Ihopethatnoonewillconsider
such a subject below the dignity of a philosopher.
Weininger - 1903 - Sex and Character
X
Consider the relation to the child first. ^The absolute prostitute thinks only of the man ; the absolute mother thinks only of the child. The best test case is the relation tothedaughter. Itisonlywhenthereisnojealousyabout her youth or greater beauty, no grudging about the admira- tion she wins, but an identification of herself with her daughter so complete that she is as pleased about her child'sadmirersasif theywereherown,thatawomanhas a claim to the title of perfect mother.
The absolute mother (if such existed), who thinks only about the child, would become a mother by any man. It will be found that women who were devoted to dolls when they were children, and were kind and attentive to children in their own childhood, are least particular about their husbands, and are most ready to accept the first good match who takes any notice of them and who satisfies their parents and relatives. When such a maiden has become a mother, it matters not by whom, she ceases to pay any attention to any other men. The absolute prostitute, on the other hand, even when she is still a child, dislikes children ; later on, she may pretend to care for them as
;
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a means of attracting men through the idea of mother and child. She is the woman whose desire is to please all men ; and since there is no such thing as an ideally perfect type of mother, there are traces of this desire to please in every woman, as every man of the world will admit.
Here we can trace at least a formal resemblance between the two types. Both are careless as to the individuality of their sexual complement. The one accepts any possible man who can make her a mother, and once that has been achieved asks nothing more ; on this ground only is she to be described as monogamous. The other is ready to yield herself to any man who stimulates her erotic desires ; that is her only object. From this description of the two extreme types we may hope to gain some knowledge of the nature of actual women.
I have to admit that the popular opinion as to the mono- gamous nature of women as opposed to the essential polygamy of the male, an opinion I long held, is erroneous. The contrary is the case. One must not be misled by the fact that a woman will wait very long for a particular man, and where possible will choose him who can bestow most value on her, the most noble, the most famous, the ideal prince. Woman is distinguished by this desire for value from the animals, who have no regard for value either for themselves and through themselves, as in the case of a man, or for another and through another, as in the case of a woman^'' But this could be brought forward only by fools as in ariy way to the credit of woman, since, indeed, it shows most strongly that she is devoid of a feeling of personal value. Thedesireforthisdemandstobesatisfied,butdoes not find satisfaction in the moral idea of monogamy, /yhe man is able to pour forth value, to confer it on the woman he can give it, he wishes to give it, but he cannot receive it. The woman seeks to create as much personal value as pos-
sible for herself, and so adheres to the man who can give her most of it ; faithfulness of the man, however, rests on other grounds. He regards it as the completion of
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ideal love, as a fulfilment, even although it is questionable if that could be attained. His faithfulness springs from the purely masculine conception of truth, the continuity demanded by the intelligible ego. ) One often hears it said that women are more faithful than men ; but man's faithful- ness is a coercion which he exercises on himself, of his own free will, and with full consciousness. He may not adhere to this self-imposed contract, but his falling away from it will seem as a wrong to himself. When he breaks his faith he has suppressed the promptings of his real nature. For the woman unfaithfulness is an exciting game, in which the thought of morality plays no part, but which is controlled only by the desire for safety and reputation. There is no wife who has not been untrue to her husband in thought, and yet no woman reproaches herself with this. For a woman pledges her faith lightly and without any full con- sciousness of what she does, and breaks it just as lightly and thoughtlessly as she pledged it. The motive for honouring a pledge can be found only in man ; for a woman does not understand the binding force of a given word. The examples of female faithfulness that can be adduced against this are of little value. They are either the slow result of the habit of sexual acquiescence, or a condition of actual slavery, dog-like, attentive, full of instinctive tenacious attachment, comparable with that necessity for actual contact which marks female sympathy.
The conception of faithfulness to one has been created by man. It arises from the masculine idea of individuality which remains unchanged by time, and, therefore, needs as its complement always one and the same person. The conception of faithfulness to one person is a lofty one, and finds a worthy expression in the sacramental marriage of theCatholicChurch. I amnotgoingtodiscussthequestion of marriage or free-love. Marriage in its existing form is as incompatible as free-love with the highest interpretations of the moral law. And so divorce came into the world with marriage.
None the less marriage could have been invented only by
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man. No proprietary institution originated with women. The introduction of order into chaotic sexual relations could have come only through man's desire for it, and his power to establish it. There have been periods in the history of many primitive races in which women had great influence; but the period of matriarchy was a period of polyandry.
The dissimilarity in the relations of mother and prostitute to their child is rich in important conclusions. A woman in whom the prostitute element is strong will perceive her son's manhood and always stand in a sexual relation to him. But as no woman is the perfect type of mother, there is something sexual in the relation of every mother and son. For this reason, I chose the relation of the mother to her daughter and not to her son, as the best measure of her type. There are many well-known physiological parallels between the relations of a mother to her children and of a wife to her husband.
Motherliness, like sexuality, is not an individual relation. When a woman is motherly the quality will be exercised not only on the child of her own body, but towards all men, although later on her interest in her own child may become all-absorbing and make her narrow, blind, and unjust in the event of a quarrel.
\The relation of a motherly girl to her lover is interesting. Such a girl is inclined to be motherly towards the man she loves, especially towards that man who will afterwards become the father of her child ; in fact, in a certain sense the man is her child. The deepest nature of the mother- type reveals itself in this identity of the mother and loving wife; themothersformtheenduringroot-stockofourrace from which the individual man arises, and in the face of which he recognises his own impermanence. '\^It is this idea which enables the man to see in the mother, even while she is still a girl, something eternal, and which gives the pregnant woman a tremendous significance. The enduring security of the race lies in the mystery of this figure, in the presence of which man feels his own fleeting impermanence. /'
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In such minutes there may come to him a sense of freedom and peace, and in the mysterious silence of the idea, he may think that it is through the woman that he is in true relation with the universe. He becomes the child of his beloved one, a child whose mother smiles on him, under- stands him, and takes care of him (Siegfried and Bru? nn- hilde, Act III. ). But this does not last long. (Siegfried tearshimselffromBru? nnhilde). Foramanonlycomesto his fulness when he frees himself from the race, when he raises himself above it. For paternity cannot satisfy the deepest longings of a man, and the idea that he is to be lost in the race is repellent to him. The most terrible chapter in the most comfortless of all the great books that have been written, the chapter on " Death and its Relation to the Indestructibility of our Nature," in Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Idea," is where the permanence of the will to maintain the species is set down as the only real permanence.
(it IS the permanence of the race that gives the mother her courage and fearlessness in contrast with the coward- liness and fear of the prostitute. It is not the courage of individuality, the moral courage arising from an inner sense of freedom and personal value, but rather the desire that the race should be maintained which, acting through the mother, protects the husband and child. \ As courage and cowardice belong respectively to the mother and the prostitute, so is it with that other pair of contrasting ideas, hope and fear. The absolute mother stands in a persisting relationtohope; asshelivesonthroughtherace,shedoes not quail before death, whilst the prostitute has a lasting fear of it.
The mother feels herself in a sense superior to the man ;
she knows herself to be his anchor ; as she is in a secure place, linked in the chain of the generations, she may be likened to a harbour trom which each new individual sails forth to wander on the high seas. From the moment of conception onwards the mother is psychically and physi- callyreadytofeedandprotectherchild. Andthisprotective
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superiority extends itself to her lover ; she understands all that is simple and naive and childlike in him, whilst the prostitute understands best his caprices and refinements, ^he mother has the craving to teach her child, to give him everything, even when the child is represented by the lover; the prostitute strives to impose herself on the man, to receiveeverythingfromhim. Themotherastheupholder of the race is friendly to all its members ; it is only when there is an exclusive choice to be made between her child and others that she becomes hard and relentless ; and so she can be both more full of love and more bitter than the prostitute. '>
The mother is in complete relation with the continuity of the race ; the prostitute is completely outside it. ^The motheristhesoleadvocateandpriestessoftherace^ The will of the race to live is embodied in her, whilst the exist- ence of the prostitute shows that Schopenhauer was pushing a generalisation too far when he declared that all sexuality hadrelationonlytothefuturegeneration. Thatthemother cares only for the life of her own race is plain from the absence of consideration for animals shown by the best of mothers. A good mother, with the greatest peace of mind and content, willslaughterfowlafterfowlforherfamily. Themotherof children is a cruel step-mother to all other living things.
