E&R Bretagne rencontre Guillaume Faye

E&R Bretagne rencontre Guillaume Faye

Guillaume Faye: Sexe et dévoiement

Guillaume Faye:

Sexe et dévoiement

Julius Evola e la metafisica del sesso. Alcune osservazioni per una lettura attualizzata del pensiero del filosofo romano

Julius Evola e la metafisica del sesso. Alcune osservazioni per una lettura attualizzata del pensiero del filosofo romano

Autore: Stefano Arcella

Ex: http://www.centrostudilaruna.it/

La mia intenzione non è quella di scrivere una recensione della Metafisica del Sesso di Julius Evola (peraltro ampiamente commentato e recensito nel susseguirsi delle varie edizioni), quanto piuttosto di mettere a fuoco alcuni aspetti salienti del suo pensiero in tema di sessualità e confrontarli con le esigenze ed i problemi dell’uomo del XXI secolo. Tale approccio si inserisce in un disegno più ampio, volto a confrontare il pensiero evoliano con la contemporaneità, per verificarne l’attualità.

Un primo aspetto da analizzare riguarda quella che il pensatore chiama la “Pandemìa del sesso” nell’epoca moderna. Evola evidenzia come – anche attraverso la pubblicità, l’influenza dei media e della televisione – il sesso sia divenuto una vera manìa, un’ossessione pervasiva, nel mentre se ne è perduto il significato profondo, realizzativo nel senso dell’“uomo integrale” nel quadro di quello che egli chiama il “mondo della Tradizione”. Tale fenomeno può leggersi come una reazione smodata al clima moralistico di estrazione cattolico-borghese, alla sessuofobia tipica di una certa educazione di matrice cattolica ma anche in opposizione al puritanesimo tipico di una certa cultura protestante. Dallo squilibrio di una educazione sessuofoba si passa all’eccesso di una manìa, entrambi i fenomeni avendo però in comune lo smarrimento del senso profondo del sesso e dell’amore, come superamento del senso dell’ego, integrazione delle complementarietà e riaccostamento a quel senso dell’unità primordiale adombrata nel mito dell’androgine riportato da Platone nel Simposio ed ampiamente citato da Evola nella sua opera. Peraltro tale ossessione banalizza il sesso ed attenua l’attrazione, poiché la fisicità femminile ed il nudo femminile divengono qualcosa di così ordinario ed abituale da perdere quella carica sottile di magnetismo, di fascinazione che sono fondamentali nell’attrazione fra i sessi.

Orbene, se confrontiamo questa analisi evoliana con la realtà contemporanea (ricordiamo che Metafisica del Sesso fu pubblicato, per la prima volta, nel 1957), notiamo che il fenomeno dell’ossessione del sesso si sia accentuato, anche per effetto della diffusione della telematica, della estrema libertà di pubblicazione che esiste su Internet e quindi della possibilità agevole per gli utenti di accedervi.

Peraltro si osserva nei rapporti fra i sessi una superficialità diffusa, una incapacità di comunicare su temi di fondo, una banalizzazione dei rapporti che coinvolge lo stesso momento sessuale, visto come una pratica scissa da qualsiasi aspetto profondo, di autentica comunione animica fra i sessi.

In ciò può cogliersi una vera e propria paura di fondo, la paura dell’uomo di entrare in contatto reale con se stesso e con gli altri, di doversi guardare dentro, di doversi magari mettere in discussione. L’uomo contemporaneo – come tendenza prevalente – rifugge dall’autoosservazione ed ha sempre più bisogno di “droghe” in senso lato, di evasioni, dal caos della metropoli a certe forme di musica che abbiano un effetto di stordimento, dal “rito”degli esodi di massa nei periodi di vacanza e nei fine-settimana alla dimensione di massa che hanno anche le villeggiature balneari, in una trasposizione automatica della dimensione della metropoli che risponde ad un bisogno di stordirsi e di perdersi comunque.

L’analisi evoliana, sotto questo aspetto, è pienamente attuale, presentandosi dunque come lungimirante nel momento in cui, oltre 50 anni orsono, veniva elaborata. La crisi dei rapporti fra i sessi e del senso stesso del sesso si inquadra così nel contesto generale della crisi del mondo moderno, del suo essere, rispetto ai significati ed ai valori della Tradizione, un processo involutivo, una vera e propria anomalìa. E qui veniamo ad un ulteriore aspetto fondamentale da considerare.

La metafisica del sesso evoliana può essere adeguatamente compresa solo nel quadro della morfologia delle civiltà e della filosofia complessiva della storia che il pensatore romano elaborò e sistematizzò nella sua opera principale, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno, peraltro preceduta e preparata con vari saggi di morfologia delle civiltà pubblicati, in età giovanile, su varie riviste, come, ad esempio, il famoso saggio Americanismo e bolscevismo, pubblicato sulla rivista Nuova Antologia nel 1929. Senza questo riferimento generale e complessivo, senza questa visione d’insieme, non si comprende il punto di vista evoliano nell’approccio alla tematica della sessualità, approccio lontano sia da impostazioni di tipo moralistico-borghese, sia da forme esasperate di “pandemìa del sesso”.

Centrale è quindi il significato che Evola conferisce a quello che chiama “mondo della Tradizione”, intendendo con questo termine un insieme di civiltà orientate “dall’alto e verso l’alto”, per citare una tipica espressione evoliana; si tratta di tutte quelle civiltà che, pur nella varietà delle loro forme non solo religiose ma soprattutto misteriche (cioé iniziatiche), hanno in comune una orientazione sacrale, nel senso che esse sono ispirate dal sacro e tendono verso il sacro, inteso e vissuto come dimensione trascendente e, al tempo stesso, immanente, ossia una sacralità che entra nella storia e nell’umano, che permea di sé i vari aspetti della vita individuale e sociale di una determinata civiltà. Ogni aspetto della vita, dall’amore al sesso alle arti ed ai mestieri, diviene, in questo particolare “tono” una occasione, una possibilità di aprire la comunicazione con il Divino, quindi una opportunità di elevazione e miglioramento personale.

In questo senso il mondo moderno, come mondo desacralizzato e materialistico, rappresenta un’anomalìa, peraltro denunciata da René Guénon ancor prima di Evola (illuminanti sono, al riguardo, le pagine di apertura del libro Simboli della Scienza Sacra, ripubblicato da Adelphi) , come anche da altri Maestri della Tradizione, come Arturo Reghini in Italia e da Rudolf Steiner nella Mitteleuropa del primo Novecento.

Il concetto di un tipo di società orientata dal terreno e verso il terreno, relegante alla fede privata individuale tutto ciò che possa avere il vago sentore di un anelito spirituale, è qualcosa che appartiene esclusivamente all’epoca moderna più recente, pressappoco da Cartesio in poi e soprattutto dall’illuminismo e dalla rivoluzione francese in avanti. Fino al Medio Evo l’orientazione sacrale della vita e della società era un dato centrale e normale, mentre ora prevale la secolarizzazione, l’essere immersi in modo esclusivo nel terreno e nella storia.

Sotto questo aspetto il conflitto fra mondo islamico e mondo occidentale, al di là di certe forme esasperate e terroristiche di antagonismo culminate con l’attacco dell’11 settembre 2001– che sono soltanto un aspetto del mondo islamico – è emblematico di un diverso modo di concepire la vita e il mondo e rappresenta la piena conferma del carattere anomalo del mondo moderno laico e secolarizzato.

In questo contesto “tradizionale” si colloca la concezione evoliana del sesso e dell’amore. Centrale è il riferimento al Simposio di Platone, quindi alla visione della polarità fra i sessi – maschile e femminile – come anelito, spesso inconsapevole, alla reintegrazione dell’unità primordiale dell’androgino, poi scissa nella dualità dei sessi. In origine, secondo il mito, esisteva una specie di essere che riassumeva in sé i due sessi, che poi si scinde nelle due sessualità che noi conosciamo come distinte e separate. L’amore e l’incontro sessuale è visto quindi come superamento dei limiti individuali, come completamento e superamento del senso dell’ego, come capacità di dono di sé, di apertura all’altro, di integrazione con l’altro e nell’altro.

Fondamentale è anche il riferimento all’archetipo di Afrodite, vista nei suoi vari aspetti e nei suoi vari gradi; L’Afrodite Celeste e l’Afrodite Pandémia simboleggiano due stati e gradi dell’amore, quello spirituale e quello sensuale, quest’ultimo essendo visto come un primo grado di approssimazione esperienziale all’amore in senso alto, come Amore per il divino, come slancio fervido e raccolto verso la nostra origine spirituale. E’ importante notare come, nella visione evoliana, non vi sia scissione fra i due piani, ma come essi rappresentino, in realtà, due fasi di un unico iter ascensionale, poiché il divino non è un quid lontano dal mondo, ma si manifesta nel mondo, pur non riducendosi ad esso. A tale riguardo, si può ricordare la concezione indiana della Shakti, ossia l’aspetto “potenza” e manifestazione del divino, cioé il suo aspetto femminile, dinamico che, non a caso, è definito nei test tantrici la “splendente veste di potenza del divino” su cui l’orientalista Filippani-Ronconi ha scritto pagine illuminanti nella sua opera Le Vie del Buddhismo. Non è marginale osservare che nello shivaismo del Kashmir, ossia nelle forme del culto di Shiva tipiche di quella regione dell’India nord-occidentale, la considerazione dell’aspetto shaktico del divino si riflette nella valorizzazione sociale della donna concepita come l’incarnazione terrena di quest’aspetto shaktico e, come tale, degna di rispetto e dotata di una sua dignità spirituale secondo le vedute delle scuole shivaite kashmire. Su questo punto si rinvia il lettore alle pagine molto illuminanti di Filippani Ronconi nel suo libro VAK. La parola primordiale dove l’Autore illustra un aspetto poco noto di alcune civiltà tradizionali, che Evola descrive sempre in chiave virile-solare e patriarcale.

Altro mito platonico cui il filosofo romano si richiama è quello di Poros e Penia, che spiega l’amore come perenne insufficienza, come continua privazione. E’ l’amore inteso come “sete inesausta”, come desiderio mai del tutto soddisfatto, come continuo anelito verso un completamento di sé mai del tutto realizzato e quindi fonte di perenne e nuovo desiderio. Qui si può cogliere il nesso fra lo stato esistenziale cui questo mito allude e l’amore sensuale, come tale sempre bramoso e sempre insoddisfatto.

L’insegnamento che la sacerdotessa Diotima (iniziata ai Misteri di Eleusi) tramanda a Socrate nel Simposio, in alcune pagine che sono fra le più belle del testo – l’essere cioé l’amore sensuale solo un primo grado per poi ascendere a forme più alte di amore secondo una scala ascensionale che ha una sua continuità di gradi di perfezionamento – ci offre la cognizione di un mondo che non demonizza il sesso ma lo valorizza nel quadro di una visione ascendente della vita umana in cui la sensualità ha una sua funzione ed un suo valore, perché è il primo momento di accostamento al bello, colto nelle sue manifestazioni fisiche più agevolmente percepibili per poi ascendere, gradualmente, al bello ideale e spirituale, all’idea del bello in sé secondo la filosofia platonica che, in realtà, riprende e sistematizza, sul piano speculativo, più antichi insegnamenti misterici, com’è dimostrato dalla connotazione sacerdotale e misterica di Diotima, non a caso introdotta ai Misteri di Demetra e Persefone-Kore, che sono i misteri della femminilità e della terra, della fecondità fisica e spirituale insieme.

Possono allora comprendersi certe forme cultuali del mondo antico inconcepibili secondo la visuale cristiana, quali, ad esempio, la prostituzione sacra, presente nel culto di Venus Erycina ed in quello di Venere Cupria. La sacerdotessa, quale incarnazione di una potenza sacra, si univa sessualmente con l’uomo devoto a quel culto, perché così il fedele entrava in contatto con la sacralità della dea Venus. L’atto sessuale era quindi un veicolo di comunicazione con il divino, un sentiero di contatto e di unione con la trascendenza. Si comprende allora anche la sacralizzazione del fallo, testimoniato dall’iconografia e dal culto del dio Priapo e dalle processioni in onore di Dioniso (le falloforie), dove si portavano in mostra le rappresentazioni falliche quali epifanie del dio, presenti del resto nella religione egizia, quali ierofanie di Osiride, nel quadro dei Misteri egizi isiaci ed osiridei. Ancora oggi, in Giappone, si celebra annualmente una ricorrenza religiosa in cui le rappresentazioni falliche come oggetti sacri sono portate in processione.

La sessualità era quindi vista come una manifestazione della potenza del divino, una irruzione della trascendenza nell’immanenza della vita terrena, un segno delle possibilità più alte presenti nell’uomo. Non è certo un caso che il neoplatonismo rinascimentale e, in particolare, Marsilio Ficino (nel suo Commento al Simposio di Platone), si sia richiamato a questa visione sacrale dell’amore, sebbene rimarcando un più netto iato fra materia e spirito, per effetto dell’influenza cristiana, ma comunque accogliendo l’idea generale di un accostamento per gradi al Bello, da quello fisico a quello spirituale.

Particolare attenzione è data dal pensatore romano alla sessualità nei Misteri antichi e, in particolare, in quelli di Eleusi, alle forme rituali di ierogamìa, di unione sessuale sacra fra un uomo e una donna nel quadro sacerdotale misterico così come molta attenzione è data alle forme ed alle procedure della magia sesssuale, soprattutto con riferimento alle scuole tantriche induiste e buddhiste, nelle quali la sessualità viene utilizzata, con diversità di metodiche fra una scuola e l’altra, per attivare una superiore integrazione della coscienza e quindi uno stato di illuminazione interiore che si desta nel momento in cui si ha il contatto reale con il Sacro. Evola avverte anche sui pericoli insiti in alcune metodiche tantriche e mette in guardia il lettore da certi atteggiamenti superficiali di imitazione di pratiche che si collocavano in un contesto ambientale e culturale molto diverso, anche sotto il profilo della carica energetica presente in certe confraternite antiche.

Il problema di fondo che si pone è se e come tale visione sacrale del sesso possa essere praticata e realizzata nel quadro del mondo moderno e post-moderno, nell’era della rivoluzione tecnologica, informatica e telematica, in un ambiente desacralizzato e laicizzato. Certe forme cultuali e rituali (ierogamie, procedure tantriche) presupponevano l’esistenza dei Misteri, dei collegi misterici, dei sacerdoti e dei maestri spirituali, che sono del tutto assenti nell’età oscura, nel kali-yuga dei testi indù.

Si ripropone quindi, in tema di sessualità, lo stesso problema che si presenta in linea generale per le possibilità di realizzazione spirituale che sono offerte nel mondo moderno ed in quello contemporaneo (distinguiamo i due termini perché il post-moderno si presenta come un’epoca con caratteri già diversi da quelli della modernità industriale dell’800 e del ’900), alla luce del processo di solidificazione materialistica che si è svolto , con ritmi sempre più accelerati, nell’uomo e nel mondo e di cui Guénon ci ha parlato nella sua opera Il regno della quantità ed i segni dei tempi.

