I WILL VENTURE in this connection, which remains a political one, and with all due caution and respect, to speak of the particular realm of feeling that was alluded to in my last remarks: that zone of eroticism, in other words, where the law of sexual polarity that is generally credited proves inoperative, superfluous, and where what we see linked in passionate communion is like with like, maturer masculinity with admiring youth, in which this masculinity may idolize a dream of itself, or young masculinity see a model for itself. Our society, which for a long while contained this unconsciously, either expelling it from awareness or prudishly misconstruing it, is gradually beginning to relax the taboo of denial and disrepute imposed on this phenomenon, to look it more calmly in the face, and to articulate its many-sidedness in properly human terms. It can indeed signify enervation, degeneration, sickness, and in such cases it is debatable whether the right way to deal with it is discipline or humanitarian care. But it is impossible to attribute fundamentally to the sphere of decay a complex of feeling that can contain what is most holy and most culturally fertile. Whoever conceives nature and its laws in the manner of Novalis, who in other words believes these are something to be overcome, will find the reproach of unnaturalness or anti-naturalness a trivial one right from the start; Goethe, moreover, already rejected this common argument with the remark that the phenomenon in question was completely within nature and humanity rather than outside of it, as it had made its appearance at all times and among all peoples, and was to be explained in aesthetic terms by the fact that objectively the masculine is the more pure and fine expression of the human ideal. Schopenhauer put it very similarly …
The aspect of this remarkable subject that I want to bring to attention here is the political one, something that is also not lacking. Is it not said that the War, with its experiences of comradeship in blood and death, the harsh and exclusive masculinity of its way of life and atmosphere, has powerfully strengthened this erotic realm? The political attitude of its believers is generally nationalistic and militarist, and it is said that relationships of this kind form the secret cement of the monarchist leagues, indeed, that an erotic-political emotion after the model of certain loving friendships of antiquity lies at the root of particular terrorist acts of our days. But Harmodios and Aristogeiton were democrats; and it cannot be said that what seems the rule today is based on any more fundamental law. The most powerful modern counter-example is the poet of the Calamus songs, Walt Whitman,
Resolv’d to sing no songs to-day but those of manly attachment,
Projecting them along that substantial life,
Bequeathing hence types of athletic love.
With these songs, this bodily-athletic love, Whitman sought to ‘make the continent indissoluble’, to ‘create divine magnetic lands’, ‘inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks, / By the love of comrades, / By the manly love of comrades’. Eros as statesman, even as the creator of states, is a trusted old idea, which in our day has been intellectually propagated anew; but it is basically nonsense to seek to make its cause and party expression a monarchist restoration. Its cause is rather the republic, in other words the unity of state and culture to which we give this name, and even if no pacifist in the vegetarian sense, it is by its very nature a god of peace, which between states as well seeks to establish ‘without edifices or rules or trustees or any argument, / The institution of the dear love of comrades’.
I did not want to leave unremarked, or ignore in my attempt to convince you, a sphere of sensibility that without a doubt contains within it, or can contain, elements important to state and culture. Health? Sickness? Be careful with these notions, they are the most difficult in all of philosophy and ethics! Whitman’s worship of boys, since in his case it forms but one fine province of the all-embracing realm of his phallically healthy, phallically brimming inspiration, was certainly something more healthy than poor Novalis with his love for the pale Sophia, Novalis who found it wise to love a sleeping form in order to prepare a convivial resting-place ‘for the night’, and in whose erotic Holy Communion the stimulable lecherousness of the consumptive uncannily breaks through.