Another striking aspect of the mother's relation to the preservation of the race reveals itself in the matter of food. She cannot bear to see food wasted, however little may be left over ; whilst the prostitute wilfully squanders the quan- tities of food and drink she demands. The mother is stingy and mean ; the prostitute open-handed and lavish, (^he mother's object in life is to preserve the race, and her delight is to see her children eat and to encourage their appetites. Andsoshebecomesthegoodhousekeeper. Cereswasa good mother, a fact expressed in her Greek name, Demeter. The mother takes care of the body, but does not trouble about the mind. * The relation between mother and child
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(*^^ Compare the conversation in Ibsen*s "Peer Gynt," Act ii. ,
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remains material from the kissing and hugging of childhood to the protective care of maturity. All her devotion is for the success and prosperity of her child in material things. )
Maternal love, then, cannot be truly represented as resting on moral grounds. Let any one ask himself if he does not believe that his mother's love would not be just as great for him if he were a totally different person. The indi- viduality of the child has no part in the maternal love
; the mere fact of its being her own child is sufficient, and so
the love cannot be regarded as moral. In the love of a man for a woman, or between persons of the same sex, there is always some reference to the personal qualities of theindividual; amother'sloveextendsitselfindifferentlyto anything that she has borne. It destroys tlje moral con- ception if we realise that the love of a mother for her child remains the same whether the child becomes a saint or a sinner, a king or a beggar, an angel or a fiend. Precisely the same conclusion will be reached from reflecting how children think that they have a claim on their mother's love simply because she is their mother, "paternal love is non- moral because it has no relation to the individuality of the being on which it is bestowed, and there can be an ethical relation only between two individualities^ The relation of motherandchildisalwaysakindofphysicalreflex. Ifthe little one suddenly screams or cries when the mother is in the next room, she will at once rush to it as if she herself had been hurt ; and, as the children grow up, every wish or trouble of theirs is directly assumed and shared by the mother as if they were her own. There is an unbreakable link between the mother and child, physical, like the cord
that united the two before childbirth. This is the real nature of the maternal relation ; and, for my part, I protest
between the father of Solveig and Aase (perhaps the best-drawn mother in all literature) when they were discussing the search for their son :
Aase. " We shall find him. "
Her Husband. " And save his soul. " Aase, " And his body. "
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against the fashion in which it is praised, its very indis- criminate character being made a merit. I believe myself that many great artists have recognised this, but have chosen to be silent about it. The extraordinary over-praising of Raphael is losing ground, and the singers of maternal love are no higher than Fischart or Richepin.
Maternal love is an instinctive and natural impulse, and animals possess it in a degree as high as that of human beings. This alone is enough to show that it is not true love, that it is not of moral origin ; for all morality proceeds from the intelligible character which animals, having no free will, do not possess, ^he ethical imperative can be heard only by a rational creature ; there is no such thing as natural morality, for all morality must be self-conscious>
Her position outside the mere preservation of the race, the fact that she is not merely the channel and the indifferent protector of the chain of beings that passes through her, place the prostitute in a sense above the mother, so far at least as it is possible to speak of higher or lower from the ethical point of view when women are being discussed.
The matron whose whole time is taken up in looking after her husband and children, who is working in, or superin- tending the work of, the house, garden, or other forms of labour, ranks intellectually very low. The most highly- developed women mentally, those who have been lauded in poetry, belong to the prostitute category ; to these, the Aspasia-type, must be added the women of the romantic
school, foremost among whom must be placed Karoline Michaelis-Bo? hmer-Forster-Schlegel-Schelling.
It coincides with what has been said that only those men are sexually attracted by the mother-type who have no desire formentalproductivity. Themanwhosefatherhoodiscon- fined to the children of his loins is he whom we should expect to choose the motherly productive woman. Great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type. * Their choice falls on the sterile woman, and, if there is
* Wherever I am using this term I refer, of course, not merely to mercenary women of the streets.
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issue, it is unfit and soon dies out. Ordinary fatherhood has as little do do with morality as motherhood. It is non-moral, as I shall show in chap. xiv. ; and it is illo- gical, because it deals with illusions. ;^o man ever knows to what extent he is the father of his own child. And its duration is short and fleeting ; every generation and every race of human beings soon disappear^>
The wide-spread and exclusive honouring of the' motherly woman, the type most upheld as the one and only possible one for women, is accordingly quite unjustified. Although most men are certain that every woman can have her con- summation only in motherhood, I must confess that the prostitute--not as a person, but as a phenomenon--is much more estimable in my opinion.
There are various causes of this universal reverence for the mother.
One of the chief reasons appears to be that the mother seems to the man nearer his ideal of chastity ; but the woman who desires children is no more chaste than the man-coveting prostitute.
The man rewards the appearance of higher morality in the maternal type by raising her morally (although with no reason) and socially over the prostitute type. The latter does not submit to any valuations of the man nor to the ideal of chastity which he seeks for in the woman ; secretly, as the woman of the world, lightly as the demi-mondaine, or flagrantly as the woman of the streets, she sets herself in opposition to them. This is the explanation of the social ostracisms, the practical outlawry which is the present almost universal fate of the prostitute. The mother readily submits to the moral impositions of man, simply because she is interested only in the child and the preservation of the race.
\It is quite different with the prostitute. She lives her own life exactly as she pleases, even although it may bring with it the punishment of exclusion from society. She is not so brave as the mother, it is true, being thoroughly cowardly ; but she has the correlative of cowardice, impu-
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dence, and she is not ashamed of her shamelessness. ' She is naturally inclined to polygamy, and always ready to attract more men than the one who would suffice as the founder of a family. She gives free play to the fulfilment of her desire, and feels a queen, and her most ardent wish is for more power. Ut is easy to grieve or shock the motherly woman ; no one can injure or offend the pros- titute ; for the mother has her honour to defend as the guardian of the species, whilst the prostitute has forsworn all social respect, and prides herself in her freedony The qiilyjihought- that disturbs her is_the possibility of losing her power. She expects, and cannot think otherwise than that every man wishes to possess her, that they think of nothing but her, and live for her. And certainly she possesses the greatest power over men, the only influence that has a strong effect on the life of humanity that is not ordered by the regulations of men.
In this lies the analogy between the prostitute and men who have been famous in politics. As it is only once in many centuries that a great conqueror arises, like Napoleon orAlexander,soitiswiththegreatcourtesan; butwhenshe does appear she marches triumphantly across the world.
There is a relationship between such men and courtesans (every politician is to a certain extent a tribune of the people, and that in itself implies a kind of prostitution). They have the same feeling for power, the same demand to be in relations with all men, even the humblest. Just as the great conqueror believes that he confers a favour on any one to whom he talks, so also with the prostitute. Observe her as she talks to a policeman, or buys something in a shop, you see the sense of conferring a favour explicit inher. Andmenmostreadilyacceptthisviewthatthey are receiving favours from the politician or prostitute (one may recall how a great genius like Goethe regarded his meetingwithNapoleonatErfurt; andontheothersidewe have the myth of Pandora, and the story of the birth of Venus).
