Is this quite clear? For the present I have wished to say nothing concerning the respective merits either of Sex, Death, Eternal Life, or Mortal Life; I have only wished to point out that, as schemes, as ideas, they are mutually exclusive and irreconcilable, and that you cannot desire the one without thereby coveting the doom of the other.
As far as this world and its problems are concerned, however—and who, if you please, stands outside this world and its problems?—we have to deal with one kind of life only—Mortal Life. As I have shown, the necessary correlative of Mortal Life, if it is to continue, is Sex. We are concerned, therefore, immediately and directly, with Mortal Life, and its indispensable correlative Sex. We need not accept the scheme as it is thus unceremoniously thrust upon us. We can deny Mortal Life and its concomitant need, Sex, by putting an end to everything at least for ourselves, through straightway committing suicide the very moment we realize that Mortal Life and Sex are undesirable. If, however, we accept the proposition, “Mortal Life is desirable,” we necessarily commit ourselves to the rider, “Sex is desirable.” These features are all we know concerning Life; they constitute the two sides of the only kind of Life of which we are aware, and however real and realistic our visions of an Eternal Life may be, however vivid our mental pictures of a Heaven may seem, such visions and such mental pictures, as we very well know, are of a kind the true existence of which is quite incapable of proof or demonstration; whereas Mortal Life is here before us, with us and in us, and the way to live it is our chief concern; the way to live it well so that it may redound to the benefit and credit of all, is our highest concern.
Throughout this book, I shall argue on the assumption that the reader, like myself, believes that mortal life is desirable. I shall take it for granted that he, like me, is content to allow transcendental questions to weigh with him only in so far as they do not render him hostile to Mortal Life. I shall therefore assume all along that he believes, as I do, that Sex is desirable, however far the consequences of such an admission may lead him.
Be this as it may, let him entertain no qualms as to the direction in which I wish these consequences to lead him. There are more than two alternatives in the choice of one’s attitude to Sex. To most people there appear to be but two opposite extremes: the attitude of the lecherous reprobate who makes decent women ashamed of being women; and the attitude of the Puritan who, in his heart of hearts, feels that if only he could have been at the Almighty’s elbow at the time of the Creation, he would have respectfully suggested a somewhat more “drawing-room” method of propagating the species.
To neither of these attitudes has this book, or the spirit of it, even the remotest relation. The acknowledgment that Mortal Life is desirable, and that consequently its indispensable correlative Sex is desirable, can be made by a man in full possession of a healthy control over his passions,[3] in a state of complete mastery over his appetites, and endowed with the most fastidious taste as to where normal desire and its gratification end, and where excess begins. Extremes belong only to the uncultured, to the hogs of life. It is they who make everything appear disgusting, simply because they are unable to approach a single aspect of life with that amount of understanding and reverence which is due to all things connected with the sacred task of making mankind and his existence an honour and not a curse to the universe.
To accept the proposition that Mortal Life is desirable and to commit one’s self by so doing to its inevitable rider that Sex is desirable, may lead one very far, as this book will show; but, if it lead one to a tastelessly pornographic or licentious attitude towards the most fundamental instinct of life, then one is of a nature that has no right to Mortal Life, much less, therefore, to its indispensable correlative Sex.
Without wishing to labour this point, but with a keen sense of the host of misunderstandings and prejudices that will cling like barnacles to a book of this kind, unless I make my position unmistakably clear from the start, let me put the case a little differently by the use of another instinct of Mortal Life. Let me say, to accept the proposition, Mortal Life is desirable, is to commit one’s self to its inevitable rider that eating and drinking are desirable. There is no objection to this statement as it stands. All who endorse Mortal Life also endorse eating and drinking. And those who attack eating and drinking, simultaneously strike at Mortal Life.
This conclusion, however, provides absolutely no sanction for those who are sufficiently material and gross to make food and drink things of shame and of horror. No man, therefore, need fear lest by acknowledging that eating and drinking are desirable he should find himself supporting gluttony, drunkenness and bestiality of all kinds. It is, however, a strange and significant coincidence that, where we find hostility to Sex, we also find a certain suspicion of all things connected with the body. The Puritans did not accept Sex as desirable; at the best they held it to be a necessary evil; but we also find the Puritans hostile to eating and drinking, and not only to excessive eating and drinking. I have already shown with sufficient elaboration elsewhere what regrettable reforms in food and drink they introduced into England in the seventeenth century.[4] This only supports my contention that you cannot be hostile to Sex without being hostile to Mortal Life in general.
If, therefore, you believe that the acceptance of Sex is immoral, as Otto Weininger did;[5] if you believe, as he did, that “woman is the sin of man”;[6] if, moreover, you claim, as he did, that “it is the Jew and the woman who are the apostles of pairing to bring guilt on mankind”;[7] if, again, you assert that “sexual union is immoral”;[8] that “women must really and truly and spontaneously relinquish it”;[9] that “woman will exist as long as man’s guilt is inexpiated, until he has really vanquished his own sexuality”;[10] that “man must free himself of sex, for in that way, and that way alone, can he free woman”;[11] and, finally—this gem of negativeness: “all sexuality implies degradation”;[12]—if this be your position, I say, then, you must logically be hostile to Mortal Life, and you cannot rationally accept it. Your only course is to commit suicide. This, as we know, Otto Weininger was logical and consistent enough to do. He died by his own hand on October 4, 1903.