Credo che occorra partire da un dato: venuti meno i supporti rituali e misterici delle civiltà antiche, con l’affermazione del cristianesimo in una chiave di esclusivismo fideistico, e con lo sviluppo scientifico e tecnico che parte da una visione materialistica del mondo, si sono avute tre conseguenze che così possiamo brevemente schematizzare:

1. l’uomo è rimesso a sé stesso perché non ha più supporti per la sua realizzazione in senso esoterico;
2. l’uomo percepisce se stesso come coscienza individuale e non più come parte di un tutto. L’uomo di una gens antica, per intenderci, o il giurista del diritto romano ancora in età imperiale, percepiva se stesso come parte integrante di una gens o di una tradizione religiosa e culturale; la sua percezione di sé era allargata ad un insieme sovraindividuale. Oggi prevale invece una autopercezione atomistica dell’uomo;
3. il “mentale” dell’uomo moderno è molto più forte rispetto a quello dell’uomo delle civiltà tradizionali, in cui prevaleva uno stile di pensiero sintetico-intuitivo che si rifletteva anche nella maggiore concisione linguistica, come è il caso del latino, lingua celebre per la sua efficace capacità di sintesi. Ciò vuol dire che l’uomo tradizionale, col suo “astrale”, cioé col mondo delle emozioni, entrava in contatto col dominio spirituale senza la mediazione del mentale, o almeno tale mediazione era molto più attenuata, essendo la mente una mente immaginativa, cioé sintetico-intutiva.

In questo contesto e con tali condizioni, l’iniziazione, oggi, può essere solo una iniziazione moderna, ossia praticabile in forme adatte alle condizioni dell’epoca.

Una realizzazione spirituale può essere attualmente solo un percorso di consapevolezza, una via dell’anima cosciente, imperniata sulla disciplina e la semplificazione della mente e sull’armonia mente-cuore.

Un approccio di tipo ritualistico non sembra adatto alle condizioni del nostro tempo, o quantomeno quell’approccio può avere un senso solo se preceduto e seguito da un continuum di operatività interiore consapevole, di azione modificatrice su se stessi e in se stessi.

Il campo della sessualità si colloca nel medesimo ordine di idee. Al sesso banalizzato e brutalizzato o alla sessuofobia di certe tendenze religiose va posta come alternativa la sessualità vissuta come consapevolezza del suo senso pieno e profondo, quindi preparata, propiziata e integrata da determinate pratiche meditative di cui ci parla ampiamente l’esoterista Massimo Scaligero nella sua opera Manuale pratico di meditazione e che risentono chiaramente dell’influenza di certe forme meditative indiane e yogiche adattate alla mentalità occidentale, sulla base degli insegnamenti della “scienza dello spirito” tramandata e rielaborata da Rudolf Steiner.

La lezione evoliana apre orizzonti profondi sulla sessualità nel mondo della Tradizione e consente di prendere coscienza delle regressioni e dei limiti che, anche in questo campo, si sono verificati nel mondo moderno. Crediamo, però, che tale lezione vada affiancata e integrata dagli interventi di altri Maestri, per maturare in sé la prospettiva pragmatica e concreta di una via dell’anima cosciente.

* * *

Tratto, col gentile consenso dell’Autore, dal mensile Fenix, n°38, dicembre 2011, pagg. 86-90.

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Stefano Arcella

Transexualismo y Constitucionalismo: Por qué tantos derechos?

Transexualismo y Constitucionalismo: ¿Por qué tantos derechos?

Por Eduardo Hernando Nieto

 

Ex: http://eduardohernandonieto.blogspot.com/ 

Publicado en: "Los Registros y las Personas", Lima, Reniec, 2010

El artículo 2 inciso 1 de nuestra Constitución señala que “toda persona tiene derecho a la vida, a su Identidad, a su integridad moral, psíquica y física a su libre desarrollo y bienestar. El concebido es sujeto de derecho en todo cuanto le favorece” y el artículo 19 sostiene también que todos los peruanos tienen derecho “a su identidad étnica y cultural. El Estado reconoce la pluralidad étnica y cultural de la Nación”. Así pues, el derecho a la identidad tiene un lugar relevante dentro de nuestro ordenamiento jurídico, sin embargo, lo que no se dice en la constitución es que cosa debemos entender por identidad o que es lo que el derecho – o los jueces - deben entender por tal a fin de poder determinarse en que casos se podría ver afectado o no este derecho.

De acuerdo a algunas clásicas definiciones doctrinaras desde la teoría del derecho moderno y el derecho civil se entiende por identidad el “ser en si mismo” siendo el modo en que la persona se muestra dentro su sociedad , también nuestro destacado académico Carlos Fernández Sessarego por su parte sostiene que la identidad es todo lo que hace que cada cual sea “uno mismo” y no “otro” y que permite que se conozca a la persona en su “mismisidad” en cuanto a lo que es su esencia humana

Se entendería que en estas dos perspectivas habrían matices relevantes en la medida que en un primer caso parece tratarse de una definición más bien estática mientras que en la siguiente definición si consideraríamos una propuesta dinámica, así la identidad inicialmente puede apreciarse en cuestiones como el sexo, la edad etc., en cambio, frente a la segunda esperaríamos una concepción más bien de carácter evolutivo en base a los mismos cambios que se pueden verificar dentro de la sociedad y que no solo involucrarían aspectos básicos registrales (estatus personal) sino que abarcarían las múltiples actividades del sujeto así como “el patrimonio cultural e ideológico de la persona”.


Sin embargo, mi interés en este texto está más bien en explorar en torno a la “radicalización” del proyecto existencialista que en algunos casos y paradójicamente podría percibirse en términos de un creciente nihilismo, es decir, en la negación de los valores y la indiferencia respecto a los proyectos y fines humanos . Una situación como esta tendrá que traer cambios relevantes en toda la realidad del derecho moderno ya que también esta etapa nihilista es conocida como “postmoderna” o deconstructiva lo cual implica afirmar la incertidumbre y también a relativizar cualquier concepto o estructura, vale decir, si el derecho moderno se creó a partir de la metafísica cartesiana en donde se afirmaba la distinción entre sujeto y objeto (cosa pensante y cosa extensa) y también una jerarquía entre ambos (el sujeto se ubica siempre por encima del objeto o el sujeto se coloca en el centro mientras que el objeto en la periferia), ahora más bien encontraríamos un cuestionamiento a cualquier posibilidad de ubicar puntos fijos en el espacio y con ello también negaríamos la posibilidad de afirmar al sujeto. Es decir, entraríamos a una etapa en la cual si el sujeto se puede desplazar y ubicar en cualquier punto entonces no solo habría dificultad para encontrarlo sino que también generaría un enorme problema para IDENTIFICARLO, es más podría ocurrir que el mismo sujeto se cree y recree así mismo según su propia voluntad o estado de ánimo y sería solamente la VOLUNTAD la que defina todo.

Precisamente, el problema que quisiera destacar ahora es el de los efectos que ocasiona al derecho a la identidad y al Estado el paradigma postmoderno pues los tiempos han cambiado mucho y ya no nos encontramos en una época en la cual las perspectivas existencialistas podían brindar a esta temática ciertos aires progresistas y libertarios sino más bien ahora con el concurso de la técnica se podrían plantear grandes conflictos y controversias sencillamente porque con el agregado tecnológico (que se debe leer también como un poder o una potencia otorgado al individuo) el existencialismo (que sirvió mucho para afirmar el derecho a la identidad como lo sostuvo Fernández Sessarego) podría contribuir hoy a incrementar la incertidumbre y generar más problemas que soluciones, es más podría convertirse paradójicamente en una amenaza a la misma autonomía personal
.

Por ejemplo recientes casos como el del escocés Norrie May-Welby quien no hace mucho ha sido reconocido como un sujeto neutro ya que según él no se sentía augusto ni con el sexo masculino ni con el femenino sería solo la punta del iceberg de una transformación radical que podría experimentar el derecho moderno construido bajo los pilares del racionalismo cartesiano y que ahora no podría contener todos estos cambios resultado de la tecnología, el avance científico sumados a un individualismo radical que buscaría ahora que las leyes se adapten a la voluntad del sujeto y no a la inversa como habría sido lo natural en los orígenes del derecho.

Pero volviendo al caso citado, se habla por ejemplo aquí de un no sexo o un sexo neutro, lo cual en si mismo resultaría no solo confuso sino que también podría dar pie a múltiples problemas legales por ejemplo al establecerse – como ocurre en nuestro ordenamiento - que el matrimonio solo corresponde a la unión de un hombre y una mujer - , excluyéndose cualquier otra posibilidad ¿Entonces habría también que facilitar nuevas formas de unión entre personas neutras tal y como se viene implementando en el caso de los homosexuales en diversos países? Sin embargo, no faltarán quienes sostengan que el caso de May – Welby , es solamente anecdótico o insólito por lo que no habría que preocuparse demasiado respecto a la necesidad de legislar sobre el particular. Empero, igual podría haberse dicho años atrás cuando alguien decidió cambiar de sexo (transexual) a través de una intervención quirúrgica y su apariencia contrastaba ahora con su documento de identidad en el que se consignaba su identidad original (por ejemplo hombre). En esas circunstancias se plantearon una serie de acciones legales destinadas a modificar no solamente el nombre sino también el sexo que se señala en el documento de identidad. Evidentemente, estos casos han ido en aumento igual en nuestro país produciéndose además cambios acelerados al respecto y no extrañaría que también a mediano o corto plazo cambios legislativos drásticos.

La posibilidad de que casos como el de May – Welby en realidad pueden plantearse con cierta facilidad en estos tiempos se debe indudablemente a la presencia del liberalismo neutral que acompaña regularmente al derecho contemporáneo, es decir, la tesis según la cual nadie puede o debe juzgar las preferencias de otros ya que hacerlo implicaría afectar la autonomía individual y no respetar las elecciones personales. En realidad, es el liberalismo el que ha venido promoviendo la tesis de la neutralidad a partir de lo que significa la crítica al Estado en tanto éste pueda interferir en las elecciones de vida de cualquier ciudadano, así mismo, ellos plantean una distinción entre lo que significa permitir una conducta e impulsarla o promoverla, vale decir, que para ellos el hecho que se permita la pornografía no implicaría que se estuviese promocionándola o se estuviese a favor de ella . Sin embargo, sus críticos conservadores no pensarían de la misma manera y considerarían que no es viable tal distinción a lo que los liberales replicarían finalmente que ellos no es que tendrían que estar a favor de la pornografía o alguna otra conducta de este tipo sino que lo que ocurre es que valoran sobre todo la tolerancia y la libre elección .


Así pues, el modelo liberal prevaleciente se sustenta en la defensa del valor tolerancia por sobre todas las cosas aunque a decir verdad es una tolerancia que resulta sin fundamentos pues si se parte del carácter subjetivo de todo valor entonces la tolerancia no podría justificarse ya que ningún valor podría ser objetivo. Esta contradicción del liberalismo los conduciría a un callejón sin salida ya que la concepción de liberalismo que manejan descansaría en realidad en el relativismo.

Sin embargo, a fin que el discurso liberal no sea contradictorio y que la defensa de la elección personal y la tolerancia estén justificadas entonces la “tolerancia” de conductas como la de la sexualidad “neutra” o la de la “transexualidad” o la unión de personas del mismo sexo tendrían que ser sustentadas en algún valor (tolerancia). ¿Cuál sería entonces la base de la tolerancia? Se entiende que existen dos morales modernas que lo podrían justificar el utilitarismo y la moral de los derechos Kant , sin embargo, ambas resultan siendo fallidas como lo pueden señalar diversos teóricos perfeccionistas , republicanos democráticos y comunitaristas , sea porque el utilitarismo no considera a todos como seres autónomos (algunos son medios para los fines de otros) sea porque la moral de los derechos se basa en una distinción que no se puede sostener, vale decir, la distinción entre lo correcto y lo bueno . Entonces si no hay justificación para la tolerancia (que si podría ser justificada en otros modelos no neutrales ciertamente) resulta difícil aceptar las tesis liberales. Es más si no fuesen acertadas las críticas contra la moral de los derechos y la tolerancia estuviese justificada, entonces también tendría sentido preguntarse ¿por qué solo la tolerancia y porque no otros valores?. Sin duda, la discusión sobre los valores será una constante en los últimos años.


Ciertamente, dentro del desarrollo de la teoría jurídica contemporánea se puede encontrar un auge de las llamadas corrientes postpositivistas del derecho que enfatizan el aspecto de la corrección antes que de la validez normativa , por ejemplo una muestra de estas nuevas perspectivas sería el caso del filósofo del derecho argentino (fallecido prematuramente) Carlos Santiago Nino, para él, el derecho debía ser entendido como la institucionalización de procedimientos (deliberativos) que nos ayudan a la solución de controversias y que también estimulan la Cooperación social, dentro de un marco de defensa de la autonomía personal, la inviolabilidad de la persona y la dignidad . En este sentido, se entendería que la base de su discurso está en los derechos humanos (autonomía, inviolabilidad y dignidad) a partir de los cuales se plantearían deliberaciones conducentes a resolver controversias mediante la aprobación mayoritaria. (Definiendo su enfoque como deliberativo democrático)

Así pues, las reglas de la democracia, como por ejemplo las que imponen que no puede haber discriminaciones en virtud de la raza, el sexo, condición económica, etc.; que el voto de los ciudadanos debe tener igual valor; que las decisiones políticas colectivas se toman por el procedimiento de la mayoría; que debe haber alternativas reales; que los representantes se eligen periódicamente; que no se pueden violar los derechos de la minoría; genera un procedimiento de toma de decisiones similar, según Nino, al procedimiento que rige el discurso moral.

Así por ejemplo, Nino podría establecer ciertas reglas concernientes a los derechos humanos como el afirmar que los derechos humanos son derechos morales que posee todo ser humano independientemente de contingencias tales como el sexo, la religión o la nacionalidad y del hecho de que sean o no reconocidos por el gobierno o que la función de tales derechos es evitar que las personas sean usadas como medios para satisfacer los objetivos de otras personas, de entidades corporativas o del gobierno entre
otras, quedando explícitamente señalado que la función de todo Estado Liberal debería ser la de la promoción de los citados derechos (como una obligación moral)

Un discurso como este que a diferencia del positivista clásico institucionaliza y moraliza los derechos individuales sin dudas que ha servido para facilitar la legalización favorable a distintas conductas y hechos que antes no se habían ni siquiera pensando (cambio de sexo por ejemplo), la ampliación del derecho de autonomía y la no injerencia de otros con respecto a las elecciones personales (neutralidad) por ejemplo serían considerados como formas de satisfacer los estándares propuestos por esta moral de los derechos individuales.

Justamente, esta tendencia postpositivista en su faceta llamada neoconstitucionalista, lo que hace es definir lo jurídico ya no desde la mera legalidad sino desde la constitucionalidad (principios) y en la medida que los principios son por su naturaleza indeterminados entonces es fácil advertir que mediante interpretaciones correctoras extensivas o “conforme a” la Constitución se podría suplir la falta de regulación o vacío al respecto y resolver entonces los casos que se presenten como seria por ejemplo el del cambio de identidad sexual y su correspondiente reconocimiento por medio de la generación de un documento de identidad. (O finalmente el del reconocimiento de la “no identidad” como ocurrió en Australia recientemente)

En síntesis, la etapa postpositivista favorece sin duda la discrecionalidad y esto viene resultando muy favorable para la defensa de diversos intereses o deseos “subjetivos”, los mismos que como vimos son ahora potenciados por la tecnología y nos llevan hacia esta realidad de la “transexualidad” o de la “neutralidad” o de sabe Dios que otro nuevo concepto podría ser conocido en el futuro mediato. Postpositivismo y Postmodernidad convergerían entonces en la defensa radical de la subjetividad moderna y el derecho parece seguir sin ninguna oposición o respuesta esta tendencia. Esta corriente en realidad nació ya con el “existencialismo” (Fernández Sessarego) que promovió esta suerte de identidad “dinámica” que parecería responder más bien a una suerte de moralidad social lejos de cualquier vínculo metafísico, luego el positivismo (que fue impulsado por la modernidad dicho sea de paso) dio pasos adelante en esta vertiente individualista aunque mantuvo mal que bien cierta idea de orden y de predictibilidad, tratando además de armonizar en la medida de lo posible la autonomía individual con la autonomía social, merced también al principio del daño al tercero y considerando que el objetivo era lograr conformar una comunidad de seres autónomos (Kant) y preservar la vida de los súbditos (Hobbes). Finalmente, la postmodernidad por su lado atacaría la tesis de la seguridad, el orden y la predictibilidad (lo cual permitiría la inserción de conceptos como el del “No Sexo”) mientras que el postpositivismo se encargaría de facilitar la concreción de los deseos individualistas gracias a la indeterminación de los principios liberales.

