“What is sex for?”

That’s a question David Halperin asks in a provocative essay of the same name. Sex, we reason, must always have a why. Such reasoning isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, to be human means to be curious, intellectually and emotionally. Experiencing sex and theorising about what it could mean seems very natural for animals that spend much of our time engaging in higher-level criticism.

Biologically, there is one an obvious why to human sex. We have sex because it fulfills biological drives, including the necessary drives to procreate and bond. In fact, these are the two whys that have passed down to us in the Western tradition, both of which are organised around a telos, or end goal.

As I wrote in a previous article, it was the stoics who, attempting to curb self-indulgence, tried to fit sex into a scheme of meaning: indulging in the pleasure of sex was alright as long as it was for the purposes of making babies. This ethic worked its way into the Christian tradition, famously through Augustine, and continues to wield enormous influence in the West. According to this framework, sex is ethical when it is practised primarily for procreation. (To clarify, though this is presented as a Christian ethic, its origins lie elsewhere. In fact, the biblical book Song of Solomon celebrates wild, passionate, erotic sex on its own terms, between two lovers – not between a husband and wife, as later Christian commentators wrongly interpreted the poem.)

The other important why for sex comes from Aristotle, as Halperin points out. In Prior Analytics from the 4th Century BCE, the Greek philosopher offers the following syllogism:

“To be loved, then, is preferable to intercourse, according to the nature of erotic desire. Erotic desire, then, is more a desire for love than for intercourse. If it is most of all for that, that is also its end. Either intercourse, then, is not an end at all or it is for the sake of being loved.”

For Aristotle, as Halperin explains, “Love is the telos of erotic desire. It is not love that aims at sex as its goal… It is sex that aims at love.” The real reason we have sex, according to Aristotle’s proof, is not because we want to have sex, but because we want to love and be loved. Sex is not about something, but about something else, something higher, something nobler.

Like many people, Aristotle takes it for granted that sex and love go hand in hand – but he never seeks to demonstrate the soundness of this assumption. What he does demonstrate, however, at least as Halperin reads him, is that “sex is not the final aim of erotic desire”. And if that’s the case, then Halperin thinks the most interesting question to ask isn’t about the relationship between sex and love but the surprising relationship between sex and erotic desire. If Aristotle is correct, then sex has no erotic purpose – its real aim lies elsewhere. In short, sex isn’t actually about sex.