Questions on world attitudes toward sex
Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard... All accomplished men, all were handsome and rich as well - turned to extreme practices under the name of Christianity such as total sexual abstinence. To them this makes a “good life”. It can't be resentment or coap because they obviously had options. Nor can it be explained as some cultural peculiarity, as their behaviors were even considered unusual by their contemporaries. What explains this?
I believe the psychoanalysts would call this “sublimation” or, with these men, conversion of energies that happens to be expressed as monasticism. This is also sometimes proposed as a reason, among many of course, for Christianity's dominance in Europe as a “civilizing” social technology. I recall BAP makes this argument to justify Buddhism as a “based” faith for warriors out of work, while having avoided the unfortunate fate of getting usurped by cretins for Bomali-printing Christcuckoldry.
It seems also that in places like Brazil even though they're at least nominally Christian they take a much more “lenient” perspective, relatively free from associations of guilt or anxiety. But on the other hand also not sure that Brazil should be taken seriously on such questions... xD
Would anyone happen to know of any writing on the matter in Chinese philosophy? I know there's the jing retention meme in Taoism but I always took that to be a practical matter and less a moral preoccupation.
Never paid attention to history in school so u must forgive if I restate or ask the obvious.
2 comments
Getting pussy in Europe was a very very annoying process. Going full sigma monk just to not have to deal with women had some appeal. And Christianity has a lot of hangups about sex in general, if you take that seriously then it's normal to get weird.
Yellows just had nothing of the sort. Well built institutional barriers against nagging. Widespread legal fancy prostitution. No religious hangups whatsoever.
Tolstoy, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein-- two heretics (one of which was a bisexual lecher) and a converso homosexual. Not very representative. But heh, Socrates liked to diddle boys too.
As for monks and celibate priests, thet can't ever have been more than one percent in the Middle Ages. It's just that they had a lot of time to write and copy books, so we know more about them than about the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers.