EROTICS AND ÆSTHETICS
The arguments which are in common use to justify a high opinion of woman
have now been examined in all except a few points to which I shall
recur, from the point of view of critical philosophy, and have been
controverted. I hope that I have justified my deliberate choice of
ground, although, indeed, Schopenhauer’s fate should have been a warning
to me. His depreciation of women in his philosophical work “On Women,”
has been frequently attributed to the circumstance that a beautiful
Venetian girl, in whose company he was, fell in love with the extremely
handsome personal appearance of Byron; as if a low opinion of women were
not more likely to come to him who had had the best not the worst
fortune with them.
The practice of merely calling any one who assails woman a misogynist,
instead of refuting argument by argument, has much to commend it. Hatred
is never impartial, and, therefore, to describe a man as having an
animus against the object of his criticism, is at once to lay him open
to the charge of insincerity, immorality, and partiality, and one that
can be made with a hyperbole of accusation and evasion of the point,
which only equal its lack of justification. This sort of answer never
fails in its object, which is to exempt the vindicator from refuting the
actual statements. It is the oldest and handiest weapon of the large
majority of men, who never wish to see woman as she is. No men who
really think deeply about women retain a high opinion of them; men
either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.
There is no doubt that it is a fallacious method in a theoretical
argument to refer to one’s opponent’s psychological motives instead of
bringing forward proofs to controvert his statements.
It is not necessary for me to say that in logical controversy the
adversaries should place themselves under an impersonal conception of
truth, and their aim should be to reach a result, irrespective of their
own concrete opinions. If, however, in an argument, one side has come to
a certain conclusion by a logical chain of reasoning, and the other side
merely opposes the conclusion without having followed the reasoning
process, it is at once fair and appropriate to examine the psychological
motives which have induced the adversaries to abandon argument for
abuse. I shall now put the champions of women to the test and see how
much of their attitude is due to sentimentality, how much of it is
disinterested, and how much due to selfish motives.
All objections raised against those who despise women arise from the
erotic relations in which man stands to woman. This relationship is
absolutely different from the purely sexual attraction which occurs in
the animal world, and plays a most important part in human affairs. It
is quite erroneous to say that sexuality and eroticism, sexual impulse
and love, are fundamentally one and the same thing, the second an
embellishing, refining, spiritualising sublimation of the first;
although practically all medical men hold this view, and even such men
as Kant and Schopenhauer thought so. Before I go into the reasons for
maintaining the existence of this great distinction, I should like to
say something about the views of these two men.
Kant’s opinion is not of much weight, because love as sexual impulse
must have been as little known to him as possible, probably less than in
the case of any other man. He was so little erotic that he never felt
the kindred desire to travel.[17] He represents too lofty and pure a
type to speak with authority on this matter: his one passion was
metaphysics.
[17] The association of these two desires may surprise readers. It
rests on a metaphysical ground, much of which will be more apparent
when I have developed my theory of eroticism further. Time, like
space, is conceived of as unlimited, and man, in his desire for
freedom, in his efforts stimulated by his power of free will to
transcend his limits, has the craving for unlimited time and unlimited
space. The desire for travel is simply an expression of this
restlessness, this fundamental chafing of the spirit against its
bonds. But just as eternity is not prolonged time, but the negation of
time, so however far a man wanders, he can extend his area but cannot
abolish space. And so his efforts to transcend space must always be
heroic failures: I shall show that his eroticism is a similar notable
failure.
As for Schopenhauer, he had just as little idea of the higher form of
eroticism; his sexuality was of the gross order. This can be seen from
the following: Schopenhauer’s countenance shows very little kindliness
and a good deal of fierceness (a circumstance which must have caused him
great sorrow. There is no exhibition of ethical sympathy if one is very
sorry for oneself. The most sympathetic persons are those who, like Kant
and Nietzsche, have no particle of self-pity).
But it may be said with safety that only those who are most sympathetic
are capable of a strong passion: those “who take no interest in things”
are incapable of love. This does not imply that they have diabolical
natures. They may, on the contrary, stand very high morally without
knowing what their neighbours are thinking or doing, and without having
a sense for other than sexual relations with women, as was the case with
Schopenhauer. He was a man who knew only too well what the sexual
impulse was, but he never was in love; if that were not so, the bias in
his famous work, “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love,” would be
inexplicable; in it the most important doctrine is that the unconscious
goal of all love is nothing more than “the formation of the next
generation.”
