YNOT EUROPE – Contemporary Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton has set his considerable brain power and formidable pen to defining new paradigms for love, happiness and religion.

Next, he intends to take on pornography. De Botton is convinced sexually explicit material needn’t be brutish, vulgar and demeaning in order to appeal. Instead, he indicated in a statement announcing his new Better Porn project, material that piques humans’ sexual interest can spring from and support man’s better nature.

“Thanks to the internet, the modern world is awash with pornography,” de Botton noted in the statement. “This pornography represents a threat not just to those who make it in terms of the exploitation involved, but also to those who consume it, in terms of the conflict it can set up between the values encoded in the porn and their responsibilities and values in the rest of their lives.”

Regardless how those words may sound, de Botton insists they are not an indictment of pornography as a medium, but rather of the crass rush to commercialize sex at its basest level. Not that there’s anything existentially wrong with that.

But mankind can do better. After all, we aren’t animals.

“We shouldn’t have to choose between being human and being sexual; the Ancient Greeks knew this very well,” de Botton said. “Ideally, porn would excite our lust in contexts which also presented other, elevated sides of human nature — in which people were being witty, for instance, or showing kindness, or working hard or being clever — so that our sexual excitement could bleed into and enhance our respect for these other elements of a good life.

“No longer would sexuality have to be lumped together with stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation,” he added. “It could instead be harnessed to what is noblest in us.”

In order to bring out such a massive change in the way pornography is considered and created, the Better Porn project will bring together pornographers and artists to investigate the ways in which porn might be reflective of man’s higher nature. A creative, humanistic approach, he feels, would allow people of all moral persuasions to embrace overt representations of sexuality in ways that don’t feel “dirty.”

In other words, pornography need not be banned; it simply needs to be rethought.

“The real problem with current pornography is that it’s so far removed from all the other concerns which a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have,” de Botton said. “As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it. Yet it is possible to conceive of a version of pornography which wouldn’t force us to make such a stark choice between sex and virtue — a pornography in which sexual desire would be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values.”

The Better Porn project will operate under the auspices of London’s The School of Life, which de Botton co-founded in 2008 as an academy that focuses on living a fulfilled life instead of learning for knowledge’s sake. De Botton said the project expects to launch a website containing more information “soon.”