Sex and Character/Part 2/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
EROTICS AND ÆSTHETICS
The arguments which are in common use to justify a high opinion of woman have now been examined in all except a few points to which I shall recur, from the point of view of critical philosophy, and have been controverted. I hope that I have justified my deliberate choice of ground, although, indeed, Schopenhauer's fate should have been a warning to me. His depreciation of women in his philosophical work "On Women," has been frequently attributed to the circumstance that a beautiful Venetian girl, in whose company he was, fell in love with the extremely handsome personal appearance of Byron; as if a low opinion of women were not more likely to come to him who had had the best not the worst fortune with them.
The practice of merely calling any one who assails woman a misogynist, instead of refuting argument by argument, has much to commend it. Hatred is never impartial, and, therefore, to describe a man as having an animus against the object of his criticism, is at once to lay him open to the charge of insincerity, immorality, and partiality, and one that can be made with a hyperbole of accusation and evasion of the point, which only equal its lack of justification. This sort of answer never fails in its object, which is to exempt the vindicator from refuting the actual statements. It is the oldest and handiest weapon of the large majority of men, who never wish to see woman as she is. No men who really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.
There is no doubt that it is a fallacious method in a theoretical argument to refer to one's opponent's psychological motives instead of bringing forward proofs to controvert his statements.
It is not necessary for me to say that in logical controversy the adversaries should place themselves under an impersonal conception of truth, and their aim should be to reach a result, irrespective of their own concrete opinions. If, however, in an argument, one side has come to a certain conclusion by a logical chain of reasoning, and the other side merely opposes the conclusion without having followed the reasoning process, it is at once fair and appropriate to examine the psychological motives which have induced the adversaries to abandon argument for abuse. I shall now put the champions of women to the test and see how much of their attitude is due to sentimentality, how much of it is disinterested, and how much due to selfish motives.
All objections raised against those who despise women arise from the erotic relations in which man stands to woman. This relationship is absolutely different from the purely sexual attraction which occurs in the animal world, and plays a most important part in human affairs. It is quite erroneous to say that sexuality and eroticism, sexual impulse and love, are fundamentally one and the same thing, the second an embellishing, refining, spiritualising sublimation of the first; although practically all medical men hold this view, and even such men as Kant and Schopenhauer thought so. Before I go into the reasons for maintaining the existence of this great distinction, I should like to say something about the views of these two men.
Kant's opinion is not of much weight, because love as sexual impulse must have been as little known to him as possible, probably less than in the case of any other man. He was so little erotic that he never felt the kindred desire to travel.[1] He represents too lofty and pure a type to speak with authority on this matter: his one passion was metaphysics.
As for Schopenhauer, he had just as little idea of the higher form of eroticism; his sexuality was of the gross order. This can be seen from the following: Schopenhauer's countenance shows very little kindliness and a good deal of fierceness (a circumstance which must have caused him great sorrow. There is no exhibition of ethical sympathy if one is very sorry for oneself. The most sympathetic persons are those who, like Kant and Nietzsche, have no particle of self-pity).
But it may be said with safety that only those who are most sympathetic are capable of a strong passion: those "who take no interest in things" are incapable of love. This does not imply that they have diabolical natures. They may, on the contrary, stand very high morally without knowing what their neighbours are thinking or doing, and without having a sense for other than sexual relations with women, as was the case with Schopenhauer. He was a man who knew only too well what the sexual impulse was, but he never was in love; if that were not so, the bias in his famous work, "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love," would be inexplicable; in it the most important doctrine is that the unconscious goal of all love is nothing more than "the formation of the next generation."
This view, as I hope to prove, is false. It is true that a love entirely without sexuality has never been known. However high a man may stand he is still a being with senses. What absolutely disposes of the opposite view is this: all love, as such—without going into aesthetic principles of love—is antagonistic to those elements (of the relationship) which press towards sexual union; in fact, such elements tend to negate love. Love and desire are two unlike, mutually exclusive, opposing conditions, and during the time a man really loves, the thought of physical union with the object of his love is insupportable. Because there is no hope which is entirely free from fear does not alter the fact that hope and fear are utterly opposite principles. It is just the same in the case of sexual impulse and love. The more erotic a man is the less he will be troubled with his sexuality, and vice versâ.
