properties. But sounds don’t fit into either category. Sounds are not properties of the objects that emit them: they do not inhere in objects, as colours, shapes and sizes do. But nor are they things. Sounds, unlike things, occur; they do not fill physical space in the way that things do, nor do they have boundaries. A sound occurs only if it is produced in some way, and it ceases when the mode of production ceases. In a nutshell, sounds are not things or properties, but events, standing in relations of cause and effect to other events.

  However, they are events of a peculiar kind. In most other cases we identify events by observing the changes in things. A car crash is an event, in which a car changes in respect of its properties and position We understand the event, by understanding the change In the case of sound, however, nothing changes. The sound occurs - but it is not a property of anything. It is self-sufficient, and we may hear it while having no knowledge of its cause. It is, so to speak, an event in which no thing participates — a ‘pure event’. This is a very odd kind of entity, for a variety of reasons. Suppose you observe a car crash, and I ask you, ‘How many events are you witnessing?’ You would probably be stuck for a reply. The crash is one event, if you mean to refer merely to the change in the car: but there is much more that happens - to the people inside, to the road, to the wheels of the car, the headlights; you could go on forever. There are as many events as there are changes in things. But you don’t have to count them. Events do not exist over and above the changes in things, and the only items in the world that you need to identify in order to refer to events are the things in which they occur.

  In the case of sounds, however, we have no such easy way of answering the question ‘How many?’ When a violin and a flute sound in unison, it is arbitrary whether we say there is one sound or two: we have only the vaguest concept of the ‘individual’ sound, and seem to get by without settling questions of identity and difference. But sounds are objective: they are part of reality, and not to be confused with the auditory experiences through which we perceive them. Imagine that you enter a room and hear the first bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. You leave the room and return a minute later to hear the start of the development section. Would it not be natural to conclude that the symphony had been sounding in your absence — that the sounds of the work had persisted unheard in the room where first you encountered them? In other words, is it not natural to distinguish the sound — which really exists out there - from the experience of hearing it, which exists only in me?

  Not all sounds are music. There are noises, shouts, words and murmurings which, while they may occur in music, are not in themselves music. When does sound become music? Pitch is not the decisive factor: there are pitched sounds which are not music (sirens, peals of bells, tonic languages), and music which involves no pitched sounds (African drum music, for example). Nor is rhythm the decisive factor, if you mean by rhythm the regularity of a sound-pattern: for this is a feature of all normal machines. Nor is harmony decisive: whenever I switch on this computer it emits an A minor chord, with added seventh and ninth, which is about as far from music as anything that occurs in my study.

  The question is best approached by asking another: what is it to hear a sound as music? Sounds heard as music are heard in a special kind of relation to one another. They appear within a musical ‘field of force’. The transformation is comparable to that which occurs when we hear a sound as a word. The word ‘bang’ consists of a sound. This sound could occur in nature, yet not have the character of a word. What makes it the word that it is, is the grammar of a language, which mobilizes the sound and transforms it into a word with a specified role: it designates a sound or an action in English, an emotion in German. When hearing this sound as a word, I hear the ‘field of force’ supplied by grammar. Likewise, to hear a sound as music is not merely to hear it, but also to order it, in a certain kind of relation to other actual and possible sounds. A sound, ordered in this way, becomes a ‘tone’.

  When we hear tones we hear their musical implications in something like the way we hear the grammatical implications of words in a language. Of course, we probably don’t know the theory of musical organization, and cannot say in words what is going on when the notes of a Haydn quartet sound so right and logical. We have only tacit knowledge of the musical grammar (if grammar is the word for it), just as we have a tacit knowledge of the grammar of English. Our knowledge of the principles of musical organization is expressed not in theories but in acts of recognition.

  Tones in music are heard in a space of their own. They do not mingle with the sounds of the world around them, although they may be drowned by them. Music exists in its own world, and is lifted free from the world of objects. Nor do we hear tones in music as belonging to the causal order. The middle C that we hear does not strike us as the effect of someone blowing on a clarinet; rather it is a response to the B that preceded it, and calls in turn for the E that follows. When Brahms hands the second theme of the last movement of the B-flat piano concerto from orchestra to piano and back again, we hear a single melody jump electrically across these poles. Each note follows in sequence as though indifferent to the world of physical causes, and as though responding only to its predecessor and to the force that it inherits from the musical line. There is a ‘virtual causality’ that generates tone from tone in the musical line, even when the tones themselves are produced by quite different physical means. The physical world here sinks away into the background.

  The virtual causality of the melodic line operates in a virtual space. The pitch spectrum for us has a ‘high’ and a ‘low’. Music rises and falls in a one-dimensional space, and we have a clear impression both of the rapidity of the music, and of the distance through which it passes. Pitches define locations, and intervals measure distances. Chords can be filled, hollow, stretched, packed, or dense: and these spatial descriptions capture what we hear, when we hear the chords as music.

  As soon as you examine the matter with a philosophical eye, however, you will see that those spatial descriptions are deeply mysterious. Suppose a melody begins with the clarinet playing middle C, and moves upward to E on the trumpet. You hear a movement through musical space, and also a change of timbre. But what exactly moves? Obviously C does not move to E, since C is always and essentially the pitch which it is. Nor does the clarinet ‘move’ to the trumpet. Besides, in the musical experience, ‘clarinet’ is the description of a colour, not a cause. The more you look at it, the harder it is to find anything in the musical space that actually moves: the melody itself does not move, being a sequence of discrete pitches, each of which is fixed forever at the ‘place’ where it is heard. The ‘useless space’ of Rilke’s sonnet is indeed u
seless, for it is not a space at all, but only the appearance of a space.

  Nevertheless, we hear it as a space, and the experience of movement is ineliminable. Moreover it is a space which is very like a one-dimensional physical space in other ways. We have already seen that there is a virtual causality which operates between events in this space: the tones of a melody are responses to the tones which precede them, and causes of the tones to come. It is also a space through which forces exert themselves: gravitational and magnetic forces, which bend tones in different directions and with different strengths. When music cadences from a dominant seventh onto the tonic, with the seventh leading, the dominant in the bass pulls the seventh down onto the third of the tonic. At the beginning of the Rite of Spring, after the bassoon has played in A minor for a bar, the horn enters on C-sharp, and you hear the melody push this C-sharp away from it and out of the musical line. The bassoon has established a field of force, which is exerting itself against the intruder. Tones become lighter and easier to carry as they rise, while those in the bass are heavy and, when filled with close harmony, painful to lift - so that cellos, bassoons and basses, at the end of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, collapse under the burden, and the music breaks and dies. Melodies sink and soar, they push against barriers and enter into places of rest and repose. Music is activity and gesture, and as we listen we move along with it, with no consciousness that the forces and fields against which we exert ourselves are not present in the music too.

  How is this ‘useless space’ organized? It is normal to suggest that the crucial components in musical organization, apart from pitch, are three: rhythm, melody and harmony. But how are these defined? When you hear a rhythm, what exactly do you hear? If sounds occur in a regular sequence, you may hear them as organised rhythmically - but you may equally not do so (as when overhearing the clicking of the wheels of a railway carriage). And sounds arranged irregularly might be immensely rhythmical, like the last movement of the Rite of Spring. It seems that, when we hear a rhythm, we group the sounds into measures, and again into beats within each measure, in such a way as to allow stresses and accents to ride on the surface of a wave. This wave is not there, in the sounds - for they could be grouped in countless contrasting ways. But it is there in the way that we hear the sounds, imbuing them in our perception with a force that ties them together, and induces a constantly fluctuating force.