Introduction
From whatever angle the problem of eroticism is approached, one retains the feeling of it having been extremely one-sided. Even more so, no doubt, when the approach is attempted by means of logic, that is to say, starting from its outward appearance.
For, in itself, beginning with the external requires us as far as possible to abstract from eroticism the immediate liveliness of impressions, until we arrive at a comfortable consensus with the majority of society. Or, to put it differently, in such a presentation we repress our subjectivity, we keep sufficient distance from ourselves as to obtain—instead of the totality, the indivisibility of a living experience—a separate fragment of life, which can thereby be put into words, manipulated with reassuring safety, embraced in a single glance, in its one-sided totality.
However, we are also required to apply this same method of presentation, which inevitably reifies and renders soulless everything it touches, to what we can know only subjectively, only personally from individual experience, and which we are consequently accustomed to describe as the “mental” traces of things, or as traces “in the mind,” to apply it, in other words, to impressions, which are, in principle, precisely beyond the reach of this method. For the sake of consensus, we can only examine and explain such variegated effects on the basis of that one single effect, while everything else that we can say about them is only useful as an aside, part of a description. Moreover, however singular such an approach is to the imperatives of logical congruity, indeed even if it is formally founded in logic, the conviction it can carry nevertheless remains more or less subjective.
This ambiguity, this split, is even more apparent when it comes to the problem of eroticism, in that, more than any other problem, the erotic seems to resist immediate definition, suspended as it is between the physical and the spiritual.
However, blurring or mixing the different methods in no way lessens this contradiction. Quite the contrary: it can only be resolved by adapting them evermore exactly to their purpose, by employing them with ever greater precision; one might say that it is by grasping an object in its totality, as something isolated and material, by defining its limits evermore exactly, that we are able to confirm and demonstrate that which, in the dimensions of our own being, extends beyond the object. This shows us the one-sidedness not only of the object of study, but also of the method: the road, which leads in a sense in two directions, which is the sole access to life, and which only through an optical illusion seemed to converge to a single point. For the further we pursue a question, the further it opens up to us in both directions, just as the horizon recedes with every step we take towards it.
If we go a little further, however, this very exact way of looking at things begins itself to seem one-sided. This is the case wherever the material observed retreats from observation, beyond sense and understanding, into the sphere of the uncontrollable, while its existence remains observable, in the sense that the term existence is understood, and its practical effects can still be gauged. All that reaches us from beyond the short stretch which alone is accessible to observation, are criteria whose value in relation to “truth” and “reality” have been altered. Measured by these criteria, even what is materially most tangible, logically easiest to grasp, becomes a generally accepted convention, a signpost for practical purposes of direction finding, and fades and evaporates beyond that, taking on the same symbolic value as what we define under the categories of “mental” or “psychical.” And at both ends of our path rears the unbreakable commandment: “Thou shalt make thyself an image and a likeness!”, such that symbolism too, that which language can express only through signs and metaphors, without which no description of the mind is possible, is itself incorporated into the fundamental value sphere of human understanding. Just as in that horizon line, which retreats from us step by step, “heaven and earth” nevertheless merge continually into each other to form a single image: the primeval optical illusion and, at the same time, the ultimate symbol.
Basis
Such a definitive acknowledgement of the equality of the two values, far from understating the exteriority of objects, in fact further underlines their autonomy of any subsequent accretions. For it is only through objective respect for the material that we can obtain an entirely unprejudiced insight into all relationships within “matter at its most material”: life even in its most physical form. Respect in a sense that we are still far from imagining, being neither sufficiently humble nor sufficiently detached from ourselves to do so: without any diversions into ethical, aesthetic, religious, or whatever other meanings—concentrating entirely on the significance of the purely physical. Concentrating on it as the manifestation of immemorial experience, of—so to speak—voyages of discovery within what we understand as the existent—a manifestation of that which we can decipher everywhere in the existent, as we would decipher battle scars or victory trophies. As if in the physical, the fruit of such an age-long process of becoming, with its immemorial weight of practical wisdom, which offers very different obstacles to analysis than the mental, were contained the very movement of life, seemingly set into sharper lines and shapes, so that even our intellect, that latecomer into the world of physical life, was able to grope its way aboard, as a fragile infant climbs into its grandfather’s lap.
All this means that the basis of eroticism—that is to say, sexuality—needs to be explored in ever greater depth, in its physiological aspect. It is only in this way that the deeper essence and action of sexuality—which, like hunger, thirst or any other manifestation of bodily life, is a type of physical need—become accessible to insight. And just as our need for food, or any other physical necessity, can only be made understandable by means of meticulous examination of the details and confirmation of the facts, so in this case no other rule is valid than that which, in the sphere of ethics, we like to define as the supreme rule: that the slightest, least significant detail, the most humble event, is no less deserving of attention than actions on which every human honor has been bestowed.
Most decisive in this respect, in the absence of any subjective prejudice to cloud the judgment, is the equality of esteem afforded both to sexual activity and to abstinence. If this esteem still belongs, in many respects, to matters pending, this is perhaps in part because the internal secretions of the glands in which both sexual activity and abstinence originate, and the relations between them (which perhaps makes them more interchangeable than we know) are very far from as precisely known as the external sexual secretions. In consequence, we cannot be truly aware of the influences that they may have on our entire person, even when the outward manifestations of sexual activity disappear (as, most commonly, when only the womb and the male member are removed, but not the ovaries and testicles, in which case the secondary sexual characteristics are not altered). For it might be envisaged from this, or from any other similar point, that it is reasonable to conclude that sexual continence not only presents no danger to health, but is also valuable—in the sense that a principle that reinforces creative power can be valuable—in resorbing and transmuting energies. And in this case, there will be many women who will smile secretly, feeling that it is something they have long known—women for whom the implacable sexual discipline of all the centuries of Christianity, at least for many strata of society, has finally been transformed into a natural independence from the brute force of the instincts, and who, still today, for this reason, should think twice—nay, a thousand times—before reaching out for a fruit that is offered to them unwanted, the fruit of a strenuous effort of civilization, and before once again abandoning this independence in favor of a more modern erotic freedom: for it will require far fewer generations to lose than it took to acquire.
However, we should be equally impartial in considering other possibilities that might put us on guard against too careless a rejection of sexuality: cases in which we can recognize in the sexual drive a natural substitute for the powerful excitements present in the body of the child, during its growth, and in the whole of its sensual life, brought about by external stimulations, stimulations that are violent and, for the child, still so novel. The cases of young patients for whom even the involuntary experience of sexuality has become a curative principle, or anemic young women who have blossomed even within an undesired marriage, and who have gained strength under the influence of changes in the tonus of their tissues and in their metabolism. All the cases where there is an obvious risk that the most intimate vital force that exists between youth and old age, might, once compressed, become not an active principle of fertile transpositions, but instead be concentrated into a sort of infection, inhibiting and obstructing life. And, even if such morbid symptoms can be counteracted by phenomena of a different kind, it should nevertheless not be forgotten how often a physiological obstacle can cause man to lose a part of his intellectual capacities, or even his most individual human value.
For all these reasons, every fact that can contribute to a fully objective examination of such questions should be welcome, and we need to be able to treat them as an entirely specific problem, without being led astray either by a hasty idealization of physiological necessities—as we sometimes see in the guise of a contemporary “return to Greece”—or by the imperatives of eroticism, in its narrow sense. For it should also be emphasized how current attempts to refine and individualize amorous feelings are powerless alone to resolve such questions, which does not make such attempts less deserving of respect, and any pure energy whose expression they promote is a very precious gain. However, the growing subtlety in the choice of the erotic object, of course, begins by simply complicating its fixation on a specific object. For it is very rare that our physiological maturity coincides with equally exceptional psychical states—and almost as rare, moreover, that either of them coincide with maturity of intelligence and character in a man intending a lasting union with another being.
In general, the mixing of all concretely conceivable points of view—whether hygienic, romantic, educational, or utilitarian—is undesirable, in that it seems always to result in pure objectivity being abandoned by one approach, allocated to another, before it has truly achieved expression. So, for example, the interests of physiology may be too hastily asserted by reference to a robust ideal of physical culture, or conversely, discredited through devotion to an ideal of delicacy; or in turn, the latter may fear confusion with its more muscular competitors, and take shelter in an overhasty marriage, which will then be set about with so many concessions and dilutions in its rigor that its physiological roots become highly suspect … and so back to where we started. And it is in this way that, in order to avoid succumbing to a style that is either frivolous or traditional, the style adopted is sometimes free and exalted, sometimes marked by philistine narrowness; just as, in the past, retired divinities were relegated to the ranks of demons and no one could imagine that they had so recently been objects of belief, until a more analytical eye reveals the fact that the very same divinities have been resurrected in their successors. That is perhaps why an unbiased examination will gain by ignoring respective rankings, any reforming intentions or the history of former struggles.
Subject
Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.
Rooted since the beginning in the substrate of all existence, eroticism grows from a soil that is ever the same, rich and strong, to whatever height it grows, whatever the immensity, the space occupied by the marvelous tree in which it flowers—subsisting—even when that soil is entirely overrun by edifices—below them, in all its primeval, obscure, and earthy strength. Its immense value to life consists precisely in the fact that, capable though it is of imposing its hegemony widely or of incarnating noble ideals, it has no need to do so, but can draw a surplus of strength from any humus, adapt to serve life in any possible circumstance. Thus we find eroticism associated with the almost purely vegetative functions of our physical being, bound closely to them, and even if it does not become, like these functions, an absolute necessity of existence, it continues to exert a powerful influence upon them. That is why, even in its elevated forms and manifestations, even at the topmost point of the most complex ecstasies of love, there remains in it something of the simplicity and profundity of its origins, always present and ineradicable—something of that healthy gaiety which experiences the life of the body—in the specific sense of the satisfaction of the instincts—as always new, always young and, so to speak, like life itself in its primitive sense. Just as all healthy beings rejoice at awakening, or in their daily bread, or in walking in the fresh air, with a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as if at a joy that is born anew each day, and just as the beginnings of neurosis can often be accurately diagnosed in the fact that these daily joys, these fundamental necessities, become tainted with “boredom,” with “monotony,” with “nausea,” likewise, in the existence of the erotic, behind and beneath the other moments of happiness that it entails, there is always present a happiness which, hardly felt and impossible to measure, man shares with everything that, like himself, breathes.
Even in animals, eroticism is not confined to this pleasure alone, since in the higher animals acts of sexuality are accompanied by changes in the brain which shake their nervous tissue with violent exaltation: basic sexuality is thus impelled towards sensation, and eventually the romanticism of feeling, to the most subtly variegated peaks and summits, in the sphere of that which is most specific to man. However, the foundations upon which this ascending evolution of love takes place are constantly shifting: instead of something that permanently retains both its nature and its value, it is governed by that law of all animal existence which holds that the intensity of excitement diminishes with each repetition. The need to choose both the erotic object and the moment of love—so evident a proof of a higher love—is paid for by the exhaustion that is soon aroused by what was previously so violently desired, and therefore by the desire for the never repeated, for the undiminished force of excitement: the desire for change. It can be said that the natural erotic life, in all its forms and perhaps above all in its most clearly individuated forms, is based on the principle of infidelity. Certainly, habit—the exact counterpart and counterforce to pleasure—for its part rather expresses, at least in its coarse form, the effects of the vegetative physical needs, those opposed to change, which are within us.