If it be the case that there is no adoration utterly free from desire, there is no reason why the two should be identified, since it might be possible for a superior being to attain the highest phases of both. That person lies, or has never known what love is, who says he loves a woman whom he desires; so much difference is there between sexual impulse and love. This is what makes talk of love after marriage seem, in most cases, make-believe.
The following will show how obtuse the view of those is who persist, with unconscious cynicism, in maintaining the identity of love and sexual impulse. Sexual attraction increases with physical proximity; love is strongest in the absence of the loved one; it needs separation, a certain distance, to preserve it. In fact, what all the travels in the world could not achieve, what time could not accomplish, may be brought about by accidental, unintentional, physical contact with the beloved object, in which the sexual impulse is awakened, and which suffices to kill love on the spot. Then, again, in the case of more highly differentiated, great men, the type of girl desired, and the type of girl loved but never desired, are always totally different in face, form, and disposition; they are two different beings.
Then there is the "platonic love," which professors of psychiatry have such a poor opinion of. I should say rather, there is only "platonic" love, because any other so-called love belongs to the kingdom of the senses: it is the love of Beatrice, the worship of Madonna; the Babylonian woman is the symbol of sexual desire.
Kant's enumeration of the transcendental ideas of love would have to be extended if it is to be held. For the purely spiritual love, the love of Plato and Bruno, which is absolutely free from desire, is none the less a transcendental concept; nor is its significance as a concept impaired, because such a love has never been fully realised.
It is the problem put forward in "Tannhäuser." We have Tannhäuser, Wolfram, Venus, and Maria. The fact that two lovers, who have found each other once for all—Tristan and Isolde—choose death instead of the bridal bed, is just as absolute a proof of a higher, maybe metaphysical, something in mankind, as the martyrdom of a Giordano Bruno.
"Dir, hohe Liebe, töne
Begeistert mein Gesang,
Die mir in Engelschöne
Tief in die Seele drang!
Du nahst als Gott gesandte:
Ich folg' aus holder Fern',—
So führst du in die Lande,
Wo ewig strahlt dein Stern."
Who is the object of such love? Is it woman, as she has been represented in this work, who lacks all higher qualities, who gets her value from another, who has no power to attain value on her own account? Impossible. It is the ideally beautiful, the immaculate woman, who is loved in such high fashion. The source of this beauty and chastity in women must now be found.
The question as to whether the female sex is the more beautiful, and as to whether it deserves the title of "the" beautiful, has been much disputed.
It may be well to consider by whom and how far woman is considered beautiful.
It is well known that woman is not most beautiful in the nude. I admit that in pictures or statues the nude female may look well. But the sexual impulse makes it impossible to look at a living woman in a nude condition with the purely critical, unemotional eye, which is an essential feature in judging any object of beauty. But apart from this, an absolute nude female figure in the life leaves an impression of something wanting, an incompleteness, which is incompatible with beauty.
A nude woman may be beautiful in details, but the general effect is not beautiful; she inevitably creates the feeling that she is looking for something, and this induces disinclination rather than desire in the spectator. The sight of an upright female form, in the nude, makes most patent her purposelessness, the sense of her purpose in life being derived from something outside herself; in the recumbent position this feeling is greatly diminished. It is evident that artists have perceived this in reproducing the nude.
But even in the details of her body a woman is not wholly beautiful, not even if she is a flawless, perfect type of her sex. The genitalia are the chief difficulty in the way of regarding her as theoretically beautiful. If the idea were justified that man's love for woman is the direct result of his sexual impulse; if we could agree with Schopenhauer that "the under-sized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-limbed sex is called beautiful only because the male intellect is befogged by the sexual impulse, that impulse being the creator of the conception of the beauty of woman," it would follow that the genitalia could not be excluded from the conception of beauty. It requires no lengthy exposition to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful, and that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as due to the sexual impulse. In fact, the sexual impulse is in reality opposed to the conception of beauty. The man who is most under its influence has least sense of female beauty, and desires any woman merely because she is a woman.