CONCLUSION

Mientras que las tesis liberales planteaban la distinción entre permitir y promover junto con la neutralidad y la tolerancia en el campo jurídico pronto las tesis positivistas que se alineaban en cierto sentido con el liberalismo pasaron a convertirse en neoconstitucionalismo y a “comprometerse” con los valores con lo cual ya no tenía mucho sentido hablar de la tolerancia, el derecho ahora – como lo sostenía Nino – debería promover la voluntad individual.
Los liberales dicen que la moral de los derechos individuales se justifica en sí misma, sin embargo, no sé si esto sea suficiente para poder afirmar que éstos realmente deben de ser aceptables, lo que parece más bien es estar ante un razonamiento de carácter circular , entiendo que en el mundo antiguo o en contextos no occidentales “la transexualidad” o la “indeterminación sexual” no fueron mayor problema para la marcha de sus civilizaciones que igualmente aportaron mucho en el desarrollo de nuestro mundo actual, por ello no veo porque los legisladores, los jueces o los poderes de facto deban tener tanto interés en legitimar estas situaciones o cualquiera otra “políticamente correcta” sin plantear un análisis más profundo respecto al porque debería legitimarse dichas conductas o porque es que se tendría que reconocer cualquier identidad según la voluntad del demandante, amparadas en la vaguedad de la “tolerancia". La defensa de la autonomía personal no necesariamente debe implicar acceder siempre a cualquier pedido o acceder de modo inmediato a cualquier capricho, por más atractivo que sea formulado sin tomar en cuenta también la manera como estos nuevos derechos podrían afectar la marcha de lo que fue considerada una civilización de progreso y bienestar colectivo.

Nazi Fashion Wars: The Evolian Revolt Against Aphroditism in the THird Reich

Nazi Fashion Wars:

The Evolian Revolt Against Aphroditism in the Third Reich

Part 1

Amanda Bradley

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

“We would like women to remain women in their nature, in the whole of their lives, in the aim and fulfilment of these lives, just as we likewise wish men to remain men in their nature and in the aim and fulfilment of their nature and their aims.”—Adolf Hitler

National Socialism promoted two images of woman: the hardworking peasant mother in traditional dress, and the uniformed woman in service to her people. Both images were an attempt to combat two types of woman that are foreign to Traditional European societies: the Aphrodisian and Amazonian woman.

To understand the implications of these types, we must first outline J. J. Bachofen’s theory of the phases of human development and their relation to the Traditionalism of Julius Evola, who translated Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right) into Italian and wrote the introduction. Bachofen posited a progressive view of history. The earliest and most primitive civilizations were earth-based, what Bachofen called “hetaerist-aphroditic,” since they were characterized by promiscuity.

As a revolt against the mistreatment of women in these early societies, Bachofen determined, agricultural-based Demetrian societies were developed. This phase of development was matriarchal, and exalted woman in her role of wife and mother, since it viewed woman and the earth as sources of generation.

Next, patriarchy developed, in which the sun and man were seen as the source of life. States of consciousness, correspondingly, went beyond the earth and the moon in solar-oriented societies.

Bachofen also outlined several regressions within his system. The cult of Dionysus was a regression from a Demetrian back into an earth-based cult, as exemplified by its emphasis on the vine (i.e., earth), a drunken dissolution into nature, and the promiscuous maenads who were its followers. Another regression was found in the various examples of Amazonian women in Western history, who did away with the need for a male principle.

Evola said that he integrated Bachofen’s ideas in “a wider and more up-to-date order of ideas.” [1]. He posits the Arctic cycle of the Golden Age as the primordial tradition. Demetrian societies came later, and eventually declined into Amazonian and Aphrodisian cycles. Meanwhile, there were descents into Titanic and Dionysian cycles, with a brief revival of the Northern spirit in the heroic age. Although Evola and Bachofen disagreed about the primacy of the Northern tradition, their interpretations of Aphroditism and other degenerations are similar.

As an earth-based society, the Aphrodisian is entirely focused on the material world. These societies are ruled by “the natural law (ius naturale) of sex motivated by lust, and with no understanding of the relationship of intercourse to conception.” [2] Even the afterlife is viewed not as an ascent to a heaven, but a return to nature. Bachofen describes woman’s status in these cultures as the lowest—she is only a sex object, the property of the tribal chief or any man who wants her. Evola’s interpretation is that in Aphrodisian societies, it is man’s status that is the lowest, since woman is the “sovereign of the man who is merely slave of his senses and sexuality, merely the ‘telluric’ being that finds its rest and its ecstasy only in the woman.” [3] Whether interpreting Aphrodisian societies as degrading to men, women, or both, one aspect is clear: Such a worldview emphasizes the lower aspects of sex, and presents woman as an object of base lust. Contrasted to this are Demetrian societies, in which monogamy and the love of the wife and mother replace mere lust.

Such Aphrodisian cultures are found only in pre-Aryan and anti-Aryan societies. In the history of the West, Evola theorizes that solar-based societies originally were found throughout Europe. In the more southern areas of Europe, in the timeline of recorded history at least, the solar forces did not withstand opposing forces for long. According to Joseph Campbell, these earth and lunar forces migrated to the Mediterranean from the East, as the Oriental principle was found in the “Aphroditic, Demetrian, and Dionysian legacies of the Sabines and Etruscans, Hellenistic Carthage and, finally, Cleopatra’s Hellenistic Egypt.”[4] Thus, much of what we associate with classical Greece cannot be assumed to be European, but must be interpreted in light of the degenerations that developed from its contact with the East. Rome, according to Evola, was able to ward off the influence of the telluric-maternal cult due to its establishment of a firm political organization that was centered on the virile principles of a solar worldview.

In addition to the spheres of love and family, Aphrodisian societies have far-reaching political implications as well. Earth and lunar cults were not necessarily (in fact, rarely) governed by women, yet like gynaecocracy, they foster “the egalitarism of the natural law, universalism and communism.” The idea is that Aphrodisian, earth-based societies viewed all men as children of one earth. Thus, “any inequality is an ‘injustice’, an outrage to the law of nature.” The ancient orgies, Evola writes, “were meant to celebrate the return of men to the state of nature through the momentary obliteration of any social difference and of any hierarchy.”[5] This also explains why in some cultures, the lower castes practiced tellurian or lunar rites, while solar rites were reserved for the aristocracy.

These were the Aphrodisian elements that had made their way into the Weimar Republic and Third Reich, and which the National Socialists tried to restrain, along with modern Amazonian woman (the unmarried, childless, career woman in mannish dress). The Aphrodite type was represented by the “movie ‘star’ or some similar fascinating Aphrodisian apparition.”[6] In his introduction to the writings of Bachofen, National Socialist scholar Alfred Baeumler wrote that the modern world has all of the characteristics of a gynaecocratic age. In writing about the European city-woman, he says, “The fascinating female is the idol of our times, and, with painted lips, she walks through the European cities as she once did through Babylon.”[7]

(PICTURE: Hungarian-born singer Marikka Rökk)

The Nazis’ attempts to combat the Aphrodisian type of woman were manifest in various campaigns and in the writings of Nazi leaders. Most prominent was the promotion of the Gretchen type (the Demetrian woman, in her role as mother and wife), and the discouragement of anything that encouraged the fall of woman into a sex toy rather than a partner for men. Primary emphasis was placed on the discouragement of provocative dress, makeup, and unnatural hair, all which have associations with earth-based cults from the East. According to Evola, the Jewish spirit emphasizes the materialist and sensualist sides of life, with the body viewed as a material instrument of pleasure rather than an instrument of the spirit. Thus, ideologies such as cosmopolitanism, egalitarianism, materialism, and feminism are prevalent in a society that has a worldview infused with a Semitic spirit.[8]

Evola categorized the Aryan spirit as solar and virile, and the Jewish spirit as lunar and feminine. Using Bachofen’s classification system, the latter classifies most easily with Aphrodisian and earth-based cultures — where woman-as-sex-object prevails over woman-as-mother. In fact, there were various versions of “royal Asian women with Aphrodisian features, above all in ancient civilizations of Semitic stock.”[9] A review of archaeological evidence of Aryan and Semitic peoples reveals that, indeed, the only records of Aphrodisian culture in the West (as determined by a culture’s molding of woman into a sex object through fashion, makeup, and the idea of unnatural beauty) are the result of Eastern influence.

Aphrodisian Fashion and Cosmetics Are Absent from the History of Northern Europeans, and Found in Mediterranean Cultures as a Result of Eastern Influence

European civilizations unanimously associated unnatural beauty, achieved by cosmetics and dyed hair, with the lowest castes. This is because in Traditional societies, “health” was a symbol of “virtue” — to feign health or beauty was an attempt to mask the Truth.[10] Although cosmetics and jewelry were used ritually in ancient civilizations, their use eventually degenerated into a purely materialistic function.

 

The earliest Europeans tended toward simplicity in dress and appearance. Adornments were used solely to signify caste or heroic deeds, or were amulets or talismans. In ancient Greece, jewels were never worn for everyday use, but reserved for special occasions and public appearances. In Rome, also, jewelry was thought to have a spiritual power.[11] Western fashion often was used to display rank, as in Roman patricians’ purple sash and red shoes. The Mediterranean cultures, influenced by the East, were the first to become extravagant in dress and makeup. By the time this influence spread to northern Europe, it had been Christianized, and makeup did not appear again in northern Europe until the fourteenth century, after which followed a long period of its association with immorality.[12]

There is no firm evidence, archeological or narrative, for the use of makeup among the Anglo-Saxons. Only one story exists about its use among the Vikings, that of tenth century A.D. traveler  Ibrahim Al-Tartushi, who suggested that Vikings in Hedeby (in modern northern Germany) used kohl to protect against the evil eye (obviously an import from the East). Instead of makeup (outside of their often-described war paint), early northern Europeans focused on cleanliness and simplicity, as well as plant-based oils and aromatherapy. Archeological evidence reveals grooming tools for keeping hair tidy and teeth clean, and long hair was an essential beauty element for women.[13] Much of the jewelry worn by Vikings was religious, received as a reward for bravery in battle, or used to fasten clothing (such as brooches).[14]

Ancient Greece and Rome started out similar to northern Europe in the realms of fashion and beauty, but were quickly influenced by the East. Cosmetics were introduced to Rome from Egypt, and become associated with prostitutes and slaves. Prostitutes tended to use more makeup and perfume as they got older, practices that were looked down on as attempts to mask the unpleasant sights and odors of the lower classes. In fact, the Latin lenocinium means both “prostitution” and “makeup.” For a long time, cosmetics also were associated with non-white races, particular those from the Orient. As Rome degenerated, however, the use of makeup spread to many classes, with specialized slaves devoting much time to applying face paint to their masters, especially to lighten the skin color.

Although cosmetics became more accepted in Rome, their use was contrary to Roman beliefs and discouraged in their writings. Romans did not believe in “unnatural embellishment,” but only the preservation of natural beauty, for which there were many concoctions. Such unadulterated beauty was associated with chastity and morality. As an example, the Vestal Virgins did not use makeup. One who did, Postumia, was accused of incestum, a broad category that signifies immoral and irreligious acts.

In addition, Roman men found it suspicious when women tried to appear beautiful: the implications of cosmetic use included a lack of natural beauty, lack of chastity, potential for adultery, seductiveness, unnatural aversion to the traditional roles for women, manipulation, and deceitfulness. The poet Juvenal wrote, “a woman buys scents and lotions with adultery in mind.” Seneca believed the use of cosmetics was contributing to the decline in morality in the Rome Empire, and advised virtuous women to avoid them.[15] The only surviving text from Rome that approves of cosmetics, Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae (Cosmetics for the Female Face), gives natural remedies for whiter skin and blemishes but extols the virtues of good manners and a good disposition as highest of all beauty treatments.

Originally, the simplest hairstyles were prized in Rome, with women wearing their hair long, often with a headband. Younger girls favored a bun at the nape of the neck, or a knot on top of their head. Elaborate hairstyles only came into fashion during the Roman Empire as it degenerated.[16]

In ancient Greece, as well, makeup was the domain of lower-class women, who attempted to emulate the fair skin of the upper classes who stayed indoors. Rouge was sometimes used to give the skin a healthy and energetic glow. This tradition was continued by women in the Middle Ages, who also valued fair skin.

Cosmetics, dyed hair, and over-accessorizing continued to be associated with loose women as Western society was Christianized. Saint Irenaeus included cosmetics in a list of evils brought to the women who married fallen angels. The early Christian writers Clement of Alexandria, Tatian the Assyrian, and Tertullian also trace the origin of cosmetics to fallen angels.[17]

Dress presents a more difficult area to examine. Although the Nazis associated skimpy dress with foreign elements, this has not always been the case in West. Aryan societies generally did not moralize sex, nor see the body as shameful; women could show a bare breast or wear a short tunic without being viewed as a sex object. In fact, Bachofen reports that more restrictive dress represented a move toward Eastern cultures, which, seeing woman as temptress, insist on extensive covering. According to Plutarch, speaking on the old Dorian spirit:

There was nothing shameful about the nakedness of the virgins, for they were always accompanied by modesty and lechery was banned. Rather, it gave them a taste for simplicity and a care for outward dignity.[18]

Much of these distinctions in beauty treatments can be traced to deeper sources, to the differences in spirit of different peoples. Evola asserts the Roman spirit as the positive side of the Italian people, and the Mediterranean (more influenced by the East) as the negative that needs to be rectified. The first Mediterranean trait is “love for outward appearances and grand gestures”—it is the type that “needs a stage.” In such people, he says, there is a split in the personality: there is “an ‘I’ that plays the role and an ‘I’ that regards his part from the point of view of a possible observer or spectator, more or less as actors do.”

A different kind of split, one that instead supervises one’s conduct to avoid “primitive spontaneity,” is more befitting of the Roman character. The ancient Romans had a model of “sober, austere, active style, free form exhibitionism, measured, endowed with a calm awareness of one’s dignity.” Another negative trait of the Mediterranean type, Evola notes, is individualism, brought about by “the propensity toward outward appearances.” Evola also cites “concern for appearances but with little or no substance” as typical of the Mediterranean type.[19] Such differences in spirit will manifest in the material choices that are inherent to different peoples.

Notes

 

1. Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1995), 211, footnote.

2. Joseph Campbell, Introduction, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, by J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), xxx–xxxi.

3. Evola, “Do We Live in a Gynaecocratic Society?”

4. Campbell, “Introduction” to Bachofen, xlviii.

5. Evola, “Gynaecocratic.”

6. Evola, “Matriarchy in J.J. Bachofen’s Work.”

7. Alfred Baeumler, quoted in Evola, “Matriarchy.”

8. Michael O’Meara, “Evola’s Anti-Semitism.”

9. Evola, “Gynaecocratic.”

10. Evola, Revolt, 102.

11. “Creationism & the Early Church.”

12. “Cosmetics use resurfaces in Middle Ages.”