However, it is indeed the most spiritual—that is to say, the most complex—principle in our vitality that impels us towards change and towards discrimination in the excitements we enjoy; this is the behavior, refined by intelligence, which, for this very reason, rejects the inveterate constancy, the stability, of the more primitive processes, which makes them, in many respects, the basis of a security that closely resembles the permanence of the non-organic—something that recalls, a little, the solidity of earth or rock. For eroticism, therefore, there is neither weakness nor loss of value in the fact that it is, by nature, hard to reconcile with fidelity; indeed, this fact is rather a sign of its ascension towards even more powerful vital relations. And that is why, even when it forms part of such relations, it cannot but retain a good part of that insatiable sensibility together with its roots in the most primitive processes of organic life. And, just as the latter—that which is “most corporeal” in us—should not be regarded other than respectfully and without prejudice, eroticism too merits the same marks of respect even in the most reckless of its aberrations, although it has become customary to perceive in these only that which has made erotic aberration the scapegoat of every tragedy of love.
This context, in which eroticism is divested of its worst faults, at least in the best instance, is provided by the workings of our minds. When we receive something into understanding and consciousness, instead of simply incorporating it into our bodily desires or our soul, we no longer experience it solely as a less powerful stimulant, weakened by the satisfaction of that desire, but modified by the growing interest of the mind, thus in its specificity and in that in it which is humanly unreproducible. Here alone lies the full meaning of what it is in love that propels one being towards another, hence towards a second, another irreplaceable I, in order to be realized for the first time in the reciprocal relations with the other, taken not as an instrument of love but as an end in itself. While it is not until this point that love also assumes its social significance, it is clear that this is not true of its external aspect: for the accommodations that love finds with its external consequences, its inevitable connection with the community’s sphere of interests, contains its other side, the social side, from the very beginning. However, this time, it is its deepest vital meaning that emerges: the degree of spiritual vitality, in comparison with which the very instinct for change, with its need to be mobilized by external stimulation, seems to constitute a lack of internal resources, while here such stimulation would rather seem intrusive or even obstructive. Fidelity and constancy here take on an entirely new background: in this hegemony of that which contains, that which offers being a maximum of life, new ways of organizing external life are provided, it again becomes possible to achieve a world of permanence, an entirely new and more secure basis for all the potential of life, analogous to our physiological base and to that which our organism separates from itself, as the incarnation of the ultimate goal of love, in the child.
In itself, however, the essence of the erotic is not entirely captured by the description of these three stages, but lies in the fact of their reciprocal interaction. In consequence, it is only with great difficulty that it is possible to establish hierarchies within it, and these do not take the form of a clearly established scale of values that can, in theory, be deduced from this correlation, but of an always self-complete whole, living and indivisible. Whether, in each case, we judge this whole to be wider or narrower, we nonetheless never know, from one case to another, whether it encompasses its total content, precisely where it is unable even to be aware of that content: somewhat in the same way that the child, physiologically, perfectly realizes the purpose of love, even though in the most ancient times the vague unconsciousness attributed the child’s birth not to the sexual act, but to the strangest acts of demons. This is what is needed to complete our description, inasmuch as the physiological element of eroticism, which, to the end, extends its influence everywhere, is also and primarily influenced by other, imprecisely identified factors: it is only by a total grasp of its essence that the problem may be defined.
The Sexual Act
In the world of the least differentiated creatures—very approximately—coupling is accomplished through a miniscule and perfect totality, which in itself has so little structure that it could almost be a symbol for the state of affairs described above. In the fusion of single-celled organisms—a fusion which sometimes seems to serve as the basis of their individual growth—the two nuclei merge completely, thus forming the new being, while only a minimal quantity of living material is split off from the surface of the original cell and then dies: procreation, the child, death, and immortality are not yet separate. We can still define the child as the animal born of the fusion of the parents—consequence as cause—somewhat as different fragments are interchangeable in the sphere of that which we call “the inanimate.” However, once the organs become more structured, coupling ceases to be a whole and can only occur partially, and the gaping contradiction becomes apparent in all its clarity: that which maintains life is at the same time a condition of death. And often so instantly that the two acts seem a single act, although they occur in two beings, representing two generations. When differentiation finally goes so far, in each individual, that each becomes unique of its kind, and therefore nothing of the progenitors survives in the product of their procreative act, death is absent from the actual union, because the animal now participates only indirectly, with all its complex physical structure, in the sexual act. That is to say, by providing only that of itself which it has already received as an inheritance, and has not absorbed in the realization of its separate individuality: sex is transmitted, so to speak, as an “hidden extra.”
The process might thus be seen as having reached a final stage as remote as possible from its starting point, and the whole instinct for self-preservation, which initially gives the cell nucleus such an appearance of ingenuity in reproduction, is emancipated—almost perversely, one might say—from that part which, originally limited to a modest fragment of the individual, died at the periphery of the cell. However, from the dawn of time the sexual cells themselves have known nothing of these large transformations, as though they continued to reign, as before, over the whole kingdom of life, rather than solely over an isolated, minute, and increasingly diminished province of that kingdom. For, because these cells contain everything that is required to construct once again so powerfully differentiated an individual, not only do they carry in themselves the same immutable wholeness, they also impose it by their temporary influence on the body that houses them.
It is perhaps as a result of these influences that it is precisely the most primitive form of union between living beings, the total fusion of single-celled organisms, which corresponds, by the strangest of symbolism, to what the mind, in its most ethereal dreams, perceives as perfect happiness in love. That is perhaps why love is so readily affected by a vague yearning and anxiety in the face of death, which can scarcely be clearly distinguished—something, an ancient dream we might say, in which the self, the loved one, and their joint child can still be as one, simply three names for a single immortality.
This is also the reason for the characteristic contrast in matters of love between the coarsest and the most ethereal, which is even apparent in animals, in a comical form, when they show their capacity to combine their sexual need with extremes of sentimental fascination. In the human world, these oscillations between brutality and emotional effusion are not simply a matter of comedy. A confused understanding of these contradictions is also the cause of that spontaneous shame, originating in deepest instinct, which the very young and naive may feel with regard to sexual relations: shame caused not by inexperience nor by well-intentioned moralizing, but by the fact that their impulse to love encompasses their whole self, and that they are disturbed by the passage from this to a partial and physiological act—somewhat as if they felt the hidden presence of an alien third person, i.e., the body, like a fragmentary being with its own separate existence—to the point that it seems as if, not long previously, when still slaves to the clumsy language of their great desire, they were almost more fully, more directly close to each other.
However, sexuality seeks as far as possible to merge within itself the contrasts and contradictions that lead it astray as a consequence of the division of labor between the different functions. It combines constantly with all the instincts that it is able, in one way or another, to bring within its grasp. Initially, perhaps, more closely akin to bulimia than any other instinct—for, as the firstcomer, insatiable appetite was itself related to everything—sexuality quickly overtakes it, for even appetite is too specialized. When today’s lovers say that they would like to swallow each other, or when the terrible female spider devours her poor little mate, the direction of this troubling encroachment is not from food to love, but the opposite: sexual desire, as a total manifestation, is what brings all the organs out of their isolation, into its own sphere of influence. And it does so without difficulty. For, after all, they each originate from the same nursery as the occupants of the sexual organs, in that each of them could in fact have played the role of a “sex cell” if the demon of pride had not prompted them to so extreme a differentiation. That is why the recollection triggered by sexuality, as it pervades them, awakens such echoes; they forget what progress they have made in the meantime, and give themselves over—more than is decent for a properly evolved organ of the higher species of animal—to an unexpected nostalgia for the good old days of the first structures and the first divisions within the maternal egg.
It is this burst of nostalgia—in human beings, we would call it sentimental—that is the basis of the infinite agitation of the whole being which, within the creature, is triggered by the sexual act. For the more this act, in its specificity, is somehow pushed to the periphery during evolution, to become an isolated act, the greater and more vigorously its influence upon the whole being grows in proportion: what then occurs, the fusion of two creatures in erotic rapture, is not their only—nor perhaps even their authentic—union. Above all, it is within ourselves that all the distinct lives, of body and of soul, together burst into flames, once again, in a desire to which all of them are subordinate, instead of indifferently pursuing their selfish existence, hardly remembering that the others exist, like members of a large family who only remember that they are “of the same blood, of the same flesh” on the occasion of birthdays. The higher we go in the scale of beings, towards organisms with more complex structures, the more such experiences will naturally take on the appearance of magnificent days of feasting and celebration, which suddenly bring everything to life, under the influence of and through the expenditure of the generative plasma, like the arrival of a rich uncle, into the remotest and most secret corners of our being: an opulent festival of origins and sexes.
That is why it is said, not entirely without reason, that love—even unfortunate love—always brings happiness, provided that the meaning we assign to this maxim is sufficiently stripped of any sentimentality, in other words provided that no account is taken of the partner. For, although we may seem filled with the other, it is in fact our own state that fills us, and, like any intoxication, renders us incapable of being objectively interested in anything at all. In all this, the beloved is the trigger for our agitation, exactly as an external sound or smell can wander into a nighttime dream and summon entire worlds into existence. Moreover, by pure instinct lovers interpret their community of life according to this one single criterion: the mutual exaltation of their mental and physical productivity, which concentrates and relieves each of them in their relation with the other, just as the sexual act exalts and relieves two bodies. If, however, instead of this mutual trade, they are too receptive to their partner’s suspect hyperbole and mistake it for the genuine article, there quickly follows the well-known fall from the clouds of adoration to the earth of reality—a development predicted for lovers by all the well-informed and skeptical—which culminates in the sad foolishness by which love, hitherto garbed as a princess in the tinsel of passion, turns back into Cinderella. The splendor of this finery makes her forget that she is clothed only through the gratitude of her partner, whom she has gorged with delights, and perhaps even that the hyperbole is always mixed unknowingly with some desire to overcompensate for the erotic egoism which, throughout the celebration, was celebrating only itself. And which, moreover, has interposed, like a bronze shadow between self and other, an elusive phantom as sole mediator.
