Читать книгу The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization - Iwan 1872-1922 Bloch - Страница 23

Table of Contents

The unquestionably existing physical differences between the sexes respectively, correspond equally without question to existing psychical differences. Psychically, also, man and woman are completely different beings. We must not employ the word “psychical,” as it is so often employed, in the sense of pure “intelligence”; we must understand the term to relate to the entire conception and content of the psyche, to the whole spiritual being—the spiritual habitus, emotional character, feelings, and will: we shall then immediately be convinced that masculine and feminine beings differ through and through, that they are heterogeneous, incomparable natures.

Under the influence of Weininger’s book, the attempt has recently been made to deny the existence of sexual differences in the psychical sphere, and especially to contest the origin of these differences from the fundamentally different nature of the masculine and feminine types. (Weininger himself not only went so far as to declare the obliteration and equalization of sexual differences, but he even asserted that all feminine nature was a personification of nothingness, of evil; he wished to annihilate femininity, in order to allow the existence of one sex only, the male, this being to him the embodiment of the objective and the good.) I recently read with great interest a most intelligent book, one full of new ideas, by Rosa Mayreder—“Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit” (A Critique of Femininity), Jena, 1905—in which the author maintains what she calls the “primitively teleological character of sexuality”; that is, she considers the different sexual functions of man and woman to be comparatively unimportant for the determination of their spiritual nature, and regards the individual psychical differentiation as independent of sexuality and of the different sexual natures. In her opinion, sexual polarity does not extend to the “higher nature” of mankind, to the spiritual sphere. She offers as a proof of this, among other points, the fact that by crossed inheritance spiritual peculiarities of the father can be transmitted to the daughter. Very true. Moreover, no objective student of Nature will deny that a woman can attain the same degree of individual psychical differentiation as a man, or that she can bring her “higher nature” to an equally great development. But quite as incontestable is the fact which Rosa Mayreder keeps too much in the background: that everything psychical, the entire emotional and voluntary life, receives from the particular sexual nature a peculiar characterization, a distinctive colouring, and a specific nuance; and that these precisely constitute the heterogeneous and the incomparable in the masculine and the feminine natures.

The attempts to annihilate sexual differences in theory are very old,[24] but they have always proved untenable in practice. They have invariably been shattered by contact with—sexual differences.

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret (You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she will inevitably return). And this return of Nature is, in fact, a step forward, in advance of primitive hermaphroditic states. Sexual differences are ineradicable; civilization shows an unmistakable tendency to increase them. There is also an individual differentiation of sexual characters. It is proportional to the differentiation of the psychical characters of man and woman. And the problem is this: How is it possible for woman to ensure the development and perfectibility of her higher nature, without eliminating and obscuring her peculiar character as a sexual being?

When Rosa Mayreder herself, at the end of her book (p. 278), comes to the conclusion—

“In the province of the physical, about which no doubt is possible, the development towards ‘homologous monosexuality,’ towards the unconditional sexual differentiation of individuals, constitutes the most desirable aim. Every divergence from the normal renders the individual an imperfect being; physical hermaphroditism is repulsive because it represents a state of insufficiency, an inadequate and malformed structure. It appertains to the qualities of beautiful and healthy human beings that the body should be that of an entire man or an entire woman, just as it is desirable that the body should be intact in all other respects”

—she has at the same time expressed a judgment regarding the value of psychical bisexuality which must ever be a rudiment merely in the “entire man” or the “entire woman,” and can never attain the transcendent importance, can never represent the progress towards higher altitudes, which the author, in her singular misunderstanding of the true relations, wishes to ascribe to that condition. We may admit that the bisexual character is more or less strongly developed in the individual male or female, without thereby abandoning the fundamental natural difference between man and woman, which involves not merely the physical, but also the psychical sphere.

I disbelieve, therefore, in Rosa Mayreder’s “synthetic human being,” who is “subordinate alike to the conditions of the masculine and the feminine” but I do believe, as I have already stated in earlier writings, in an individualization of love, in an ennobling and deepening of the relationship between the sexes, such as is possible only to free personalities. This is easily attainable in conjunction with the retention of all bodily and mental peculiarities, as these have developed during the process of sexual differentiation between man and woman.

There can be no possible doubt that psychically woman is a different creature from man. And quite rightly Mantegazza declares the opinion of Mirabeau, that the soul has no sex, but only the body, to be a great blunder.

Let us now return to the directly visible elementary phenomenon of love, to the process of coalescence of the spermatozoon and the ovum. From our study of other natural processes we feel we are justified by analogy in drawing the conclusion that the observed kinetic difference between the spermatozoon and the ovum is the expression also of different psychical processes. Georg Hirth draws attention to these remarkable differences in respect of their modes of energy between spermatozoa and ova.[25] He also infers from the greater variability of the spermatozoa in the different animal species, as compared with the usual spherical form of the ova, that to the spermatozoon is allotted the most important kinetic function in the process of reproduction, to which opinion its aggressive mobility would also lead us, whereas the ovum rather represents potential energy.