Definitely words to think on. Thank you for your critical review!!

Genius. Just sent the link to my daughter, a Sophomore at Mt Holyoke. Well done.

I feel the absolute tone of the Kant quoted here is founded in his own and that of his times sexual puritanism. Are we, as this tone suggests, really unable to make the round trip to the constricted realm of sexual objectification and back to appreciation of the entire being? Must we even lose the broader perspective at all? In which ways are love and lust incompatible? Once sexual lust has disabled "...all motives of moral relationships..." what then, are we stuck? Does it disable all of them? Is their a specific degree or kind of lust required for this to happen? Do all sexual thoughts, no matter how small and passing, seize up our moral machinery?

Or is it an insisted upon division between the sexual and the moral, between sexual temptation and an assumed moral path from which we are able to be tempted, that makes us only think that this is what will happen? 'Lust makes me do it' is what Kant seems to imply here, 'and therefore I myself am not at fault'.

Perhaps the onus isn't on the particular desire, be it sexual, or, for example, for a loved ones happiness, but on the capacity for maintaining responsibility to the "...motives of moral relationship..." regardless of our desires.

Iphgenia,

I'm sorry, I left out how much I enjoyed reading your thoughts and thinking of such things. Thank you.