User:Jahsonic/The unruly member series  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

The unruly member series is a series of mini-essays I wrote on the unruly member in the first half of 2011. I published them on Tumblr, the first of the series was removed by Tumblr in one of their anti-porn pogroms of the 2010s.

With the unruly member I mean man's most honest organ and Plato's reference to it is from Timaeus.

Number 1[1]

Cupidon (1875) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

I was getting ready to write a chapter on Schopenhauer's views on human sexuality (based on his "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love") in my upcoming book The Perverted Century, when I noticed that Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy already had the same information. De Botton even mentions Schopenhauer's dictum "Illico post coitum cachinnus auditur Diaboli," which the French call "petite mort." However, he leaves out the "the genitals are the real focus of the will" quote.

Schopenhauer considered himself one of the first philosophers of the "sexual question":

"So then, after what has here been called to mind, no one can doubt either the reality or the importance of the matter ; and therefore, instead of wondering that a philosophy should also for once make its own this constant theme of all poets, one ought rather to be surprised that a thing which plays throughout so important a part in human life has hitherto practically been disregarded by philosophers altogether, and lies before us as raw material."

In deploring that love is the domain of poets and not of philosophers, Schopenhauer echoes Plato's dictum "philosophy is a bitch."

Number 2[2]

Plato was the first philosopher to point out that the genitals have a life of their own when he stated that "the gods have given us one disobedient and unruly member". Schopenhauer was the second to state the same: "the genitals are the real focus of the will" and using the very fine metaphor of the "strong blind man" he depicted the irrationality of our behaviour in our love lives.

The best illustration to these two dicta is Rops's "Droit au travail"[3]. But I already gave you that.

So today, a new one, called Sakuzōzu[4] (Phallus-Monk) is a print by Katsukawa Shunshō (1726-1792) from the Hyaku bobo gatari series.

Dutch:

Plato was de eerste filosoof om er op te wijzen dat de geslachtsorganen een eigen leven leiden toen hij verklaarde dat "de goden ons een ongehoorzaam en onhandelbaar lid hebben gegeven". Schopenhauer was de tweede die hetzelfde stelde: "de geslachtsorganen zijn het werkelijke brandpunt van de wil" en met behulp van de zeer fraaie metafoor van de "sterke blinde man" schilderde hij de irrationaliteit van ons gedrag in ons liefdesleven.

"Zo komt het dat het mannelijk lid van nature eigenzinnig is en tiranniek, als een wezen dat doof is voor rede en in zijn hevige begeerte als een horzel alle andere verlangens in de grond probeert te boren." (Vertaling: School voor Filosofie, Amsterdam, 2011)

Number 3[5]

To round up my research: first I found Plato saying that "the gods have given us one disobedient and unruly member" (4th century BC), then there was Schopenhauer who equated his will to live with the sex drive, saying the genitals are the real focus of the will (19th century). But in between there was Leonardo da Vinci (Renaissance) who wrote the little text "Della Verga" (on the penis) in his notebooks:

"[The phallus] confers with the human intelligence and sometimes has intelligence of itself, and although the will of the man desires to stimulate it it remains obstinate and takes his own course, and moving sometimes of itself without license or thought by the man, whether he be sleeping or waking, it does what it desires; and often the man is asleep and it is awake, and many times the man is awake and it is asleep; many times the man wishes it to practice and it does not wish it; many times it wishes and the man forbids it.

It seems therefore that this creature often has a life and intelligence separate from the man, and it would appear that the man is in the wrong in being ashamed to give it a name or exhibit it, seeking rather constantly to cover and conceal what he ought to adorn and display with ceremony as a ministrant."--translation Edward McCurdy[6]

How to illustrate? Aha. French artist Jean-Jacques Lequeu comes to the rescue with his phenomenal Le Dieu Priape (shown above). Enjoy. And PS, my advice, listen to your members. Genitals don't lie.

Just to be clear, my choice of Lequeu is not arbitrary. If one were to write a Pervert's Guide to History, one would have to admit that the standard for everything that comes after the 18th century is the unholy trinity of Sade, Fuseli and Lequeu.