The Erotic Chimera
It is amusing to observe how, at precisely this point, eroticism is treated more cursorily than elsewhere. It is true that the part the mind plays in the rapture of love contains so much intoxication, or to be precise, such clear symptoms of intoxication, that no solution seems possible but to dispose of it by assigning it to the sphere of the romantic, or suspecting that it is, to some degree, pathological. This critical point in the whole story is usually treated simply as if the dunce’s hat that our reason dons for a while prevents its actual state being taken seriously. In most cases, people are content to examine sexuality under a microscope, where it seems to be situated, in the lower centers of the brain, and then append to it all the sentimental material, distinct from eroticism, which, thank God, gradually becomes associated with it, such as, for example, sympathy, goodness, friendship, the sense of duty, and similar notions. Whatever these may be, the rapture and luxuriance of erotic exaltation gives them not the slightest aid to their development: on the contrary, this exaltation initially does nothing but hinder the growth of love, conceived as a socially useful plant.
However, something supremely human in the sexual experience is omitted when the human folly that it entails is swept aside as irrelevant. It is only the most delirious effusions of lovers throughout history and among all peoples, which complete the inventory of what man has done with sex by allowing this fever to lead his intelligence astray: and only when we ourselves are prepared to examine it neither under a romantic light nor from a more or less medical perspective.
For this inventory contains the intellectual language of that which sex, since the beginning of the world, has sought to express as its unique meaning in the clarity of bodily acts: that it gives and takes the totality of being. The revolution gradually wrought by the sexual cells, the only ones out of all of physical existence to take a full part in that existence from the start, the revolt of these retrograde libertines—our most ancient nobility, so to speak—in the body’s otherwise ordered state, finally reaches the mind’s consciousness. It is in the mind, since the mind is the supreme leader, the organ of synthesis, above the multiplicity of the other organs, that sex’s will to hegemony finally finds its echo; moreover, the very existence of the mind to some degree realizes its ambitious aspirations through the fact that, as the unifying principle, it must pass through sex before it can exercise its influence on all the rest, even though this only happens in the form of an illusory firework, as an illusion.
This explains why Schopenhauer himself was forced to delve deep into his metaphysical sack in condemning this erotic illusion as one of the most cunning traps of his “will-to-live,” and with it the deceiving bait that it contains: what we feel here, in all frankness, is the rage of the dupe. For it is true that, as soon as sexuality is simply classified with the rest, as an isolated process in a highly organized body, this feverish and passionate upheaval of the entire being can only more or less vanish into the void. It can only be a luxury in which the facts of sexuality are dressed up, a kind of deceit and seduction, which clothes and obscures what is necessary and real in sexuality, and disguises it in a whole paraphernalia of sentiment for which no reality can ever compensate. Yet nevertheless, in so doing all it does is to succumb to autosuggestion, however many others it may unintentionally deceive in the process; all it does is to try, for the first time, to acquire its own entry, by purely spiritual paths, from the mind, through the barriers of physiology, into some lost paradise. Thus do we live with even greater conviction the illusion that our own love is more authentic, and if that illusion is reinforced by the assembled power of the brain, it will simply be all the greater.
It is not unusual for the behavior of lovers, in their relations, to express something of the vague intuition that they must only show themselves to the other transfigured, veiled, and that they must—without the slightest pretence or intention—conform, as if under a spell, to their dream image. The fact is that certain things, the most beautiful things, can, as it were, live only in stylized form, and not purely realistically, in the fullness of their being, as if that fantastically poetic exuberance could only be apprehended in a more controlled form: organized by a desire that respects beauty, giving oneself with extreme restraint, extreme abandon, hence in an entirely new combination of being. In this illusion-mediated act, the influence of one person upon the other is nevertheless more compelling than any actual dependency could be; for, even though the other person remains “outside,” external to us—while still touching and imbuing the whole circle of our being—it is nevertheless from here that the whole of the rest of the world opens to us, and this is where our real marriage with life begins, that exteriority of things that we could otherwise never fully incorporate: it becomes the language in which life assumes all its eloquence for us, in which it finds the sounds and the intonations that strike right to the center of our soul. Loving, in the most serious sense of the term, means knowing someone whose colors all things must wear if they are to reach us whole, to the extent that things cease to be indifferent or frightening, cold or empty, and that even the most threatening, like the wild beasts when we enter the Garden of Eden, fall tame at our feet. In the most beautiful love songs, something of this irresistible feeling survives, as if the object of love were not only itself, but also the leaf quivering on the tree, the sunlight flaming on the water—metamorphosed into all things, and a magician that metamorphoses all things: an image split into a thousand shards through the infinity of the All, so that, wherever we go, it is always the sweet land of our birth.
That is why lovers are right to fear that knowing each other too well will put an end to the rapture of love; that is why every true rapture begins with a sort of creative jolt that unsettles both the senses and the mind. Which is why, however absorbed lovers are by one another, there is so little desire to know who the other “really is,” and why, even if the reality of the other greatly exceeds expectations, to the extent that the union is in every way reinforced and deepened, there is that intense disappointment which sometimes comes from no longer having enough space to maintain a creative, poetic, “playful” relation. Minute irritations then often become attached to the same small traits of character that were previously particularly appealing and, for that reason, particularly attracted us; the fact that we cannot subsequently remain unaffected by them, at the very least, and that in truth they irritate us, reminds us again how strange was the world which previously made all our nerves vibrate—and how strange it has remained!
Eroticism & Art
We discern more than otherwise what are the ultimate, the true stimulations of eroticism, when we compare it with other births which energetically express the imagination, in particular those of artistic creation. There is no doubt that there is a profound kinship here—we might almost say a blood kinship, since the artist’s act brings into play and reveals archaic forces, with passionate emotion, beneath those that have been individually acquired: in both cases containing mysterious syntheses of past and present—i.e., fundamental experience—and in both cases the rapture of their secret interaction. In these obscure border regions, the role that the germ plasma itself may also play in the second of these cases has been studied little if at all, but that the instinct for aesthetic creation and the sexual instinct show such extensive similarities that aesthetic ecstasy slips imperceptibly into erotic ecstasy, that erotic desire involuntarily attempts to capture its adornment, the aesthetic—or perhaps directly clothes animality in its adornment, with the body as its artistic material—these facts seem to denote a twin growth from a single root. They would seem to represent the same emergence of a primitive vitality, as yet unspent, into all the most individual manifestations of personality; the same return, so to speak, of the individual energies dispersed through the hot depths of the earth on which all creation, of whatever kind, is based, and by which the created achieves birth in the form of a living whole. And if sexuality can be described as the awakening of that which is most archaic in man, of the body’s memory, it is equally true of the creative artist that hereditary wisdom must in some way be changed into the most personal of reminiscences, combined with that which is most actual, most particular, a kind of summons issued by the upheaval of a certain hour to wake the artist from the sleep of the past.
In the creative act, however, the physiological excitement that accompanies this upheaval acts, amidst the mobilization of the whole being, only as a contingent element, while the real outcome emerges as the intellectual product of the most individual associations; in sexuality, by contrast, the physiological processes only permit the spiritual exaltation generated by this agitation to exist as an epiphenomenon, concerned with no other “opus” than the physical existence of a child. That is why the erotic, much more than the aesthetic, expresses its rapture in pure fantasies, images of a much “more mendacious” kind. True, in the artist too, the special state erupts in each case through the normal state, like an anomaly, a violation of the present, of the firmly hierarchical datum, by the stimulating interaction of past and future imperatives that occurs in this state. However, this “amorous attitude towards his own intimacy,” which is also the most precious thing the artist possesses, finds both its ultimate explanation and its final fulfillment on a spiritual plane, is concentrated, and realized more or less totally in his work, while the general erotic state, lacking this justification through achievement, remains enclosed within the rest of life’s business as a particular kind of eccentricity, or at any rate, of abnormality.
Although the artist, for this reason, is much freer than the lover to loosen the bridle on the neck of his imagination, not being limited by vital relations with a reality that is concretely imposed upon him, in the object of his love, the fact remains that only the creator incorporates such a reality into his imagination; only he creates the new reality out of the existent, while the lover—powerless as he is—can only adorn it with his fantasies. Thus, instead of being able to take solace in the finally achieved harmony of the work, separate from its creator, love poetry remains forever incomplete, wandering through the totality of life, seeking, offering its gifts, and, in its external works, tragic in that it can neither free itself, in its self-reflection, from the physiological fact of its object, nor limit itself to that object. Love thus becomes the most physical thing that lurks within us, and also the most spiritual, at least in appearance, and the most superstitious; it is entirely attached to the body, but equally entirely attached to the body as a symbol, as a physiological hieroglyphic of that which would seek to slip into our soul through the door of the senses, to waken in them their boldest dreams, therefore everywhere merging possession with the vague sense of the inaccessible, everywhere marrying satisfaction with renunciation, as things that are different, not in nature, but in degree. This way in which love makes us creators, makes us outdo our strength, renders it a symbol for every quest, not only for the object of our erotic desire, but for every higher value to which it makes us aspire.
Therefore, while in the aesthetic creation the physical agitation that accompanies the mind’s creative labor eventually disappears, an epiphenomenon without importance, eroticism, the creativity of the body, is quite different. The spiritual overflowing to which this vibration is communicated is in some way like a newly formulated tonic, a panacea supporting every aspiration at an obscure and inexpressible state. It is as if, for the sole reason that it has become individualized to the level of spirituality, it thereby receives the specific character whereby—instead of being consigned over time to the category of an accessory or adjuvant—it is now obliged to constitute an organizing principle, even when required to breathe life into the most invisible, the least truly existent, world.
Idealization
The question that one might ask here is what is the real meaning of this instinct for idealization that seems so profoundly rooted, precisely, in creative acts. And whether it is not in fact an essential element in creative productions, insofar as these should be understood as a synthesis of exterior and interior, farthest and nearest, the content of the world and the content of individuality, the depths and summits of being.
Even when it applies not to more exceptional acts, but to our day-to-day existence, the mere human fact of our consciousness is based on something similar: the same necessity to capture in a single view the confrontation between the world and the self, which is already given in consciousness. It is only the dimension of that which this capture embraces that distinguishes what man can accomplish from what the animal can accomplish. As the consciousness of being alive develops, this process also advances, encompassing in consequence the most profoundly local with the most remote, and thereby resembling the behavior that we have, in a narrow sense of the term, described as creative. It progresses until such undoubtedly important opposites of being have been dominated, until they are assimilated into a unity so fertile that it is as if the coming into being of the world and the birth of the self were being relived, re-experienced—which alone gives our creations their core of autonomous life, instead of merely a derivative pseudo-existence and superficial being.
When this occurs, however, we recognize that the idealizing activity is in full operation. The lover, like the creator, he who creates in the child as he who creates in the work of his mind, are both characterized by their naive ecstasies, whose objective value it is quite impossible to evaluate. The partner we have referred to—and even more so when a more important principle is concerned—can evidently only exist on a shared plane as a consequence of such mutual exaltation, can only in this way, at a level thus sublimated, balance his needs and his differences, and the occasion of all this, the accentuation of the joy of life itself, is sufficient to bring about such behavior. One might say that this process produces a sort of consecration of what the two partners share to seal their pact, so that in their unity they seem to stand on “sacred ground.” As if that which we call idealization were a kind of primeval act, preceding all others, of creation of beings, a kind of primordial autonomous reproduction, a continuation of every life—and that is why it is present at the very beginning, even in the procreative instinct, accompanying by anticipation the first traces of cerebral activity. As if it were the source from which springs in celebration the great jubilant frenzy of existence, like the joyful songs of birds in the early morning, as the sun prepares to rise on a new day of creation—for no three states on earth are as intimately connected as these: creation, adoration, and joy.
