Matter needs to be formed: and thus woman demands that man should clear her confusion of thought, give meaning to her henid ideas. Women are matter, which can assume any shape. Those experiments which ascribe to girls a better memory for learning by rote than boys are explained in this way: they are due to the nullity and inanity of women, who can be saturated with anything and everything, whilst man only retains what has an interest for him, forgetting all else.
This accounts for what has been called woman’s submissiveness, the way she is influenced by the opinions of others, her suggestibility, the way in which man moulds her formless nature. Woman is nothing; therefore, and only therefore, she can become everything, whilst man can only remain what he is. A man can make what he likes of a woman: the most a woman can do is to help a man to achieve what he wants.
A man’s real nature is never altered by education: woman, on the other hand, by external influences, can be taught to suppress her most characteristic self, the real value she sets on sexuality.
Woman can appear everything and deny everything, but in reality she is never anything.
Women have neither this nor that characteristic; their peculiarity consists in having no characteristics at all; the complexity and terrible mystery about women come to this; it is this which makes them above and beyond man’s understanding—man, who always wants to get to the heart of things.
It may be said, even by those who may wish to agree with the foregoing arguments, that they have not indicated what man really is. Has he any special male characteristics, like match-making and want of character in women? Is there a definite idea of what man is, as there is of woman, and can this idea be similarly formulated?
Here is the answer: The idea of maleness consists in the fact of an individuality, of an essential monad, and is covered by it. Each monad, however, is as different as possible from every other monad, and therefore cannot be classified in one comprehensive idea common to many other monads. Man is the microcosm; he contains all kinds of possibilities. This must not be confused with the universal susceptibility of woman who becomes all without being anything, whilst man is all, as much or as little, according to his gifts, as he will. Man contains woman, for he contains matter, and he can allow this part of his nature to develop itself, i.e., to thrive and enervate him; or he can recognise and fight against it—so that he, and he alone, can get at the truth about woman. But woman cannot develop except through man.
The meaning of man and woman is first arrived at when we examine their mutual sexual and erotic relations. Woman’s deepest desire is to be formed by man, and so to receive her being. Woman desires that man should impart opinions to her quite different to those she held before, she is content to let herself be turned by him from what she had till then thought right. She wishes to be taken to pieces as a whole, so that he may build her up again.
Woman is first created by man’s will—he dominates her and changes her whole being (hypnotism). Here is the explanation of the relation of the psychical to the physical in man and woman. Man assumes a reciprocal action of body and mind, in the sense rather that the dominant mind creates the body, than that the mind merely projects itself on phenomena, whilst the woman accepts both mental and psychical phenomena empirically. None the less, even in the woman there is some reciprocal action. However, whilst in the man, as Schopenhauer truly taught, the human being is his own creation, his own will makes and re-makes the body, the woman is bodily influenced and changed by an alien will (suggestion).
Man not only forms himself, but woman also—a far easier matter. The myths of the book of Genesis and other cosmogonies, which teach that woman was created out of man, are nearer the truth than the biological theories of descent, according to which males have been evolved from females.
We have now to come to the question left open in chap. ix., as to how woman, who is herself without soul or will, is yet able to realise to what extent a man may be endowed with them; and we may now endeavour to answer it. Of this one must be certain, that what woman notices, that for which she has a sense, is not the special nature of man, but only the general fact and possibly the grade of his maleness. It is quite erroneous to suppose that woman has an innate capacity to understand the individuality of a man. The lover, who is so easily fooled by the unconscious simulation of a deeper comprehension on the part of his sweetheart, may believe that he understands himself through a girl; but those who are less easily satisfied cannot help seeing that women only possess a sense of the fact not of the individuality of the soul, only for the formal general fact, not for the differentiation of the personality. In order to perceive and apperceive the special form, matter must not itself be formless; woman’s relation to man, however, is nothing but that of matter to form, and her comprehension of him nothing but willingness to be as much formed as possible by him; the instinct of those without existence for existence. Furthermore, this “comprehension” is not theoretical, it is not sympathetic, it is only a desire to be sympathetic; it is importunate and egoistical. Woman has no relation to man and no sense of man, but only for maleness; and if she is to be considered as more sexual than man, this greater claim is nothing but the intense desire for the fullest and most definite formation, it is the demand for the greatest possible quantity of existence.
And, finally, match-making is nothing else than this. The sexuality of women is super-individual, because they are not limited, formed, individualised entities, in the higher sense of the word.
The supremest moment in a woman’s life, when her original nature, her natural desire manifests itself, is that in which her own sexual union takes place. She embraces the man passionately and presses him to her; it is the greatest joy of passivity, stronger even than the contented feeling of a hypnotised person, the desire of matter which has just been formed, and wishes to keep that form for ever. That is why a woman is so grateful to her possessor, even if the gratitude is limited to the moment, as in the case of prostitutes with no memory, or, if it lasts longer, as in the case of more highly differentiated women.
This endless striving of the poor to attach themselves to riches, the altogether formless and therefore super-individual striving of the inarticulate to obtain form by contact, to keep it indefinitely and so gain an existence, is the deepest motive in pairing.
Pairing is only possible because woman is not a monad, and has no sense of individuality; it is the endless striving of nothing to be something.
It is thus that the duality of man and woman has gradually developed into complete dualism, to the dualism of the higher and lower lives, of subject and object, of form and matter, something and nothing. All metaphysical, all transcendental existence is logical and moral existence; woman is non-logical and non-moral. She has no dislike for what is logical and moral, she is not anti-logical, she is not anti-moral. She is not the negation, she is, rather, nothing. She is neither the affirmation nor the denial. A man has in himself the possibility of being the absolute something or the absolute nothing, and therefore his actions are directed towards the one or the other; woman does not sin, for she herself is the sin which is a possibility in man.
The abstract male is the image of God, the absolute something; the female, and the female element in the male, is the symbol of nothing; that is the significance of the woman in the universe, and in this way male and female complete and condition one another. Woman has a meaning and a function in the universe as the opposite of man; and as the human male surpasses the animal male, so the human female surpasses the female of zoology. It is not that limited existence and limited negation (as in the animal kingdom) are at war in humanity; what there stand in opposition are unlimited existence and unlimited negation. And so male and female make up humanity.
The meaning of woman is to be meaningless. She represents negation, the opposite pole from the Godhead, the other possibility of humanity. And so nothing is so despicable as a man become female, and such a person will be regarded as the supreme criminal even by himself. And so also is to be explained the deepest fear of man; the fear of the woman, which is the fear of unconsciousness, the alluring abyss of annihilation.
An old woman manifests once for all what woman really is. The beauty of woman, as may be experimentally proved, is only created by love of a man; a woman becomes more beautiful when a man loves her because she is passively responding to the will which is in her lover; however deep this may sound, it is only a matter of everyday experience.
All the qualities of