1 may now return to the subject of great men of action
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which I opened in chap. v. Even so far-seeing a man as Carlyle has exalted the man of action, as, for instance, in his chapter on "The Hero as King. " I have already shown that I cannot accept such a view. I may add here that all great men of action, even the greatest of them, such as Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, have not hesitated to em- ploy falsehood ; that Alexander the Great did not hesitate to defend one of his murders by sophistry. But untruth- fulness is incompatible with genius. The "Memoirs of Napoleon," written at St. Helena, are full of mistatements and watery sophistry, and his last words, that " he had loved only France," were an altruistic pose. Napoleon, the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore, not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself. There is this element in all the conquerors, great or small. Just because he had great gifts, greater than those of any emperor before him, he had greater difficulty in stifling the disapprovingvoicewithinhim. Themotiveofhisambition was the craving to stifle his better self. A truly great man may honestly share in the desire for admiration or fame but personal ambition will not be his aim. He will not try to knit the whole world to himself by superficial, transitory bonds, to heap up all the things of the world in a pyramid overhisname. Themanofactionshareswiththeepileptic the desire to be in criminal relation to everything around him, to make them appanages of his petty self. (The great man feels himself defined and separate from the world, a monad amongst monads, and, as a true microcosm, he feels the world already within him ; he realises in the fullest sense of personal experience that he has a definite, assured, intelli- gible relation to the world whole. The great tribune and the great courtesan do not feel that they are marked off from the world ; they merge with it, and demand it all as decoration or adornment of their empirical persons, and th^y^arejiTcapable of love,^ff^ectic)n^_Qrjfrie. ndshi^.
The kmg of the fairy tale who wished to conquer the
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stars is the perfect image of the conqueror. The great genius honours himself, and has not to hve in a condition of give and take with the populace, as is necessary for the politician. The great politician makes his voice resound in the world, but he has also to sing in the streets ; he may make the world his chessboard, but he has also to strut in a booth ; he is no more a despot than he is a beggar for alms. He has to court the populace, and here he joins with the prostitute. The politician is a man of the streets. He must be completed by the public. It is the masses that he re- quires, not real individualities. If he is not clever he tries to be rid of the great men, or if, like Napoleon, he is cunning, he pretends to honour them in order that he may make them harmless. His dependence on the public makes some such course necessary. A politician cannot do all that he wishes, even if he is a Napoleon, and if, unlike Napoleon, he actually wished to realise ideals, he would soon be taught better by the public, his real master. The will of him who covets power is bound.
Every emperor is conscious of this relation between him- self ind the masses, and has an almost instinctive love of great assemblages of his people, or his army, or of his electors. Not Marcus Aurelius or Diocletian, but Kleo, Mark Antony, Themistocles, and Mirabeau are the em- bodiments of the real politician. Ambition means going amongstthepeople. Thetribunehastofollowtheprosti- tute in this respect. According to Emerson, Napoleon used to go incognito amongst the people to excite their hurrahs and praise. Schiller imagined the same course for his Wallenstein.
Hitherto the phenomena of the great man of action have been regarded even by artists and philosophers as unique. I think that my analysis has shown that there is the strongest resemblance between them and prostitutes. To see an analogy between Antonius (Caesar) and Cleopatra may appear at first far-fetched, but none the less it exists. The great man of action has to despise his inner life, in order that he may live altogether " in the world," and he must
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perish,likethethingsoftheworld. Theprostituteabandons the lasting purpose of her sex, to live in the instincts of the moment. The great prostitute and the great tribune are firebrands causing destruction all around them, leaving death and devastation in their paths, and pass like meteors unconnected with the course of human life, indifferent to its objects, and soon disappearing, whilst the genius and the mother work for the future in silence. ^The prostitute and the tribune may be called the enemies of God ? they are both anti-moral phenomena^
Great men of action, then, must be excluded from the category of genius. The true genius, whether he be an artist or a philosopher, is always strongly marked by his relation to the constructive side of the world.
The motive that actuates the prostitute requires further investigation. The purpose of the motherly woman was easy to understand ; she is the upholder of the race. But the fundamental idea of prostitution is much more mys- terious, and no one can have meditated long on the subject without often doubting if it were possible to get an explana- tion. Perhaps the relation of the two types to the sexual actmayassisttheinquiry.
Ihopethatnoonewillconsider such a subject below the dignity of a philosopher. The spirit in which the inquiry is made is the chief matter. It is at least clear that the painters of Leda and Dana? e have pondered over the problem, and many great writers-- have in mind Zola's "Confession of Claude," his "Hortense," "Renee," and "Nana," Tolstoi's "Resurrection," Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler," and " Rita," and above all the "Sonja" of that great soul Dostoyevski--must have been thinking of the
general problem rather than merely wishing to describe particular cases.
The maternal woman regards the sexual relations as means to an end ; the prostitute considers them as the end itself. That sexual congress may have another purpose than mere reproduction is plain, as many animals and plants are devoid of it. On the other hand, in the animal kingdom, sexual congress is always in connection with reproduction,
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and is never simply lust ; and, moreover, takes place only at times suitable for breeding. Desire is simply the means employed by nature to secure the contmuity of the species.
Although sexual congress is an end in itself for the prostitute, it must not be assumed that it is meaningless in themother-type. Womenwhoaresexuallyanaestheticno doubt exist in both classes, but they are very rare, and many apparent cases may really be phenomena of hysteria.
The final importance attached by the prostitute to the sexual act is made plain by the fact that it is only that type inwhichcoquetryoccurs. Coquetryhasinvariablyasexual significance. Its purpose is to picture to the man the
. f? Q0Ja? 9if:s. t_oi _the woman before it has_ occurred, in order to induce him to make the conquest an actual fact. The readiness of the type to coquet with every man is an expres- sion of her nature ; whether it proceeds further depends on mprely accidental circumstances.
[The maternal type regards the sexual act as the beginning of a series of important events, and so attaches value to it equally with the prostitute, although in a different fashion/ The one is contented, completed, satisfied ; her life is made richer and of fuller meaning to her by it. The other, for whom the act is everything, the compression and end of all life, is never satisfied, never to be satisfied, were she visited by all the men in the world.
' The body of a woman, as I have already shown, is sexual 'throughout, and the special sexual acts are only intensifica- tions of a distributed sensation. Here, also, the difference between the two types displays itself. The prostiiute type in coquetting is merely using the general sexuality of her body as an end in itself ; for her there is a difference only in degree between flirtation and sexual congress. The maternal type is equally sexual, but with a different purpose; all her life, through all her body, she is being impregnated. In this fact lies the explanation of the "impression " which I referred to as being indubitable, although it is denied by
men of science and physicians^ Paternityisadiffusedrelation. Manyinstances,disputed
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by men of science, point to an influence not brought about directly by the reproductive cells. White women who have borne a child to a black man, are said if they bear children afterwards to white men, to have retained enough impression from the first mate to show an effect on the subsequent children. All such facts, grouped under the names of " telegony," ** germinal infection," and so. on, although disputed by scientists, speak for my view. (And so also the motherly woman, throughout her whole lire, is impressed by lovers, by voices, by words, by inanimate things. All the influences that come to her she turns to the purpose of her being, to the shaping of her child, and the " actual " father has to share his paternity with perhaps other men and many other things. )
Thewomanis impregnatednotonlythroughthegenital tract but through every fibre of her being. All life makes an impression on her and throws its image on her child. This universality, in the purely physical sphere, is analagous to genius.
