This text offers a broad range of topics relating to the philosophy of sexuality. These include: morality; adultery; sex and gender differences; romantic love; gender-based speech; marriage; family and parenthood; feminism; and others.
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Yes, you can access Philosophy of Sexuality by Don Marietta, Jr. in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Politics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
A positive and constructive philosophy of sexuality is largely a product of the twentieth century. Very few philosophers said anything at all about sexuality until this century. Most of what was said only reflected commonly held notions about family life and the roles of males and females. Some philosophers looked upon sex as a necessary evil or even as an evil to be avoided as much as possible. Actual misogyny was not given voice very often, but condescension toward women was common, almost universal, and Saint Paul, Thomas Aquinas, and some other theologians came close to being contemptuous of women.
Plato made a significant contribution to the psychology of love in seeing that all love is eroticāthat is, that it grows from a need and seeks to fulfill that lack. What he thought that love was seeking, immortality and intellectual growth, is not so obviously correct. The striking thing about Platoās view of love is that he did not value love for its own sake. Love was valued as a means to something else. Sex was seen as a bodily matter, which limited its importance. Plato relegated the body to a low level of significance. It was one of the worldly objects that was subject to change and eventual destruction, which made it less important than the intelligible forms that never change and are the only things about which there can be real knowledge. He did not realize that sex is in large part mental, so sex shared the low estate of body. It was not a fit subject for philosophical contemplation. Plato plainly stated that sex was for reproduction only1 and that couples childless after ten years of marriage should be separated.2 Any pleasure taken in sex was detrimental to mental development. Plato held that the purpose of life was to tend the soul, and this was done through intellectual growth, consisting of continually turning oneās thought from sensible things to intellectual things and from particular things to general truths. Relations of love and friendship should lead to intellectual growth, not to physical enjoyment.3
Plato used the concept of an ideal republic as his image of what a just soul would be like. The important aspect of this healthy soul is that the rational part of it would rule the appetites and the ambitious part of human nature. His political image of the rational ruling part of the soul was a group of educated rulers whom he called guardians. Surprisingly, he said that very intelligent women could be educated to perform the role of guardians.4 Unfortunately, this equality of males and females was limited to an imaginary city. His proposed laws for an actual city show that Plato was no champion of womenās liberation. In the Laws, a dialogue about the best law codes for a city, Plato was not an innovator in matters of sex and family life. He advocated athletics and military training for women, but he was heeding precedents of what had been done or was being done in some cities of the Greek world. He advocated a different education for boys and girls and different work for men and women.5 It is clear that Plato considered women inferior to men.6 His suggestion of holding women and children in common was restricted by too many rules to be seen as libertinism, but the notion of womenās being possessions of the men is compatible with common customs of the time, which made women little more than chattel property.7
Aristotle considered the family a sort of government in which the man is the ruler of wife, children, and slaves. Only men have a developed deliberative faculty and the highest kinds of virtue. Women are capable of reason, but they have no need for it, and in children reason is undeveloped. Slaves are incapable of reason. Aristotle held that the husband is superior to the wife and should rule in accordance with his superior virtue. He considered marriage a sort of friendship that is for āutility and pleasureā as well as for reproduction.8 Aristotleās views on sex and the roles of man and women were made parts of Christian belief by Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages, which made these ideas influential up to the present time.
Some of the Sophists, such as Alcidemus and Antiphon, held that slavery, social distinctions, and customs that relegate women to a lower estate than that of men have no basis in nature and therefore were morally wrong. Other Sophists, such as Callicles and Meno, did not share this progressive vision, however, and Plato and Aristotle scorned the Sophists, who were not Athenians and taught for money. The prestige of Plato and Aristotle overshadowed the visiting teachers, as bright as some of them were. Frankly, the Sophists were a threat to conservative Athens, and they did not make appreciable social change.