This view, as I hope to prove, is false. It is true that a love entirely
without sexuality has never been known. However high a man may stand he
is still a being with senses. What absolutely disposes of the opposite
view is this: all love, as such--without going into æsthetic principles
of love--is antagonistic to those elements (of the relationship) which
press towards sexual union; in fact, such elements tend to negate love.
Love and desire are two unlike, mutually exclusive, opposing conditions,
and during the time a man really loves, the thought of physical union
with the object of his love is insupportable. Because there is no hope
which is entirely free from fear does not alter the fact that hope and
fear are utterly opposite principles. It is just the same in the case of
sexual impulse and love. The more erotic a man is the less he will be
troubled with his sexuality, and _vice versâ_.
If it be the case that there is no adoration utterly free from desire,
there is no reason why the two should be identified, since it might be
possible for a superior being to attain the highest phases of both. That
person lies, or has never known what love is, who says he loves a woman
whom he desires; so much difference is there between sexual impulse and
love. This is what makes talk of love after marriage seem, in most
cases, make-believe.
The following will show how obtuse the view of those is who persist,
with unconscious cynicism, in maintaining the identity of love and
sexual impulse. Sexual attraction increases with physical proximity;
love is strongest in the absence of the loved one; it needs separation,
a certain distance, to preserve it. In fact, what all the travels in the
world could not achieve, what time could not accomplish, may be brought
about by accidental, unintentional, physical contact with the beloved
object, in which the sexual impulse is awakened, and which suffices to
kill love on the spot. Then, again, in the case of more highly
differentiated, great men, the type of girl desired, and the type of
girl loved but never desired, are always totally different in face,
form, and disposition; they are two different beings.
Then there is the “platonic love,” which professors of psychiatry have
such a poor opinion of. I should say rather, there is only “platonic”
love, because any other so-called love belongs to the kingdom of the
senses: it is the love of Beatrice, the worship of Madonna; the
Babylonian woman is the symbol of sexual desire.
Kant’s enumeration of the transcendental ideas of love would have to be
extended if it is to be held. For the purely spiritual love, the love of
Plato and Bruno, which is absolutely free from desire, is none the less
a transcendental concept; nor is its significance as a concept impaired,
because such a love has never been fully realised.
It is the problem put forward in “Tannhäuser.” We have Tannhäuser,
Wolfram, Venus, and Maria. The fact that two lovers, who have found each
other once for all--Tristan and Isolde--choose death instead of the
bridal bed, is just as absolute a proof of a higher, maybe metaphysical,
something in mankind, as the martyrdom of a Giordano Bruno.
“Dir, hohe Liebe, töne
Begeistert mein Gesang,
Die mir in Engelschöne
Tief in die Seele drang!
Du nahst als Gott gesandte:
Ich folg’ aus holder Fern’,--
So führst du in die Lande,
Wo ewig strahlt dein Stern.”
Who is the object of such love? Is it woman, as she has been represented
in this work, who lacks all higher qualities, who gets her value from
another, who has no power to attain value on her own account?
Impossible. It is the ideally beautiful, the immaculate woman, who is
loved in such high fashion. The source of this beauty and chastity in
women must now be found.
The question as to whether the female sex is the more beautiful, and as
to whether it deserves the title of “the” beautiful, has been much
disputed.
It may be well to consider by whom and how far woman is considered
beautiful.
It is well known that woman is not most beautiful in the nude. I admit
that in pictures or statues the nude female may look well. But the
sexual impulse makes it impossible to look at a living woman in a nude
condition with the purely critical, unemotional eye, which is an
essential feature in judging any object of beauty. But apart from this,
an absolute nude female figure in the life leaves an impression of
something wanting, an incompleteness, which is incompatible with beauty.
A nude woman may be beautiful in details, but the general effect is not
beautiful; she inevitably creates the feeling that she is looking for
something, and this induces disinclination rather than desire in the
spectator. The sight of an upright female form, in the nude, makes most
patent her purposelessness, the sense of her purpose in life being
derived from something outside herself; in the recumbent position this
feeling is greatly diminished. It is evident that artists have perceived
this in reproducing the nude.