<Jt is quite different with the prostitute. Whilst the maternal woman turns the whole world, the love of her lover, and all the impressions that she receives to the pur- poses of the child, the prostitute absorbs everything for herself^ But just as she has this absorbing need of the man, so the man can get something from her which he fails to find in the badly dressed, tasteless, pre-occupied maternal type. Something within him requires pleasure, and this he gets from the daughters of joy. Unlike the mother, these think of the pleasures of the world, of dancing, of dressing, of theatres and concerts, of pleasure-resorts. They know the use of gold, turning it to luxury instead of to comfort, they flame through the world, making all its ways a triumphant march for their beautiful bodies.
The prostitute is the great seductress of the world, the female Don Juan, the being in the woman that knows the art of love, that cultivates it, teaches it, and enjoys it.
Very deep-seated differences are linked with what I have been describing. The mother-woman craves for respect-
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ability in the man, not because she grasps its value as an idea, but because it is the supporter of the life of the world. Sheherselfworks,andisnotidleliketheprostitute; sheis tilled with care for the future, and so requires from the man a corresponding practical responsibility, and will not seduce him to pleasure. (The prostitute, on the other hand, is
most attracted by a careless, idle, dissipated man. A man that has lost self-restraint repels the mother-woman, is attractive to the prostitute. There are women who are dissatisfiedwithasonthatisidleatschool; thereareothers who encourage him^ The diligent boy pleases the mother- woman, the idle and careless boy wins approval from the prostitute type. This distinction reaches high up amongst the respectable classes of society, but a salient example of it is seen in the fact that the " bullies " loved by women of the streets are usually criminals. The souteneur is always a criminal, a thief, a fraudulent person, or sometimes even a murderer.
I am almost on the point of saymg that, however little woman is to be regarded as immoral (she is only non- moral), prostitution stands in some deep relation with crime, whilst motherhood is equally bound with the oppo- site tendency. We must avoid regarding the prostitute as the female analogue of the criminal ; women, as I have already pointed out, are not criminals ; they are too low in the moral scale for that designation. None the less, there is a constant connection between the prostitute type and crime. The great courtesan is comparable with that great criminal, the conqueror, and readily enters into actual rela- tions with him ; the petty courtesan entertains the thief and the pickpocket. 'vThe mother type is in fact the guardian of the life of the world, the prostitute type is its enemy^ But just as the mother is in harmony, not with the soul but with the body, so the prostitute is no diabolic destroyer of the idea,butonlyacorrupterofempiricalphenomena. Physi- cal life and physical death, both of which are in intimate connection with the sexual act, are displayed by the woman
SEX AND CHARACTER
,in her two capacities of mother and prostitute. /
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It is siill impossible to give a clearer solution than that which I h:ive attempted, of the real significance of mother- hood and prostitution. I am on an unfamiliar path, almost untrodden by any earlier wayfarer. Religious myths and plilosophy alike have been unable to propound solutions. I have found some clues however. The anti-moral signi- ficance of prostitution is in harmony with the fact that it appearsonlyamongstmankind. Inalltheanimalkingdom the females are used only for reproduction ; there are no true females that are sterile. There are analogies to prosti- tution, however, amongst male animals ; one has only to think of the display and decoration of the peacock, of tne shining glow-worm, of singing birds, of the love dances of many male birds. These secondary sexual manifestations, however, are mere advertisements of sexuality.
Prostitution is a human phenomenon ; animals and plants are non-moral ; they are never disposed to immo- ralityandpossessonlymotherhood. Hereisadeepsecret, hidden in the nature and origin of mankind. I ought to correctmyearlierexpositionbyinsistingthatI havecome to regard the prostitute element as a possibility in all women just as much as the merely animal capacity for motherhood. It is something which penetrates the nature of the human female, something with which the most animal-like mother is tinged, something which corresponds in the human female, to the characters that separate the human male from the animal male. ^Just as the immoral, possibility of man is something that distinguishes him from the male animal/so the quality of the prostitute distinguishes the human female from the animal female. I shall have something to say as to the general relation of man to this element in woman, towards the end of my investigation, but possibly the ultimate origin of prostitution is a deep mystery into which none can penetrate.
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? CHAPTER XI
EROTICS AND ESTHETICS
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 philo- sophical 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.
? EROTICS AND ^ESTHETICS
Na? here is no doubt that it is a fallacious method in a theoretical argument to refer to one's opponent's psycho- logical motives instead of bringing forward proofs to controvert his statements^
It is not necessary for me to say that in logical contro- versy 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 Kam 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. * He represents too lofty and pure a type to speak
* The association of these two desires may surprise readers. It rests on a metaphysical ground, much of which will be more
237
? 238 SEX AND CHARACTER
with authority on this matter : his one passion was meta- physics.
As for Schopenhauer, he had just as Httle idea of the higher form of eroticism ; his sexuality was of the gross order. This can be seen from the following : Schopen- hauer's countenance shows very little kindliness and a good deal of fierceness (a circumstance which must have causedhimgreatsorrow. Thereisnoexhibitionofethical sympathy if one is very sorry for oneself. The most sym- pathetic 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 notimplythattheyhavediabolicalnatures. Theymay,on the contrary, stand very high morally without knowmg 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 inex- plicable ; in it the most important doctrine is that the uncon- scious goal of all love is nothing more than "the formation of the next generation. y
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
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 rest- lessness, 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.
EROTICS AND ESTHETICS
239
senses, ^hatabsolutelydisposesoftheoppositeviewisthis 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 m the case of sexual impulse and love. The more erotic a man is the less he will be troubled with his sexuality, and vice versag
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 attainthehighestphasesofboth. Thatpersonlies,orhas 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.
,^he 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 im- pulse 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 psy- chiatry have such a poor opinion of. I should say rather, there is only " platonic " love, because any other so-called
:
? --"
? 240 SEX AND CHARACTER
' love belongs to the kingdom of the senses :At is the love of Beatrice, the worship of Madpnna ; the Babylonian woman is the symbol of sexual desire. )
Kant's enumeration of th6 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 " Tannha? user. " We have Tannha? user, 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, to? ne Begeistert mein Gesang, Die mir in Engelscho? ne Tief in die Seele drang !
Du nahst als Gott gesandte :
-- So fu? hrst 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 quali- ties 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 suchhighfashion. Thesourceofthisbeautyandchastity 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 m the nude. I admit that in pictures or statues the nude female maylookwell. Butthesexualimpulsemakesitimpossible
Ich folg' aus holder Fern',
? EROTICS AND . ESTHETICS 241
to look at a living woman in a nude condition with the purely critical, unemotional eye, which is an essential feature injudginganyobjectofbeauty. Butapartfromthis,an absolute nude female figure in the life leaves an impression of something wanting, an incompleteness, which is incom- patible 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 disin- clination 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 theconceptionofbeauty. Itrequiresnolengthyexposition to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful, and that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as duetothesexualimpulse. Infact,thesexualimpulseism
realityopposedtotheconceptionofbeauty. Themanwho 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
242
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 beauti- ful does not present itself to human beings with any im- perative 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 directedA)ut 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 dis- cerned, 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.
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? SEX AND CHARACTER
whoareunnaturalandsecretlyimmorally-minded. Buta man who has become immorally-minded no longer is interested in the nude as such, because it has lost its in- fluence on him. He merely desires and no longer loves. AW 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 itk This would represent the conceivable maxi- mum of shamelessness ; but there is no declaration of love which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by
? EROTICS AND ^STHETICS^
243 I now come to the second question : what are the inno-
cence 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 m^ 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. Uf 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 charac- teristics 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, in- telligible nature, free from all fetters of necessity, from all taint of earthy
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
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SEX AND CHARACTER
much as to realise his own ideal, to find his real higher self. M. nd as he cannot find this true self within himself, he has to seek it without himself. He projects his ideal of an abso- lutely 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 piirification, 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.
?