If we grope our way back to the obscurity of human origins and humanity’s past, the most distant discernible points that we encounter are religious manifestations. This thing with its scarce awakened consciousness, confronted suddenly with an outside world, is always in relation, in some form, with the god. It is the god which constantly and repeatedly guarantees the unity which alone can beget the different efforts that constitute the origins of civilization. However, conscious awareness, by contrast with simple, scarce awakened, animal self-reflection, is in itself so great an exaltation of life that one can understand that all the miseries, all the powerlessness that suddenly accompany it, are sublimated, despite everything, into a primordial and spontaneous human creation, the creation of the divine. For this implies nothing less than that the decisive weapon in the struggle for life is no longer only the purely material weapon of animality, whose strength in so many ways surpasses that of man, but an act of creative imagination. Not, of course, in the form of a debilitating underestimation of the strangeness and hostility that confront him, which the imagination tends rather to overestimate, including the elusive power of magical effects, but only insofar as man’s strength itself, as it deepens, feels conscious of itself: feels that it is not confined solely to the materiality of the visible. Thus, despite all the urgency of struggle, the battle is no longer simply a momentary search for prey, but at the same time a capture of the unity of the individual, with all the life that surrounds him, and of that in which the animal still remains unalterably rooted—an attempt to experience this unity in the divine, in magical sublimation. Even in spilling blood, in devouring flesh, man exchanges his strength with that of his enemy and concludes something like a pact of this kind, a sacred union; by postulating that certain realities exist, but precisely by positing that they are his own future, he celebrates in anticipation, for the first time prey to a new hunger and a new thirst, the sacrament of his redemption by the mind.
It is only because this interior urgency that forces us to raise all things to a higher power, to idealize them, means, in the most primitive sense of the term, “to behave as a creator,” that we find this same urgency at all the high points of human activity, and everywhere, finally encountering death at the pinnacles of lived experience. For this same reason, our highest creativity shows the strange characteristic of being experienced almost as a conception, the subtlest peak of our activity as autonomous beings, so that our extreme achievements involve a giving of ourselves at levels that lie beyond us. When we are masters of life, as at no other time, do we feel ourselves nearest to an atmosphere of initiatory fervor: for these are not different kinds of individual experience, but the ultimate expressions of the intensity specific to that experience. As if, in the quest for evermore fertile freedoms, for evermore creative being, our Self would remain sterile if it did not feel, at the heights of its being, once again mysteriously split, rediscovering the original duality of its beginnings, the sole guarantee of its unity. As if something of the symbols of the original divinity, beneath a thousand changing disguises and refinements, continued to accompany all our experiences, a traveling companion for all people and all times; as if the creative faculty itself were but the other facet of adoration, and our unions wrought of impregnation and conception were the ultimate image of every becoming.
Eroticism & Religion
If religion is one of the spheres that can be defined with the greatest diversity, whose essence has always been explained in the most contradictory ways, this must be due to the intensity of its identity—with regard to the emotion that underlies it—with all our most intimate vital affects—aspects of inner life that are life and death to us, and which, for that reason, seem to deny us the distance from ourselves that is the sine qua non of theoretical analysis.
This is why, in the beginning, eroticism is directly incorporated into the religious, and vice versa, if for no other reason than that exaltation of life which is engendered by the rise to consciousness of the inner and outer worlds, a source of the impulse to create—after which this faculty of integration, this reinforced pleasure in living and desiring, became more narrowly differentiated into physiological and spiritual pleasure. In this respect, the connection between them would be the same as between all other human activities, where the new coloring adopted by the religious only reveals its original hue at their base or at their summit. However, the bond connecting sexuality with religious phenomena proves to be particularly close, in that the creative aspect of the sexual processes comes to the fore so early, at the stage of physiological procreation, thus from this moment conferring on purely physical rapture its character of general exaltation: a sort of spirituality conferred in advance. And if the mind transfers its cerebral excitements to sexual emotion, we also find in religious fervor, as in fact in all ardent activity of the psyche, an aspect drawn from the stimulating excitements of the body: between the two, the whole of human evolution stretches and is deployed, but nevertheless, no interruptions: their multiplicity is linked unit by unit and, in this process, beginning and end are intertwined. For religious fervor itself would not exist without the intuition that our sublimest dreams can sprout in our most earthy native soils. That is why the rituals of the most ancient religions have been linked with sexual life for much longer and more profoundly than with the other manifestations of life, and why, even in so-called “spiritual” religions—“religions of the founder”—this connection subsists in some form.
However, there is another specific parallel between religious fervor and erotic fervor, a manner in which each of their essences is quite clearly revealed: I refer to their intellectual manifestations.
From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a single step; likewise, it might be found, despite all the respect we owe to the works of the great religious geniuses and all the astonishment that they inspire, that, for the cool observer of reality, the intellectual world of the person on fire with religiosity exhibits a fatal resemblance, at least in one regard, with the exuberant images that people the imagination of the lover—both in their method of creation and in the desires they contain. Despite the immense difference, appropriate to their subject, which distinguishes the importance that we attribute to each of them: for even the most intense love neither requires nor expects that the impartial gaze of all human beings should see the world solely through the blinded and visionary eyes of lovers, while religious belief strenuously asserts the irresistible authenticity of its image of God. Not, as is often said, purely out of narrow bigotry, but because of the most intimate of constraints, and in accordance with the single meaning contained in its very essence. And this parallel undoubtedly holds despite a second difference: although belief draws the outlines of its image under the inspiration of an even more untrammeled subjectivity. For, while the amorous instinct, producer of illusions as it is, nevertheless remains chained to a real object; or while, for example, in aesthetic creation, shapes, however freely imagined they may be, must still give concrete form to a criterion of their own relationship with the real, the religious man projects his imaginings—without being obliged to “verify” them positively at their origin, nor once their goal is attained—with untrammeled spiritual violence, first beyond himself, and subsequently, with the appearance of a more than human greatness, over the whole heavens.
In consequence, in the man possessed of such a feeling, where one would least expect it, it is precisely the theoretical aspect of his religious postulates which is most vigorously exhibited in the foreground, most particularly visible from a distance and most peculiarly arrogant. His different suppositions, more resistant to correction than any other, since they are more incapable of being associated with anything beyond themselves, must ultimately be erected into evermore stringent constructions in order to constitute a world totally exterior to all other things.
There is, in all this, only one obvious contradiction: in order to be expressed so sovereignly, it is true that the religious principle must isolate its world of ideas in so absolute a manner—yet, this very sovereignty is only a reflection of the universality and the spontaneity that its insistence on universal significance acquires in practice, according to which nothing is outside it, and it itself, in a sense, is part of everything, the underlying basis of everything, crowning everything in the sublimity of the goal finally attained. This host of contradictions results in nothing but the following: all that can be grasped of life by theoretical means is a tiny part, and it is at the highest point of its vitality that it appears more than ever distorted, badly drawn in the very image that took it for a model. Belief formulates this as the profound principle that God can only be known in the immediate experience of Him, and that a degree of truth which can, for example, be attributed to Him according to other criteria, can in no way make Him “truer” for us. If, in the end, everything that lends itself docilely to investigation by thought is in consequence to be classified as inanimate—as is seen most fully in the object of scientific dissection—life that is still nearest to its source will even pass, more elusively than ever, through the finest web of thought. That which is always new, and exists with an existence unceasingly renewed, can only leave behind itself and repudiate at every moment everything that allows it to be fixed: not only because it bears only a partial correspondence, but because, once constructed, it becomes sloughed snakeskin, dross and, one might say, petrified fossil.
For this reason, the illusory nature of mental images is not in itself a fatal defect, either for religion, or for eroticism, but rather confirms their vitality. With this distinction: that the exuberance of lovers, with its physiological causes, in a way anticipates the full experience of the mind, by projecting the images that it begets: bizarre, funny, touching, edifying, a set of confusing and fleeting reflections;—while the believer, wishing to give form to an extreme experience of the mind, is obliged to draw from that which is less spiritualized, and therefore never grasps anything other than a past that is permanently lost: in truth, a massive, granite world, projected into a fatally petrified material by the immense vitality of internal impetus! And, for this very reason, a permanent asylum for the use of those who seek shelter and protection from the tribulations of existence. For it is true that every religion possesses the following two characteristics: it is one thing for the ardor of the person who lives it and another for the misery of the person who believes in it, different when it serves as an asylum than when it serves as a crutch.
As for abstaining from the activity of thought from one episode to the next, neither religion nor love can do this, any more than we can abstain from thinking in any moment of our experience as human beings: for nothing happens which is not at the same time both an event of the intimate self and a concrete symbol. However, the fewer claims they make, the more the forms of these symbols have to say to us, and thus especially if they do not pretend to represent the most spontaneous of ecstasies or an universal and intangible validity, but instead come verifiably together in the greatest possible variety of combinations, mutually supporting and conditioning each other in such a way that they are constantly self confirming, without any noticeable interest on our part—so especially, as we usually say, if they represent external reality.
Here, however, is the great lesson that emerges, both for religious experience and for erotic experience: that at this point their path must deviate to return to life itself. That, for the living being, the other path, that which leads to intellectual proofs and confirmations, becomes, after a short distance, a cul-desac, inexorably barred, since only life can totally reflect life. Which implies, for religious behavior, an adhesion without limit to everything that is—for what could exist that does not become for religion a throne and a stepping stone, as is the universe for God? For love, this implies that it should find its fulfillment in social life.
Eroticism & Society
Eroticism occupies an intermediate position between the two great categories of feeling: egoism and altruism. Or to put it less equivocally, on the one hand, the shrinking, the contraction of our individual will to the point of secession, hostility; on the other hand, the dilation by which the Other, that which is outside, is incorporated as if it were a part of the self. Over time, the two categories themselves modify their reciprocal positions, and the esteem in which human beings hold them and the manner in which they settle their differences, determines the specific character of an époque. Each of the groups always needs to be completed by the other; every man participates in both, and, if he gives himself too exclusively to one, can only run the gravest of risks, for in order to give oneself one must be able to possess oneself, and in order to possess one must first be able to receive from things and from people that which cannot be acquired by force, that which can only be accepted as a gift, with an open soul. These two opposed principles are in fact—although superficially their incompatibilities would seem to keep them eternally separate—united, at their roots, by the most profound solidarity, a mutual interaction: “I want to be everything!,” prodigality of being, and “I want to have everything!,” insatiable greed, contain, elevated to the level of a supreme desire for communion with the Whole, the same meaning.
