On Desire

I am writing (or so I sometimes claim) a novel based on John Cleland’s ‘Fanny Hill’ which set the eighteenth century standard for pornography. (They knew it when they saw it.)

Like Cleland’s book, mine will deal with desire and its comic consequences, but as I have long forgotten what little I ever knew about desire, I thought I’d better review the literature, beginning with Cleland’s approximate contemporary, Jeremy Bentham, and his famous ‘calculus of pleasure’.

Although our acquaintance was brief (a survey course in philosophy fifty years ago) I have always liked Bentham. I lump him with the Enlightenment thinkers, well past Locke, but not yet to J. S. Mill (whom we never reached.) Bentham was as far as we got before the course ran out of time and steam, and so he became, for me, the ultimate British philosopher.

Bentham's philosophy was grounded in psychology. He thought it was ‘human nature’ to seek pleasure and avoid pain. From this premise, he proceeded (by way of arguments I have long since forgotten) to the conclusion, that society should seek the greatest good for the greatest number.

Well, that seems fair enough, liberal, sensible, and sort of middle class. Still, Bentham could be as odd as anybody. He left his body to be dissected in an anatomy class (OK so far) but required that the leftovers be reassembled and preserved. His mummy ended up at University College London where (dressed in his own clothes and sitting in a glass cabinet) he presides over its Board of Regents, no doubt reminding them to make ‘rational choices’, calculated to produce ‘the greatest good for the greatest number.’

In Bentham’s day, and for long after his death, 'free will' wasn’t a theory, much less a joke. It was an ingrained assumption, an entirely different sort of psychology than we imagine today. Intent was thought to be an important part of every act.

Freud was not yet born—and his diabolical invention, ‘the subconscious’, was as yet undreamt of—at least by proper Englishmen. Years of simple-hearted goodness and moderation remained to mankind—decades in which subscribers to Bentham’s thinking could enjoy a reasonable degree of pleasure and avoid a ton of pain.

Baron de Sade, another approximate contemporary of Cleland, was almost certainly unknown to Bentham who was far too British to grasp the notion that pain could be fun. Bentham could hardly have factored Sade into his calculus of pleasure.

I Googled ‘Bentham+Freud’ to see what the solemn Austrian might have thought about a fellow who had his body converted into an ‘auto-icon’.

No luck. Instead, I unearthed an article by the late Andrew S. Watson, M.D.

It brought back memories. Watson was a brilliant psychiatrist, who worked at the intersection of criminal law and psychiatry—the flash point of free will and determinism. I had him for a class in the early 60’s. Like all law students, my classmates and I wanted to ‘get the answer’ and move on—especially in ‘Crim’ where nobody intended to practice anyway.

His teaching method consisted of disruptive challenges to our inside-the-box thinking. On the first day of class Watson announced that anybody who needed to know criminal law could look it up. Instead, he meant to teach us How to Think About Criminal Law. (Gaack! Who wanted to think? Especially about Crim Law?)

The text for the class was a massive tome called ‘Donnelly, Goldstein and Schwartz’, a casebook that followed a paedophile through the justice system, from arrest to prison to parole, with detailed excerpts from the legal filings, judicial rulings, witness statements, briefs, etc.

Now it happened that the gentleman in question was arrested and tried in the same county where I grew up. I had never heard of him as his arrest occurred after I left for college and the army. It was rather startling, on first opening D, G & S, to find this alleged ‘monster’ capably defended by my grandmother’s lawyer, and to find my high school principal testifying as a character witness for the accused.

Fifty years ago, beginning law students were 99% white, 98% male, and totally committed to conventional values and un-nuanced judgments. Watson meant to shake us up, and he succeeded... in a way. We hated the course, and even more did we hate the prospect of having to discuss the case in a classroom full of equally inhibited peers.

We lived in abject fear of being called upon, and the agony was in no way reduced by his inquiry one Monday morning, ‘How were your climaxes this weekend?’ Talk about ‘deathly silence’... my heart still goes out to the lone female in that sea of balked testosterone, an attractive girl with the nervous habit of biting a strand of her hair.  

Alas, Bentham’s calculus of rational choice is obsolete. And so, too, is Cleland’s heroine, wending her (more or less) merry way through a series of bad choices to a happy conclusion.

If anything, we assume the opposite, that people are helpless pawns in the grip of subconscious urges running from ‘nasty’ to ‘appalling’. Nothing is likely to end well, but of course, everyone is more to be pitied than blamed.

It’s progress of a sort... I guess... or at least, it’s different.

But where do we go to find out about desire?