After the death of Alexander the Great came the Hellenistic age, a time of great advances in learning and commerce, beautiful planned cities, and the spread of Greek culture into most of the Mediterranean world. Many people were forced to leave their native towns, familiar social arrangements were lost, and many became slaves or joined the urban poor, especially during the Roman period. The lot of people who had been displaced from their old sources of security and meaning in life was difficult, and philosophies, as well as religions, sought to provide them with ways to cope with this life and have hope in an afterlife. The philosophies were religious quests for salvation with strong philosophical underpinnings from earlier Greek philosophies. Philosophers tended to ignore bodily matters in favor of matters of the intellect. Even the Epicureans, who are commonly thought to have advocated the pursuit of pleasure, actually thought of pleasure as the avoidance of pain. The best state of mind a person can achieve, they held, is one of calm serenity. They did not consider sex a source of pleasure or happiness. They sought a serenity that is achieved through knowledge that there is nothing to fear, since there is no life after death, a view they borrowed from Democritus, and the gods, who are just clusters of atoms as are humans, cannot do people any harm. It is interesting to note that this freedom from fear of gods did not lead people to joyful and fearless sexual license.
The Cynics and their more sophisticated intellectual heirs the Stoics had an equally modest concept of happiness. Their escape from pain lay in avoiding concern about matters beyond a personās control. They believed that the world was governed by a world mind that would make everything work out well in the end, and in the meantime everything that happened did so of necessity. Happiness was not to be found in sexuality. Marriage and family were social duties and not to be avoided, but they were just part of the life that is to be endured. This disregard of sexuality was not a matter of placing a high value on the spiritual and disvaluing the material. The Epicureans and Stoics were materialists; mental life was itself material, but only in thought was escape from suffering to be found.
In his guidebook on achieving happiness, Epictetus explains that happiness is found in paying little attention to the body and instead concentrating on intellectual growth. āIf you happen to turn your attention to externals, for the pleasure of anyone, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of lifeā¦. Provide things relating to the body no further than absolute need requires.ā āAs in walking you take care not to tread upon a nail, or turn your foot, so likewise take care not to hurt the ruling faculty of your mind.ā āIt is a work of want of intellect to spend much time in things relating to the body.ā9
The highest development of intellectual religious paganism was undoubtedly the philosophy of Plotinus, whose philosophy deemed the inscrutable One and the Divine Intellect and World Soul, with which it forms a divine trinity, the only true reality.10 Of things in the world, the human soul, which is part of the World Soul, is the only thing real. The human soul, having fallen into association with a body, must not let its concern for intellectual matters become distracted by bodily appetites. The soulās salvation lies in eventual reunion with the divine reality from which it came, and this is accomplished through highly disciplined intellectual growth.11
The influence of Plotinus upon the developing Judaism and Christianity was great indeed. Only through the Neoplatonists, as his followers were known, were the ideas of Plato available to the late Roman and medieval world. A complete translation of Platoās dialogues into a Western language was first made by Marcilio Ficino in the fifteenth century.
Of course, only the learned few were likely to know much of the works of Plotinus and his successors, but gnosticism provided crude popular versions of a view of the world as evil, with sex as the ultimate aspect of the evil of material things. Gnosticism was a heretical movement in Judaism, in Christianity, and in paganism. Judaism and Christianity made a valiant effort to overcome the influence of gnosticism, but they were both influenced by the world-despising attitude of the heresy in spite of all they could do.
In fairness, we should recognize that the negative attitudes toward sexuality that appeared in Christianity and Judaism were not products of the ancient Hebrew culture. The Hebrew scriptures show a much more wholesome view of sex than that for which Christianity and Judaism have often been blamed. The primary source of the view that sex is wicked was in certain strains of Greek philosophy that flourished in the Roman period. Perhaps it was inevitable that the religions that became dominant in the medieval period would be affected by a negative view of sex.
