I had the opportunity to offer a response to Maria Fedoryka’s “The Intimate Structure of Sex and Its Meaning” at the American Catholic Philosophical Association Conference on November 16, 2024.

My title was “Centrality of Sexuality: A Beginning to Metaphysics.” Here is an excerpt from my talk:

“In a rather provocative statement, Merleau-Ponty argues that our sexuality is a starting place for metaphysics: “Metaphysics — the emergence of a beyond nature — is not localized on the level of knowledge; it begins with the opening to an ‘other,’ it is everywhere and already contained within the distinctive development of sexuality.”^[1] Sexual desires, as Merleau-Ponty points out, although rooted in our body, are for more than physical gratification, but for closeness and intimacy with an other (a “union” as Fedoryka calls it). This opening up to something beyond ourselves is the work of metaphysics; it is a drawing us and pulling us to the truth of being which is the source for all meaning of human life. All of metaphysics is always done as bodily creatures; we can never take a break from our bodies to contemplate the questions of existence and yet, as bodily creatures, in doing metaphysics, we are constantly drawn to higher things. Sexual desires illustrate this unlike anything else: they are firmly embedded in our bodily desires and yet include a longing to be caught up in something bigger than ourselves. Merleau-Ponty writes, “There is no explanation of sexuality that reduces it to something other than itself; it already is, so to speak, our entire being.”^[2] The centrality of sexuality reveals how humans have an openness to transcendence which permeates all of our being.” 

^[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A Landes (Routledge, 2012), 171.

^[2] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 174.