But even in the details of her body a woman is not wholly beautiful, not
even if she is a flawless, perfect type of her sex. The genitalia are
the chief difficulty in the way of regarding her as theoretically
beautiful. If the idea were justified that man’s love for woman is the
direct result of his sexual impulse; if we could agree with Schopenhauer
that “the under-sized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-limbed
sex is called beautiful only because the male intellect is befogged by
the sexual impulse, that impulse being the creator of the conception of
the beauty of woman,” it would follow that the genitalia could not be
excluded from the conception of beauty. It requires no lengthy
exposition to prove that the genitalia are not regarded as beautiful,
and that, therefore, the beauty of woman cannot be regarded as due to
the sexual impulse. In fact, the sexual impulse is in reality opposed to
the conception of beauty. The man who is most under its influence has
least sense of female beauty, and desires any woman merely because she
is a woman.
A woman’s nude body is distasteful to man because it offends his sense
of shame. The easy superficiality of our day has given colour to the
statement that the sense of shame has arisen from the wearing of
clothes, and it has been urged that the objection to the nude arises
from those who are unnatural and secretly immorally-minded. But a man
who has become immorally-minded no longer is interested in the nude as
such, because it has lost its influence on him. He merely desires and no
longer loves. All true love is modest, like all true pity. There is only
one case of shamelessness--a declaration of love the sincerity of which
a man is convinced of in the moment he makes it. This would represent
the conceivable maximum of shamelessness; but there is no declaration of
love which is quite true, and the stupidity of women is shown by their
readiness to believe such protestations.
The love bestowed by the man is the standard of what is beautiful and
what is hateful in woman. The conditions are quite different in
æsthetics 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 æsthetics beauty is created by love; there is no determining
law to love what is beautiful, and the beautiful does not present itself
to human beings with any imperative command to love it. (And so there is
no abstract, no super-individual “right” taste).
All beauty is really more a projection, an emanation of the requirements
of love; and so the beauty of woman is not apart from love, it is not an
objective to which love is directed, but woman’s beauty is the love of
man; they are not two things, but one and the same thing.
Just as hatefulness comes from hating, so love creates beauty. This is
only another way of expressing the fact that beauty has as little to do
with the sexual impulse as the sexual impulse has to do with love.
Beauty is something that can neither be felt, touched, nor mixed with
other things; it is only at a distance that it can be plainly discerned,
and when it is approached it withdraws itself. The sexual impulse which
seeks for sexual union with woman is a denial of such beauty; the woman
who has been possessed and enjoyed, will never again be worshipped for
her beauty.
I now come to the second question: what are the innocence and morality
of a woman?
It will be convenient to start with a few facts that concern the origin
of all love. Bodily cleanliness, as has often been remarked, is in men a
general indication of morality and rectitude; or at least it may be said
that uncleanly men are seldom of high character. It may be noticed that
when men, who formerly paid little attention to bodily cleanliness,
begin to strive for a higher perfection of character, they at the same
time take more trouble with the care of the body. In the same way, when
men suddenly become imbued with passion they experience a simultaneous
desire for bodily cleanliness, and it may almost be said of them that
only at such a time do they wash themselves thoroughly. If we now turn
to gifted men, we shall see that in their case love frequently begins
with self-mortification, humiliation, and restraint. A moral change sets
in, a process of purification seems to emanate from the object loved,
even if her lover has never spoken to her, or only seen her a few times
in the distance. It is, then, impossible that this process should have
its origin in that person: very often it may be a bread-and-butter miss,
a stolid lump, more often a sensuous coquette, in whom no one can see
the marvellous characteristics with which his love endows her, save her
lover. Can any one believe that it is a concrete person who is loved?
Does she not in reality serve as the starting point for incomparably
greater emotions than she could inspire?
In love, man is only loving himself. Not his empirical self, not the
weaknesses and vulgarities, not the failings and smallnesses which he
outwardly exhibits; but all that he wants to be, all that he ought to
be, his truest, deepest, intelligible nature, free from all fetters of
necessity, from all taint of earth.