A woman's nude body is distasteful to man because it offends his sense of shame. The easy superficiality of our day has given colour to the statement that the sense of shame has arisen from the wearing of clothes, and it has been urged that the objection to the nude arises from those who are unnatural and secretly immorally-minded. But a man who has become immorally-minded no longer is interested in the nude as such, because it has lost its influence on him. He merely desires and no longer loves. All true love is modest, like all true pity. There is only one case of shamelessness—a declaration of love the sincerity of which a man is convinced of in the moment he makes it. This would represent the conceivable maximum of shamelessness; but there is no declaration of love which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by their readiness to believe such protestations.
The love bestowed by the man is the standard of what is beautiful and what is hateful in woman. The conditions are quite different in aesthetics from those in logic or ethics. In logic there is an abstract truth which is the standard of thought; in ethics there is an ideal good which furnishes the criterion of what ought to be done, and the value of the good is established by the determination to link the will with the good. In aesthetics beauty is created by love ; there is no determining law to love what is beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself to human beings with any imperative command to love it. (And so there is no abstract, no super-individual "right" taste).
All beauty is really more a projection, an emanation of the requirements of love; and so the beauty of woman is not apart from love, it is not an objective to which love is directed, but woman's beauty is the love of man; they are not two things, but one and the same thing.
Just as hatefulness comes from hating, so love creates beauty. This is only another way of expressing the fact that beauty has as little to do with the sexual impulse as the sexual impulse has to do with love. Beauty is something that can neither be felt, touched, nor mixed with other things; it is only at a distance that it can be plainly discerned, and when it is approached it withdraws itself. The sexual impulse which seeks for sexual union with woman is a denial of such beauty; the woman who has been possessed and enjoyed, will never again be worshipped for her beauty. I now come to the second question: what are the innocence and morality of a woman?
It will be convenient to start with a few facts that concern the origin of all love. Bodily cleanliness, as has often been remarked, is in men a general indication of morality and rectitude; or at least it may be said that uncleanly men are seldom of high character. It may be noticed that when men, who formerly paid little attention to bodily cleanliness, begin to strive for a higher perfection of character, they at the same time take more trouble with the care of the body. In the same way, when men suddenly become imbued with passion they experience a simultaneous desire for bodily cleanliness, and it may almost be said of them that only at such a time do they wash themselves thoroughly. If we now turn to gifted men, we shall see that in their case love frequently begins with self-mortification, humiliation, and restraint. A moral change sets in, a process of purification seems to emanate from the object loved, even if her lover has never spoken to her, or only seen her a few times in the distance. It is, then, impossible that this process should have its origin in that person: very often it may be a bread-and-butter miss, a stolid lump, more often a sensuous coquette, in whom no one can see the marvellous characteristics with which his love endows her, save her lover. Can any one believe that it is a concrete person who is loved? Does she not in reality serve as the starting point for incomparably greater emotions than she could inspire?
In love, man is only loving himself. Not his empirical self, not the weaknesses and vulgarities, not the failings and smallnesses which he outwardly exhibits; but all that he wants to be, all that he ought to be, his truest, deepest, intelligible nature, free from all fetters of necessity, from all taint of earth.
