The masochist suffers from what is unreal to him as from guilt. That is why he feels embarassed in front of women, the sadist never. He is passive toward women, as toward every sensation, which he can only make real for himself through association that in the end leads to concept formation. The sadist does not make associations: in the face of a sensation he is breathless, ready and willing to plunge himself into it completely, to be totally absorbed in a sensation.
The masochist can, therefore, never love a picture or a statue: here there is all too little reality (activity) for him. The sadist can very well love them; he is also, of course, gallant, and gallantry is primarily the adornment of statues, from which one later removes the ornaments, or which one smashes, when there is no more reality to be sucked from them.
The true concept of God is incomprehensible to the sadist; his art is to be an over-sensitive person, constantly focussing everything, and unjustly, on a man, on a moment, on a situation. He can tell stories; the masochist never (not even jokes), because no particular is real enough for him to be able to be lovingly absorbed in it. To the masochist, the character of Napoleon is a starting point from which he distances himself in order to think, and to comprehend him through thought: for the sadist, all the world lies in such a figure.
The masochist is thus helplessly weak in face of the sensory world: the sadist is strong in it. The masochist seeks to assert himself against appearance, against change: only he understands the concept of the Absolute (of God, of the idea, of meaning). The sadist does not question things about their meaning. For him, “Carpe Diem!”14 is the command of his I; change appears real to him. What strikes him about time is not change, but rather duration (“aere perennius”15).
14 Carpe diem! = Seize the day! [Trans] 15 Aere perennius = for the ages. [Trans]
Rhythm, which attends precisely to every individual note, every individual syllable, is sadistic; harmony is masochistic, as with true melodious vocal music (in which the individual notes do not emerge as such).
The mystic (whether a theosophist like Böhme, or rationalist like Kant) is identical with the masochist;16 the amystical man is the sadist. The Northerners are masochists (as well as the Jew); the Southerners are sadists. Among Germans and Greeks are found both; but masochism predominates. Venetian epigrams, Hermann and Dorothea (?) are sadistic; Iphigeneia, Tasso, Werther, Faust (for the most part: the Gretchen episode creates a partial exception) are masochistic. The author of The Odyssey was a sadist, although Circe is the blatant masochistic ideal (i. e. , the ideal of the masochist who does not fight against his masochism, but wants to retain his passivity in face of the individual thing). Aeschylus, Richard Wagner, Dante, but above all Beethoven and Schumann are masochists; Verdi (likewise Mascagni, and Bizet) is more the sadist, just as with all anacreontic poets and the French of the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as Titian, Paolo Veronese, Rubens and Raphael. Shakespeare has much of the sadist, but is still more the masochist; towards women however, without the sharp division of sexuality and love, as Goethe, Dante, Ibsen and Richard Wagner have. The most complete masochism is in the first act of Tristan and Isolde; less so in Tannhäuser, Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman).
[Geometry corresponds to harmony, arithmetic to rhythm (addition of units of time?): this as a comment on the earlier remark. ]
Criminals who commit great individual criminal actions are sadists; criminals in grand style, who actually commit no individual, separate crime, are masochists. Napoleon was a masochist, not a sadist as perfunctorily believed; as proof take his relationship to Josephine and his enthusiasm for Werther, his relationship to astronomy and to God. The individual woman never possessed real existence for him.
The sadist, moreover, can be a thoroughly decent and good person.
The sex murder is perhaps a relief for the sadist, when the reality of the individual woman becomes too great. (??) Perhaps it does not have to be an act of revenge, as in Zola, at all.
Englishmen are all masochists, and perhaps that is why their women are often so stunted in their womanhood.
In the words of Napoleon to his soldiers: “Du haut de ces pyramides quarante siècles vous contemplent. ” 17, lies something metaphysical, of which a true Frenchman and sadist would not be capable.
The masochist is initially struck by similarity, the sadist by difference.
Clocks and calendars are the greatest enigma for the masochist even as a child, because time is always the main problem for him.
16 Philosophers with sadistic (unmystical) inclinations are Descartes, Hume, Aristippus. [Rappaport] 17 “Forty centuries are watching you from the top of these pyramids. ” [Trans]
The masochist can never lightly brush aside something that has happened earlier, which the sadist always does, when the new moment promises more reality than the old.
The masochist takes everything as fate; the sadist loves to play fate. For masochists, the idea of fate is especially contained in concrete pain; pain has only as much reality for him as it has a share of this idea. So the sadist is the fate of the woman; the woman the fate of the masochist. “Woman” is sadistic (whoever is active in the sensation of woman); “Mrs. ” masochistic.
The relationship of the sadist to the masochist is the relationship of the present to eternity. The present is the one thing over which a person has power; whoever feels free in it will use it, like the sadist; whoever feels that he suffers in it, because it is not real for him, seeks to awaken it to eternity. So also may the ethical striving of both be characterised: one wants to transform all eternity into present, the other, every present into eternity.
The same holds for space. The sadist believes in, and hopes for, happiness on earth: he is the man of “Tusculum”, of “Sans-Souci”. The masochist needs a heaven.
Remorse offends the sadist and he holds it to be a weakness (Carpe diem!); the masochist is penetrated by its sublimity (Carlyle).
The suicide is almost always a sadist, because he only wants to get out of a situation and can act; a masochist must first question all eternity whether he might, should, take his own life.
The sadist seeks to help people (against their will, their constant disposition) to (momentary) happiness or pain; he is grateful or revengeful.
In gratefulness and revengefulness there is always a lack of compassion, thoughtlessness towards our (timeless) fellow man; both are, like all immorality, boundary transgressions, i. e. , functional connections with our fellow man.
Mental modesty, i. e. continuity which does not easily release a single mental content from the I (cf. Sex and Character, 1st ed. , p. 436 [E. 323-2418]), is masochistic.
Contemporary health care and therapy is immoral and therefore ineffective: it seeks to work from outside to inside, instead of from inside to outside. It corresponds to the tattooing of the criminal: he alters his outer appearance from outside, instead of by a change in his mind. Thus he also actually denies his outer appearance, and therefore does not like to look in the mirror, because he hates himself (the intelligible being), without the desire to love himself. The criminal is pleased when others are
18 Not all of the passage is translated [Trans]
offended by him (as every connection whatsoever to others, every influence upon them, every unsettling of their person through his own is agreeable to him).
Every sickness has mental causes; and each must be cured by the person himself, by means of his will: he himself must seek to recognize it inwardly. All sickness19 is only the mental become unconscious, “gone into the body”; just as it is raised into consciousness, the sickness is cured.
In general, the criminal does not get sick; his original sin is different. If I were to represent it quite conspicuously, it would go something like this: at the moment of the Fall of Man, the criminal, with his back turned to God, falls from Heaven to Earth, to that place where he can stand, but well regards. The other, the sick person (neurasthenic20, madman) falls with face and countenance raised suppliantly to God, and without being conscious of, or attending to, where he might come to lie. If the ultimate danger of the latter is the plant, and that of the former the animal, then this fits well: the plant grows from the centre of the earth straight up toward the sky; the animal’s gaze is directed toward the earth. (The plant can never serve as an anti-moral symbol, as so many animals can).
Every person can always conceive himself merely as quality; only through comparison with others does he draw nearer to quantitative considerations. Number and time.
A good musician is one whose melodies have, above all, long breath.
History and society: people who are in a space together always form a community against newcomers.
19
