More on the Imagination and Sexuality

AVI posted a piece yesterday that references a discussion we had here a couple of weeks ago. The issue, which we are discussing in terms of the new digital 'reality' that the young occupy, is that sex that is disembodied becomes alienating. 

Today, while trying to find an old discussion of Open Range that I wrote years ago, I came across a very similar problem in Hegel's work from the 19th century.

The claim begins in paragraph 448, on the mental faculty of attention. The issue of attention is that you are free to give it, or not; and therefore, if you are to have a passion, it is because you have chosen to give it your attention.

But what is the thing to which you are giving your attention? It is an idea: and, therefore, it is your idea. After all, it exists in your mind, and the thoughts you have are your own. He offers an example:

Thus we know, for example, that if anyone is able to form a clear picture to himself, say in a poem, of the feelings of joy or sorrow that are overwhelming him he rids himself of the thing that was oppressing his mind and thereby procures for himself relief or complete freedom. For although by contemplating the many aspects of his feelings he seems to increase their power over him, yet he does in fact dimnish this power by making his feelings into something confronting him, something that becomes external to him. Goethe, for instance, particularly in his Werther, brougth himself relief while subjecting the readers of this this romance to the power of feeling.

The book he mentions, The Sorrows of Young Werther, sparked a wave of suicides across Europe. The title character is a suicide, killing himself over losing his love.

Why was his love worth dying over, though? She was an idea -- that is to say, she was not just a girl, with all the problems any individual girl might have. She was an ideal girl: it was his mind which had made her an ideal that was worth dying over.

We remember here our discussion around Chaucer's A Knight's Tale, and the objection raised by female readers that the young knights didn't know -- and therefore could not love -- the lady at all. Hegel seems entirely subject to that line of attack.

Here we have exactly the problem that the digital youth are running into, yet in an embodied reality that ought to prevent it. The problem is that they leave the realm of the physical -- where sex is straightforward -- for the imaginary. Being free of the digital world, their imagination is at least tied to their idea of a being they first encountered as a physical being. In chasing after their own idea rather than the actual girl, though, they lose both the girl and their will to live. Apparently this was common enough to have sparked 'a wave of suicides across Europe' when the works of imagination were novels rather than digital pornography. 

At the time I wrote the discussion of Hegel I was still trying to decide if he was on to something, as the ideal gives us aspiration. I am now ready to pronounce upon that. The ideal can point the way to perfection only in the way that art can perfect nature (as Aristotle says). It must begin with what is given by nature, and only seek to perfect what nature has not made perfect. 

Hegel's concept is that the physical and the ideal only appear to be different, and in fact all physical things will turn out to be ideas in a higher mind to which we are striving to return -- God, in a word. Even if you are inclined to that model, the nature of the physical things should still be prioritized as already extant in the higher mind, whereas your own imaginations are still the work of your still-lower mind.

Yet even that kind of perfecting is highly problematic when the object of the imagination is someone else and not yourself. You might look at yourself and draft ideas for more perfectly achieving the highest expression of your nature; that is virtue. You might have similar ideas about how someone else could more perfectly achieve their nature: that may not be virtuous, but domineering. A parent might rightly try to help their child in places, but even there a child who does better by being pushed is not necessarily developing the internal drive to perfect themselves. A girl who does not quite live up to your ideal of love and beauty may not really be any of your business at all, and is certainly not obligated to try to attain your ideal for her (which she cannot even access, since it is only in your imagination and she has no access to that). 

It seems like this philosophical error has led to a lot of human misery over the centuries. The digital has made it worse by making the idealized/imaginary seem more real and more immediate, and by removing the helpful influence of natural things like pheromones and embodied reality. For Hegel, this should have been an improvement, another step towards the realization that the ideal is actually real. Waves of suicides -- then and now -- strongly suggest that it is not. You cannot think your way to God. You cannot even think your way to love.