Consider the relation to the child first. ^The absolute prostitute thinks only of the man ; the absolute mother thinks only of the child. The best test case is the relation tothedaughter. Itisonlywhenthereisnojealousyabout her youth or greater beauty, no grudging about the admira- tion she wins, but an identification of herself with her daughter so complete that she is as pleased about her child'sadmirersasif theywereherown,thatawomanhas a claim to the title of perfect mother.
The absolute mother (if such existed), who thinks only about the child, would become a mother by any man. It will be found that women who were devoted to dolls when they were children, and were kind and attentive to children in their own childhood, are least particular about their husbands, and are most ready to accept the first good match who takes any notice of them and who satisfies their parents and relatives. When such a maiden has become a mother, it matters not by whom, she ceases to pay any attention to any other men. The absolute prostitute, on the other hand, even when she is still a child, dislikes children ; later on, she may pretend to care for them as
;
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a means of attracting men through the idea of mother and child. She is the woman whose desire is to please all men ; and since there is no such thing as an ideally perfect type of mother, there are traces of this desire to please in every woman, as every man of the world will admit.
Here we can trace at least a formal resemblance between the two types. Both are careless as to the individuality of their sexual complement. The one accepts any possible man who can make her a mother, and once that has been achieved asks nothing more ; on this ground only is she to be described as monogamous. The other is ready to yield herself to any man who stimulates her erotic desires ; that is her only object. From this description of the two extreme types we may hope to gain some knowledge of the nature of actual women.
I have to admit that the popular opinion as to the mono- gamous nature of women as opposed to the essential polygamy of the male, an opinion I long held, is erroneous. The contrary is the case. One must not be misled by the fact that a woman will wait very long for a particular man, and where possible will choose him who can bestow most value on her, the most noble, the most famous, the ideal prince. Woman is distinguished by this desire for value from the animals, who have no regard for value either for themselves and through themselves, as in the case of a man, or for another and through another, as in the case of a woman^'' But this could be brought forward only by fools as in ariy way to the credit of woman, since, indeed, it shows most strongly that she is devoid of a feeling of personal value. Thedesireforthisdemandstobesatisfied,butdoes not find satisfaction in the moral idea of monogamy, /yhe man is able to pour forth value, to confer it on the woman he can give it, he wishes to give it, but he cannot receive it. The woman seeks to create as much personal value as pos-
sible for herself, and so adheres to the man who can give her most of it ; faithfulness of the man, however, rests on other grounds. He regards it as the completion of
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 221
ideal love, as a fulfilment, even although it is questionable if that could be attained. His faithfulness springs from the purely masculine conception of truth, the continuity demanded by the intelligible ego. ) One often hears it said that women are more faithful than men ; but man's faithful- ness is a coercion which he exercises on himself, of his own free will, and with full consciousness. He may not adhere to this self-imposed contract, but his falling away from it will seem as a wrong to himself. When he breaks his faith he has suppressed the promptings of his real nature. For the woman unfaithfulness is an exciting game, in which the thought of morality plays no part, but which is controlled only by the desire for safety and reputation. There is no wife who has not been untrue to her husband in thought, and yet no woman reproaches herself with this. For a woman pledges her faith lightly and without any full con- sciousness of what she does, and breaks it just as lightly and thoughtlessly as she pledged it. The motive for honouring a pledge can be found only in man ; for a woman does not understand the binding force of a given word. The examples of female faithfulness that can be adduced against this are of little value. They are either the slow result of the habit of sexual acquiescence, or a condition of actual slavery, dog-like, attentive, full of instinctive tenacious attachment, comparable with that necessity for actual contact which marks female sympathy.
The conception of faithfulness to one has been created by man. It arises from the masculine idea of individuality which remains unchanged by time, and, therefore, needs as its complement always one and the same person. The conception of faithfulness to one person is a lofty one, and finds a worthy expression in the sacramental marriage of theCatholicChurch. I amnotgoingtodiscussthequestion of marriage or free-love. Marriage in its existing form is as incompatible as free-love with the highest interpretations of the moral law. And so divorce came into the world with marriage.
None the less marriage could have been invented only by
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man. No proprietary institution originated with women. The introduction of order into chaotic sexual relations could have come only through man's desire for it, and his power to establish it. There have been periods in the history of many primitive races in which women had great influence; but the period of matriarchy was a period of polyandry.
The dissimilarity in the relations of mother and prostitute to their child is rich in important conclusions. A woman in whom the prostitute element is strong will perceive her son's manhood and always stand in a sexual relation to him. But as no woman is the perfect type of mother, there is something sexual in the relation of every mother and son. For this reason, I chose the relation of the mother to her daughter and not to her son, as the best measure of her type. There are many well-known physiological parallels between the relations of a mother to her children and of a wife to her husband.
Motherliness, like sexuality, is not an individual relation. When a woman is motherly the quality will be exercised not only on the child of her own body, but towards all men, although later on her interest in her own child may become all-absorbing and make her narrow, blind, and unjust in the event of a quarrel.
\The relation of a motherly girl to her lover is interesting. Such a girl is inclined to be motherly towards the man she loves, especially towards that man who will afterwards become the father of her child ; in fact, in a certain sense the man is her child. The deepest nature of the mother- type reveals itself in this identity of the mother and loving wife; themothersformtheenduringroot-stockofourrace from which the individual man arises, and in the face of which he recognises his own impermanence. '\^It is this idea which enables the man to see in the mother, even while she is still a girl, something eternal, and which gives the pregnant woman a tremendous significance. The enduring security of the race lies in the mystery of this figure, in the presence of which man feels his own fleeting impermanence. /'
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 223
In such minutes there may come to him a sense of freedom and peace, and in the mysterious silence of the idea, he may think that it is through the woman that he is in true relation with the universe. He becomes the child of his beloved one, a child whose mother smiles on him, under- stands him, and takes care of him (Siegfried and Bru? nn- hilde, Act III. ). But this does not last long. (Siegfried tearshimselffromBru? nnhilde). Foramanonlycomesto his fulness when he frees himself from the race, when he raises himself above it. For paternity cannot satisfy the deepest longings of a man, and the idea that he is to be lost in the race is repellent to him. The most terrible chapter in the most comfortless of all the great books that have been written, the chapter on " Death and its Relation to the Indestructibility of our Nature," in Schopenhauer's "The World as Will and Idea," is where the permanence of the will to maintain the species is set down as the only real permanence.
(it IS the permanence of the race that gives the mother her courage and fearlessness in contrast with the coward- liness and fear of the prostitute. It is not the courage of individuality, the moral courage arising from an inner sense of freedom and personal value, but rather the desire that the race should be maintained which, acting through the mother, protects the husband and child. \ As courage and cowardice belong respectively to the mother and the prostitute, so is it with that other pair of contrasting ideas, hope and fear. The absolute mother stands in a persisting relationtohope; asshelivesonthroughtherace,shedoes not quail before death, whilst the prostitute has a lasting fear of it.
The mother feels herself in a sense superior to the man ;
she knows herself to be his anchor ; as she is in a secure place, linked in the chain of the generations, she may be likened to a harbour trom which each new individual sails forth to wander on the high seas. From the moment of conception onwards the mother is psychically and physi- callyreadytofeedandprotectherchild. Andthisprotective
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superiority extends itself to her lover ; she understands all that is simple and naive and childlike in him, whilst the prostitute understands best his caprices and refinements, ^he mother has the craving to teach her child, to give him everything, even when the child is represented by the lover; the prostitute strives to impose herself on the man, to receiveeverythingfromhim. Themotherastheupholder of the race is friendly to all its members ; it is only when there is an exclusive choice to be made between her child and others that she becomes hard and relentless ; and so she can be both more full of love and more bitter than the prostitute. '>
The mother is in complete relation with the continuity of the race ; the prostitute is completely outside it. ^The motheristhesoleadvocateandpriestessoftherace^ The will of the race to live is embodied in her, whilst the exist- ence of the prostitute shows that Schopenhauer was pushing a generalisation too far when he declared that all sexuality hadrelationonlytothefuturegeneration. Thatthemother cares only for the life of her own race is plain from the absence of consideration for animals shown by the best of mothers. A good mother, with the greatest peace of mind and content, willslaughterfowlafterfowlforherfamily. Themotherof children is a cruel step-mother to all other living things.