13. “In Pursuit of Beauty.”

14. Fiona McDonald,Jewelry And Makeup Through History (Milwaukee, Wis.: Gareth Stevens, 2007), 13.

15. Wikipedia. “Cosmetics in Ancient Rome.”

16. “Roman Hairstyles.”

17. “Creationism & the Early Church.”

18. Plutarch, quoted in Bachofen, 171.

19. Evola, Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, trans. Guido Stucco (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2002), 260–62.

Nazi Fashion Wars:
The Evolian Revolt Against Aphroditism in the Third Reich, Part 2

Jewish Views on Jewelry and Cosmetics as Aphrodisian, Jewish Involvement in the Fashion Industry, and the Reaction of Germany

There is much archeological evidence for cosmetics and other beauty treatments in the East, particularly in Egypt and Asia. In Arab cultures, cosmetic use is traced back to ancient times, and there are no prohibitions in Islamic law against cosmetics. Though a simple use of makeup or hair dye could not be evidence of an Aphrodisian belief system, if such use is intended to limit woman’s role to the sexual realm, then we can assume there are elements of the culture that are earth-based and opposed to the Aryan solar cults.

Judaism is not historically opposed to cosmetics and jewelry, although two stories can be interpreted as negative indictments on cosmetics and too much finery: Esther rejected beauty treatments before her presentation to the Persian king, indicating that the highest beauty is pure and natural; and Jezebel, who dressed in finery and eye makeup before her death, may the root of some associations between makeup and prostitutes.

In most cases, however, Jewish views on cosmetics and jewelry tend to be positive and indicate woman’s role as sexual: “In the rabbinic culture, ornamentation, attractive dress and cosmetics are considered entirely appropriate to the woman in her ordained role of sexual partner.” In addition to daily use, cosmetics also are allowed on holidays on which work (including painting, drawing, and other arts) are forbidden; the idea is that since it is pleasurable for women to fix themselves up, it does not fall into the prohibited category of work.[1]

In addition to the historical distinctions between cultures on cosmetics, jewelry, and fashion, the modern era has demonstrated that certain races enter industries associated with the Aphrodisian worldview more than others. Overwhelmingly, Jews are overrepresented in all of these arenas. Following World War I, the beauty and fashion industries became dominated by huge corporations, many of the Jewish-owned. Of the four cosmetics pioneers — Helena Rubenstein, Elizabeth Arden, Estée Lauder (née Mentzer), and Charles Revson (founder of Revlon) — only Elizabeth Arden was not Jewish. In addition, more than 50 percent of department stores in America today were started or run by Jews. (Click here for information about Jewish department stores and jewelers, and here for Jewish fashion designers).

Hitler was not the only one who noticed Jewish influence in fashion and thought it harmful. Already in Germany, a belief existed that Jewish women were “prone to excess and extravagance in their clothing.” In addition, Jews were accused of purposefully denigrating women by designing immoral, trashy clothing for German women.[2] There was an economic aspect to the opposition of Jews in fashion, as many Germans thought them responsible for driving smaller, German-owned clothiers out of business. In 1933, an organization was founded to remove Jews from the Germany fashion industry. Adefa “came about not because of any orders emanating from high within the state hierarchy. Rather, it was founded and membered by persons working in the fashion industry.”[3] According to Adefa’s figures, Jewish participation was 35 percent in men’s outerwear, hats, and accessories; 40 percent in underclothing; 55 percent in the fur industry; and 70 percent in women’s outerwear.[4]

Although many Germans disliked the Jewish influence in beauty and fashion, it was recognized that the problem was not so much what particular foreign race was impacting German women, but that any foreign influence was shaping their lives and altering their spirit. The Nazis obviously were aware of the power of dress and beauty regimes to impact the core of woman’s self-image and being. According to Agnes Gerlach, chairwoman for the Association for German Women’s Culture:

Not only is the beauty ideal of another race physically different, but the position of a woman in another country will be different in its inclination. It depends on the race if a woman is respected as a free person or as a kept female. These basic attitudes also influence the clothes of a woman. The southern ‘showtype’ will subordinate her clothes to presentation, the Nordic ‘achievement type’ to activity. The southern ideal is the young lover; the Nordic ideal is the motherly woman. Exhibitionism leads to the deformation of the body, while being active obligates caring for the body. These hints already show what falsifying and degenerating influences emanate from a fashion born of foreign law and a foreign race.[5]

Gerlach’s statements echo descriptions of Aphrodisian cultures entirely: Some cultures view women as a sex object, and elements of promiscuity run through all areas of women’s dress and toilette; Aryan cultures have a broader understanding of the possibilities of the female being and celebrate woman’s natural beauty.

The Introduction of Aphrodisian Elements into Germany and the Beginning of the Fashion Battles

Long before the Third Reich, Germans battled the French on the field of fashion; it was a battle between the Aphrodisian culture that had made its way to France, and the Demetrian placement of woman as a wife and mother. As early as the 1600s, German satirical picture sheets were distributed that showed the “Latin morals, manners, customs, and vanity” of the French as threatening Nordic culture in Germany. In the twentieth century, Paris was the height of high fashion, and as tensions between the two countries increased, the French increased their derogatory characterizations of German women for not being stereotypically Aphrodisian. In 1914, a Parisian comic book presented Germans as “a nation of fat, unrefined, badly dressed clowns.”[6] And in 1917, a French depiction of “Virtuous Germania” shows her as “a fat, large-breasted, mean-looking woman, with a severe scowl on her chubby face.”[7]

Hitler saw the French fashion conglomerate as a manifestation of the Jewish spirit, and it was common to hear that Paris was controlled by Jews. Women were discouraged from wearing foreign modes of dress such as those in the Jewish and Parisian shops: “Sex appeal was considered to be ‘Jewish cosmopolitanism’, whilst slimming cures were frowned upon as counter to the birth drive.”[8] Thus, the Nazis staunch stance against anything French was in part a reaction to the Latin qualities of French culture, which had migrated to the Mediterranean thousands of years earlier, and that set the highest image of woman as something German men did not want: “a frivolous play toy that superficially only thinks about pleasure, adorns herself with trinkets and spangles, and resembles a glittering vessel, the interior of which is hollow and desolate.”[9] Such values had no place in National Socialism, which promoted autarky, frugalness, respect for the earth’s resources, natural beauty, a true religiosity (Christian at first, with the eventual goal to return to paganism), devotion to higher causes (such as to God and the state), service to one’s community, and the role of women as a wife and mother.

Opposition to the Aphrodisian Culture in the Third Reich

Most students of Third Reich history are familiar with the more popular efforts to shape women’s lives: the Lebensborn program for unwed mothers, interest-free loans for marriage and children, and propaganda posters that emphasized health and motherhood. But some of the largest battles in the fight for women occurred almost entirely within the sphere of fashion—in magazines, beauty salons, and women’s organizations.

The Nazis did not discount fashion, only its Aphrodisian manifestations. On the contrary, they understood fashion as a powerful political tool in shaping the mores of generations of women. Fashion and beauty also were recognized as important elements in the cultural revolution that is necessary for lasting political change. German author Stafan Zweig commented on fashion in the 1920s:

Today its dictatorship becomes universal in a heartbeat. No emperor, no khan in the history of the world ever experienced a similar power, no spiritual commandment a similar speed. Christianity and socialism required centuries and decades to win their followings, to enforce their commandments on as many people as a modern Parisian tailor enslaves in eight days.[10]

Thus, Nazi Germany established a fashion bureau and numerous women’s organizations as active forces of cultural hegemony. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, the national leader of the NS-Frauenschaft (NSF, or National Socialist Women’s League), said the organization’s aim was to show women how their small actions could impact the entire nation.[11] Many of these “small actions” involved daily choices about dress, shopping, health, and hygiene.

The biggest enemies of women, according to the Nazi regime, were those un-German forces that worked to denigrate the German woman. These included Parisian high fashion and cosmetics, Jewish fashion, and the Hollywood image of the heavily made up, cigarette-smoking vamp—the archetype of the Aphrodisian. These forces not only impacted women’s clothing, personal care choices, and activities, but were dangerous since they touched the German woman’s very spirit.

Although the image of the dirndl-wearing woman working the fields was heavily promoted, Hitler was not anti-fashion and realized the value in beautiful dress and that in order to retain women’s support, he could not do away with their luxury items completely. Part of the reason he opposed Joseph Goebbels’ 1944 plans to close fashion houses and beauty parlors was not because he disagreed, but because he was “fearful that this would antagonize German women,” particular those of the middle classes who he relied on for support.[12] Hitler showed his concern for tasteful clothing when he rejected the first design of girls’ uniforms for the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM, League of German Girls) as “old sacks” and said the look should not be “too primitive.”[13] And in a conference with party leaders he said:

Clothing should not now suddenly return to the Stone Age; one should remain where we are now. I am of the opinion that when one wants a coat made, one can allow it to be made handsomely. It doesn’t become more expensive because of that. . . . Is it really something so horrible when [a woman] looks pretty? Let’s be honest, we all like to see it.[14]

Though understanding the need for tasteful and beautiful dress, the Nazis were adamantly against elements foreign to the Nordic spirit. The list included foreign fashion, trousers, provocative clothing, cosmetics, perfumes, hair alterations (such as coloring and permanents), extensive eyebrow plucking, dieting, alcohol, and smoking. In February 1916, the government issued a list of “forbidden luxury items” that included foreign (i.e., French) cosmetics and perfumes.[15] Permanents and hair coloring were strongly discouraged. Although the Nazis were against provocative clothing in everyday dress, they encouraged sportiness and were certainly not prudish about young girls wearing shorts to exercise. A parallel can be seen in the scanty dress worn by Spartan girls during their exercises, a civilization characterized by its Nordic spirit and solar-orientation.

Some have said that Hitler was opposed to cosmetics because of his vegetarian leanings, since cosmetics were made from animal byproducts. More likely, he retained the same views that kept women from wearing makeup for centuries in Western countries—the innate understanding that the Aphrodisian woman is opposed to Aryan culture. Nazi proponents said “red lips and painted cheeks suited the ‘Oriental’ or ‘Southern’ woman, but such artificial means only falsified the true beauty and femininity of the German woman.”[16] Others said that any amount of makeup or jewelry was considered “sluttish.”[17] Magazines in the Third Reich still carried advertisements for perfumes and cosmetics, but articles started advocating minimal, natural-looking makeup, for the truth was that most women were unable to pull off a fresh and healthy image without a little help from cosmetics.

Although jewelry and cosmetics were not banned, many areas of the Third Reich were impossible to enter unless conforming to Nazi ideals. In 1933, “painted” women were banned from Kreisleitung party meetings in Breslau. Women in the Lebensborn program were not allowed to use lipstick, pluck their eyebrows, or paint their nails.[18] When in uniform, women were forbidden to wear conspicuous jewelry, brightly colored gloves, bright purses, and obvious makeup.[19] The BDM also was influential in shaping fashion in the regime, with young girls taking up the use of clever pejoratives to reinforce the regime’s message that unnatural beauty was not Aryan. The Reich Youth Leader said:

The BDM does not subscribe to the untruthful ideal of a painted and external beauty, but rather strives for an honest beauty, which is situated in the harmonious training of the body and in the noble triad of body, soul, and mind. Staunch BDM members whole-heartedly embraced the message, and called those women who cosmetically tried to attain the Aryan female ideal ‘n2 (nordic ninnies)’ or ‘b3 (blue-eyed, blonde blithering idiots).’[20]

The Nazis offered many alternatives to Aphrodisian values: beauty would be derived from good character, exercise outdoors, a good diet, healthy skin free of the harsh chemicals in makeup, comfortable (yet still stylish and flattering) clothing, and from the love for her husband, children, home, and country. The most encouraged hairstyles were in buns or plaits—styles that saved money on trips to the beauty salon and were seen as more wholesome and befitting of the German character. In fact, Tracht (traditional German dress) was viewed as not merely clothing, but also as “the expression of a spiritual demeanor and a feeling of worth . . . Outwardly, it conveys the expression of the steadfastness and solid unity of the rural community.”[21] Foreign clothing designs, according to Gerlach, led to physical and “psychological distortion and damage, and thereby to national and racial deterioration.”[22]

*   *   *

Some people may be inclined to interpret Aphrodisian culture as positive for the sexes—it puts the emphasis for women not on careers but on their existence as sexual beings. Men often encourage such behavior by their dating choices and by complimenting an Aphrodisian “look” in women. But Aphrodisian culture is not only damaging to women, as Bachofen relates, by reducing them to the status of sex slave of multiple men. It also is degrading for men, at the level of personality and at the deepest levels of being. As Evola writes about the degeneration into Aphroditism:

The chthonic and infernal nature penetrates the virile principle and lowers it to a phallic level. The woman now dominates man as he becomes enslaved to the senses and a mere instrument of procreation. Vis-à-vis the Aphrodistic goddess, the divine male is subjected to the magic of the feminine principle and is reduced to the likes of an earthly demon or a god of the fecundating waters—in other words, to an insufficient and dark power.[23]

(PICTURE: Swedish singer Zarah Leander)

Aphroditism also contributes to the loss of wonder that is essential to a transcendent-based worldview, since many now find it hard to be moved by the ordinary. Josef Pieper discusses the importance of being able to see the divine in the natural:

If someone needs the ‘unusual’ to be moved to astonishment, that person has lost the ability to respond rightly to the wondrous, the mirandum, of being. The hunger for the sensational . . . is an unmistakable sign of the loss of the true power of wonder, for a bourgeois-ized humanity.[24]

A society that promotes so much unnatural beauty will no doubt lose the ability to experience the wondrous in the natural. It is essential that people retain the ability to love and be moved by the pure and natural, in order to once again return to a civilization centered in a Traditional Aryan worldview.

Notes

1. Daniel Boyarin, “Sex,” Jewish Women’s Archive.

2. Irene Guenther, Nazi ‘Chic’?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 50–51.

3. Guenther, 16.

4. Guenther, 159.

5. Agnes Gerlach,  quoted in Guenther, 146.

6. Guenther, 21–22.

7. Guenther, 26.

8. Matthew Stibbe, “Women and the Nazi state,” History Today, vol. 43, November 1993.

9. Guenther, 93.

10. Stefan  Zweig, quoted in Guenther, 9.

11. Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (Essex, UK: Pearson, 2001), 88.

12. Stephenson, 133.

13. Guenther, 120.

14. Adolf Hitler, quoted in Guenther, 141.

15. Guenther, 32.

16. Guenther, 100.

17. Guido Knopp,  Hitler’s Women (New York: Routledge, 2003), 231.

18. Guenther, 99.

19. Guenther, 129.

20. Guenther, 121.

21. Guenther, 111.

22. Gerlach, quoted in Guenther, 145.

23. Evola, Revolt, 223.

24. Josef Pieper,  Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Gerald Malsbary (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), 102.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women

D. H. Lawrence on Men & Women

Derek HAWTHORNE

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

1. Love and Strife

In a 1913 letter D. H. Lawrence writes that “it is the problem of to-day, the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one, between men and women.” Lawrence’s views about relations between the sexes, and about sex differences are perhaps his most controversial – and they have frequently been misrepresented. But before we delve into those views, let us ask why it should be the case that establishing a new relation between men and women is “the problem of to-day.” The reason is fairly obvious. The species divides itself into male and female, reproduces itself thereby, and the overwhelming majority of human beings seek their fulfillment in a relationship to the opposite sex. If relations between the sexes have somehow been crippled—as Lawrence believes they have been—then this is a catastrophe. It is hard to imagine a greater, more pressing problem.