In his actual physical existence, this being is limited by space and
time and by the shackles of the senses; however deep he may look into
himself, he finds himself damaged and spotted, and sees nowhere the
image of speckless purity for which he seeks. And yet there is nothing
he covets so much as to realise his own ideal, to find his real higher
self. And as he cannot find this true self within himself, he has to
seek it without himself. He projects his ideal of an absolutely worthy
existence, the ideal that he is unable to isolate within himself, upon
another human being, and this act, and this alone, is none other than
love and the significance of love. Only a person who has done wrong and
is conscious of it can love, and so a child can never love. It is only
because love represents the highest, most unattainable goal of all
longing, because it cannot be realised in experience but must remain an
idea; only because it is localised on some other human being, and yet
remains at a distance, so that the ideal never attains its realisation;
only because of such conditions can love be associated with the
awakening of the desire for purification, with the reaching after a goal
that is purely spiritual, and so cannot be blemished by physical union
with the beloved person; only thus, is love the highest and strongest
effort of the will towards the supreme good; only thus does it bring the
true being of man to a state between body and spirit, between the senses
and the moral nature, between God and the beasts. A human being only
finds himself when, in this fashion, he loves. And thus it comes about
that only when they love do many men realise the existence of their own
personality and of the personality of another, that “I” and “thou”
become for them more than grammatical expressions. And so also comes
about the great part played in their love story by the names of the two
lovers. There is no doubt but that it is through love that many men
first come to know of their own real nature, and to be convinced that
they possess a soul.
It is this which makes a lover desire to keep his beloved at a
distance--on no account to injure her purity by contact with him--in
order to assure himself of her and of his own existence. Many an
inflexible empiricist, coming under the influence of love, becomes an
enthusiastic mystic; the most striking example being Auguste Comte, the
founder of positivism, whose whole theories were revolutionised by his
feelings for Clotilde de Vaux.
It is not only for the artist, but for the whole of mankind that _Amo,
ergo sum_ holds good psychologically.
Love is a phenomenon of projection just as hate is, not a phenomenon of
equation as friendship is. The latter presupposes an equality of both
individuals: love always implies inequality, disproportion. To endow an
individual with all that one might be and yet never can be, to make her
ideal--that is love. Beauty is the symbol of this act of worship. It is
this that so often surprises and angers a lover when he is convinced
that beauty does not imply morality in a woman. He feels that the nature
of the offence is increased by “such depravity” being possible in
conjunction with such “beauty.” He is not aware that the woman in
question seems beautiful to him because he still loves her; otherwise
the incongruity between the external and internal would no longer pain
him.
The reason an ordinary prostitute can never seem beautiful is because it
is naturally impossible to endow her with the projection of value; she
can satisfy only the taste of vulgar minds. She is the mate of the worst
sort of men. In this we have the explanation of a relation utterly
opposed to morality: woman in general is simply indifferent to ethics,
she is non-moral, and, therefore, unlike the anti-moral criminal, who is
instinctively disliked, or the devil who is hideous in every one’s
imagination, serves as a receptacle for projected worthiness; as she
neither does good nor evil, she neither resists nor resents this
imposition of the ideal on her personality. It is patent that woman’s
morality is acquired; but this morality is man’s, which he in an access
of supreme love and devotion has conveyed to her.
Since all beauty is always only the constantly renewed endeavour to
embody the highest form of value, there is a pre-eminently satisfying
element in it, in the face of which all desire, all self-seeking fade
away.
All forms of beauty which appeal to man, by reason of the æsthetic
function, are in reality also attempts on his part to realise the ideal.
Beauty is the symbol of perfection in being. Therefore beauty is
inviolable; it is static and not dynamic; so that any alteration with
regard to it upsets and annuls the idea of it. The desire of personal
worthiness, the love of perfection, materialise in the idea of beauty.
And so the beauty of nature is born, a beauty that the criminal can
never know, as ethics first create nature. Thus it is that nature always
and everywhere, in its greatest and smallest forms, gives the impression
of perfection. The natural law is only the mortal symbol of the moral
law, as natural beauty is the manifestation of nobility of the soul;
logic thus becomes the embodiment of ethics! Just as love creates a new
woman for man instead of the real woman, so art, the eroticism of the
All, creates out of chaos the plenitude of forms in the universe; and
just as there is no natural beauty without form, without a law of
nature, so also there is no art without form, no artistic beauty which
does not conform to the laws of art. Natural beauty is no less a
realisation of artistic beauty than the natural law is the fulfilment of
the moral law, the natural reflection of that harmony whose image is
enthroned in the soul of man. The nature which the artist regards as his
teacher, is the law which he creates out of his own being.