It is from this still mutual parent-root that the third group of affective relations, that of the erotic, seems to diverge, as an intermediate form, perhaps the first of forms, between the isolated animal and the fraternal creature: combining both elements within itself, strangely and without regard for their contradictions, in such a way that they are reciprocally intensified, and that their momentum continually increases. Thus it is that everywhere in Nature different protoplasmic corpuscles seek each other out precisely in order to procreate, and gradually and spontaneously develop differences of sex, making possible specialization into an evermore complex multiplicity. And thus, in men as in animals, we must recognize the justice of the old cliché that love between the sexes is a battle of the sexes, and that there is nothing that so easily becomes its opposite as love and hate. For, if self-love grows in sexuality, at the same time it also sharpens to the extreme violence of its egoistic desires and, if it becomes an egoistic aggression, this too is only to enthrone everything that it has conquered, and even to raise it high above itself: everywhere hindered, because of its physiological determination, from clearly expressing the direction of its spiritual intentions—and nevertheless, more profoundly than any other emotion, directing these intentions towards the totalizing unity that we feel ourselves to be.
Therefore, this hindrance to sexuality should not lead us to conclude that man’s most spiritualized egoisms, or even simple intellectual fraternization between all human beings, are necessarily in themselves superior to sexuality, and that the latter represents little more than a preliminary to more conscious stages of evolution. On the contrary, within its own sphere, it is present at every stage, from the most primitive to the most complex, from those most limited by the body to those most liberated by the mind, and always on its own ground. Where the hazards of life graft upon it forms of relationship, such as friendship or compassion, that originate elsewhere, it is not ennobled by their influence, but rather is more likely to put at risk the instinctive forces contained within its essence, and which flow into it from a very different level. Being itself full of creative elements of both an egoistic and altruistic kind, it exerts itself autonomously in both directions. And, just as, in the previous pages, it has been shown, with deliberate partiality, in its aspect of joyous rapture, a union of all the energies, which was initially its sole total and indubitable truth, in other words, has been shown from the perspective of its egoism—likewise it can also be examined from the perspective of productivity and altruism: the Other, the partner, so far seen only as the occasion of its overflowing enthusiasm, the trigger for gratifying illusions, can equally become its truth and the great event of its existence. It is true that “mutual egoism” would appear still to carry a suggestion of egoism, and that it is only overcome in the relationship to the child—hence only at that point where love between the sexes and social love meet and are reconciled, complementing each other. However, that which characterizes sexual love, which accomplishes its “social” task in the physiological sense of that word, is that this physical activity already contains within itself everything that it will extend into the mental sphere. True, it would not be entirely wrong to say that love creates two human beings: alongside the one physically created by the embrace, another, imaginary, being. However, it is precisely this being created by the bodies who, most often, is the first to draw lovers from the simple somnolence of love. Provided, at least, that this birth arises from the primitive levels and spontaneously from the life of Nature, the rut is socialized in the litter, love in the child.
Motherhood
It is interesting that it is in the woman, usually prone to the most excessive idealizations of the amorous life, that this first hint of socialization emerges most strongly. For maternal love, exalted and, in recent times, somewhat despised as being exercised so totally under constraint, without discernment, without any reservation as to the real value of its object, in fact brings about a synthesis of the two tendencies. On the one hand it is true that maternal love remains unaffected by any reality, and allows no affront to its tender emotional prejudice, as if, in fact, the little creature that is the child were nothing but a prop to support that prejudice. On the other hand, however, this is only so because maternal love in itself is nothing but a sort of brooding instinct, an extended procreation, one might say, nothing but a warmth directed to and enveloping the seed, a warmth that enables its virtualities to be realized, which interprets the seed as a promise—a promise that the woman makes to herself in the seed. It is to this end that her effort of idealization is as closely and as authentically related to the creative act as its original and supreme meaning requires; to this end that acts and prayers are contained even in the little endearments with which she caresses her child in order to encourage him, day by day, to enter evermore deeply into life.
It is also for this reason that even in her relations with the man, her outpourings express something more than simply the intellectual sparks of an unused surplus of sexuality. Just as, each time she praises her child to the skies without regard for truth, she celebrates just one of those splendors, the marvelous fact of his small life, likewise, behind the bright cloak of illusions in which she clothes the man she loves and which makes him unique in her eyes, it is always the human being himself whom she finds, who, however ordinary and imperfect he may be when naked to the world, is nevertheless from birth included in the depths of her life. In all those ideal images that she projects upon him, with, it would seem, simultaneously so much arrogance and so much humility, all she does is to give him access to that immense warmth in which the individual, if he has but once tasted its repose, finds the ending of his original solitude, as if he were once again enclosed within that world of motherhood which surrounded him before he came into being.
Thus, for a few moments, it is somewhat as if she were restoring him to the center of the world, in his value as a unique being which, being given to every man, cannot for that very reason be considered the prerogative of any individual, and which nevertheless survives in every creature, in the form of that feeling that only a love “with all her heart and all her strength” can do justice to the smallest of beings. She thus exercises for him, by so loving him, that form of higher justice, alongside the justice based on social or practical considerations—but without harming anyone, because hers is the only sky that suits him, one that for others would be nothing more than a little patch of blue above the terrestrial sphere.
Not only does she harm no one, but she shows the male the way, by the fact that out of the mere chimera of eroticism, with its touch of the ridiculous, she is able to draw another image, an authentic image of what man profoundly is, and which is true for all. To the extent that all the illusions that accompany eroticism can in the end have no more importance for her than have little plumes of sparkling water above the great bright wave that produced them, and that her woman’s love is further twinned in its depths with a human love that is bottomless and limitless. So that her stubborn passion for the One—as if, in this miniscule grain of dust, she had conquered the Universe and closed herself off to everything else—is immediately enlarged, as if she felt that all things were speaking a new language, with the voice of the beloved’s life—with everything close to her heart down to the last of the beasts of the field.
This new interpretation of the emotions occurs more and more involuntarily as the parental role evolves. For, in the parental role the same tragic process once again emerges, according to which the greater the differentiation between creatures, the more surely are they able to pass on their being only in partial acts: for, just as the physical embrace only briefly accomplishes the fusion of two beings into one, likewise the child only receives that which the lovers have themselves already received from their ancestors. The most difficult and the most precious of conquests, personal overcoming, remains outside this transmission, and with it the unreproducible totality of individuality, that which is most living in life: for individuality is only the custodian, a little better or a little worse than others, of the heritage of generations. Once again, it is the great overflowing of directionless feeling that is revealed, which is no longer a part of any unity, which can only try after the event, of its own momentum in all autonomy and by methods invented by itself, to fill in the spaces in reality, to perfect it.
That is why motherhood is an act that lasts a lifetime, which is not complete when the female no longer needs to care for her offspring, an attempt to give her soul, in the same way as she has given her body. And that is why animal instincts, which begin with this desire, culminate in a surplus of spirituality, in the same way as does sexual love between man and woman: thus managing not only to become self-deceiving and self-glorifying, under the pretence of celebrating another—the other conceived, so to speak, as the incarnation of a part of oneself—but also to enter into him, into his life, the life of the “Other,” in the precise sense of the word. Not in order to prolong her physical existence in the child, nor even to impress her own image psychically upon the child. That is not the reason why the mother gives herself to the human life born of her, finally achieving that ultimate, most subtle, gift of self, which wishes in return to receive a gift, to be enriched, to be enlarged. A gift that renders the child the honor due to it as a totality, as an intangible and autonomous world, as a being with whom one can no longer unite, except, precisely, through an explicitly acknowledged duality, thus on the basis of an entirely new kind of alliance. Motherhood finds its consummation only in this act by which the mother consciously places that which belongs to her most intimate being outside herself, like an alien creature, with its own existence: in a final painful act of spontaneity, an ultimate relinquishment, she has finally, for the first time, brought her child into the world, allowed her fruit to fall from her branches, and can enter her autumn.
However, this autumn is transmuted into new springs without number for she whom it has once a mother, in the full sense of the term: uniting her to life, with all the warmth of the being who has not only loved her, but who has brought her forth from her flesh, who, in all his reality, has separated her from her heart, and for this reason makes her continually experience something new, a world. Of all the relations between humans, it is therefore only to motherhood that it is given to realize a relationship fully, from its deepest original source to its topmost pinnacle: from its flesh and its blood to the spiritual self of the Other, in which the beginning of the world is rediscovered. For, just as no other relationship can start from this point, so close to the beginning, likewise no other can, in the same sense, find its completion: if she does not die a violent and premature death, she remains to some degree eternally seeking, without end, without goal, which defines the human concept of “fidelity.” Not being born of a total unity, nor does she end in the possibility of an ever new duality—in that perfection of conclusion, of decline, which is almost nothing but another name for recommencement, opening to life, immortality.
Woman
Motherhood is not the only form of being in which it is revealed how it is precisely the physiology of the woman that contains the seeds of its most sovereign development, beyond mere eroticism, to a more general humanity. A second type of femininity in which the supreme symbol of love is also celebrated, in a form that apparently surmounts the erotic, is attached to the image of the Madonna. Even if it is true that the virgin’s possession by the god, in the most ancient times, has since been incorporated into the intrigues of the clergy, it is nevertheless beyond doubt that this image is born of the need to subordinate sexuality to that which is approved and sanctified by religion, and, even when orgiastic rituals are grafted onto it, the need to elevate it as something sacred above the needs of the individual. Indeed, this primitive conception of the Madonna seems close to our current conception of the whore: the gift of self without the possibility of choice, or even of pleasure, in other words, the gift of self for purposes profoundly remote from the erotic. The type of the whore and the type of the Madonna resemble each other in this respect somewhat as do the caricature and its living model, or meet at the extremes; that which makes both of them possible, however, is the same principle that gives the woman the role of the life-giving animal, the maternal animal: her body—which carries the child to be, as the temple of the god, or as the theatre and venal locus of sexuality—becomes expression made flesh, the symbol of that passivity which makes the woman capable equally of degrading the sexual act and of transfiguring it.
However, just as in motherhood it is the woman’s greater passivity that is metamorphosed into the extreme of her creative power, the notion of the Madonna could also, not without reason, be spiritualized to the highest level of meaningful activity. For it designates not only a negation, the woman liberated from concupiscence, but also the woman who has dedicated all her powers, including non-erotic powers, for the sole purpose of conception. The more a woman is rooted in love, the more she has found personal fulfillment in it, the more the passive elimination of pure and simple pleasure in sexuality is transformed into a living act, a living accomplishment, a living action. Here, sensuality and chastity, fulfillment and self-sanctification merge: in all woman’s greatest hours, the man is never more than Mary’s carpenter, compared with a god. It could be said that, insofar as male love is so different from hers, more active, more partial, more encumbered by the need for relief, it makes him, even within this love, more clumsy than the woman who, loving more totally and more passively, seeks body and soul for a space in which to find fulfillment, and the whole content of a life to bring to fruition, to combustion: a space in which she can burn. Just as it is characteristic that there is no masculine word equivalent to “whore,” which refers to the solely passive sexual use of another’s body, there is also no word to designate the type of the Madonna, the positiveness of sanctification: the man can only be “a saint” by negation of sexuality, as in the type of the ascetic.