Lawrence came to relations with women bearing serious doubts about his own manhood, and with the conviction that his nature was fundamentally androgynous. Throughout his life, but especially as a boy, it was easier for him to relate to women and to form close bonds with them. Thus, when Lawrence discusses the nature of woman he draws not only upon his experiences with women, but also upon his understanding of his own nature. One of the questions we must examine is whether, in doing so, Lawrence was led astray. After all, Lawrence eventually came to repudiate the idea of any sort of fundamental androgyny and to claim that men and women are radically different. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he writes, “We are all wrong when we say there is no vital difference between the sexes.” Lawrence wrote this in 1921 intending it to be provocative, but it is surely much more controversial in today’s world, where it has become a dogma in some circles to insist that sex differences (now called “gender differences”) are “socially constructed.” Lawrence continues: “There is every difference. Every bit, every cell in a boy is male, every cell is female in a woman, and must remain so. Women can never feel or know as men do. And in the reverse, men can never feel and know, dynamically, as women do.”

Lawrence saw relations between the sexes as essentially a war. He tells us in his essay “Love” that all love between men and women is “dual, a love which is the motion of melting, fusing together into oneness, and a love which is the intense, frictional, and sensual gratification of being burnt down, burnt into separate clarity of being, unthinkable otherness and separateness.” The love between men and women is a fusing—or a will to fusing—but one that never fully takes place because the relation is also fundamentally frictional. Again and again Lawrence emphasizes the idea that men and women are metaphysically different. In other words, they have different, and even opposed ways of being in the world. They are not just anatomically different; they have different ways of thinking and feeling, and achieve satisfaction and fulfillment in life through different means.

Lawrence’s view of the difference between the sexes can be fruitfully compared to the Chinese theory of yin and yang.  These concepts are of great antiquity, but the way in which they are generally understood today is the product of an ambitious intellectual synthesis that took place under the early Han dynasty (207 B.C.–9 A.D.). According to this philosophy, the universe is shot through with an ultimate principle or power known as the Tao. However, the Tao divides itself into two opposing principles, yin and yang. These oppose yet complement each other. Yang manifests itself in maleness, hardness, harshness, dominance, heat, light, and the sun, amongst other things. Yin manifests itself in femaleness, softness, gentleness, yielding, cold, darkness, the moon, etc.

Contrary to the impression these lists might give, however, yang is not regarded as “superior” to yin; hardness is not superior to softness, nor is dominance superior to yielding. Each requires the other and cannot exist without the other. In certain situations a yang approach or condition is to be preferred, in others a yin approach. On occasion, yang may predominate to the point where it becomes harmful, and it must be counterbalanced by yin, or vice versa. (These principles are of central importance, for example, in traditional Chinese medicine.) The Tao Te Ching, a work written by a man chiefly for men extols the virtues of yin, and continually advises one to choose yin ways over yang. Lao-Tzu tells us over and over that it is “best to be like water,” that “those who control, fail. Those who grasp, lose,” and that “soft and weak overcome stiff and strong.”

Like the Taoists, Lawrence regards maleness and femaleness as opposed, yet complementary. It is not the case that the male, or the male way of being, is superior to the female, or vice versa. In a sense the sexes are equal, yet equality does not mean sameness. The error of male chauvinism is in thinking that one way, the male way, is superior; that dominance and hardness are just “obviously” superior to their opposites.

Yet the same error is committed by some who call themselves feminists. Tacitly, they assume that the male or yang characteristics are superior, and enjoin women to seek fulfillment in life through cultivating those traits in themselves. To those who might wonder whether such a program is possible, to say nothing of desirable, the theory of the “social construction of gender” is today being offered as support. According to this view, the only inherent differences between men and women are anatomical, and all of the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral characteristics attributed to the sexes throughout history have actually been the product of culture and environment. (And so “yin and yang,” according to this view, is really a rather naïve philosophy which confuses nurture with nature.) Clearly, Lawrence would reject this theory. In doing so, he is on very solid ground.

It would, of course, be foolish not to recognize that some “masculine” and “feminine” traits are culturally conditioned. An obvious example would be the prevailing view in American culture that a truly “masculine” man is unable, without the help of women or gay men, to color-coordinate his wardrobe. However, when one sees certain traits in men and women displaying themselves consistently in all cultures and throughout all of human history it makes sense to speak of masculine and feminine natures. It is plausible to argue that a trait is culturally conditioned only if it shows up in some cultures but not in others. Unfortunately, the “social construction of gender” thesis has achieved the status of a dogma in academic circles. And, in truth, ultimately it has to be asserted as dogma since believing in it requires that we ignore the evidence of human history, profound philosophies such as Taoism, and most of the scientific research into sex differences that has taken place over the last one hundred years.

I said earlier that Lawrence believes men and women to be “metaphysically different,” and in his essay “A Study of Thomas Hardy” he does indeed write as if he believes they actually see the world with a different metaphysics in mind:

It were a male conception to see God with a manifold Being, even though He be One God. For man is ever keenly aware of the multiplicity of things, and their diversity. But woman, issuing from the other end of infinity, coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation, is obsessed by the oneness of things, the One Being, undifferentiated. Man, on the other hand, coming forth as the desire to single out one thing from another, to reduce each thing to its intrinsic self by process of elimination, cannot but be possessed by the infinite diversity and contrariety in life, by a passionate sense of isolation, and a poignant yearning to be at one.

So, men seek or are preoccupied with multiplicity, and women with unity. What are we to make of such a bizarre claim? First of all, it seems to run counter to the Greek tradition, especially that of the Pythagoreans, which tended to identify the One with the masculine, and the Many with the feminine. However, if one looks to Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher Lawrence was particularly keen on, one finds a different story. Empedocles posits two fundamental forces which are responsible for all change in the universe: Love and Strife. Love, at the purely physical level, is a force of attraction. It draws things together, and without the intervention of Strife it would result in a monistic universe in which only one being existed. Strife breaks up and divides. It is a force of repulsion and separation. Now, Empedocles seems to identify Love with Aphrodite, and we may infer, though he does not say so, that Strife is Ares. In other words, he identifies his two forces with the archetypal female and male. This can offer us a clue as to what Lawrence is up to.

In Lawrence’s view, it is the female who wants to draw things, especially people, together. It is the female who yearns to heal divisions, to break down barriers. “Coming forth as the flesh, manifest in sensation” she seeks to overcome separateness through feeling, primarily through love. In the family situation, it is the female who tries to unite and overcome discord through love, whereas it is the male, typically, who frustrates this through the insistence on rules and distinctions. The ideal of universal love and an end to strife and division is fundamentally feminine—one which men, throughout history, have continually frustrated. It is characteristic of men to make war, and characteristic of women, no matter what cause or principle is involved, to object and to call for peace and unity.

Now the male, as Lawrence puts it, suffers from a sense of isolation, and a “yearning to be one.” He yearns for oneness, in fact, as the male yearns for the female. Yet his entire being disposes him to see the world in terms of its distinctness, and, indeed, to make a world rife with distinctions. Lawrence implies that polytheism is a “male” religion, and monotheism a “female” one. It is easy to see the logic involved in this. Polytheism sees the divine being that permeates the world as many because the world is itself many. Further, societies with polytheistic religions have always been keenly aware of ethnic and social differences, differences within the society (as in the Indian caste system), and between societies. Monotheism, on the other hand, tends toward universalism. Christianity especially, however it has actually been practiced, declares all men equal in the sight of God and calls for peace and unity in the world. (Lawrence, as we shall see later on, does indeed regard Christianity as a “feminine” religion, and blames it, in part, for feminizing Western men.)

This fundamental, metaphysical difference has the consequence that men and women do, in a real sense, live in different worlds. But perhaps such a formulation reflects a male bias towards differentiation. It is equally correct to say, in a more “feminine” formulation, that it is the same world seen in two, complementary ways. Indeed, it may be the case that it is difficult to see, from a male perspective, how the two sexes and their different ways of thinking and perceiving can achieve a rapprochement. Lawrence believes, of course, that they can live together, and that their opposite tendencies can be harmonized. In this way he is like Heraclitus, Lawrence’s favorite pre-Socratic, when he says “what is opposed brings together; the finest harmony is composed of things at variance, and everything comes to be in accordance with strife.” Heraclitus also tells us that “They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it [the Logos] agrees with itself. It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of the bow and lyre.” In order to make a lyre or a bow, the two opposite ends of a piece of wood must be bent towards each other, never meeting, but held in tension. Their tension and opposition makes possible beautiful music, in the case of the lyre, and the propulsion of an arrow, in the case of the bow. Both involve a harmony through opposition.

In a 1923 newspaper interview Lawrence is quoted as saying “If men were left to themselves, they would rush off . . . into destruction. But women keep life back at its own center. They pull the men back. Women have enormous passive strength, the strength of inertia.” Here Lawrence uses an image he was very fond of: women are at the center, the hub. This is because they are closer to “the source” than men are.

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, Lawrence tells us “The blood-consciousness and the blood-passion is the very source and origin of us. Not that we can stay at the source. Nor even make a goal of the source, as Freud does. The business of living is to travel away from the source. But you must start every single day fresh from the source. You must rise every day afresh out of the dark sea of the blood.” Lawrence believes that men yearn for purposive, creative activity, which involves moving away from the source. However, the energy and inspiration for purposive activity is drawn from the source, and so there is a complementary movement back towards it.

In The Rainbow, Lawrence describes how Tom Brangwen, besotted with his wife, seems to lose himself in a sensual obsession with her, and with knowing her sexually. But gradually,

Brangwen began to find himself free to attend to the outside life as well. His intimate life was so violently active, that it set another man in him free. And this new man turned with interest to public life, to see what part he could take in it. This would give him scope for new activity, activity of a kind for which he was now created and released. He wanted to be unanimous with the whole of purposive mankind.

Sex is one means of contacting the source. Men contact the source through women. This does not mean, of course, that blood-consciousness is in women but not in men. Rather, it means that in most men the blood-consciousness in them is “activated” primarily through their relationship to women. Second, in women blood-consciousness is more dominant than it is in men. Women are more intuitive than men; they operate more on the basis of feeling than intellect. It should not be necessary to point out that whereas such an observation might, in another author, be taken as a denigration of women, in Lawrence it is actually high praise. Women are also much more in tune with their bodies and bodily cycles than men are. Men tend to see their bodies as adversaries that must be whipped into shape.

When Lawrence continually tells us that we must find a way to reawaken the blood-consciousness in us, he is writing primarily for men. Women are already there—or, at least, they can get there with less effort. There is an old adage: “Women are, but men must become.” To be feminine is a constant state that a woman has as her birthright. Masculinity, on the other hand, is something men must achieve and prove. Rousseau in Emile states “The male is male only at certain moments, the female is female all of her life, or at least all her youth.” We exhort boys to “be a man,” but never does one hear girls told to “be a woman.” One can compliment a man simply by saying “he’s a man,” whereas “she’s a woman” seems mere statement of fact. The psychological difference between masculinity and femininity mirrors the biological fact that all fetuses begin as female; something must happen to them in order to make them male. It also articulates what is behind the strange conviction many men have had, including many great poets and artists, that woman is somehow the keeper of life’s mysteries; the one closest to the well-spring of nature.

In “A Study of Thomas Hardy,” Lawrence states that “in a man’s life, the female is the swivel and centre on which he turns closely, producing his movement.” Goethe tells us “Das ewig Weiblich zieht uns hinan” (“The Eternal Feminine draws us onwards”). The female, the male’s source of the source, stands at the center of his life. The woman as personification of the life mystery entices him to come together with her, and through their coupling the life mystery perpetuates itself. But he is not, ultimately, satisfied by this coupling. He goes forth into the world, his body renewed by his contact with the woman, but full of desire to know this mystery more adequately, and to be its vehicle through creative expression.

Without a woman, a man feels unmoored and ungrounded, for without a woman he has no center in his life. A man—a heterosexual man—can never feel fulfilled and can never reach his full potential without a woman to whom he can turn. As to homosexual men, it is a well-known fact that many cultivate in themselves characteristics that have been traditionally usually associated with woman: refined taste in clothing and decoration, cooking, gardening, etc. What these characteristics have in common is connectedness to the pleasures of the moment, and to the rhythms and necessities of life. Men are normally purpose-driven and future-oriented. They tend to overlook those aspects of life that please, but lack any greater purpose other than pleasing. They tend, therefore, to be somewhat insensitive to their surroundings, to color, to texture, to odor, to taste. They tend, in short, to be so focused upon doing, that they miss out on being. Heterosexual men look to women to ground them, and to provide these ingredients to life—ingredients which, in truth, make life livable. Homosexual men must make a woman within themselves, in order to be grounded. (This does not mean, however, that they must become effeminate – see my review essay of Jack Donovan’s Androphilia for more details.)

Homosexual men are, of course, the exception not the rule. Lawrence writes, of the typical man, “Let a man walk alone on the face of the earth, and he feels himself like a loose speck blown at random. Let him have a woman to whom he belongs, and he will feel as though he had a wall to back up against; even though the woman be mentally a fool.” And what of the woman? What does she desire? Lawrence tells us that “the vital desire of every woman is that she shall be clasped as axle to the hub of the man, that his motion shall portray her motionlessness, convey her static being into movement, complete and radiating out into infinity, starting from her stable eternality, and reaching eternity again, after having covered the whole of time.” Man is the “doer,” the actor, whereas woman need do nothing. Just by being woman she becomes the center of a man’s universe.

The dark side of this, in Lawrence’s view, is a tendency in women towards possessiveness, and towards wanting to make themselves not just the center of a man’s life but his sole concern. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s describes at length Rupert Birkin’s process of wrestling with this aspect of femininity:

But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of self-importance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up.

Birkin sees these qualities in Ursula, with whom he is in love. “She too was the awful, arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest depended.” He feels she wants, in a way, to worship him, but “to worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession.”

Woman’s possessiveness is understandable given that the man is necessary to her well-being: she is only happy if she is center to the orbit and activity of some man. Again, for Lawrence, such a claim does not denigrate women, for he has already as much as said that a man is nothing without a woman. Nevertheless, some will see in this view of men and woman a sexism that places the man above the woman. From Lawrence’s perspective, this is illusory. It is true that the man is “doer,” but his perpetual need to act and to do stands in stark contrast to the woman, who need do nothing in order be who she is. It is true, further, that men’s ambition has given them power in the world, but it is a power that is nothing compared to that of the woman, who exercises her power without having to do anything. She reigns, without ruling. The man does what he does, but must return to the woman, and is “like a loose speck blown at random without her” – and he knows this. Much of misogyny may have to do with this. From the man’s perspective, the woman is all-powerful, and the source of her power a mystery.

Many modern feminists, however, conceive of power in an entirely male way, as the active power of doing. Lawrence recognized that in trying to cultivate this male power within themselves, women do not rise in the estimation of most men. Instead they are diminished, for men’s respect for and fascination with women springs entirely from the fact that unlike themselves women do not have to chase after an ideal of who they ought to be; they do not have to get caught up in the rat race in order to respect themselves. They can simply be; they can live, and take joy just in living.

One can make a rough distinction between two types of feminism. The most familiar type is what one might call the “woman on the street feminism,” which one encounters from average, working women, and which they imbibe from television, films, and magazines. This feminism essentially has as its aim claiming for women all that which formerly had been the province of men—including not only traditionally male jobs, but even male ways of speaking, moving, dressing, bonding, exercising, and displaying sexual interest. Ironically, this form of feminism is at root a form of masculinism, which makes traditionally masculine traits the hallmarks of the “liberated” or self-actualized human being.

