Arthur Schopenhauer Quotes
Every woman while she would be ready to die of shame if surprised in the act of generation, nonetheless carries her pregnancy without a trace of shame and indeed with a kind of pride. The reason is that pregnancy is in a certain sense a cancellation of the guilt incurred by coitus; thus coitus bears all the shame and disgrace of the affair, while pregnancy, which is so intimately associated with it, stays pure and innocent and is indeed to some extent sacred.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne, vol. 2, Dover Publications, 1966, p. 513.
This quotation gives us an insight into the sexual mores and its contrast with the teachings of Christianity ito the upper middle class n the American Colonial era. Guid was strong, but not strong enough to suppress the “evil” sexual activity.
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and insatiable noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.