This greater power of concentration in the sphere of love, this relation of the whole being which finds its unity in a single principle, and which the man tends, by compensation, to achieve in other spheres, all this often places the woman high above him, at a point of value that is essential for life. However, this superiority still needs to be evaluated accurately, as a natural outcome of its lesser degree of differentiation. Thus, we might find that it is too enthusiastically asserted that a female often succumbs to misfortune for the sole reason that her spiritual attachment follows the most fugitive, the most sensual of fleeting raptures. Now, it is hard to see wherein lies her moral superiority, as compared with male indifference, if it is true that, realizing the damage after the event, she is dismayed to discover that her own indifference has become encumbered with all sorts of more profound feelings. It might be said that this greater difficulty in distancing herself from the physical and psychical mass of the instincts is appealing, but it is unjust to blame male injustice, simply because in a woman so many things are swept along with the seduction that were not originally intended to have anything to do with it.
On the one hand, women would like to pursue their efforts of differentiation at any price and by any means, and on the other hand to remain—or even become more—unsurpassed lovers, by virtue of their nobility as mother and as Madonna, which is not entirely logical. However, one might imagine that the clarity of knowledge has given them, in regard to their own bodily existence, a slightly different attitude than in the past. One might conceive of a new, subtle modesty—no longer fixed so prudishly on the physical giving of self as was required by traditional upbringing, which made this modesty second nature—a modesty that would lead rather to a consistent self-control, because the joy entailed in physiological pleasure can only open wide the door to intrusions into the soul: the door to the most intimate Self, which refuses to give itself up, the most precious of gifts between human beings, and which, once spent, can never be entirely recovered, because it is our very being.
If, in the woman’s erotic affect, so much psychical material is drawn, even against her will, into the corporeal, for the same reasons the process is reversed in diseases of the psyche. Forel’s work, The Question of Sexuality, shows that sexuality, which in men affects the lower centers of the brain, appears in women to be situated in the encephalon, “the seat of mental disturbances.” “When one visits,” he says, “even in female company, the men’s section in an asylum of the insane, one is surprised by the lethargy and the sexual indifference of almost all the male inmates,” while amongst the women, “even the most modest and the most sexually cold can, when suffering from mental alienation, fall into the most unbridled eroticism, and behave for a certain time like prostitutes.” Thus it is that the final word, that of mental alienation, even that of a tragically involuntary degradation, once again confirms that for the woman love is the whole of existence.
That which is most distinctive in the essence of the woman’s sexual nature means that its development oscillates, even in the most balanced woman, along a zigzag line between the life of sex and her individual life; either women and mothers feel their particular gifts atrophy, or they are compelled to develop them at the expense of their role as woman or as mother. Despite the many remedies prescribed for this condition, as if it were a treatable disorder, there is no general solution to this conflict, nor can there be one. However, instead of using it as a pretext to rail against the tragic fate from which the female may not escape, it would be better to rejoice at the fact that woman, in her infinite vitality, is able not to undergo her development in a straight line, but to allow the contradictions that arise from the fact of her birth to be resolved case by case, by virtue of an act of extreme individuality. For, if there is one thing that can confer great significance on even the most mediocre of female destinies, it is the fact that she must, in every new case, begin anew the conflict of her inner life, and resolve it on her own initiative; which is no less an act than the triumphs of the man, in his combats with the “outside” world, since the savagery of early times. If it is true that today he can still only be fairly judged by reference to his successes in the outside world, everything, for the woman, is included in this single trait: how has she resolved within herself the enigma of existence, and that is the reason why grace, in the highest sense of the term, remains the criterion of her success, and also that of her physical and natural value. “Ethical” and “beautiful” can, in a subtle way, mean one and the same thing, like “sacred” and “sexual,” wherein are expressed for evermore both the prerogative and the limitation of the female sex.
It is almost, one might say, in compensation for this omnipresent and omnipotent insistence by the sexual element that, in woman, sexuality, in its physiological aspect, ceases to act sooner than in the man; that, even before she enters into true old age, everything of love that life has been able to create in her is seen to wither into a delicious growth. For—once again in contrast with the man—this arrest is not merely a sign of a negation, an extinction before the imminence of new expenditure, but it is all the value of accumulated experience which here takes visible form and which demonstrates all its richness, like a hamster’s burrow at the approach of winter. Thus it is that a very subtle echo of love is still visible in this the most purely human, least sexual, manifestation of the feminine principle, something in which the whole content of her existence reaches perfection in a totality so solemn that only the gaze of the child or of the old man might detect its splendor, if immaturity or death did not prevent it. Just as motherhood is the only thing that offers the full experience, in its totality, of a human relationship, and, for this very reason, that can be ceaselessly renewed, woman receives from life the gift of new beginnings, in a way that man could never imitate. And the truer this is of her, the more of a woman she is, the more she attains her greatness in these renewals of life—and the more she is able to capture vast possibilities, robust energies, to incorporate them organically into the totality of her being, however remote they may have been from her female nature, or however opposed to it. There is no particular trait or any special tendency, even when by their content they are proclaimed specifically “female,” in which she ever differs from the essence of masculinity; the only difference lies in this manner of harmonizing them all in order to bring them into relation with the very core of her life.
Hence, no doubt, the futility of the interminable discussions which, with largely equal reason on both sides, sometimes emphasize the complete opposition between women and men, and sometimes, precisely, celebrate the progress that consists in having gone beyond it; in which woman is alternately credited with or denied almost all possible and imaginable qualities, being represented, always more or less accurately, under the species of levity and seriousness, of folly and cold realism, of agitation and harmony, of caprice and profundity, of wisdom and stupidity, of delicacy and brutality, as chthonic demon or angel. For, in fact, without looking very far, the concept “woman,” broken down into particular traits, covers the most irreconcilable qualities: the woman is always contradiction incarnate, provided that, in accordance with her creative vocation, she carries life itself working within her.
Male & Female
A sort of taste in man for the ordered, for the solid, sometimes balks at all this female nature, or also at love, which alternately disturbs him, overcomes him, or seems to him to merit his disdain. However much we may wish that, in matters of love, concord should reign between the two, it is nevertheless understandable that the man, full of the tangible successes that he requires of himself, should respond with a certain irritation to a female exuberance which occupies his time. Assuredly, there have during entire époques and even in our own day enough examples of idolatry of women, but nevertheless, it would be more tolerable to see the model of Kleist’s Catherine as exemplifying the ultimate in femininity than to see the Sire of Toggenburg as representing the nec plus ultra of masculinity.1 For, it is undoubtedly an exaggeration highly characteristic of our time that is expressed in the convention that it is only in the complete fulfillment of the amorous ideal, in its perfection extended to the whole of existence, that we should see man’s most important business, the humanization of being, the “only necessary thing.” A feminine exaggeration, and, from the point of view of masculine ideals, somewhat female, which makes one forget to what extent all our strengths are only fully realized at one another’s expense, how many supreme achievements already implicitly assume the renunciation of any possible harmony, whether physical or spiritual, how self-exaltation requires one, in quest of this perfection, to undergo every kind of mutilation of one’s being, and that it is only during its intermissions, during interruptions in its constant and energetic pursuits, that masculinity concentrates on beauty. And, if these intermissions are more suited to women than to men, one is led to wonder whether, in compensation, the man, when his gifts are examined one by one, is not in fact the more gifted of the two—extending the frontiers of his being further in each of them, whether they be of the instincts or of the mind. In consequence, his erotic and egotistical affects take a different social form, he establishes their limits in relation to other generally human concerns; as a result, the impact of human nature, that mysterious influence of the germinative plasma upon the whole personality, will often have something of the effect, particularly upon the male absorbed in serious or important occupations, of an acute anomaly, an intoxication rising to his head, rather than a new harmony, which, in the woman, teaches the body and soul to vibrate in unison to the rhythms of universal life, and for that very reason constantly threatens her individual development. That, therefore, which inspires in him his best, his strongest love of the woman, is that she comes in a sense to incarnate that from which he himself was born, and from which his children came—he loves in her that which, in each case, makes the woman’s identity more vague, and even gives the lines of her body a greater gentleness, her voice the accent of youth: the heritage that is handed down from human to human—and for human beings, eternal motherhood, eternal childhood, present in everything that is.
This difference between the sexes is considered today to be so deeply ingrained that, beyond eradication by evolution, it seems in every respect to reach down to the deepest layers of the self. However, it is precisely in this that, in every case, it also finds its counterpart in its very essence: for, the deeper we look for its source, the more the lines of the two sexes must meet at some point, within the embryonic forms of man and of woman; life, an autonomous whole in its action, must in some sense be doubly engendered, just as each of us comes from a father and a mother. The further we descend into the deep layers of our being, the more this fertile connection of duality in the form of unity, of unity in the form of duality, is revealed; more than anywhere, therefore, in the creative activities of the mind—as if they needed to excavate, to draw from the most remote generations, that which is required to impregnate them, to order them according to such a duality, so that they may bring an autonomous life into the world. Which is why we so readily observe the relative frequency of bisexuality in artists, as, more generally, in any manifestation of genius: a state of permanent engendering, which has become, so to speak, fixed.
When, by contrast, we are under the influence of love, that is to say when our creative agitation, in order to produce a corporeal opus exterior to itself, requires its complementary half, from outside, not only is there no attenuation of the antithesis between the sexes, but it is even accentuated to the point of complete opposition. Everything that concentrates, combines, unites within us under the influence of erotic affect, seems to do so only for this, most one-sided of possible purposes, and the individual himself seems frankly overloaded with meaning, as a representative of his sex: it is only as the complement, the world as “other,” that he is elevated to the dignity of the beloved “Only” and “All.” And, in fact, the decisive nature of these states and these processes can only be described more precisely, be stated, through a certain exaggeration of this kind, such that everything contained in the concept of “male” or “female” is, in each case, concentrated in the person of the individual man, of the female individual presented by reality.
In this respect, one aspect of the question should be emphasized a posteriori, an aspect which, for this very reason, has not been sufficiently considered, and which alone rescues it from the excessive superficiality of the intellectual consideration it has received, to place it under the light of multiple meanings, of a more complete reality: I refer to the fact that, even with regard to individuals, the experience of love can exercise a dual influence.
