To Be from Another: Nature, Sexual Difference, and the Gift of Existence

Abstract

This essay explores the relationship between nature, being, and sexual difference and argues that adequate understandings of each rise and fall with each other. The case is advanced that human sexual difference must be understood in terms of a union of modally distinct persons whose union neither destroys nor diminishes their alterity but rather augments it. Human sexual union is thus seen as like the intellectual union of knower of known. The unique and generative distinction that constitutes sexual difference provides a window through which one might look more deeply into nature as constituted of the fruitful union of essence and the Origin of all essence. Hence, the meaning of human sexual difference is found to be bound with the right understanding of nature and to open vistas that reveal the nature of being itself.