We must recur to the earliest beginnings of the evolution of the human psyche in its association with sexuality, in order to understand the profound and primitive connexion between the bodily and the spiritual formative impulse; this connexion has been expressed by the saying that the sexual impulse is the father of all those intellectual impulses peculiar to man which have made him a thinker and a discoverer. In the time of Schelling’s natural philosophy, they went so far as to speak of the “testicular hemispheres” as analogous to the hemispheres of the brain. And is not this connexion also expressed etymologically (in German) in the verbal association of Zeugung (procreation) and Ueberzeugung (certainty, i.e., higher, or intellectual, procreation), and, further, by the fact that in the Hebrew tongue the ideas of “procreation” and “cognition” are jointly represented by a single term? And, returning to the physical sphere, it may be mentioned that, according to Moebius (“Ueber die Wirkungen der Kastration”—“Concerning the Effects of Castration,” Halle, 1906), sexuality is the common product of testicular and cerebral activity.
Plato was already aware of this relationship when he called thought a sublimated sexual impulse, and Buffon likewise when he described love as “le premier essor de la sensibilité, qui se porte ensuite à d’autres objets.” In more recent times, Dr. Santlus, in his valuable essay, “On the Psychology of the Human Impulses” (Archiv für Psychiatrie, 1864, vol. vi., pp. 244 and 262), alluded to this combination of the sexual sphere with the highest spiritual interests of mankind under the name of the “function-impulse.”
From these intimate relations between sexual and spiritual productivity is to be explained the remarkable fact that certain spiritual creations may take the place of the purely physical sexual impulse; that there are psychical sexual equivalents into which the potential energy of the sexual impulse may be transformed. Here belong numerous emotions, such as ferocity, anger, pain, and the productive spiritual activities which find their vent in poetry, art, and religion—in short, the whole imaginative life of mankind in the widest sense is able, when the natural activity of the sexual impulse is inhibited, to find such sexual equivalents, the importance of which in the evolutionary history of human love we shall have later to study in further detail.
Interesting observations regarding this intimate connexion between the spiritual and the physical procreative impulse are to be found in the work of a thinker who made no secret of his intense sensuality, and in whose life and thought sexuality played a peculiar part—in the work of Schopenhauer. In his “New Paralipomena” he lays stress on the similarity between the work of productive genius and the modification of the sexual impulse peculiar to the human race. In another place in which, as Frauenstädt also insists, he is speaking from personal experience, he writes: “In the days and hours when the voluptuous impulse is most powerful, not a dull desire, arising from emptiness and dullness of the consciousness, but a burning longing, a violent ardour, precisely then also are the highest powers of the spirit available, the finest consciousness is prepared for its intensest activity, although at the moment when the consciousness has given itself up to desire they are latent; but it needs merely a powerful effort to turn their direction, and instead of that tormenting, despairing lust (the kingdom of darkness), the activity of the highest spiritual powers fills the consciousness (the kingdom of light).”
Georg Hirth, who, in the section of his “Ways to Love” entitled “Stark-naked Thoughts,” gives in aphorisms an interesting account of the psychology of love, affirms the “delightful phenomenon of a peculiarly active enhancement of our impulse to thought and production,” after erotic satisfaction, after a fortunate love-night. Very ably, also, has Mantegazza described the spiritual activity produced by a happy and victorious love.[35]
Many great thinkers have complained of the alleged impairment of pure spirituality by the sexual life, and have recommended asceticism in order to arrive at a truer internal enlightenment. This, however, would imply pulling up the roots of spiritual poietic[36] activity, the suppression of a rich inner life of thought and feeling, the destruction of all true poetry and art. There would be left behind only the wilderness of a cold abstraction. Look at the letters of Abelard before and after his emasculation. Sexuality first breathes into our spiritual being the warm and blooming life.
“The world,” says Philipp Frey, “would be conceived by us in sharply bounded intellectual pictures, unless we saw it in the changing lights of our sexuality. From the green of gently dreaming desire, through the yellow of surging emotion, and from the blood-red of eager desire to the cool blue of satisfaction—all things appear to us in the light of our sexuality. Life would be better ordered if we were purely intelligible machines for the purposes of nutrition, work, and production. But without the dualism of desire and satisfaction, the world would become torpid in a great yawn.”
This intimate connexion between the psychic-emotional being and the sexual impulse gave rise to a deepening, a concentration, and an increasing intensity, of the feeling of love, whereby the latter becomes the most powerful influence affecting mankind in bodily and spiritual relations. Voltaire, in his “Pensées Philosophiques,” says aptly: “L’amour est de toutes les passions la plus forte, parce qu’elle attaque à la fois la tête, le cœur, et le corps.” That it is in love that the immediate admixture of organic processes most clearly manifests itself is a fact pointed out already by Aristotle, and among modems emphasized by Griesinger.[37]
Thus love discloses itself as a nucleus, the axis of the individual, and therewith also of the social life, a fact indicated already in Schopenhauer’s phrase, describing love as the “focus of the will,” and in Weismann’s expression “the continuity of the germ-plasma.” And we can easily understand that there are literary advocates of a consequent “sexual philosophy,” who base their view of the universe solely and entirely upon the sexual. To them the sexual problem becomes a world problem, eroticism expands into metaphysics. These sexual philosophers start from love to unveil the mysteries of life. The most celebrated advocate of such a sexual philosophy was the Marquis de Sade, of whom I have myself given an account in a pseudonymous work entitled “New Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade” (Berlin, 1904). According to de Sade, it is only through the sexual that the world can be grasped and understood.
In a certain sense the antipodes of the Marquis de Sade is a remarkable sexual philosopher of our own time, the author of “Sex and Character,” Dr. Otto Weininger. His whole circle of thought also revolves exclusively round the sexual. It forms the basis, the starting-point of his exposition; though, indeed, it does so in a purely negative sense. For Weininger is the apostle of asexuality; to him the highest type of human being is the non-sexual, the one who renounces all sexuality. And woman, as the incorporation of sexuality, is to him “nothingness,” the “radically evil” which must be annihilated.