In his actual physical existence, this being is limited by space and time and by the shackles of the senses; however deep he may look into himself, he finds himself damaged and spotted, and sees nowhere the image of speckless purity for which he seeks. And yet there is nothing he covets so much as to realise his own ideal, to find his real higher self. And as he cannot find this true self within himself, he has to seek it without himself. He projects his ideal of an absolutely worthy existence, the ideal that he is unable to isolate within himself, upon another human being, and this act, and this alone, is none other than love and the significance of love. Only a person who has done wrong and is conscious of it can love, and so a child can never love. It is only because love represents the highest, most unattainable goal of all longing, because it cannot be realised in experience but must remain an idea; only because it is localised on some other human being, and yet remains at a distance, so that the ideal never attains its realisation; only because of such conditions can love be associated with the awakening of the desire for purification, with the reaching after a goal that is purely spiritual, and so cannot be blemished by physical union with the beloved person; only thus, is love the highest and strongest effort of the will towards the supreme good; only thus does it bring the true being of man to a state between body and spirit, between the senses and the moral nature, between God and the beasts. A human being only finds himself when, in this fashion, he loves. And thus it comes about that only when they love do many men realise the existence of their own personality and of the personality of another, that "I" and "thou" become for them more than grammatical expressions. And so also comes about the great part played in their love story by the names of the two lovers. There is no doubt but that it is through love that many men first come to know of their own real nature, and to be convinced that they possess a soul.
It is this which makes a lover desire to keep his beloved at a distance—on no account to injure her purity by contact with him—in order to assure himself of her and of his own existence. Many an inflexible empiricist, coming under the influence of love, becomes an enthusiastic mystic; the most striking example being Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, whose whole theories were revolutionised by his feelings for Clotilde de Vaux. It is not only for the artist, but for the whole of mankind that Arno, ergo sum holds good psychologically.
Love is a phenomenon of projection just as hate is, not a phenomenon of equation as friendship is. The latter presupposes an equality of both individuals: love always implies inequality, disproportion. To endow an individual with all that one might be and yet never can be, to make her ideal—that is love. Beauty is the symbol of this act of worship. It is this that so often surprises and angers a lover when he is convinced that beauty does not imply morality in a woman. He feels that the nature of the offence is increased by "such depravity" being possible in conjunction with such "beauty." He is not aware that the woman in question seems beautiful to him because he still loves her; otherwise the incongruity between the external and internal would no longer pain him.
The reason an ordinary prostitute can never seem beautiful is because it is naturally impossible to endow her with the projection of value; she can satisfy only the taste of vulgar minds. She is the mate of the worst sort of men. In this we have the explanation of a relation utterly opposed to morality: woman in general is simply indifferent to ethics, she is non-moral, and, therefore, unlike the antimoral criminal, who is instinctively disliked, or the devil who is hideous in every one's imagination, serves as a receptacle for projected worthiness; as she neither does good nor evil, she neither resists nor resents this imposition of the ideal on her personality. It is patent that woman's morality is acquired; but this morality is man's, which he in an access of supreme love and devotion has conveyed to her.
Since all beauty is always only the constantly renewed endeavour to embody the highest form of value, there is a pre-eminently satisfying element in it, in the face of which all desire, all self-seeking fade away.
All forms of beauty which appeal to man, by reason of the aesthetic function, are in reality also attempts on his part to realise the ideal. Beauty is the symbol of perfection in being. Therefore beauty is inviolable; it is static and not dynamic; so that any alteration with regard to it upsets and annuls the idea of it. The desire of personal worthiness, the love of perfection, materialise in the idea of beauty. And so the beauty of nature is born, a beauty that the criminal can never know, as ethics first create nature. Thus it is that nature always and everywhere, in its greatest and smallest forms, gives the impression of perfection. The natural law is only the mortal symbol of the moral law, as natural beauty is the manifestation of nobility of the soul; logic thus becomes the embodiment of ethics! Just as love creates a new woman for man instead of the real woman, so art, the eroticism of the All, creates out of chaos the plenitude of forms in the universe; and just as there is no natural beauty without form, without a law of nature, so also there is no art without form, no artistic beauty which does not conform to the laws of art. Natural beauty is no less a realisation of artistic beauty than the natural law is the fulfilment of the moral law, the natural reflection of that harmony whose image is enthroned in the soul of man. The nature which the artist regards as his teacher, is the law which he creates out of his own being.
1 return to my own theme from these analyses of art, which are no more than elaborations of the thoughts of Kant and Schelling (and of Schiller writing under their influence). The main proposition for which I have argued is that man's belief in the morality of woman, his projection of his own soul upon her, and his conception of the woman as beautiful, are one and the same thing, the second being the sensuous side of the first.