The other type of feminism is usually to be found only in academia, though not all academic feminists subscribe to it. It insists that women have their own ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to others. Feminist philosophers have written of woman’s “ways of knowing” as distinct from men’s, and have even put forward the idea that women approach ethical decision-making in a markedly different way. It is this form of feminism to which Lawrence is closest. Lawrence’s writings are concerned with liberating both men and women from the tyranny of a modern civilization which cuts them off from their true natures. Liberation for modern women cannot mean becoming like modern men, for modern men are living in a condition of spiritual (as well as wage) slavery. In an essay on feminism, Wendell Berry writes

It is easy enough to see why women came to object to the role of [the comic strip character] Blondie, a mostly decorative custodian of a degraded, consumptive modern household, preoccupied with clothes, shopping, gossip, and outwitting her husband. But are we to assume that one may fittingly cease to be Blondie by becoming Dagwood? Is the life of a corporate underling—even acknowledging that corporate underlings are well paid—an acceptable end to our quest for human dignity and worth? . . . How, I am asking, can women improve themselves by submitting to the same specialization, degradation, trivialization, and tyrannization of work that men have submitted to? [Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002), 69–70.]

I will return to this issue later.

Having now characterized, in broad strokes, Lawrence’s views on the differences between men and woman, I now turn to a more detailed discussion of each.

2. The Nature of Man

As we have seen, Lawrence believes that men (most men) need to have a woman in their lives. Their relationship to a woman serves to ground their lives, and to provide the man not only with a respite from the woes of the world, but with energy and inspiration. However, this is not the same thing as saying that the man makes the woman, or his relationship to her, the purpose of his life. In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “When he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair. When he makes woman, or the woman and child, the great centre of life and of life-significance, he falls into the beginnings of despair.” This is because Lawrence believes that true satisfaction for men can come only from some form of creative, purposive activity outside the family.

Having a woman is therefore a necessary but not a sufficient condition for male happiness. In addition to a woman, he must have a purpose. Women, on the other hand, do not require a purpose beyond the home and the family in order to be happy. This is another of those claims that will rankle some, so let us consider two important points about what Lawrence has said. First, he is speaking of what he believes the typical woman is like, just as he is speaking of the typical man. There are at least a few exceptions to just about every generalization. Second, we must ask an absolutely crucial question of those who regard such claims as demeaning women: why is being occupied with home and family lesser than having a purpose (e.g., a career) outside the home? The argument could be made—and I think Lawrence would be sympathetic to this—that the traditional female role of making a home and raising children is just as important and possibly more important than the male activities pursued outside the home. Again, much of contemporary feminism sees things from a typically male point of view, and denigrates women who choose motherhood rather than one of the many meaningless, ulcer-producing careers that have long been the province of men.

Lawrence writes, “Primarily and supremely man is always the pioneer of life, adventuring onward into the unknown, alone with his own temerarious, dauntless soul. Woman for him exists only in the twilight, by the camp fire, when day has departed. Evening and the night are hers.” Lawrence’s male bias creeps in here a bit, as he romanticizes the “dauntless” male soul. Men and women always believe, in their heart of hearts, that their ways are superior. Nevertheless, Lawrence is not here relegating women to an inferior position. Half of life is spent in the evening and night. Day belongs to the man, night to the woman. It is a division of labor. Lawrence is drawing here, as he frequently does, on traditional mythological themes: the man is solar, the woman lunar.

Lawrence characterizes the man’s pioneering activity as follows: “It is the desire of the human male to build a world: not ‘to build a world for you, dear’; but to build up out of his own self and his own belief and his own effort something wonderful. Not merely something useful. Something wonderful.” In other words, the man’s primary purpose is not having or doing any of the “practical” things that a wife and a family require. And when he acts on a larger scale—Lawrence gives building the Panama Canal as an example—it is not with the end in mind of making a world in which wives and babes can be more comfortable and secure (“a world for you, dear”). He seeks to make his mark on the world; to bring something glorious into existence. And so men create culture: games, religions, rituals, dances, artworks, poetry, music, and philosophy. Wars are fought, ultimately, for the same reason. It is probably true, as is often asserted, that every war has some kind of economic motivation. However, it is probably also true to assert that in the case of just about every actual war there was another, more cost-effective alternative. Men make war for the same reason they climb mountains, jump out of airplanes, race cars, and run with the bulls: for the challenge, and the fame and glory and exhilaration that goes with meeting the challenge. It is an aspect of male psychology that most women find baffling, and even contemptible.

Now, curiously, Lawrence refers to this “impractical,” purposive motive of the male as an “essentially religious or creative motive.” What can he mean by this? Specifically, why does he characterize it as a religious motive?

It is religious because it involves the pursuit of something that is beyond the ordinary and the familiar. It is a leap into the unknown. The man has to follow what Lawrence frequently calls the “Holy Ghost” within himself and to try to make something within the world. He yearns always for the yet-to-be, the yet-to-be-realized, and always has his eye on the future, on what is in process of coming to be. Yet there seems to be, at least on the surface, a strange inconsistency in Lawrence’s characterization of the man’s motive as religious. After all, for Lawrence the life mystery, the source of being is religious object—and women are closer to this source. Man is entranced by woman, and with her he helps to propagate this power in the world through sex, but his sense of “purpose” causes him to move away from the source. So why isn’t it the woman whose “motives” are religious, and the man who is, in effect, irreligious?

The answer is that religion is not being at the source: it is directedness toward the source. Religion is possible only because of a lack or an absence in the human soul. Religion is ultimately a desire to put oneself at-one with the source. But this is possible only if one is not, originally or most of the time, at one with it. In a way, the woman is not fundamentally religious because she is the goddess, the source herself. The sexual longing of the man for the woman, and his utter inability ever to fully satisfy his desire and to resolve the mystery that is woman, are a kind of small-scale allegory for man’s large-scale, religious relationship to the source of being itself. He is, as I have said, renewed by his relations with women and, for a time, satisfied. But then he goes forth into the world with a desire for something, something. He creates, and when he does he is acting to exalt the life mystery (religion and art), to understand it (philosophy and science), or to further it (invention and production).

Lawrence speaks of how a man must put his wife “under the spell of his fulfilled decision.” Woman, who rules over the night, draws man to her and they become one through sex. Man, who rules the day, draws woman into his purpose, his aim in life, and through this they become one in another fashion. The man’s purpose does not become the woman’s purpose. He pursues this alone. But if the woman simply believes in him and what he aims to do, she becomes a tremendous source of support for the man, and she gives herself a reason for being. The man needs the woman as center, as hub of his life, and the woman needs to play this role for some man. Without a mate, though a man may set all sorts of purposes before him, ultimately they seem meaningless. He feels a sense of hollow emptiness, and drifts into despair. He lets his appearance go, and lives in squalor. He may become an alcoholic and a misogynist. He dies much sooner than his married friends, often by his own hand. As to the woman, without a man who has set himself some purpose that she can believe in, she assumes the male role and tries to find fulfillment through some kind of busy activity in the world. But as she pursues this, she feels increasingly bitter and hard, and a terrific rage begins to seethe beneath her placid surface. She becomes a troublemaker and a prude. Increasingly angry at men, she makes a virtue of necessity and declares herself emancipated from them. She collects pets.

In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence writes:

As a matter of fact, unless a woman is held, by man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force. She can’t help herself. A woman is almost always vulnerable to pity. She can’t bear to see anything physically hurt. But let a woman loose from the bounds and restraints of man’s fierce belief, in his gods and in himself, and she becomes a gentle devil.

If a woman is to be the hub in the life a man, and derive satisfaction from that, everything depends on the spirit of the man. A few lines later in the same text Lawrence states, “Unless a man believes in himself and his gods, genuinely: unless he fiercely obeys his own Holy Ghost; his woman will destroy him. Woman is the nemesis of doubting man.” In order for the woman to believe in a man, the man must believe in himself and his purpose. If he is filled with self-doubt, the woman will doubt him. If he lacks the strength to command himself, he cannot command her respect and devotion. And the trouble with modern men is that they are filled with self-doubt and lack the courage of their convictions.

Lawrence, following Nietzsche, in part blames Christianity for weakening modern, Western men. Men are potent—sexually and otherwise—to the extent they are in tune with the life force. But Christianity has “spiritualized” men. It has filled their heads with hatred of the body, and of strength, instinct, and vitality. It has infected them with what Lawrence calls the “love ideal,” which demands, counter to every natural impulse, that men love everyone and regard everyone as their equal.

Frequently in his fiction Lawrence depicts relationships in which the woman has turned against the man because he is, in effect, spiritually emasculated. The most dramatic and symbolically obvious example of this is the relationship of Clifford and Connie  in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Clifford returns from the First World War paralyzed from the waist down. But like the malady of the Grail King in Wolfram’s Parzival, this is only (literarily speaking) an outward, physical expression of an inward, psychic emasculation. Clifford is far too sensible a man to allow himself to be overcome by any great passion, so the loss of his sexual powers is not so dear. He has a keen, cynical wit and believes that he has seen through passion and found it not as great a thing as poets say that it is. It is his spiritual condition that drives Connie away from him, not so much his physical one. And so she wanders into the game preserve on their estate (representing the small space of “wildness” that still can rise up within civilization) and into the arms of Mellors, the gamekeeper. Their subsequent relationship becomes a hot, corporeal refutation of Clifford’s philosophy.

In Women in Love, Gerald Crich, the industrial magnate, is destroyed by Gudrun essentially because he does not believe in himself. Outwardly, he is “the God of the machine.” But his mastery of the material world is meaningless busywork, and he knows it. Gudrun is drawn to him because of this outward appearance of power, but when she finds that it is an illusion she hates him, and ultimately drives him to his death. For Lawrence, this is an allegory of the modern relationship between the sexes. Men today are masters of the material universe as they have never been before, but inside they are anxious and empty. The reason is that these “materialists” are profoundly afraid of and hostile to matter and nature, especially their own. Their intellect and “will to power” has cut them off from the life force and they are, in their deepest selves, impotent. The women know this, and scorn them.

In The Rainbow, Winifred Inger is Ursula’s teacher (with whom she has a brief affair), and an early feminist. She tells Ursula at one point,

The men will do no more,–they have lost the capacity for doing. . . .  They fuss and talk, but they are really inane. They make everything fit into an old, inert idea. Love is a dead idea to them. They don’t come to one and love one, they come to an idea, and they say “You are my idea,” so they embrace themselves. As if I were any man’s idea! As if I exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I will be betrayed by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy to be able to act; they are all impotent, they can’t take a woman. They come to their own idea every time, and take that. They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they are hungry.”

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled.”

It is important to understand here that the issue is not one of power. Lawrence’s point not that men must dominate or control their wives. In fact, in a late essay entitled “Matriarchy” (originally published as “If Women Were Supreme”) Lawrence actually advocates rule by women, at least in the home, because he believes it would liberate men. He assumes the truth of the claim—now in disrepute—that early man had lived in matriarchal societies and writes, “the men seem to have been lively sorts, hunting and dancing and fighting, while the woman did the drudgery and minded the brats. . . . A woman deserves to possess her own children and have them called by her name. As to the household furniture and the bit of money in the bank, it seems naturally hers.” The man, in such a situation, is not the slave of the woman because the man is “first and foremost an active, religious member of the tribe.” The man’s real life is not in the household, but in creative activity, and religious activity:

The real life of the man is not spent in his own little home, daddy in the bosom of the family, wheeling the perambulator on Sundays. His life is passed mainly in the khiva, the great underground religious meeting-house where only the males assemble, where the sacred practices of the tribe are carried on; then also he is away hunting, or performing the sacred rites on the mountains, or he works in the fields.

Men, Lawrence tells us, have social and religious needs which can only be satisfied apart from women. The disaster of modern marriage is that men not only think they have to rule the roost, but they accept the woman’s insistence that he have no needs or desires that cannot be satisfied through his relationship to her. He becomes master of his household, and slave to it at the same time:

Now [man’s] activity is all of the domestic order and all his thought goes to proving that nothing matters except that birth shall continue and woman shall rock in the nest of this globe like a bird who covers her eggs in some tall tree. Man is the fetcher, the carrier, the sacrifice, and the reborn of woman. . . . Instead of being assertive and rather insentient, he becomes wavering and sensitive. He begins to have as many feelings—nay, more than a woman. His heroism is all in altruistic endurance. He worships pity and tenderness and weakness, even in himself. In short, he takes on very largely the original role of woman.

Ironically, in accepting such a situation without a fight, he only earns the woman’s contempt: “Almost invariably a [modern] married woman, as she passes the age of thirty, conceives a dislike, or a contempt, of her husband, or a pity which is near to contempt. Particularly if he is a good husband, a true modern.”

3. The Nature of Woman

In Fantasia of the Unconscious Lawrence writes, “Women will never understand the depth of the spirit of purpose in man, his deeper spirit. And man will never understand the sacredness of feeling to woman. Each will play at the other’s game, but they will remain apart.” But what is meant by “feeling” here? Lawrence is referring again to his belief that women live, to a greater extent than men, from the primal self. In the case of most men today, “mind-consciousness” and reason are dominant—to the point where they are frequently detached from “blood-consciousness” and feeling.

In describing the nature of woman Lawrence once again draws on perennial symbols: “Woman is really polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth. Her deep positivity is in the downward flow, the moon-pull.” The sun represents man, and the moon woman. Day belongs to him, and night to her. However, another set of mythic images associates the earth with woman and the sky with man. The “pull” in women is towards the earth, and this means several things. First, the earth is the source of chthonic powers, and so, as poetic metaphor, it represents the primal, pre-mental, animal aspect in human beings. In a literal sense, however, Lawrence believes that women are more in tune than men with chthonic powers: with the rhythms of nature and the cycle of seasons. Further, the “downward flow” refers to Lawrence’s belief that the lower “centres” of the body are, in a sense, more primitive, more instinctual than the upper, and that women tend to live and act from these centers more than men do. Lawrence writes, “Her deepest consciousness is in the loins and belly. . . . The great flow of female consciousness is downwards, down to the weight of the loins and round the circuit of the feet.”

Finally, to be “polarized downwards, towards the centre of the earth” means to have one’s life, one’s vital being fixed in reference to a central point. If Lawrence intends us to assume that man is polarized upwards then we may ask, toward what? If woman is oriented towards the center of the earth, then–following the logic of the mythic categories–is man oriented toward the center of the sky? But the sky has no center. Man is less fixed than woman; he is a wanderer. He is a hunter, a seeker, a pioneer, an adventurer. Woman, on the other hand, lives from the axis of the world. Mircea Eliade writes that “the religious man sought to live as near as possible to the Center of the World.” Woman is at the center. Man begins there, then goes off. He returns again and again, the phallic power in him rising in response to the chthonic power of the woman. And his religious response is an ongoing effort to bring his daytime self into line with the life force he experiences when in the arms of the woman.

Woman, Lawrence tells us, “is a flow, a river of life,” and this flow is fundamentally different from the man’s river. However, “The woman is like an idol, or a marionette, always forced to play one role or another: sweetheart, mistress, wife, mother.” The mind of the male is built to analyze and categorize. But the nature of woman, like the nature of nature itself, defies categorization. Even before Bacon, man’s response to nature was to force it to yield up its secrets, to bend it to the human will, or to see it only within the narrow parameters of whatever theory was fashionable at the moment. The male mind attempts to do this to woman as well–and the woman, to a great extent, cooperates. She fits herself into the roles expected of her by authority figures, whether it is dutiful daughter-sister-wife-mother, or dutiful feminist and career-woman.

