It is only because love represents the highest, most unattainable goal of all longing, because it cannot be realised in experience but must remain an idea; only because it is localised on some other human being, and yet remains at a distance, so that the ideal never attains its realisation; only because of such conditions can love be associated with the awakening of the desire for purification, with the reaching after a goal that is purely spiritual, and so cannot be blemished by physical union with the beloved person; only thus, is love the highest and strongest effort of the will towards the supreme good; only thus does it bring the true being of man to a state between body and spirit, between the senses and the moral nature, between
God and the beasts. A human being only finds himself when, in this fashion, he loves. And thus it comes about that only when they love do many men realise the existence of their own personality and of the personality of another, that “I” and “thou” become for them more than grammatical expressions. And so also comes about the great part played in their love story by the names of the two lovers. There is no doubt but that it is through love that many men first come to know of their own real nature, and to be convinced that they possess a soul.
It is this which makes a lover desire to keep his beloved at a distance—on no account to injure her purity by contact with him—in order to assure himself of her and of his own existence. Many an inflexible empiricist, coming under the influence of love, becomes an enthusiastic mystic; the most striking example being Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism, whose whole theories were revolutionised by his feelings for Clotilde de Vaux.
It is not only for the artist, but for the whole of mankind that Amo, ergo sum holds good psychologically.
Love is a phenomenon of projection just as hate is, not a phenomenon of equation as friendship is. The latter presupposes an equality of both individuals: love always implies inequality, disproportion. To endow an individual with all that one might be and yet never can be, to make her ideal—that is love. Beauty is the symbol of this act of worship. It is this that so often surprises and angers a lover when he is convinced that beauty does not imply morality in a woman. He feels that the nature of the offence is increased by “such depravity” being possible in conjunction with such “beauty.” He is not aware that the woman in question seems beautiful to him because he still loves her; otherwise the incongruity between the external and internal would no longer pain him.
The reason an ordinary prostitute can never seem beautiful is because it is naturally impossible to endow her with the projection of value; she can satisfy only the taste of vulgar minds. She is the mate of the worst sort of men. In this we have the explanation of a relation utterly opposed to morality: woman in general is simply indifferent to ethics, she is non-moral, and, therefore, unlike the anti-moral criminal, who is instinctively disliked, or the devil who is hideous in every one’s imagination, serves as a receptacle for projected worthiness; as she neither does good nor evil, she neither resists nor resents this imposition of the ideal on her personality. It is patent that woman’s morality is acquired; but this morality is man’s, which he in an access of supreme love and devotion has conveyed to her.
Since all beauty is always only the constantly renewed endeavour to embody the highest form of value, there is a pre-eminently satisfying element in it, in the face of which all desire, all self-seeking fade away.
All forms of beauty which appeal to man, by reason of the æsthetic function, are in reality also attempts on his part to realise the ideal. Beauty is the symbol of perfection in being. Therefore beauty is inviolable; it is static and not dynamic; so that any alteration with regard to it upsets and annuls the idea of it. The desire of personal worthiness, the love of perfection, materialise in the idea of beauty. And so the beauty of nature is born, a beauty that the criminal can never know, as ethics first create nature. Thus it is that nature always and everywhere, in its greatest and smallest forms, gives the impression of perfection. The natural law is only the mortal symbol of the moral law, as natural beauty is the manifestation of nobility of the soul; logic thus becomes the embodiment of ethics! Just as love creates a new woman for man instead of the real woman, so art, the eroticism of the All, creates out of chaos the plenitude of forms in the universe; and just as there is no natural beauty without form, without a law of nature, so also there is no art without form, no artistic beauty which does not conform to the laws of art. Natural beauty is no less a realisation of artistic beauty than the natural law is the fulfilment of the moral law, the natural reflection of that harmony whose image is enthroned in the soul of man. The nature which the artist regards as his teacher, is the law which he creates out of his own being.
I return to my own theme from these analyses of art, which are no more than elaborations of the thoughts of Kant and Schelling (and of Schiller writing under their influence). The main proposition for which I have argued is that man’s belief in the morality of woman, his projection of his own soul upon her, and his conception of the woman as beautiful, are one and the same thing, the second being the sensuous side of the first.
It is thus intelligible, although an inversion of the truth, when, in morality, a beautiful soul is spoken of, or when, following Shaftesbury and Herbart, ethics are subordinated to æsthetics; following Socrates and Plato we may identify the good and the beautiful, but we must not forget that beauty is only a bodily image in which morality tries to represent itself, that all æsthetics are created by ethics. Every individual and temporal presentation of this attempted incarnation must necessarily be illusory, and can have no more than a fictitious reality. And so all individual cases of beauty are impermanent; the love that is directed to a woman must perish with the age of the woman. The idea of beauty is the idea of nature and is permanent, whilst every beautiful thing, every part of nature, is perishable. The eternal can realise itself in the limited and the concrete only by an illusion; it is self-deception to seek the fulness of love in a woman. As all love that attaches itself to a person must be impermanent, the love of woman is doomed to unhappiness. All such love has this source of failure inherent in it. It is an heroic attempt to seek for permanent worth where there is no worth. The love that is attached to enduring worth is attached to the absolute, to the idea of God, whether that idea be a pantheistic conception of enduring nature, or remain transcendental; the love that attaches itself to an individual thing, as to a woman, must fail.
I have already partly explained why man takes this burden on himself. Just as hatred is a projection of our own evil qualities on other persons in order that we may stand apart from them and hate them; just as the devil was invented to serve as a vehicle of all the evil impulses in man; so love has the purpose of helping man in his battle for good, when he feels that he himself is not strong enough. Love and hate are alike forms of cowardice. In hate we picture to ourselves that our own hateful qualities exist in another, and by so doing we feel ourselves partly freed from them. In love we project what is good in us, and so having created a good and an evil image we are more able to compare and value them.
Lovers seek their own souls in the loved ones, and so love is free from the limits I described in the first part of this book, not being bound down by the conditions of merely sexual attraction. In spite of their real opposition, there is an analogy between erotics and sexuality. Sexuality uses the woman as the means to produce pleasure and children of the body; erotics use her as the means to create worth and children of the soul. A little understood conception of Plato is full of the deepest meaning: that love is not directed towards beauty, but towards the procreation of beauty; that it seeks to win immortality for the things