Another striking aspect of the mother's relation to the preservation of the race reveals itself in the matter of food. She cannot bear to see food wasted, however little may be left over ; whilst the prostitute wilfully squanders the quan- tities of food and drink she demands. The mother is stingy and mean ; the prostitute open-handed and lavish, (^he mother's object in life is to preserve the race, and her delight is to see her children eat and to encourage their appetites. Andsoshebecomesthegoodhousekeeper. Cereswasa good mother, a fact expressed in her Greek name, Demeter. The mother takes care of the body, but does not trouble about the mind. * The relation between mother and child
224
(*^^ Compare the conversation in Ibsen*s "Peer Gynt," Act ii. ,
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION
225
remains material from the kissing and hugging of childhood to the protective care of maturity. All her devotion is for the success and prosperity of her child in material things. )
Maternal love, then, cannot be truly represented as resting on moral grounds. Let any one ask himself if he does not believe that his mother's love would not be just as great for him if he were a totally different person. The indi- viduality of the child has no part in the maternal love
; the mere fact of its being her own child is sufficient, and so
the love cannot be regarded as moral. In the love of a man for a woman, or between persons of the same sex, there is always some reference to the personal qualities of theindividual; amother'sloveextendsitselfindifferentlyto anything that she has borne. It destroys tlje moral con- ception if we realise that the love of a mother for her child remains the same whether the child becomes a saint or a sinner, a king or a beggar, an angel or a fiend. Precisely the same conclusion will be reached from reflecting how children think that they have a claim on their mother's love simply because she is their mother, "paternal love is non- moral because it has no relation to the individuality of the being on which it is bestowed, and there can be an ethical relation only between two individualities^ The relation of motherandchildisalwaysakindofphysicalreflex. Ifthe little one suddenly screams or cries when the mother is in the next room, she will at once rush to it as if she herself had been hurt ; and, as the children grow up, every wish or trouble of theirs is directly assumed and shared by the mother as if they were her own. There is an unbreakable link between the mother and child, physical, like the cord
that united the two before childbirth. This is the real nature of the maternal relation ; and, for my part, I protest
between the father of Solveig and Aase (perhaps the best-drawn mother in all literature) when they were discussing the search for their son :
Aase. " We shall find him. "
Her Husband. " And save his soul. " Aase, " And his body. "
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against the fashion in which it is praised, its very indis- criminate character being made a merit. I believe myself that many great artists have recognised this, but have chosen to be silent about it. The extraordinary over-praising of Raphael is losing ground, and the singers of maternal love are no higher than Fischart or Richepin.
Maternal love is an instinctive and natural impulse, and animals possess it in a degree as high as that of human beings. This alone is enough to show that it is not true love, that it is not of moral origin ; for all morality proceeds from the intelligible character which animals, having no free will, do not possess, ^he ethical imperative can be heard only by a rational creature ; there is no such thing as natural morality, for all morality must be self-conscious>
Her position outside the mere preservation of the race, the fact that she is not merely the channel and the indifferent protector of the chain of beings that passes through her, place the prostitute in a sense above the mother, so far at least as it is possible to speak of higher or lower from the ethical point of view when women are being discussed.
The matron whose whole time is taken up in looking after her husband and children, who is working in, or superin- tending the work of, the house, garden, or other forms of labour, ranks intellectually very low. The most highly- developed women mentally, those who have been lauded in poetry, belong to the prostitute category ; to these, the Aspasia-type, must be added the women of the romantic
school, foremost among whom must be placed Karoline Michaelis-Bo? hmer-Forster-Schlegel-Schelling.
It coincides with what has been said that only those men are sexually attracted by the mother-type who have no desire formentalproductivity. Themanwhosefatherhoodiscon- fined to the children of his loins is he whom we should expect to choose the motherly productive woman. Great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type. * Their choice falls on the sterile woman, and, if there is
* Wherever I am using this term I refer, of course, not merely to mercenary women of the streets.
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issue, it is unfit and soon dies out. Ordinary fatherhood has as little do do with morality as motherhood. It is non-moral, as I shall show in chap. xiv. ; and it is illo- gical, because it deals with illusions. ;^o man ever knows to what extent he is the father of his own child. And its duration is short and fleeting ; every generation and every race of human beings soon disappear^>
The wide-spread and exclusive honouring of the' motherly woman, the type most upheld as the one and only possible one for women, is accordingly quite unjustified. Although most men are certain that every woman can have her con- summation only in motherhood, I must confess that the prostitute--not as a person, but as a phenomenon--is much more estimable in my opinion.
There are various causes of this universal reverence for the mother.
One of the chief reasons appears to be that the mother seems to the man nearer his ideal of chastity ; but the woman who desires children is no more chaste than the man-coveting prostitute.
The man rewards the appearance of higher morality in the maternal type by raising her morally (although with no reason) and socially over the prostitute type. The latter does not submit to any valuations of the man nor to the ideal of chastity which he seeks for in the woman ; secretly, as the woman of the world, lightly as the demi-mondaine, or flagrantly as the woman of the streets, she sets herself in opposition to them. This is the explanation of the social ostracisms, the practical outlawry which is the present almost universal fate of the prostitute. The mother readily submits to the moral impositions of man, simply because she is interested only in the child and the preservation of the race.
\It is quite different with the prostitute. She lives her own life exactly as she pleases, even although it may bring with it the punishment of exclusion from society. She is not so brave as the mother, it is true, being thoroughly cowardly ; but she has the correlative of cowardice, impu-
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dence, and she is not ashamed of her shamelessness. ' She is naturally inclined to polygamy, and always ready to attract more men than the one who would suffice as the founder of a family. She gives free play to the fulfilment of her desire, and feels a queen, and her most ardent wish is for more power. Ut is easy to grieve or shock the motherly woman ; no one can injure or offend the pros- titute ; for the mother has her honour to defend as the guardian of the species, whilst the prostitute has forsworn all social respect, and prides herself in her freedony The qiilyjihought- that disturbs her is_the possibility of losing her power. She expects, and cannot think otherwise than that every man wishes to possess her, that they think of nothing but her, and live for her. And certainly she possesses the greatest power over men, the only influence that has a strong effect on the life of humanity that is not ordered by the regulations of men.
In this lies the analogy between the prostitute and men who have been famous in politics. As it is only once in many centuries that a great conqueror arises, like Napoleon orAlexander,soitiswiththegreatcourtesan; butwhenshe does appear she marches triumphantly across the world.
There is a relationship between such men and courtesans (every politician is to a certain extent a tribune of the people, and that in itself implies a kind of prostitution). They have the same feeling for power, the same demand to be in relations with all men, even the humblest. Just as the great conqueror believes that he confers a favour on any one to whom he talks, so also with the prostitute. Observe her as she talks to a policeman, or buys something in a shop, you see the sense of conferring a favour explicit inher. Andmenmostreadilyacceptthisviewthatthey are receiving favours from the politician or prostitute (one may recall how a great genius like Goethe regarded his meetingwithNapoleonatErfurt; andontheothersidewe have the myth of Pandora, and the story of the birth of Venus).