Lawrence writes, “The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done.” Two opposing wills exist in women, Lawrence believes: a will to conform or to submit, and a will to reject all boundaries and be free. In Women in Love, Birkin compares women to horses:

“And of course,” he said to Gerald, “horses haven’t got a complete will, like human beings. A horse has no one will. Every horse, strictly, has two wills. With one will, it wants to put itself in the human power completely—and with the other, it wants to be free, wild. The two wills sometimes lock—you know that, if ever you’ve felt a horse bolt, while you’ve been driving it. . . . And woman is the same as horses: two wills act in opposition inside her. With one will, she wants to subject herself utterly. With the other she wants to bolt, and pitch her rider to perdition.”

Ursula, who is present at this exchange, laughs and responds “Then I’m a bolter.” The trouble is that she is not.

Lawrence’s fiction is filled with vivid portrayals of women (arguably much more vivid and well-drawn than his portrayals of men). The central characters in several of his novels are women (The Rainbow, The Lost Girl, The Plumed Serpent, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover). All of Lawrence’s major female characters exhibit these two wills, but frequently he presents pairs of women each of whom represents one of the wills. This is the case in Women in Love. Ultimately, in Ursula’s character the will to surrender emerges as dominant. In her sister Gudrun the will to be free and wild dominates, with tragic results. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Connie Chatterley exhibits the will to surrender, and her sister Hilda the will to be free. The two lesbians in Lawrence’s novella The Fox are cut from the same cloth. Similar pairs of women also crop up in Lawrence’s short stories. In each case, one woman learns the joys of submitting, not to a man but to the earth, to nature, to the life mystery within her. The man is a means to this, however. The best example of this in Lawrence’s fiction is probably Connie Chatterley’s journey to awakening. In John Thomas and Lady Jane, an earlier version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence has Connie speak of the significance of her lover and of his penis: “I know it was the penis which really put the evening stars into my inside self. I used to look at the evening star, and think how lovely and wonderful it was. But now it’s in me as well as outside me, and I need hardly look at it. I am it. I don’t care what you say, it was penis gave it me.” As to the other woman in Lawrence’s fiction, she tends to be horrified by the primal self in her, and its call to surrender. She lives from the ego. She rages against anything in her nature that is unchosen, and against anything else that would hem her in, especially any man. She views herself as “realistic” and hardheaded, but the general impression she gives is of being hardhearted and sterile.

In his portrayals of the latter type of woman, Lawrence is partly depicting what he believes to be a perennial aspect of the female character, and partly depicting what he regards as the quintessential “modern” woman. It is in the nature of woman to counterbalance the will to submit with an opposing will that “bolts,” and kicks against all that which limits her, including her own nature. Lawrence believes that modern womanhood and all the problems of women today arise from the over-development of that will to freedom.

A “will to freedom” sounds like a good thing, so it is important to realize that essentially what Lawrence means by this is a negative will which tries either to control, or to destroy all that which it cannot control. Lawrence’s critique of modernity is a major topic in itself, but suffice it say that he believes that in the modern period a disavowal of the primal self takes place on a mass, cultural scale. The seeds of this disavowal were sown by Christianity, and reaped by modern scientism, which becomes the avowed enemy of the religion that helped foster it. Individuals live their lives from the standpoint of ego and mental-consciousness, and distrust the blood-consciousness. The negative will in women seizes upon reason and ego-dominance as a means to free herself from the influence of her dark, chthonic self, and from the influence of the men that this dark, chthonic self draws her to. The will to negate, using the mind as its tool, thus becomes the path to “liberation.”

Lawrence writes in Apocalypse:

Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract, and driven by a self-determination terrible to behold. A strange ‘spiritual’ creature is woman today, driven on and on by the evil demon of the old Logos, never for a moment allowed to escape and be herself.

And in an essay he writes, “Woman is truly less free today than ever she has been since time began, in the womanly sense of freedom.” This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what is asserted by most pundits today, when they speak of the progress made by woman in the modern era. Why does Lawrence believe that woman is now so unfree? The answer is implied in the quotation from Apocalypse: she is not allowed to be herself.

In Studies in Classic American Literature Lawrence tells us

Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.

Because the deepest self is way down, and the conscious self is an obstinate monkey. But of one thing we may be sure. If one wants to be free, one has to give up the illusion of doing what one likes, and seek what IT wishes done.

What Lawrence says here is applicable to both men and women. “To be oneself” in the true sense means to answer to the call of the deepest self. We can only achieve our “fullness of being” if we do so. The mind invents all manner of goals and projects and ideals to be pursued, but ultimately all that we do produces only frustration and emptiness if we act in a way that does not fundamentally satisfy the needs of our deepest, pre-mental, bodily nature.

Lawrence writes further in Apocalypse: “The evil Logos says she must be ‘significant,’ she must ‘make something worth while’ of her life. So on and on she goes, making something worth while, piling up the evil forms of our civilization higher and higher, and never for a second escaping to be wrapped in the brilliant fluid folds of the new green dragon.” Earlier in the same text, Lawrence tells us that “The long green dragon with which we are so familiar on Chinese things is the dragon in his good aspect of life-bringer, life-giver, life-maker, vivifier.” In short, the “green dragon” represents the life force, the source of all, the Pan power. Lawrence is saying that modern woman, in search of something “significant” to do with her life, falls in with all the corrupt (largely, money-driven) pursuits that have brought men nothing but ulcers, emptiness, and early death. “All our present life-forms are evil,” he writes. “But with a persistence that would be angelic if it were not devilish woman insists on the best in life, by which she means the best of our evil life-forms, unable to realize that the best of evil life-forms are the most evil.” Like men, she loses touch with the natural both within herself and in the world surrounding her. Lawrence’s dragon symbolizes both of these: primal nature as such, and the primal nature within me. It is this dragon which Lawrence seeks to awake in himself, and in his readers. The tragedy of modern woman is that she has renounced the dragon, whereas she would be better off being devoured by it.

In John Thomas and Lady Jane Lawrence also links the ideal of fulfilled womanhood to the dragon. Following Connie Chatterley’s musings on the meaning of the phallus (which I quoted earlier), Lawrence writes:

The only thing which had taken her quite away from fear, if only for a night, was the strange gallant phallus looking round in its odd bright godhead, and now the arm of flesh around her, the socket of the hand against her breast, the slow, sleeping thud of the man’s heart against her body. It was all one thing—the mysterious phallic godhead. Now she knew that the worst had happened. This dragon had enfolded her, and its folds were pure gentleness and safety.

Make no mistake, Lawrence believes that women can adopt the ways of men; he believes that they can succeed at traditionally male work. But he believes that they do this at great cost to themselves. “Of all things, the most fatal to a woman is to have an aim,” Lawrence tells us. In general, he believes that the ultimate aim of life is simply living, and that we set a trap for ourselves when we declare that some goal or some ideal shall be the end of life, and believe that this will make life “meaningful.” This applies to men, but even more so to women. Why? Because, again, women are so much closer to the source that men tend to regard women as the life force embodied (“Mother Nature”). For a woman to live for something other than living is to pervert her nature, and her gift. Again, Lawrence’s position is not that a woman is incapable of doing the work of a man, but ultimately she will find it deadening: “The moment woman has got man’s ideals and tricks drilled into her, the moment she is competent in the manly world—there’s an end of it. She’s had enough. She’s had more than enough. She hates the thing she has embraced.”

In our age, many women who have forgone marriage and children in order to pursue a career are discovering this. The body has its own needs and ends, and the organism as a whole cannot flourish and achieve satisfaction unless these needs and ends are satisfied. With some exceptions, women who have chosen not to have children regret it, and suffer in other ways as well (for example, they are at higher risk for developing ovarian cancer than women who have given birth). The same goes for men, many of whom spend a great many “productive” years without feeling a need to reproduce–then are suddenly hit by that need and launch themselves on a frantic, sometimes worldwide search for a suitable mate able to father them a child. Lawrence wrote the following, prophetic words in one of his final essays:

It is all an attitude, and one day the attitude will become a weird cramp, a pain, and then it will collapse. And when it has collapsed, and she looks at the eggs she has laid, votes, or miles of typewriting, years of business efficiency—suddenly, because she is a hen and not a cock, all she has done will turn into pure nothingness to her. Suddenly it all falls out of relation to her basic henny self, and she realizes she has lost her life. The lovely henny surety, the hensureness which is the real bliss of every female, has been denied her: she had never had it. Having lived her life with such utmost strenuousness and cocksureness, she has missed her life altogether. Nothingness!

This quote suggests that Lawrence believes that the woman, the hen, ruins herself by taking up the ways appropriate and natural for the cock – but this is not exactly what he means. In Lawrence’s view, the modern ways of the cock are destroying the cock as well, but they are doubly bad for the hen. What’s bad for the gander is worse for the goose. Lawrence believes that in order to achieve satisfaction in life, we must get in touch with that primal self that the woman is fortunate enough always to be closer to.

4. A New Relation Between Man and Woman

So what is to be done? How are we to repair the damage that has been done in the modern world to the relation between the sexes? How are we to make men into men again, and women into women?

Lawrence has a great deal to say on this subject, but one of his oft-repeated recommendations essentially amounts to saying that relations between the sexes should be severed. By this he means that in order for men and women to come to each other as authentic men and women, they must stop trying to be “pals” with each other. In a 1925 letter he writes, “Friendship between a man and a woman, as a thing of first importance to either, is impossible: and I know it. We are creatures of two halves, spiritual and sensual—and each half is as important as the other. Any relation based on the one half—say the delicate spiritual half alone—inevitably brings revulsion and betrayal.”

In order for men and women to be friends, they must deliberately put aside or suppress their sexual identities and their very different natures. They must actively ignore the fact that they are men and women. They relate to each other, in effect, as neutered, sexless beings. They can never truly relax around each other, for they must continually monitor the way that they look at each other or (more problematic) touch each other. Sitting in too close proximity could awaken feelings that neither wants awakened. If, with respect to their “daytime selves,” men and women are forced to relate to each other in this way regularly, it has the potential of wrecking the ability of the “nighttime self” to relate to the opposite sex in a natural, sensual manner. Once accustomed to the daily routine of suppressing thoughts and feelings, and taking great care never to show a sexual side to their nature, these habits carry over into the realm of the romantic and sexual. Dating and courtship become fraught with tension, each party unsure of the “appropriateness” of this or that display of sexual interest or simple affection. The man, in short, becomes afraid to be a man, and the woman to be a woman. “On mixing with one another, in becoming familiar, in being ‘pals,’ they lose their own male and female integrity.” Writing of the modern marriage, Wendell Berry states

Marriage, in what is evidently its most popular version, is now on the one hand an intimate “relationship” involving (ideally) two successful careerists in the same bed, and on the other hand a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended. Marriage, in other words, has now taken the form of divorce: a prolonged and impassioned negotiation as to how things shall be divided. During their understandably temporary association, the “married” couple will typically consume a large quantity of merchandise and a large portion of each other.

If we must suppress our masculine and feminine natures in order to be friends with the opposite sex, in what way then do we actually relate to each other? We relate almost entirely through the intellect. Lawrence writes, “Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. We find a woman who is the same. We marry because we are ‘pals.’” And: “We have made the mistake of idealism again. We have thought that the woman who thinks and talks as we do will be the blood-answer.” Modern men and women begin their relationships as sexless things who relate through ideas and speech. The man looks for a woman, or the woman for a man who thinks and talks as they do; who “knows where they are coming from,” and has “similar values.” They might as well not have bodies at all, or conduct the initial stages of their relationships by telephone or email. Indeed, that is exactly the way many modern relationships are now beginning. But the primary way men and women are built to relate to each other is through the body and the signals of the body; through the subtle, sexual “vibrations” that each gives off, through the sexual gaze (different in the male and in the female), and through touch. No real, romantic relationship can be forged without these, and without feeling through these non-mental means that the two are “right” for each other. We cannot start with “mental agreement” and then construct a sexual relationship around it.

Lawrence, like Rousseau, had a good deal to say about education, and in fact much of what he says is Rousseauian. His ideas on the subject are expressed chiefly in Fantasia of the Unconscious and in a long essay, “The Education of the People.”

In Fantasia of the Unconscious, in a chapter entitled “First Steps in Education,” Lawrence lays out a new program for educating girls and boys: “All girls over ten years of age must attend at one domestic workshop. All girls over ten years of age may, in addition, attend at one workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art. . . . All boys over ten years of age must attend at one workshop of domestic crafts, and at one workshop of skilled labour, or of technical industry, or of art.” The difference between how boys and girls are to be educated (at least initially) is that whereas both are required to attend a “domestic workshop,” only boys are required to attend a “workshop of skilled labour or of technical industry, or of art.” Keep in mind that Lawrence is laying down the rules for education in his ideal society. He anticipates that whereas all males will work outside the home (in some fashion or other), not all females will. His system is not designed to force women into the role of homemakers, for he leaves it open that girls may, if they choose, learn the same skills as boys. As to higher education, Lawrence leaves this open: “Schools of mental culture are free to all individuals over fourteen years of age. Universities are free to all who obtain the first culture degree.” The system is designed in such a way that individuals are drawn to pursue certain avenues based on their personalities and natural temperaments. Unlike our present society, in Lawrence’s world there would be no universal pressure to attend university: only individuals with certain natural gifts and inclinations would go in that direction. Similarly, the system leaves open the possibility that some women will pursue the same path as men, but only if that is their natural inclination. The intent of Lawrence’s program is not to force individuals into certain roles, but to cultivate their natural, innate characteristics. And as we have seen, Lawrence believes that males and females are innately different.

Lawrence makes it clear elsewhere that in the early years education will be sex-segregated. This is intended to facilitate the development of each student’s character and talents. Males, especially early in life, relate more easily to other males and are better able to devote themselves to their studies in the absence of females. The same thing applies to females. Sex-segregated education in the early years also has the advantage, Lawrence believes, of promoting a healthier interaction between males and females later on. In Fantasia of the Unconscious he states, “boys and girls should be kept apart as much as possible, that they may have some sort of respect and fear for the gulf that lies between them in nature, and for the great strangeness which each has to offer the other, finally.” After all, “You don’t find the sun and moon playing at pals in the sky.”

But this is, of course, all in the realm of fantasy. Lawrence’s system would be practical, if modern society could be entirely restructured, and he is aware that this is not likely to occur anytime soon. So what are we to do in the meantime? Here we encounter some of Lawrence’s most controversial ideas, and most inflammatory prose. He writes, “men, drive your wives, beat them out of their self-consciousness and their soft smarminess and good, lovely idea of themselves. Absolutely tear their lovely opinion of themselves to tatters, and make them look a holy ridiculous sight in their own eyes.” It is this sort of thing that has made Lawrence a bête noire of feminists. Yet, in the next sentence, he adds “Wives, do the same to your husbands.” Lawrence’s intention, as always, is to destroy the ego-centredness in both husband and wife; to destroy the modern tendency for men and women to relate to each other, and to themselves, through ideas and ideals.

As a man and a husband, however, he writes primarily from that standpoint: “Fight your wife out of her own self-conscious preoccupation with herself. Batter her out of it till she’s stunned. Drive her back into her own true mode. Rip all her nice superimposed modern-woman and wonderful-creature garb off her, Reduce her once more to a naked Eve, and send the apple flying.” Does he mean any of this literally? Is he advocating that husbands beat their wives? Perhaps. Lawrence and Frieda were famous for their quarrels, which often came to blows, though the blows were struck by both. Lawrence states the purpose of such “beatings” (whether literal or figurative) as follows: “Make her yield to her own real unconscious self, and absolutely stamp on the self that she’s got in her head. Drive her forcibly back, back into her own true unconscious.”