If it is true that every love is founded on the capacity to experience another nature vividly within oneself, by participating in it, and if it can be said without fear of its most violent manifestations that the experience of both lovers is in this respect identical, love thus already possesses a dual human face: in conception it incorporates into itself, somewhat as it does physically, the affective expression of the other’s sex. Which makes it capable, despite the accentuation of sexual characteristics, of acquiring, alongside these characteristics, traits in which it reflects, so to speak, its own sexual opposite.2
If, in the physiological processes, the germinative plasma became the cause which leads the most hidden faculties within us to act upon and stimulate all the rest, here it is the extreme degree of spiritualized love that provides the same opportunity to release within ourselves, in giving it life, that which was not included in the program of our own evolution. The emotional rapture aroused by physiological excitement seems in this case almost totally consumed by the positive creation of entirely new psychical events. And there is no better proof that this rapture, originally a source of illusions, is a form of life, than the fact that it cannot be confined to effecting the union of two beings between themselves and in the child, but that it even awakens and elicits in them that creative duality contained in every becoming, in order to induce it to its own self-overcoming. In this way, for the first time, it independently seeks the spiritual counterpart of that “beyond the self” that the child represents. So, while the physical ecstasy of love, by virtue of its power to unite everything within us, already contains within it a sense of happiness, this last amorous experience, the rarest of all, can only emerge in the inner life as happiness and the fulfillment of every wish. An infallible instinct tells us that love, in both its most primitive and its most evolved sense, has of itself a revitalizing and fulfilling effect; that where its destiny in the outside world makes it instead a principle of anguish and of death, it is not its own force that makes this destiny so insurmountable, but on the contrary, an incompleteness in the love itself that makes it a prisoner of sentimentality, of suffering, and of a half-imaginary community of life. For it is precisely here, when the lovers once again—almost as at the beginning of their relationship—bear their destiny, entirely determined by the emotions they each feel, that for the first time they seem bound by an indissoluble bond, but in an interdependence that is no longer limited to the attachment of two complementary halves, and which is even less concerned to attenuate these oppositions by appending to love additional elements that are alien to it. Rather, by one of those paradoxes that only the creative ordering of all things can invent, two human beings, a man and a woman, are merged one into the other, becoming a suprapersonal unity by the fact that this relationship magnifies each of them to their most profound degree of autonomy—their total and everlasting ipseity.
Criteria & Limits
What can thus be revealed about a partial domain—that precisely its most lively aspect, its sharpest point of life, cannot be unequivocally fixed, but needs apparently contradictory adjustments—this truth also holds for the general background from which a question is examined. The result of this uncertainty is almost that, from time to time, background scales of value and definitions are overturned and reversed, the confusion of origins re-established, before the question is entirely clear or entirely distinct, but when it constitutes, in compensation, colorful medley of realities. In particular, it should be remembered that the subject we are considering covers an indissoluble totality of phenomena, in which each trait correlates with every other and in which a constant connection needs to be maintained between the most sublime and the basest results.
Thus it is that we may not envisage the ultimate, the highest values in that which can be described of all this, without ascribing to them a sacred right: the right to stoop, in a constant return, towards the most primitive states—and the higher they stand, the further they will stoop. Rather like the Indian banyan, the most marvelous tree on this earth, whose hanging branches become airborne roots so that, by constantly re-establishing contact with the ground through them, it constructs living temples one upon another, each tier of branches serving, like columns, as a support for the boughs immediately above, while above them the whole crown of the maternal trunk, the trunk born of a single root, sings in the sun.
Even in the animal world, we perceive almost nothing of phenomena which, even in their psychical manifestations, are visible to us only in their physiological aspect, and yet, in the deep shadow, in the chiaroscuro of those temples of Nature that we consider inferior, there reigns a life comparable with our own. It is no accident that even here we find ecstasies of sexual love, sometimes manifested in the most subtle—as well as the most brutal—aesthetic forms, together with the greatest abnegation in the care shown by one partner for another, and for their children. For even certain species of parrots and monkeys (it seems that they are, unfortunately, the least manlike!) “outdo” us very considerably in their penchant for monogamy, and bees, like ants, show us—a fact as deplorable for us as it is humiliating—models of social instinct that we are incapable of equaling, or even imitating, in the very slightest degree.
The same is true, at least to some extent, for the “primitive” races; sometimes considered as examples of humanity in its Adamic state, sometimes despised as impervious to culture of any kind, and despite the coarseness or the cruelty of their customs, which are often governed by ritual, they can nevertheless otherwise surpass us in innate expressions of purity, goodness, or fidelity. Indeed, it is precisely sexual experience which largely controls that which constitutes the being of the primitive creature, as it does our own; after all, that which appeals to love in the human being is animal substance modified by growing intelligence, and the latter is everywhere manifested in two different tendencies: sublimation of the innate instinctive life or its ruination.
Ruination would mean, in the present case, that beings gifted with the capacity to think would not experience their sexual lives according to their nature, with the brain in the end becoming the involuntary recipient of increasing stimulation, but that eventually the brain itself would become an artificial and abusive inducer of fragmented physical pleasures. The ever freer mobility of the instinctual life, and in the end, the release from the seasonal rutting cycle, would be employed by the brain to fragment, to isolate that instinctual life evermore arbitrarily, so that it would again, in a sense, come to resemble the least animate or the inanimate, which lends itself to use in fragments, instead of an increasingly conscious unity of life, an ever greater and more all-embracing sympathy, an enhanced participation in universal life. In such cases, reason, with its expertise in refinements, manipulates the very life of life-like dead matter to be subjugated, and illustrates the ruin of instinct and the sin of sex.
Quite the opposite happens to the intellect when it sublimates sex: here, as it becomes conscious of itself, it pushes to the extreme the intensification of an evermore animate mental life, first imprinting thereon its own spiritual criteria, as yet adapted to no place and leading to illusions. As for actual behavior, such sublimation gives rise to a considerable frivolity of judgment. For, in fact, the sexual instincts are subject to the same laws of desire and satiety, of excitement diminished by repetition, and of the resulting need for change, as the whole sphere of animal life. It is no objection that all this is altered by the individuation and refinement of the instincts: it is only the sequence of emotions that are individuated and refined. While in the past, it was easy for a husband on his travels to find a substitute wife, being content with the fact that she belonged to the same category as his own: dark or blonde, thin or fat; nowadays we make the most meticulous distinctions, but in compensation, we—or at least a part of us—are much more often “on our travels,” absent, solitary, seeking! It is precisely this differentiation that revives the need for so many different sensations, a variety of moments and beings, and which therefore sometimes increases, sometimes attenuates the urgency of variety. So let us be ready to concede to eroticism that which makes it beautiful and perilous! The life of erotic desires, which moves rapidly, which quickly find fulfillment, has by natural necessity nothing to do with duration, even where it has been enriched, reinforced, refined by the intelligence and by the soul in a festival of the entire being; the natural necessity is that it should imagine on every new occasion that it will never have to awake from that festival. And it this conviction alone that ennobles its frivolity, that can, in some cases, even make it a companion to greatness.
States of mind that greatly exceed the average intensity of mental life extinguish the awareness of time, the sense of continuing possibilities, by virtue of their power of harmonious and intense concentration; it is precisely such states—those that, more than others, create a sudden conflagration by their very violence and are therefore the most transitory—which are for this very reason as if ringed with deepest eternity—and it is only this inseparable coloring, acting almost mystically beneath all the other contents of consciousness, which makes their happiness seem blessed, and their suffering seem tragic. Two beings who seriously believe in this high eternity in the transitory, who take it as the sole criterion for their actions and behavior, who wish for no other fidelity than the blessedness that they find in one another, are living for a time-honored folly—although it is often as humanly beautiful as many long and authentic fidelities motivated, perhaps unknowingly, solely by a fear of loss or a fear of life, by greed or weakness of the soul. However much they exhibit the colors of their ardor, they can do no more than sketch the faint outlines of love, but more profound virtuosity and perfection may be expressed in this half-failure than by many a lavishly detailed painting of existence. In such cases, one might even say that around the genuine frivolity of love, often attracted by its self-confident audacity, may crystallize every grandeur, every spirit of tenderness and sincerity—which now has only one fear: that it may violate its own ethic, for all that is outside it is beneath it.
However, the tragic fact that erotic affect obeys laws whose grandeur is illusory, larger than any life, is not solely revealed in its transitoriness, but also, so to speak, in the distortions of its desire for eternity. For, where there is no diminution in its emotive and illusory character—or, more properly, where this occurs too late—it is transmuted into disease: the morbid exaltation of that which, by its essence, is only appropriate for a temporary state. Condensed into a sort of poisonous influence, isolated among the forces that move the organism, exalting being by its excitants, no longer in a living way, but in a sense mechanically, it becomes an imposed substance, an alien material that the healthy being attempts to expel, even if this entails the permanent fever of combat. For the affectivity contained within eroticism, the next natural stage of evolution is not, in fact, to survive and save itself whatever happens, but on the contrary to renounce, to give itself up to the cycles and alternations of life as it progresses and of which it was born—to that which will dissolve it, even render it entirely unrecognizable, anonymously incorporated into the quest for all-powerful goals.
Just as both lovers’ erotic need would only be exalted to the level of a sterile spirituality if its culmination were a reciprocal and continuous divinization, since it is the child, the commitment to a wholly primitive creature, which makes it enter for the first time into the “other essence” and thus into life, the same is true for eroticism as a whole. In order to continue, evolution is obliged to quit the summits of feeling, and resume its course from the very bottom: from its apparent opposite, from that which is farthest from and beneath it—the community of day-to-day existence in everyday life.
United for Life
If our dreams of love take us to such heights, then the more powerful those dreams have been in us, the better able they are to make that leap, as if from a diving board, which leads from their sky to the earth. For it is the very fact that these dreams were originally no more than mere epiphenomena, superfetations, by comparison with processes conditioned by the body, and therefore tending to evaporate into illusion, that makes them precursors of a future reality, greedy for life, signs of the future, promises; their life instinct can only draw avidly from the whole sphere of the “real,” the elemental, the simple datum, just as the victim of a spell who fears becoming a ghost touches his body, however dull his physical existence, in order to return to himself.
However, it is understandable how humans in the grip of the rapture of love, and, with them, those who are hypersensitive in any way, can nevertheless experience contact with external life as a disappointment; this is true not only when they see a failure of their dreams in life, but also when they succeed, for the simple reason that they are thereby forced to come to grips with the coarseness of matter itself. For the very fact of their coming to life is like the destruction of what they were—destruction all the more significant in that it achieves a unity present in and by the mind—taking the form of a dissociation into fragments, into mixtures, which breaks the primary shape as surely as the seed, within the mother’s body, under the impulsion given to it by the union of two lives, divides and then becomes structured. It must also be confessed that the rapture of love and a lifelong union are not the same things, and that there is truth in the adage that one more or less ends where the other begins—and that here again it is not simply a matter of mediocre performance, but that this failure is already inherent in two totally different methods of experiencing love.