1 may now return to the subject of great men of action
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 229
which I opened in chap. v. Even so far-seeing a man as Carlyle has exalted the man of action, as, for instance, in his chapter on "The Hero as King. " I have already shown that I cannot accept such a view. I may add here that all great men of action, even the greatest of them, such as Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, have not hesitated to em- ploy falsehood ; that Alexander the Great did not hesitate to defend one of his murders by sophistry. But untruth- fulness is incompatible with genius. The "Memoirs of Napoleon," written at St. Helena, are full of mistatements and watery sophistry, and his last words, that " he had loved only France," were an altruistic pose. Napoleon, the greatest of the conquerors, is a sufficient proof that great men of action are criminals, and, therefore, not geniuses. One can understand him by thinking of the tremendous intensity with which he tried to escape from himself. There is this element in all the conquerors, great or small. Just because he had great gifts, greater than those of any emperor before him, he had greater difficulty in stifling the disapprovingvoicewithinhim. Themotiveofhisambition was the craving to stifle his better self. A truly great man may honestly share in the desire for admiration or fame but personal ambition will not be his aim. He will not try to knit the whole world to himself by superficial, transitory bonds, to heap up all the things of the world in a pyramid overhisname. Themanofactionshareswiththeepileptic the desire to be in criminal relation to everything around him, to make them appanages of his petty self. (The great man feels himself defined and separate from the world, a monad amongst monads, and, as a true microcosm, he feels the world already within him ; he realises in the fullest sense of personal experience that he has a definite, assured, intelli- gible relation to the world whole. The great tribune and the great courtesan do not feel that they are marked off from the world ; they merge with it, and demand it all as decoration or adornment of their empirical persons, and th^y^arejiTcapable of love,^ff^ectic)n^_Qrjfrie. ndshi^.
The kmg of the fairy tale who wished to conquer the
? 230 SEX AND CHARACTER
stars is the perfect image of the conqueror. The great genius honours himself, and has not to hve in a condition of give and take with the populace, as is necessary for the politician. The great politician makes his voice resound in the world, but he has also to sing in the streets ; he may make the world his chessboard, but he has also to strut in a booth ; he is no more a despot than he is a beggar for alms. He has to court the populace, and here he joins with the prostitute. The politician is a man of the streets. He must be completed by the public. It is the masses that he re- quires, not real individualities. If he is not clever he tries to be rid of the great men, or if, like Napoleon, he is cunning, he pretends to honour them in order that he may make them harmless. His dependence on the public makes some such course necessary. A politician cannot do all that he wishes, even if he is a Napoleon, and if, unlike Napoleon, he actually wished to realise ideals, he would soon be taught better by the public, his real master. The will of him who covets power is bound.
Every emperor is conscious of this relation between him- self ind the masses, and has an almost instinctive love of great assemblages of his people, or his army, or of his electors. Not Marcus Aurelius or Diocletian, but Kleo, Mark Antony, Themistocles, and Mirabeau are the em- bodiments of the real politician. Ambition means going amongstthepeople. Thetribunehastofollowtheprosti- tute in this respect. According to Emerson, Napoleon used to go incognito amongst the people to excite their hurrahs and praise. Schiller imagined the same course for his Wallenstein.
Hitherto the phenomena of the great man of action have been regarded even by artists and philosophers as unique. I think that my analysis has shown that there is the strongest resemblance between them and prostitutes. To see an analogy between Antonius (Caesar) and Cleopatra may appear at first far-fetched, but none the less it exists. The great man of action has to despise his inner life, in order that he may live altogether " in the world," and he must
I
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION 231
perish,likethethingsoftheworld. Theprostituteabandons the lasting purpose of her sex, to live in the instincts of the moment. The great prostitute and the great tribune are firebrands causing destruction all around them, leaving death and devastation in their paths, and pass like meteors unconnected with the course of human life, indifferent to its objects, and soon disappearing, whilst the genius and the mother work for the future in silence. ^The prostitute and the tribune may be called the enemies of God ? they are both anti-moral phenomena^
Great men of action, then, must be excluded from the category of genius. The true genius, whether he be an artist or a philosopher, is always strongly marked by his relation to the constructive side of the world.
The motive that actuates the prostitute requires further investigation. The purpose of the motherly woman was easy to understand ; she is the upholder of the race. But the fundamental idea of prostitution is much more mys- terious, and no one can have meditated long on the subject without often doubting if it were possible to get an explana- tion. Perhaps the relation of the two types to the sexual actmayassisttheinquiry.
Ihopethatnoonewillconsider such a subject below the dignity of a philosopher. The spirit in which the inquiry is made is the chief matter. It is at least clear that the painters of Leda and Dana? e have pondered over the problem, and many great writers-- have in mind Zola's "Confession of Claude," his "Hortense," "Renee," and "Nana," Tolstoi's "Resurrection," Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler," and " Rita," and above all the "Sonja" of that great soul Dostoyevski--must have been thinking of the
general problem rather than merely wishing to describe particular cases.
The maternal woman regards the sexual relations as means to an end ; the prostitute considers them as the end itself. That sexual congress may have another purpose than mere reproduction is plain, as many animals and plants are devoid of it. On the other hand, in the animal kingdom, sexual congress is always in connection with reproduction,
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SEX AND CHARACTER
and is never simply lust ; and, moreover, takes place only at times suitable for breeding. Desire is simply the means employed by nature to secure the contmuity of the species.
Although sexual congress is an end in itself for the prostitute, it must not be assumed that it is meaningless in themother-type. Womenwhoaresexuallyanaestheticno doubt exist in both classes, but they are very rare, and many apparent cases may really be phenomena of hysteria.
The final importance attached by the prostitute to the sexual act is made plain by the fact that it is only that type inwhichcoquetryoccurs. Coquetryhasinvariablyasexual significance. Its purpose is to picture to the man the
. f? Q0Ja? 9if:s. t_oi _the woman before it has_ occurred, in order to induce him to make the conquest an actual fact. The readiness of the type to coquet with every man is an expres- sion of her nature ; whether it proceeds further depends on mprely accidental circumstances.
[The maternal type regards the sexual act as the beginning of a series of important events, and so attaches value to it equally with the prostitute, although in a different fashion/ The one is contented, completed, satisfied ; her life is made richer and of fuller meaning to her by it. The other, for whom the act is everything, the compression and end of all life, is never satisfied, never to be satisfied, were she visited by all the men in the world.
' The body of a woman, as I have already shown, is sexual 'throughout, and the special sexual acts are only intensifica- tions of a distributed sensation. Here, also, the difference between the two types displays itself. The prostiiute type in coquetting is merely using the general sexuality of her body as an end in itself ; for her there is a difference only in degree between flirtation and sexual congress. The maternal type is equally sexual, but with a different purpose; all her life, through all her body, she is being impregnated. In this fact lies the explanation of the "impression " which I referred to as being indubitable, although it is denied by
men of science and physicians^ Paternityisadiffusedrelation. Manyinstances,disputed
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? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION
by men of science, point to an influence not brought about directly by the reproductive cells. White women who have borne a child to a black man, are said if they bear children afterwards to white men, to have retained enough impression from the first mate to show an effect on the subsequent children. All such facts, grouped under the names of " telegony," ** germinal infection," and so. on, although disputed by scientists, speak for my view. (And so also the motherly woman, throughout her whole lire, is impressed by lovers, by voices, by words, by inanimate things. All the influences that come to her she turns to the purpose of her being, to the shaping of her child, and the " actual " father has to share his paternity with perhaps other men and many other things. )
Thewomanis impregnatednotonlythroughthegenital tract but through every fibre of her being. All life makes an impression on her and throws its image on her child. This universality, in the purely physical sphere, is analagous to genius.
