The Sexual Life of our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization
Translated from the Sixth German Edition
9781465636218
201 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The sexuality of the modern civilized man—the sum, that is to say, of the phenomena of sexual love dependent upon and associated with the sexual impulse—is the result of a process of development lasting many thousands of years. Therein, as in a mirror, we may see an accurate reflection of all the phases of the bodily and mental history of the human race. Anyone who wishes to understand modern love in all its complexity must, in the first place, succeed in informing himself, not merely regarding the first foundations of the feeling of love in the grey primeval age, but, in addition, as to the manner in which that feeling has been transformed and enriched in the course of the history of civilization. For modern love is a complex of two constituents. The word “love” is applicable to the sexual impulse of human beings only. Its use implies that in the case of man the purely animal feelings have acquired an importance far greater than that of subserving the purposes of mere reproduction, and aim at a goal transcending that of the preservation of the species. The nature of human love can be understood and explained only with reference to this intimate and inseparable union of its purposes in respect of the preservation of the species and its independent significance in the life of the loving individual himself. Herein is to be found the starting-point of the whole so-called “sexual problem,” and it is necessary that the matter should be clearly understood at the outset of this book. In earlier days human love was mainly concerned with the purposes of the species. Modern civilized man, conceiving history as progress in the consciousness of freedom, has also come to recognize the profound individual significance of love for his own inward growth, for the proper development of his free manhood. To quote a phrase from Georg Hirth, a cultured modern writer, the genuine experienced love of a civilized man of the present day is one of the “ways to freedom.” By love is made manifest, and through love is developed, his inmost individual nature. For this reason Schopenhauer’s “Metaphysik der Geschlechtsliebe” (“Metaphysic of Sexual Love”), which wholly ignores this individual factor, must be regarded, brilliant as it unquestionably is, as a quite inadequate explanation of the nature of love. Again, a recent writer, Arnold Lindwurm, greatly influenced by Schopenhauer’s teaching, in the introduction to his work entitled “Ueber die Geschlechtsliebe in sozial-ethische Beziehung” (“Sexual Love in its Socio-Ethical Relations”), writes: “The fruit of love, children, and marriage as a domestic institution indispensable for the upbringing of children—these constitute the author’s ethical criterion in the field of sexual research; these also form the socio-ethical goal of all sexual love, inasmuch as the sole standard by which sexual love can be judged is the procreation and upbringing of children.” We, however, at the very outset, contest the validity of such a standpoint, for we consider that it fails entirely to do justice to the nature of modern love. For the history of the human sexual impulse teaches us beyond dispute that, in the course of the development of the human species, that impulse, through its progressive association with intellectual and emotional elements to form the complex whole designated by the term “love,” has undergone a progressive individualization, and has attained a more defined significance for the unitary human being. At the present day sexual love constitutes a part of the very being of the civilized man; his sexual life clearly reflects his individual nature, and love influences his development in an enduring manner. Love conjoins in a quite unique way the two principal classes of vital manifestations—the lower vegetative and the higher animal life; and it thus constitutes the highest and the most intense expression of the unity of life (Schopenhauer’s “focus of the will;” Weismann’s “continuity of the germ-plasma”).