I return to my own theme from these analyses of art, which are no more
than elaborations of the thoughts of Kant and Schelling (and of Schiller
writing under their influence). The main proposition for which I have
argued is that man’s belief in the morality of woman, his projection of
his own soul upon her, and his conception of the woman as beautiful, are
one and the same thing, the second being the sensuous side of the first.
It is thus intelligible, although an inversion of the truth, when, in
morality, a beautiful soul is spoken of, or when, following Shaftesbury
and Herbart, ethics are subordinated to æsthetics; following Socrates
and Plato we may identify the good and the beautiful, but we must not
forget that beauty is only a bodily image in which morality tries to
represent itself, that all æsthetics are created by ethics. Every
individual and temporal presentation of this attempted incarnation must
necessarily be illusory, and can have no more than a fictitious reality.
And so all individual cases of beauty are impermanent; the love that is
directed to a woman must perish with the age of the woman. The idea of
beauty is the idea of nature and is permanent, whilst every beautiful
thing, every part of nature, is perishable. The eternal can realise
itself in the limited and the concrete only by an illusion; it is
self-deception to seek the fulness of love in a woman. As all love that
attaches itself to a person must be impermanent, the love of woman is
doomed to unhappiness. All such love has this source of failure inherent
in it. It is an heroic attempt to seek for permanent worth where there
is no worth. The love that is attached to enduring worth is attached to
the absolute, to the idea of God, whether that idea be a pantheistic
conception of enduring nature, or remain transcendental; the love that
attaches itself to an individual thing, as to a woman, must fail.
I have already partly explained why man takes this burden on himself.
Just as hatred is a projection of our own evil qualities on other
persons in order that we may stand apart from them and hate them; just
as the devil was invented to serve as a vehicle of all the evil impulses
in man; so love has the purpose of helping man in his battle for good,
when he feels that he himself is not strong enough. Love and hate are
alike forms of cowardice. In hate we picture to ourselves that our own
hateful qualities exist in another, and by so doing we feel ourselves
partly freed from them. In love we project what is good in us, and so
having created a good and an evil image we are more able to compare and
value them.
Lovers seek their own souls in the loved ones, and so love is free from
the limits I described in the first part of this book, not being bound
down by the conditions of merely sexual attraction. In spite of their
real opposition, there is an analogy between erotics and sexuality.
Sexuality uses the woman as the means to produce pleasure and children
of the body; erotics use her as the means to create worth and children
of the soul. A little understood conception of Plato is full of the
deepest meaning: that love is not directed towards beauty, but towards
the procreation of beauty; that it seeks to win immortality for the
things of the mind, just as the lower sexual impulse is directed towards
the perpetuation of the species.
It is more than a merely formal analogy, a superficial, verbal
resemblance, to speak of the fruitfulness of the mind, of its conception
and reproduction, or, in the words of Plato, to speak of the children of
the soul. As bodily sexuality is the effort of an organic being to
perpetuate its own form, so love is the attempt to make permanent one’s
own soul or individuality. Sexuality and love are alike the effort to
realise oneself, the one by a bodily image, the other by an image of the
soul. But it is only the man of genius who can approach this entirely
unsensuous love, and it is only he who seeks to produce eternal children
in whom his deepest nature shall live for ever.
The parallel may be carried further. Since Novalis first called
attention to it, many have insisted on the association between sexual
desire and cruelty. All that is born of woman must die. Reproduction,
birth, and death are indissolubly associated; the thought of untimely
death awakens sexual desire in its fiercest form, as the determination
to reproduce oneself. And so sexual union, considered ethically,
psychologically, and biologically, is allied to murder; it is the
negation of the woman and the man; in its extreme case it robs them of
their consciousness to give life to the child. The highest form of
eroticism, as much as the lowest form of sexuality, uses the woman not
for herself but as means to an end--to preserve the individuality of the
artist. The artist has used the woman merely as the screen on which to
project his own idea.
