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Philosophers Have Avoided Sex
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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It is a strange and puzzling fact that philosophers have acted almost as though man were not sexual.
It's as though sex had no significance for human thought, or as though it made no difference that the thinker was also a sexual creature.
This philosophical blind spot has been remarked from time to time by one solitary observer or other. In the last century the German sociologist Georg Simmel noticed that the discussions in Plato's Phaedrus and the Symposium and “the very one-sided reflections of Schopenhauer,” apart from occasional individual comments, “are all that the great thinkers have contributed to this problem.” As Erwin Reisner sees it, philosophy has paid strikingly little attention to this phenomenon so absorbing to the poets. “Indeed, one can almost say, it has industriously ignored and skirted the subject, exactly so, as if it had to fear that it might be corrupted by the notion...”
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- Copyright © 1970 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 "Fragment über die Liebe," Logos, X, 1, p. 18.
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4 Genealogy of Morals (translation by Kaufmann and Hollingdale) "What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?," paragraph 7.
5 See Hamann's Essay of a Sibyl on Marriage (1775) and Skirts of Fig Leaves (1777).
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8 London, 1763.
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13 Jowett translation.
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16 ST, 2/2, 154, 1c and ST 1/2, 94, 3.
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19 Commentary on I Cor. 7, Lectio 1.
20 ST, 2/2, 153, 2.
21 ST, 2/2, 153, 2-3.
22 ST, 2/2, 151, 1.
23 ST, 2/2, 152, 1c.
24 ST, 2/2, 152, 5c.
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