It is thus intelligible, although an inversion of the truth, when, in morality, a beautiful soul is spoken of, or when, following Shaftesbury and Herbart, ethics are subordinated to aesthetics; following Socrates and Plato we may identify the good and the beautiful, but we must not forget that beauty is only a bodily image in which morality tries to represent itself, that all aesthetics are created by ethics. Every individual and temporal presentation of this attempted incarnation must necessarily be illusory, and can have no more than a fictitious reality. And so all individual cases of beauty are impermanent; the love that is directed to a woman must perish with the age of the woman. The idea of beauty is the idea of nature and is permanent, whilst every beautiful thing, every part of nature, is perishable. The eternal can realise itself in the limited and the concrete only by an illusion; it is self-deception to seek the fulness of love in a woman. As all love that attaches itself to a person must be impermanent, the love of woman is doomed to unhappiness. All such love has this source of failure inherent in it. It is an heroic attempt to seek for permanent worth where there is no worth. The love that is attached to enduring worth is attached to the absolute, to the idea of God, whether that idea be a pantheistic conception of enduring nature, or remain transcendental; the love that attaches itself to an individual thing, as to a woman, must fail.
I have already partly explained why man takes this burden on himself. Just as hatred is a projection of our own evil qualities on other persons in order that we may stand apart from them and hate them; just as the devil was invented to serve as a vehicle of all the evil impulses in man; so love has the purpose of helping man in his battle for good, when he feels that he himself is not strong enough. Love and hate are alike forms of cowardice. In hate we picture to ourselves that our own hateful qualities exist in another, and by so doing we feel ourselves partly freed from them. In love we project what is good in us, and so having created a good and an evil image we are more able to compare and value them.
Lovers seek their own souls in the loved ones, and so love is free from the limits I described in the first part of this book, not being bound down by the conditions of merely sexual attraction. In spite of their real opposition, there is an analogy between erotics and sexuality. Sexuality uses the woman as the means to produce pleasure and children of the body; erotics use her as the means to create worth and children of the soul. A little understood conception of Plato is full of the deepest meaning: that love is not directed towards beauty, but towards the procreation of beauty; that it seeks to win immortality for the things of the mind, just as the lower sexual impulse is directed towards the perpetuation of the species.
It is more than a merely formal analogy, a superficial, verbal resemblance, to speak of the fruitfulness of the mind, of its conception and reproduction, or, in the words of Plato, to speak of the children of the soul. As bodily sexuality is the effort of an organic being to perpetuate its own form, so love is the attempt to make permanent one's own soul or individuality. Sexuality and love are alike the effort to realise oneself, the one by a bodily image, the other by an image of the soul. But it is only the man of genius who can approach this entirely unsensuous love, and it is only he who seeks to produce eternal children in whom his deepest nature shall live for ever.
The parallel may be carried further. Since Novalis first called attention to it, many have insisted on the association between sexual desire and cruelty. All that is born of woman must die. Reproduction, birth, and death are indissolubly associated; the thought of untimely death awakens sexual desire in its fiercest form, as the determination to reproduce oneself. And so sexual union, considered ethically, psychologically, and biologically, is allied to murder; it is the negation of the woman and the man; in its extreme case it robs them of their consciousness to give life to the child. The highest form of eroticism, as much as the lowest form of sexuality, uses the woman not for herself but as means to an end—to preserve the individuality of the artist. The artist has used the woman merely as the screen on which to project his own idea.
The real psychology of the loved woman is always a matter of indifference. In the moment when a man loves a woman, he neither understands her nor wishes to understand her, although understanding is the only moral basis of association in mankind. A human being cannot love another that he fully understands, because he would then necessarily see the imperfections which are an inevitable part of the human individual, and love can attach itself only to perfection. Love of a woman is possible only when it does not consider her real qualities, and so is able to replace the actual psychical reality by a different and quite imaginary reality. The attempt to realise one's ideal in a woman, instead of the woman herself, is a necessary destruction of the empirical personality of the woman. And so the attempt is cruel to the woman; it is the egoism of love that disregards the woman, and cares nothing for her real inner life.
