No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
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...”
1 "Fragment über die Liebe," Logos, X, 1, p. 18.
2 Vom Ursinn der Geschlechter (Berlin, Lettner-Verlag, 2nd edition, 1956), p. 10.
3 Aspects of Love in Western Society (London, Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 68.
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).
6 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (ed. James Strachey; London, Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1957), pp. 90-91.
7 Phenomenology of Perception (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, reprinted 1966), pp. 168-169.
8 London, 1763.
9 Love Declared: Essays on the Myths of Love (New York, Pantheon Books, 1963; translation by Richard Howard of Comme Toi-Même, Editions Albin Michel, 1961), p. 22.
10 Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, The Sexually Responsive Woman (New York, Grove Press, 1964), pp. 84-85.
11 Irving Singer, The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther (New York, Random House, 1966), pp. 76.
12 The Nature of Love, p. 76.
13 Jowett translation.
14 Quoted in Civilization and Its Discontents (translated by James Strachey; New York, W. W. Norton, 1962), p. 53, n. 3.
15 Summa Theologica, 1/2, 94, 2c.
16 ST, 2/2, 154, 1c and ST 1/2, 94, 3.
17 ST, 2/2, 154, 11c.
18 Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, 122.
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.
25 The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (New York, Basic Books, 1964, reprinted 1966), p. 31.
26 Mahabharata, Anusasana parvan, 14. 211-232.
27 La Nouvelle Justine, ou les Malheurs de la vertu, chapter 11, "Histoire de Jerome" (Œuvres complètes du Marquis de Sade, Paris, Au Circle du livre précieux, 1963, tome VII, p. 47).
28 The World as Will and Representation (translated by E. F. J. Payne; The Falcon's Wing Press, 1958), Vol. II, "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love," pp. 531-567.
29 Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (Princeton, Van Nostrand, 1958).
30 Psychoanalysis and Religious Mysticism (Wallingford, Pa., Pendle Hill, 1959).
31 See Civilization and Its Discontents.
32 Standard Edition, Vol. 17, pp. 143-144.
33 Franz X. von Baader (1765-1841). See Sätze aus der erotischen Philosophie und andere Schriften (Frankfurt, Insel, 1966) and Über Liebe, Ehe und Kunst, aus den Schriften, Briefen und Tagebüchern (Munich, Kösel, 1953).