As we have already seen, Lawrence believes that healthy relations between a man and a woman depend largely on the man’s ability to make the woman believe in him, and the purpose he has set for himself in life. Sex unites the “nighttime self” of men and women, but the daytime self can only be united, for Lawrence, through the man’s devotion to something outside the marriage, and the woman’s belief in the man. This is just the same thing as saying that what unites the lives of men and women (as opposed to their sexual natures) is the woman’s belief in the man and his purpose. And so Lawrence writes:

You’ve got to fight to make a woman believe in you as a real man, a pioneer. No man is a man unless to his woman he is a pioneer. You’ll have to fight still harder to make her yield her goal to yours: her night goal to your day goal. . . . She’ll never believe until you have your soul filled with a profound and absolutely inalterable purpose, that will yield to nothing, least of all to her. She’ll never believe until, in your soul, you are cut off and gone ahead, into the dark. . . . Ah, how good it is to come home to your wife when she believes in you and submits to your purpose that is beyond her. . . . And you feel an unfathomable gratitude to the woman who loves you and believes in your purpose and receives you into the magnificent dark gratification of her embrace. That’s what it is to have a wife.

Friends of Lawrence must have smiled when they read these words, for he was hardly giving an accurate description of his own marriage. As I have mentioned, Lawrence and Frieda frequently fell into violent quarrels, and she would often demean and humiliate him, and he her. Yet, ultimately, Frieda believed in Lawrence’s abilities and his mission in life; he knew it and derived strength from it. Those who may think that Lawrence’s prescriptions for marriage require an extraordinarily submissive and even unintelligent wife should take note of the sort of woman Lawrence himself chose.

Now, some might respond to Lawrence’s description of marriage by asking, understandably, “Where is love in all of this? What has become of love between man and wife?” Yet Lawrence speaks again and again, especially in Women in Love, of love between man and wife as a means to wholeness, as a way to transcend the false, ego-centered self. In a 1914 letter he tells a male correspondent:

You mustn’t think that your desire or your fundamental need is to make a good career, or to fill your life with activity, or even to provide for your family materially. It isn’t. Your most vital necessity in this life is that you shall love your wife completely and implicitly and in entire nakedness of body and spirit. Then you will have peace and inner security, no matter how many things go wrong. And this peace and security will leave you free to act and to produce your own work, a real independent workman.

Initially in these remarks Lawrence seems to be taking a position different from the one he expressed in the later Fantasia of the Unconscious, where he asserts that the man derives his chief fulfillment from purpose, not from the home and family. But Lawrence’s position is complex. He believes that the man requires a relationship to a woman in order to be strengthened in the pursuit of his purpose. Recall the lines I quoted earlier, “Let a man walk alone on the face of the earth, and he feels himself like a loose speck blown at random. Let him have a woman to whom he belongs, and he will feel as though he had a wall to back up against; even though the woman be mentally a fool.” Man fulfills himself through having a purpose beyond the home, but he must have a home and a wife to support him. Through romantic love (which always involves a strong sexual component) the man comes to his primal self, and emerges from the encounter with the strength to carry on in the world. Lawrence is telling his correspondent—and this becomes clear in the last lines of the passage quoted—that in order to accomplish anything meaningful he must first submerge himself, body and soul, into love for his wife.

Of course, this makes it sound as if Lawrence regards married love merely as a means to an end: merely as a means to pursuing a male “purpose.” Elsewhere, however, he speaks of it as if it were an end in itself. This is particularly the case in Women in Love. Early in the novel Birkin tells Gerald, “I find . . . that one needs some one really pure single activity—I should call love a single pure activity. . . . The old ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage—and there isn’t anything else.” Again, Lawrence is seeking a way to get beyond idealism, and all the corrupt apparatus of modern, ego-driven life. To get beyond this, to what? To the true self, and to relationships based upon blood-consciousness and honest, uncorrupted sentiment. In Women in Love, Lawrence’s plan for achieving this involves a “perfect union” with a woman (and, as he states in the same novel, “the additional perfect relationship between man and man—additional to marriage”).

Birkin wants to achieve this with Ursula, but he keeps insisting over and over (much to her bewilderment and anger) that he means something more than mere “love.” The reason for this is that Birkin and Lawrence associate “love” with an ideal that is drummed into the heads of people in the modern, post-Christian world. We are issued with the baffling injunction to “love thy neighbor,” where thy neighbor means all of humanity. Any intelligent person can see that to love everyone means to love no one in particular. And any psychologically healthy person would find valueless the “love” of someone who claimed also to love all the rest of humanity. Lawrence is reacting also against the lovey-dovey, white lace, sanitized, billing and cooing sort of “love” that society encourages in married couples. Lawrence’s disgust for this sort of thing is expressed in his short story “In Love.” The main character, Hester, is repulsed by the “love” her fiancé, Joe, shows for her. They had been friends prior to their engagement and got on well

But now, alas, since she had promised to marry him, he had made the wretched mistake of falling “in love” with her. He had never been that way before. And if she had known he would get this way now, she would have said decidedly: Let us remain friends, Joe, for this sort of thing is a come-down. Once he started cuddling and petting, she couldn’t stand him. Yet she felt she ought to. She imagined she even ought to like it. Though where the ought came from, she could not see.

Birkin (like Lawrence) wants to avoid at all costs falling into this sort of scripted, stereotyped love relationship, but Ursula has a great deal of difficulty understanding what it is that he does want. He tries his best to explain it to her:

“There is,” he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, “a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you—not in the emotional, loving plane—but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unknown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman—so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever—because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire.”

The “final me and you” refers to the primal self. “The old ideals are dead as nails” and so is modern civilization. Birkin does not want his relationship to Ursula to “fit” into the modern social scheme, to become conventional or “safe.” He also fears and abhors the impress of society on his conscious, mental self. He does not want to come together with Ursula “though the ego,” as it were. He wants them to come together through their primal selves and to forge a relationship that is based on something deeper and far stronger than what the overly socialized creatures around him call “love.” Yet, at the same time, one could simply say that what he wants is a truer, deeper love, and that what passes for love with other people is usually not the genuine article. They are doing what one “ought” to do, even when in bed together.

In The Rainbow (to which Women in Love forms the “sequel”), Tom Brangwen offers his views on love and marriage in a famous passage:

“There’s very little else, on earth, but marriage. You can talk about making money, or saving souls. You can save your own soul seven times over, and you may have a mint of money, but your soul goes gnawin’, gnawin’, gnawin’, and it says there’s something it must have. In heaven there is no marriage. But on earth there is marriage, else heaven drops out, and there’s no bottom to it. . . . If we’ve got to be Angels . . . and if there is no such thing as a man or a woman among them, then it seems to me as a married couple makes one Angel. . . . [An] Angel can’t be less than a human being. And if it was only the soul of a man minus the man, then it would be less than a human being. . . . An Angel’s got to be more than a human being. . . . So I say, an Angel is the soul of a man and a woman in one: they rise united at the Judgment Day, as one angel. . . . If I am to become an Angel, it’ll be my married soul, and not my single soul.”

À la Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, men and women form two halves of a complete human being. Human nature divides itself into two, complementary aspects: masculinity and femininity. A complete human being is made when a man and a woman are joined together. But they cannot be joined—not really—through the mental, social self, but only through the unconscious, primal self.

In Women in Love, this view returns but in a modified form. Now Birkin tells us, “One must commit oneself to a conjunction with the other—for ever. But it is not selfless—it is a maintaining of the self in mystic balance and integrity—like a star balanced with another star.” And Lawrence tells us of Birkin, “he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons.” Tom Brangwen’s view implies that men and women, considered separately, do not have complete souls, and that a complete soul is made only when they join together in marriage. There is a suggestion in what he says that the “individuality” of single men and women is false, and that only a married couple constitutes a true individual. Birkin’s ideal, on the other hand, involves the man and the woman each preserving their selfhood and individuality and “balancing” each other.

Despite the fact that Birkin frequently, and transparently, speaks for Lawrence we cannot take him as speaking for Lawrence here. I believe that it is Brangwen’s position that is closest to Lawrence’s own. When Women in Love opens, Birkin is in a relationship with Hermione, who Lawrence portrays as a woman living entirely from out of her head, without any naturalness or spontaneity. Yet there is a bit of this in Birkin as well, which is perhaps why he reacts against it so violently when he sees it in Hermione. After the passage just quoted from Women in Love, Lawrence writes of Birkin, “He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. . . . And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him.” Lawrence then goes on to describe Birkin’s fear and loathing of women’s “clutching.” Birkin is a conflicted character. He wants to lose himself in a relationship with a woman, but fears it at the same time. He wants Ursula, and talks on and on about spontaneity and the evil of ideals, yet he is continually preaching to Ursula about his ideal relationship which, conveniently, is one in which he can unite with her yet preserve his ego intact. This at first bewilders then infuriates Ursula, who never understands what it is that he wants. In the end, the problem resolves itself, probably just as it would in real life. Drawn to Ursula by a power stronger than his conscious ego, Birkin eventually drops all of his talk, surrenders his will, and settles into a married bliss that is marred only by his continued desire for the love of a man.

Ultimately, Lawrence believes that the “establishment of a new relation” between men and women depends upon a return to the oldest of relationships, and that this is possible only through a recovery of the oldest part of the self. We must, he believes, drop our ideal of the unisex society and be alive again to the fundamental, natural differences between men and women. Men and woman do not naturally desire to enjoy each other’s society at all times. We must not only educate men and women apart, but re-establish “spaces” within civilized society where men can be with men, and women with women. We must not force men and women together and command them to forget that they are men and women. Education and, indeed, much else in society must work to cultivate and to affirm the natural, masculine qualities and virtues in men, and the feminine qualities and virtues in women. Having become true men and women and having awakened, through their apartness, to the mystery and the allure that is the opposite sex, they will then come together and forge romantic alliances that are not based upon talk and “common values” but upon the “pull” between man and woman. Lawrence is not referring here simply to lust. A sexual element is, of course, involved, but what he means is the mysterious, ineffable attraction between an individual man and a woman, what we often call “chemistry,” which has nothing to do with the words they utter or the ideals they pay lip service to. And once this attraction is established, if the two desire to become bound to each other, then they must surrender themselves to the relationship. They must overcome their fear of the loss of ego boundaries. They must drop all talk of “rights” and not fall into the trap of treating the marriage as if it were a business partnership. For both, it is a leap into the unknown but in this case the unknown is the natural. When we plant a seed we must close the earth over it and go off and wait in anticipation. But we know that nature, being what it is, will produce as it has before. If all goes well, in that spot will grow the plant we were expecting. Similarly, marriage is not a human invention but something that grows naturally between a man and woman if its seed is planted in the fertile soil of the primal selves of each.

Guillaume Faye / Dr. Gérard Zwang: Sur la sexualité

Bonjour à tous,

Le libre Journal des Lycéens a été consacré, samedi 20 novembre 2010, à la sexualité et son évolution. Pour nous éclairer sur le sujet, nous avons reçu le Dr Gérard Zwang et Guillaume Faye.

Vous pouvez également vous rendre sur notre blog afin d'écouter les dernières émissions.

A très bientôt, sur Radio Courtoisie bien sûr.

Romain LECAP

http://librejournalromainlecap.over-blog.com/

http://www.radiocourtoisie.net/tempo/

http://radio-courtoisie.over-blog.com/

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Au cours de cette émission, les animateurs évoqueront la question de la sexualité confronté à la modernité. Comment évoluent nos comportements sexuels en France et en Europe? En quoi le matérialisme et l'individualisme de notre temps ont pu la transformer? Et si au contraire elle n'avait jamais été aussi forte et saine?

Autant de questions que nous poserons à nos deux invités, le Dr gérard Zwang, sexologue mais aussi militant anti-mutilation et Guillaume Faye, pamphlétaire bien connu qui publiera prochainement l'ouvrage Sexe et dévoiement.

De la pornographie à la publicité, des comportements amoureux et personnels à la morale publique et religieuse, nous aborderons toutes les grands sujets relatifs à la sexualité afin de mieux la définir.

La metafisica del sesso in Mircea Eliade

La metafisica del sesso in Mircea Eliade

di Giovanni Casadio*

Fonte: Rinascita [scheda fonte]

“La vita è fatta di partenze”
Jurnalul Portughez, 19 luglio 1945

Mircea Eliade nacque nel marzo 1907 e morì nel 1986, quindi a poco più di 79 anni. Trascorse 3 anni in India, quasi un anno in Inghilterra, quasi 5 anni in Portogallo (Lisbona e Cascais), 11 anni a Parigi, 30 anni in America (Chicago) e naturalmente 33 anni in Romania, gli anni della formazione, durante i quali fece continui viaggi in Italia e in Germania. Durante i 30 anni di relativa stabilità a Chicago, quasi tutte le estati traslocava in Francia, con lunghe trasferte prima nel Canton Ticino e poi in Italia.

 

 

Si sposò due volte (come adombrato nel proverbio “di Venere e di Marte non si sposa e non si parte”, le nozze sono come un imbarco per un viaggio assai incerto). La prima moglie Nina Mareş (dal 1934 al 1944), la seconda Christinel Cottescu (dal 1950 al 1986) furono devotissime amanti, massaie e segretarie. Ebbe una decina di amori extraconiugali importanti (i più notevoli, quello con Maitreyi, per il contesto orientale e il libro – anzi i due libri – che ne seguirono, e quello con Sorana, per l’exploit orgasmico di cui parlerò nel seguito). E svariate altre donne: non tantissime come il coetaneo Georges Simenon (1903-1989), che si vantava di aver consumato un numero di donne superiore a quello delle matite usate nei suoi innumerevoli scritti (quattrocento e più romanzi e migliaia di articoli) e in un’intervista al vitellone romagnolo Federico Fellini dichiarava: “Fellini, je crois que, dans ma vie, j’ai été plus Casanova que vous! J’ai fait le calcul, il ya un an ou deux. J’ai eu dix mille femmes depuis l’âge de treize ans et demi. Ce n’est pas du tout un vice. Je n’ai aucun vice sexuel, mais j’avais besoin de communiquer!”
Ma anche i libri o gli articoli che si scrivono e poi (non sempre) si pubblicano sono partenze. Un elenco provvisorio, probabilmente in difetto, potrebbe essere il seguente: Romanzi o racconti lunghi: 15 - volumi di novelle: 4 - diari: 5 - volumi di memorie: 2 - drammi: 4 - saggi di storia delle religioni, di filosofia, di critica letteraria: 34 e più - curatele di opere singole o collettive: 2 tomi (Bogdan Hasdeu); 1 tomo (Nae Ionescu); 4 tomi (From Primitives to Zen: fonti di storia delle religioni), 15 voll. (Encyclopedia of Religion) - riviste fondate e dirette o co-dirette: 1. Zalmoxis, 2. Antaios, 3. History of Religions.
Aggiungiamo più di 1900 articoli, pubblicati in riviste e miscellanee di varia cultura soprattutto nel periodo romeno, ripresi solo in minima parte nelle opere menzionate sopra. E non parliamo degli infiniti frammenti inediti: abbozzi di libri non condotti a termine, note erudite, appunti di diario smarriti nei vari traslochi o da lui stesso gettati nelle fiamme o distrutti nel grande incendio che devastò il suo ufficio all’Università di Chicago un anno prima della morte. Molto si trova ancora nei 177 scatoloni del fondo Eliade conservato allo “Special Collections Research Center” presso la Regenstein Library della Università di Chicago, insieme alla corrispondenza, i manoscritti e le prime copie a stampa di tutti i libri pubblicati da Eliade, scritti su di lui e altro materiale interessante, compreso la famosa pipa, 5 temperini e un calzascarpe. