Schopenhauer's views on homosexuality and pederasty
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Schopenhauer was one of the first philosophers since the days of Greek philosophy to address the subject of male homosexuality. In the third, expanded edition of The World as Will and Representation (1856), Schopenhauer added an appendix to his chapter on the "Metaphysics of Sexual Love". He also wrote that homosexuality did have the benefit of preventing ill-begotten children. Concerning this, he stated, "... the vice we are considering appears to work directly against the aims and ends of nature, and that in a matter that is all important and of the greatest concern to her, it must in fact serve these very aims, although only indirectly, as a means for preventing greater evils." On page 566 he wrote that only those who were too old or too young to reproduce strong, healthy children would resort to pederasty (Schopenhauer considered pederasty to be in itself a vice).
Shrewdly anticipating the interpretive distortion on the part of the popular mind of his attempted scientific explanation of pederasty as a personal advocacy of a phenomenon Schopenhauer otherwise describes, in terms of spiritual ethics, as an "objectionable aberration", Schopenhauer sarcastically concludes the appendix with the statement that "by expounding these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of philosophy a small favour, for they are very disconcerted by the ever-increasing publicization of my philosophy which they so carefully concealed. I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty."
See also
- The_Metaphysics_of_Sexual_Love#Addendum_on_pederasty_.281859.29_to_the_Metaphysics_of_Sexual_Love_.28German.29
- Philosophy of sex
