The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization: Translated from the Sixth German EditionBloch, Iwan
Philosophy
The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization: Translated from the Sixth German Edition
Bloch, Iwan
Sex; Sexual ethics
“There is nothing on earth like the times of waiting,
The days of springtime, the days of blossoming;
Not even May can diffuse a light
Like the clear light of April.”
On the other hand, it is a demand of true morality that healthy men and
women between the ages of twenty and thirty years should enjoy the
possibility of marriage--of free marriage. This possibility can,
however, be secured only by economic reforms.
The author then considers the very important point of love’s choice, and
demands above all the compulsory provision of a =medical certificate of
health= before entering on marriage.
“It is absolutely beyond question that the healthy self-seeking which
wishes to safeguard the personal ego, in conjunction with the
increasing valuation of a healthy posterity, will hinder the
contraction of many unsuitable marriages. In other cases, love might
overcome these considerations, as far as husband and wife are
themselves concerned; but they must then renounce parentage. In those
cases, on the contrary, in which the law would distinctly forbid
marriage, one could naturally not prevent the sick persons from
procreating independently of marriage; but the same is true of all
laws: the best do not need them, the worst do not obey them, but the
majority are guided by them in the formation and development of their
ideas of what is right.”
As =immoral=, Ellen Key indicates:
“Parentage without love.
“Irresponsible parentage.
“Parentage on the part of immature or degenerate human beings.
“Voluntary unfertility on the part of a married pair who are competent
to reproduce their kind.
“All manifestations of the sexual life resulting from force or
seduction, or from the disinclination or the incapacity for the proper
fulfilment of sexual intercourse.”
It is interesting to note that Ellen Key prophesies as the result of the
progressive improvement of the species by love’s selection, the
attainment of a state wherein =every= man and =every= woman will be
suited for the reproduction of the species. Then would the ideal of
monogamy, one husband for one wife, one wife for one husband, be for the
first time realized.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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