For in reality, the erotic affect is only perfected in such a union in the sense that a river is perfected in the sea, and thus sees its particular category of ethic of feelings—according to which it alone can ennoble or eradicate a community of life—disappear, absorbed into larger collectivities that are alien to eroticism. A bond accepted for an entire life can only be formed through the eradication of a previous affect, the arrival of a subsequent, more long-lasting aspiration, which knows itself sufficiently rich to consent to such sacrifices: for what is seeking to be lived through to the end here is a life that requires the same protection and the same consideration, the same spirit of sacrifice, as the child engendered by the body. Ultimately, this is no more and no different than is implicitly expected of anyone who dedicates himself, come what may, to a service, to a cause, and who would be more than ever ashamed were he to desert at the very moment of the peril he himself had brought upon that cause. This more masculine notion of fidelity needs to be allied with the notion—sentimental or founded upon an instinctual feminine connection—of purely personal satisfaction, which is sometimes deemed quite sufficient: however, since, in the end, it makes everything reliant upon a foundation of temperament, it is right that it should become absorbed into this other fidelity. It is only the replacement of the subjective—even when this comes in the guise of “moral sentiment”—or even, perhaps, only the operation of an element of asceticism, which distinguishes the rapture of love from lifelong union, and distinguishes them with respect to their principle. Just as it would be an outmoded formalism to conform in this to the approval of the state or of the church, it is, all things considered, a sign of the softness of modern times to shy away from this inner acceptance and commitment, crossing oneself timidly at the words “asceticism,” as if any supra-subjective purpose could be achieved without accepting it in principle as a means for accomplishing that purpose.
While love, in its erotic sense, is the crucial element in the formation of a lifelong union, it then learns for the first time to behave in the manner which, in fact, suits its character, but on a higher plane, i.e., as a creator of space. For the mind, which itself had elevated love from pure sexual instinct to a festival and splendor of the soul, also remains loyal when it incorporates it into its everyday labor: the most remote from love of all its acts, but the only agent of its desires that it can find. And its protector also: for the fidelity that it retains, which is no longer that unique, exaggerated good, is found, in compensation, to be bound to all the fidelities required by the conduct of life, and also because when it is violated, it is no longer love alone that is offended: one damages that living coexistence which two beings have created together, and one commits a sort of offence against a life in the seed. If, therefore, the rapture of love, even long before the agreement to a lifelong union, was a flowering tree that stays long in bloom before withering, it has now been replanted in the same soil to grow afresh. Entirely detached from that which made it bloom—sensation—it is rooted in that which generally made it wither, habit: for, in order to keep total community alive and equally active at every moment, it is of little importance that one be agitated and disturbed by the ebb and flow of sensation. If it is true that these highs and lows of the bodily functions and of the emotions that depend on them express one of the vital values of love, if it seems that existence cries out to us from them: “Don’t stop here, as if you had reached your ultimate goal! You must go further!,” the mind, having itself attained its goal, demands the subordination of passing moods, demands constancy. So while eroticism seems to become concentrated to the point that it appears necessary to take refuge in that eternity of the moment in order, despite all the traps, to thwart the passage of time to which it is chained, the mind for its part dilutes it over the extended succession of things by which eroticism is metamorphosed into action. For while, in its impudently achieved completion, the affective element always—despite the spiritual airs that it puts on—mimics physiological life, where events present themselves to our eyes, one after the other and once and for all in their coarse reality, the processes of the psyche are confirmed in an entirely different way: in no other form than that of a perpetual renewal of being for the purpose of action, seemingly disposing of infinite time and inexhaustible matter. The mental element, being the most living of the factors of overcoming, can therefore only represent its totality indirectly, in the guise of initiative, the fruitful distribution of forces between existing unities.
For this reason, the characteristic of every mind-controlled behavior is the presence of certain investments, constantly renewed, in the work that always remains to be done, and that which carries the imprint of the mind, even though it is thereby moved to a higher level, is that which, from the outside, seems most imperfect. This characteristic is equally present in the lifelong union between the sexes, and precisely in those cases that most seem to match the idea that the sublime can contain the most trivial—to the point that nothing can remain scornfully apart—in order to receive from it such an influx of new strengths that we no longer recognize in it its former self-sufficient perfection. This characteristic mixture of kinds with which all marriages are, quite wrongly, reproached, is, for obvious reasons, in no way imposed from the outside alone; rather, it is the psychical perspective, which reorganizes everything within it, which confers this equality of value, this relativity of values, even on the dullest or the coarsest of materials. If it is true that every marriage commitment in one way or another includes the formula for better and for worse,3 this not only expresses the fact that love must prove itself by patiently tolerating its least agreeable moments; it is truly entitled to assert that, unlike the rapture of love, good and bad are valuable within it, can be used, for the purpose of that ultimate goal of a full community of life. And likewise we can equally say of the reciprocal relationship between those two human beings that, in a certain sense, it encompasses everything. One might be tempted to think that again, as in the idolatry of eroticism, they recognize each other in every shape, in every event that their desire, fantastically, has inspired in them. Only, the meaning of this union is no longer the same, founded now in a profound attention to the poverties of the real; within this meaning of union, the desire is not to paint the other in cheerful colors but to work on oneself, a task that bestows unsuspected strengths and metamorphoses the other’s needs, when these need to be met—and, depending on the degree of love, no final limit can be placed on what may be given. To be a spouse to one another can mean everything at the same time: lovers, brother and sister, refuges, goals, fences,4 judges, angels, friends, children, and more: to have the right to stand in each other’s presence in all the nakedness and all the misery of creaturehood.
Conclusion
From this, it would seem that within the lifelong union everything is again brought together—like a recapitulation, just as immeasurable, just as indistinguishable in value, as we find characteristically in the whole problem of love. And, just as the most primitive of sexual relations—the total union of two cells—might be envisaged as a sort of anticipatory metaphor of the most ardent dreams of love, here again it seems that there is an image that dominates, a delimitation of the community of life, to begin with purely as a contentless symbol: in the external forms of its adoption in the guise of marriage. And, if it is true that the most simple of sexual events flowers, according to its own laws, into an ever richer system of relations, an internal dynamic which becomes increasingly impossible for us to judge, likewise here, between the emptiness of external form alone and the content of inner experience, the values can in no way be judged but only deciphered by divination from ambiguous external signs. However, just as sexual life cannot be understood by means of its higher manifestations alone, and is always rooted in the depths, likewise here the community sanctioned by society is offered to every couple and their child, and it matters little if society penetrates only superficially from this exteriority into the interiority of the reciprocal relationship. In these two spheres, the physical and the psychical, the affective and the social, the unlimited richness of things can only ever be grasped by a few, and, in love as in everything else, ultimate success will remain the rare achievement of exceptional beings predestined for it by birth. Nonetheless, that which their genius so incarnates should still always be the guide, the support, and the hope for all those who seek to rise from the bottom, or who attempt to penetrate from the outside into the empire of the union between the sexes. For the supreme and rarest achievement is not to discover the unknown, to proclaim the incredible, but to explore day-to-day existence, the possibilities open to all, to the full richness of its potential fulfillment in the human spirit. Just as we believe, on a foggy morning, that we are walking on level ground until the sun dissipates the fog and we see the light fall on the mountaintops, which are often so isolated from the earth by clouds that they seem phantasmagorical—always higher, always more remote, and despite all this the most inaccessible are still ours, still also part of our life: are our landscape.
However, the courage to love and to live, inspired by the sight of summits such as these, that compels us to new dreams and animates our steps, cannot be broken down into further specialization or transcribed into language, notwithstanding a certain vulgarization and an illumination which gives them the clarity of daylight—and also the clarity of the banal—we can only decipher them in vague generalities, so remote from any separation and division into precise fragments, as if, for example, we imagined ourselves in a flight of angels, able only to distinguish bright wings and faces, with no knowledge of their names. If this work on the self, the most secret and the most demanding there is, also becomes in reality a shared experience between two beings, then it is already like a two-person religion: the attempt to enter into a personal and shared relationship with the highest thing our gaze can reach, in order to transmute it into everyday experience. By this very effort, experience becomes a creative act, and is no longer accessible except in this capacity: implanted, in consequence, in a secret life much deeper, much more safely shielded from profane eyes, than even the best hidden secrets of love. For, while love is obliged either to dissimulate consciously, i.e., to hide behind an alien principle, or to express itself aloud, that is to say pathetically, as demanded by the overflow of its exuberant feelings, here, so to speak, feeling is no longer suspended in the void, but instead is incarnate in the most personal acts and thoughts, no longer seeking, in the form of feeling, but in its turn receiving all things into itself—and entirely present in all things, even the smallest, just as the totality of the divine Being is expressed through the intermediary of the Burning Bush.
Just as certainly as forms, envelopes, senseless proofs of community of life cannot, without risk of being unmasked, boast a content that should never have entered into them, equally certainly this content is constantly symbolized in concretely experienced results in places where we would never look for them, deceived as we are by their everyday character. And thus deceived, we doubtless wander thousands of times, in that which is most coarsely visible, most ordinarily “real,” as among the external symbols of the dreams which sleep in them, of intimate enchantments, without guessing that we are in the presence of the sublime, and closer than ever to the perfect fullness of life. For all life exists only as miracle that constantly renounces its miraculousness.
These very words, with their inevitably superficial grasp on reality, can only grope in pursuit of a psychical process, as if it were the coarsest of external objects, hoping that, despite all, something of what this process contains may be perceived, symbolically, behind them.
Notes
1. Catherine, the (supposed) daughter of the goldsmith of Heilbron, who is fascinated by Count Wetter von Strahl, and follows him with the fidelity of a household pet, although he rejects her; the Sire of Toggenburg, who accepts to spend his life adoring a cold beauty from afar. (Translator’s note.)
2. Friendship between beings of a different sex, when it is truly without any erotic nuance, perhaps derives from a reciprocal action of the same order on characteristics of being which still exist only in an embryonic state, being but the rudiments of the opposite sex—by which the sexual part of the relationship might be spontaneously eliminated. However, if these characteristics are from the first abnormally distinct, they usually result in the development of an erotic relationship: the relationship of two inverted sexualities. Within this relationship, all sexual echoes are then possible, echoes of every spiritual hermaphroditism, including its physiological harmonics, and finally every amorous behavior towards one’s own sex.
In such cases, one would say that the division into two sexes, that is, the foundation of all our beings, has lost in the world of reality its basis as an unequivocal distinction, so that it is incapable of creating the distinctiveness in reality of the single sex, or, in a sense, that it cannot find the magic word that would release that distinctiveness. In this, the problem is linked with that of the division of the being into two for the purpose of procreation, and also that of the creative activities of the mind: one might almost say that a certain feeling has been frustrated of the outlet that these represent, that instead of this it has become lost in the corporeal, and that, captive to the latter, reduced to the infirmity of a physiological absurdity, it is seeking to act freely in the world of unicity by looking in vain (that is to say, in a sterile quest) for union with the partner of the same sex. (Author’s note.)
3. In English in the original. (Translator’s note.)
4. In the sense of receivers of stolen goods. (Translator’s note.)