The real psychology of the loved woman is always a matter of
indifference. In the moment when a man loves a woman, he neither
understands her nor wishes to understand her, although understanding is
the only moral basis of association in mankind. A human being cannot
love another that he fully understands, because he would then
necessarily see the imperfections which are an inevitable part of the
human individual, and love can attach itself only to perfection. Love of
a woman is possible only when it does not consider her real qualities,
and so is able to replace the actual psychical reality by a different
and quite imaginary reality. The attempt to realise one’s ideal in a
woman, instead of the woman herself, is a necessary destruction of the
empirical personality of the woman. And so the attempt is cruel to the
woman; it is the egoism of love that disregards the woman, and cares
nothing for her real inner life.
Thus the parallel between sexuality and love is complete. Love is
murder. The sexual impulse destroys the body and mind of the woman, and
the psychical eroticism destroys her psychical existence. Ordinary
sexuality regards the woman only as a means of gratifying passion or of
begetting children. The higher eroticism is merciless to the woman,
requiring her to be merely the vehicle of a projected personality, or
the mother of psychical children. Love is not only anti-logical, as it
denies the objective truth of the woman and requires only an illusory
image of her, but it is anti-ethical with regard to her.
I am far from despising the heights to which this eroticism may reach,
as, for instance, in Madonna worship. Who could blind his eyes to the
amazing phenomenon presented by Dante? It was an extraordinary
transference of his own ideal to the person of a concrete woman whom the
artist had seen only once and when she was a young girl, and who for all
he knew might have grown up into a Xantippe. The complete neglect of
whatever worth the woman herself might have had, in order that she might
better serve as the vehicle of his projected conception of worthiness,
was never more clearly exhibited. And the three-fold immorality of this
higher eroticism becomes more plain than ever. It is an unlimited
selfishness with regard to the actual woman, as she is wholly rejected
for the ideal woman. It is a felony towards the lover himself, inasmuch
as he detaches virtue and worthiness from himself; and it is a
deliberate turning away from the truth, a preferring of sham to reality.
The last form in which the immorality reveals itself is that love
prevents the worthlessness of woman from being realised, inasmuch as it
always replaced her by an imaginary projection. Madonna worship itself
is fundamentally immoral, inasmuch as it is a shutting of the eyes to
truth. The Madonna worship of the great artists is a destruction of
woman, and is possible only by a complete neglect of the women as they
exist in experience, a replacement of actuality by a symbol, a
re-creation of woman to serve the purposes of man, and a murder of woman
as she exists.
When a particular man attracts a particular woman the influence is not
his beauty. Only man has an instinct for beauty, and the ideals of both
manly beauty and of womanly beauty have been created by man, not by
woman. The qualities that appeal to a woman are the signs of developed
sexuality; those that repel her are the qualities of the higher mind.
Woman is essentially a phallus worshipper, and her worship is permeated
with a fear like that of a bird for a snake, of a man for the fabled
Medusa head, as she feels that the object of her adoration is the power
that will destroy her.
The course of my argument is now apparent. As logic and ethics have a
relation only to man, it was not to be expected that woman would stand
in any better position with regard to æsthetics. Æsthetics and logic are
closely interconnected, as is apparent in philosophy, in mathematics, in
artistic work, and in music. I have now shown the intimate relation of
æsthetics to ethics. As Kant showed, æsthetics, just as much as ethics
and logic, depend on the free will of the subject. As the woman has not
free will, she cannot have the faculty of projecting beauty outside
herself.
The foregoing involves the proposition that woman cannot love. Women
have made no ideal of man to correspond with the male conception of the
Madonna. What woman requires from man is not purity, chastity, morality,
but something else. Woman is incapable of desiring virtue in a man.
It is almost an insoluble riddle that woman, herself incapable of love,
should attract the love of man. It has seemed to me a possible myth or
parable, that in the beginning, when men became men by some miraculous
act of God, a soul was bestowed only on them. Men, when they love, are
partly conscious of this deep injustice to woman, and make the fruitless
but heroic effort to give her their own soul. But such a speculation is
outside the limits of either science or philosophy.
I have now shown what woman does not wish; there remains to show what
she does wish, and how this wish is diametrically opposed to the will of
man.