Simon Blackburn: “Love receives the world's applause. Lust is furtive, ashamed, embarrassed. Love pursues the good of the other with self-control, reason and patience. Lust pursues its own gratification, headlong, impatient of any control, immune to reason. Love thrives on candlelight and conversation. Lust is equally happy in a doorway or in a taxi, and its conversation is made of animal grunts and cries. Love is individual: there is only the unique Other. Lust takes what comes. Lovers gaze into each other's eyes. Lust looks sideways, inventing deceits, stratagems and seductions, sizing up opportunities. Love grows with knowledge and time, courtship, truth and trust. Lust is a trail of clothing in the hallway, the collision of two football packs. Love lasts, lust cloys.”
Blackburn has, in that essay, what he believes to be a philosophical justification for lust: “excessive desire is bad because it is excessive, not because it is desire.” There are some clever turns of phrase in the piece, but he does make some interesting points, e.g. that one of the complaints the church has about lust is that the blood required for praying goes from the brain to other parts of the body and that Western culture is sexualized partly because of the shame still associated with sex.
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