<Jt is quite different with the prostitute. Whilst the maternal woman turns the whole world, the love of her lover, and all the impressions that she receives to the pur- poses of the child, the prostitute absorbs everything for herself^ But just as she has this absorbing need of the man, so the man can get something from her which he fails to find in the badly dressed, tasteless, pre-occupied maternal type. Something within him requires pleasure, and this he gets from the daughters of joy. Unlike the mother, these think of the pleasures of the world, of dancing, of dressing, of theatres and concerts, of pleasure-resorts. They know the use of gold, turning it to luxury instead of to comfort, they flame through the world, making all its ways a triumphant march for their beautiful bodies.
The prostitute is the great seductress of the world, the female Don Juan, the being in the woman that knows the art of love, that cultivates it, teaches it, and enjoys it.
Very deep-seated differences are linked with what I have been describing. The mother-woman craves for respect-
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234
ability in the man, not because she grasps its value as an idea, but because it is the supporter of the life of the world. Sheherselfworks,andisnotidleliketheprostitute; sheis tilled with care for the future, and so requires from the man a corresponding practical responsibility, and will not seduce him to pleasure. (The prostitute, on the other hand, is
most attracted by a careless, idle, dissipated man. A man that has lost self-restraint repels the mother-woman, is attractive to the prostitute. There are women who are dissatisfiedwithasonthatisidleatschool; thereareothers who encourage him^ The diligent boy pleases the mother- woman, the idle and careless boy wins approval from the prostitute type. This distinction reaches high up amongst the respectable classes of society, but a salient example of it is seen in the fact that the " bullies " loved by women of the streets are usually criminals. The souteneur is always a criminal, a thief, a fraudulent person, or sometimes even a murderer.
I am almost on the point of saymg that, however little woman is to be regarded as immoral (she is only non- moral), prostitution stands in some deep relation with crime, whilst motherhood is equally bound with the oppo- site tendency. We must avoid regarding the prostitute as the female analogue of the criminal ; women, as I have already pointed out, are not criminals ; they are too low in the moral scale for that designation. None the less, there is a constant connection between the prostitute type and crime. The great courtesan is comparable with that great criminal, the conqueror, and readily enters into actual rela- tions with him ; the petty courtesan entertains the thief and the pickpocket. 'vThe mother type is in fact the guardian of the life of the world, the prostitute type is its enemy^ But just as the mother is in harmony, not with the soul but with the body, so the prostitute is no diabolic destroyer of the idea,butonlyacorrupterofempiricalphenomena. Physi- cal life and physical death, both of which are in intimate connection with the sexual act, are displayed by the woman
SEX AND CHARACTER
,in her two capacities of mother and prostitute. /
? MOTHERHOOD AND PROSTITUTION
It is siill impossible to give a clearer solution than that which I h:ive attempted, of the real significance of mother- hood and prostitution. I am on an unfamiliar path, almost untrodden by any earlier wayfarer. Religious myths and plilosophy alike have been unable to propound solutions. I have found some clues however. The anti-moral signi- ficance of prostitution is in harmony with the fact that it appearsonlyamongstmankind. Inalltheanimalkingdom the females are used only for reproduction ; there are no true females that are sterile. There are analogies to prosti- tution, however, amongst male animals ; one has only to think of the display and decoration of the peacock, of tne shining glow-worm, of singing birds, of the love dances of many male birds. These secondary sexual manifestations, however, are mere advertisements of sexuality.
Prostitution is a human phenomenon ; animals and plants are non-moral ; they are never disposed to immo- ralityandpossessonlymotherhood. Hereisadeepsecret, hidden in the nature and origin of mankind. I ought to correctmyearlierexpositionbyinsistingthatI havecome to regard the prostitute element as a possibility in all women just as much as the merely animal capacity for motherhood. It is something which penetrates the nature of the human female, something with which the most animal-like mother is tinged, something which corresponds in the human female, to the characters that separate the human male from the animal male. ^Just as the immoral, possibility of man is something that distinguishes him from the male animal/so the quality of the prostitute distinguishes the human female from the animal female. I shall have something to say as to the general relation of man to this element in woman, towards the end of my investigation, but possibly the ultimate origin of prostitution is a deep mystery into which none can penetrate.
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? CHAPTER XI
EROTICS AND ESTHETICS
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 philo- sophical 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.
? EROTICS AND ^ESTHETICS
Na? here is no doubt that it is a fallacious method in a theoretical argument to refer to one's opponent's psycho- logical motives instead of bringing forward proofs to controvert his statements^
It is not necessary for me to say that in logical contro- versy 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 Kam 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. * He represents too lofty and pure a type to speak
* The association of these two desires may surprise readers. It rests on a metaphysical ground, much of which will be more
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? 238 SEX AND CHARACTER
with authority on this matter : his one passion was meta- physics.
As for Schopenhauer, he had just as Httle idea of the higher form of eroticism ; his sexuality was of the gross order. This can be seen from the following : Schopen- hauer's countenance shows very little kindliness and a good deal of fierceness (a circumstance which must have causedhimgreatsorrow. Thereisnoexhibitionofethical sympathy if one is very sorry for oneself. The most sym- pathetic 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 notimplythattheyhavediabolicalnatures. Theymay,on the contrary, stand very high morally without knowmg 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 inex- plicable ; in it the most important doctrine is that the uncon- scious goal of all love is nothing more than "the formation of the next generation. y
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
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 rest- lessness, 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.
EROTICS AND ESTHETICS
239
senses, ^hatabsolutelydisposesoftheoppositeviewisthis 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 m the case of sexual impulse and love. The more erotic a man is the less he will be troubled with his sexuality, and vice versag
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 attainthehighestphasesofboth. Thatpersonlies,orhas 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.
,^he 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 im- pulse 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 psy- chiatry have such a poor opinion of. I should say rather, there is only " platonic " love, because any other so-called
:
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? 240 SEX AND CHARACTER
' love belongs to the kingdom of the senses :At is the love of Beatrice, the worship of Madpnna ; the Babylonian woman is the symbol of sexual desire. )
Kant's enumeration of th6 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 " Tannha? user. " We have Tannha? user, 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, to? ne Begeistert mein Gesang, Die mir in Engelscho? ne Tief in die Seele drang !
Du nahst als Gott gesandte :
-- So fu? hrst 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 quali- ties 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 suchhighfashion. Thesourceofthisbeautyandchastity 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 m the nude. I admit that in pictures or statues the nude female maylookwell. Butthesexualimpulsemakesitimpossible
Ich folg' aus holder Fern',
? EROTICS AND . ESTHETICS 241
to look at a living woman in a nude condition with the purely critical, unemotional eye, which is an essential feature injudginganyobjectofbeauty. Butapartfromthis,an absolute nude female figure in the life leaves an impression of something wanting, an incompleteness, which is incom- patible 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 disin- clination 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 theconceptionofbeauty. Itrequiresnolengthyexposition to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful, and that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as duetothesexualimpulse. Infact,thesexualimpulseism
realityopposedtotheconceptionofbeauty. Themanwho 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
242
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 beauti- ful does not present itself to human beings with any im- perative 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 directedA)ut 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 dis- cerned, 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.
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? SEX AND CHARACTER
whoareunnaturalandsecretlyimmorally-minded. Buta man who has become immorally-minded no longer is interested in the nude as such, because it has lost its in- fluence on him. He merely desires and no longer loves. AW 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 itk This would represent the conceivable maxi- mum of shamelessness ; but there is no declaration of love which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by
? EROTICS AND ^STHETICS^
243 I now come to the second question : what are the inno-
cence 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 m^ 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. Uf 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 charac- teristics 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, in- telligible nature, free from all fetters of necessity, from all taint of earthy
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
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SEX AND CHARACTER
much as to realise his own ideal, to find his real higher self. M. nd as he cannot find this true self within himself, he has to seek it without himself. He projects his ideal of an abso- lutely 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 piirification, 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.
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