The Medieval Period
In the medieval period, most of the philosophy was done by theologians, and the influence of the religions did not lead to positive notions of sexuality. Augustine, who was the most influential Christian theologian of the Middle Ages, and who is still accepted as a major doctrinal authority, taught that the body is corrupted by original sin. He expressed great shame for the sexual activity of his youth. He held that all love should be love for God and that lust is evil; the wise person would prefer (were it possible) that procreation be achieved without sexual lust. Sex was only for procreation, of course, and even legitimate conjugal intercourse is attended by shame, which he said is indicated by the secrecy in which intercourse is practiced.12
Thomas Aquinas, who finally achieved an authority second only to that of Augustine, promulgated eight truths,13 some of which seem wrong-headed to many Christian believers as well as to humanistic people today, but their influence upon Christian thinking and the social practices of Western societies is undeniable. First, Thomas taught as Christian doctrine that seminal discharge defines the essence of sexual intercourse. This sees sexual intercourse only from a male perspective, and a very limited male perspective at that. Thomasās second teaching is that procreation is the only morally right function of sexual intercourse; emission of semen in a way that prevents conception is un-natural and immoral. The Roman Catholic Church insists that intercourse be open to conception and rejects the use of the biological, chemical, and physical barriers that are commonly employed as contraceptives. Even by Roman Catholic standards, however, Thomasās second truth is not completely adequate. Modern Catholic doctrine does not limit the function of sexual intercourse to procreation but rather sees it as a union that enriches the relationship between husband and wife, as well as being a means of conception. Thomasās third truth, that procreation naturally completes itself in the generation of an adult, can be taken as an obvious biological fact, but Thomas undoubtedly meant by natural what is morally right according to natural law. His fourth teaching, that those who engage in sexual intercourse should provide what is necessary for the rearing of any child created, is accepted by most people as a simple matter of personal responsibility. The fifth truth makes a claim with which most people agree, that the family is the best place for rearing children, but some people do not believe it is true. It is certainly something that we should be able to discuss rationally and upon which more research can be done.
Thomasās sixth and seventh truths must be an embarrassment to those who feel a need to defend his teaching; most of my students see these truths as a joke. Thomas said that females are inferior to males and that the male is the femaleās governor in marriage. Thomasās eighth truth is that divorce is improper. Some people who agree with his disapproval of divorce might have trouble with his argument. Thomas rests his rejection of divorce on his sixth and seventh truths, so his eighth truth has little to say regarding contemporary discussions of divorce.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the thinking of philosophers in ancient and medieval times is that they seem to have had little comprehension of the degree to which sexuality involves the mental and emotional aspects of life. Within a dualistic conception of the human person, sex was associated with the body and was of importance to the mind positively only in its role in producing new generations of minds and negatively in the damaging effect it had upon human attention to the important matters of intellectual growth and the leading of a pure moral life.
The Renaissance did not produce a joyful and wholesome view of sexuality. It further developed the cult of courtly love, which placed the woman, or more accurately a few favored women, on the pedestal that few women find a comfortable place to be. Danteās attitude toward Beatrice and that of some of the Tuscan poets held the untouchable woman in high honor, but she was not pictured as having a full life, and certainly not as competing with men in the social world or the marketplace.
Marcilio Ficino, head of the Platonic Academy of Florence, developed the concept of Platonic love, holding that every love should be love of God and further the contemplation whereby the soul ascends toward the holy beatitude that is its natural desire. This concept of love does not promote greater appreciation of sex.
Savonarola, the monk who dominated Florence for a time, did nothing to raise the social standing of women, and he made war against all pleasures of the flesh.
The popular notion of the Renaissance as a time of sexual liberation probably grows out of the stories of Boccaccio and reports of the behavior of dissolute clergy, but this was not a time of growth in understanding of sexuality or liberation of women.
The Modern Period before the Twentieth Century
The modern period did not bring much radical change in the way sexuality was treated. Even though a wide array of views of sexuality can be found among modem philosophers before the twentieth century, most philosophers ignored sexuality. They seem to have considered other things much more important. Those who did write about sexuality usually reflect the commonly held opinions about marriage, family life, and sexual behavior. Expression of new, progr...