Thus the parallel between sexuality and love is complete. Love is murder. The sexual impulse destroys the body and mind of the woman, and the psychical eroticism destroys her psychical existence. Ordinary sexuality regards the woman only as a means of gratifying passion or of begetting children. The higher eroticism is merciless to the woman requiring her to be merely the vehicle of a projected personality, or the mother of psychical children. Love is not only anti-logical, as it denies the objective truth of the woman and requires only an illusory image of her, but it is anti-ethical with regard to her.
I am far from despising the heights to which this eroticism may reach, as, for instance, in Madonna worship. Who could blind his eyes to the amazing phenomenon presented by Dante? It was an extraordinary transference of his own ideal to the person of a concrete woman whom the artist had seen only once and when she was a young girl, and who for all he knew might have grown up into a Xantippe. The complete neglect of whatever worth the woman herself might have had, in order that she might better serve as the vehicle of his projected conception of worthiness, was never more clearly exhibited. And the three-fold immorality of this higher eroticism becomes more plain than ever. It is an unlimited selfishness with regard to the actual woman, as she is wholly rejected for the ideal woman. It is a felony towards the lover himself, inasmuch as he detaches virtue and worthiness from himself; and it is a deliberate turning away from the truth, a preferring of sham to reality.
The last form in which the immorality reveals itself is that love prevents the worthlessness of woman from being realised, inasmuch as it always replaced her by an imaginary projection. Madonna worship itself is fundamentally immoral, inasmuch as it is a shutting of the eyes to truth. The Madonna worship of the great artists is a destruction of woman, and is possible only by a complete neglect of the women as they exist in experience, a replacement of actuality by a symbol, a re-creation of woman to serve the purposes of man, and a murder of woman as she exists.
When a particular man attracts a particular woman the influence is not his beauty. Only man has an instinct for beauty, and the ideals of both manly beauty and of womanly beauty have been created by man, not by woman. The qualities that appeal to a woman are the signs of developed sexuality; those that repel her are the qualities of the higher mind. Woman is essentially a phallus worshipper, and her worship is permeated with a fear like that of a bird for a snake, of a man for the fabled Medusa head, as she feels that the object of her adoration is the power that will destroy her.
The course of my argument is now apparent. As logic and ethics have a relation only to man, it was not to be expected that woman would stand in any better position with regard to aesthetics. Esthetics and logic are closely interconnected, as is apparent in philosophy, in mathematics, in artistic work, and in music. I have now shown the intimate relation of aesthetics to ethics. As Kant showed, aesthetics, just as much as ethics and logic, depend on the free will of the subject. As the woman has not free will, she cannot have the faculty of projecting beauty outside herself.
The foregoing involves the proposition that woman cannot love. Women have made no ideal of man to correspond with the male conception of the Madonna. What woman requires from man is not purity, chastity, morality, but something else. Woman is incapable of desiring virtue in a man.
It is almost an insoluble riddle that woman, herself incapable of love, should attract the love of man. It has seemed to me a possible myth or parable, that in the beginning, when men became men by some miraculous act of God, a soul was bestowed only on them. Men, when they love, are partly conscious of this deep injustice to woman, and make the fruitless but heroic effort to give her their own soul. But such a speculation is outside the limits of either science or philosophy.
I have now shown what woman does not wish; there remains to show what she does wish, and how this wish is diametrically opposed to the will of man.
- ↑ The association of these two desires may surprise readers. It rests on a metaphysical ground, much of which will be more apparent when I have developed my theory of eroticism further. Time, like space, is conceived of as unlimited, and man, in his desire for freedom, in his efforts stimulated by his power of free will to transcend his limits, has the craving for unlimited time and unlimited space. The desire for travel is simply an expression of this restlessness, this fundamental chafing of the spirit against its bonds. But just as eternity is not prolonged time, but the negation of time, so however far a man wanders, he can extend his area but cannot abolish space. And so his efforts to transcend space must always be heroic failures: I shall show that his eroticism is a similar notable failure.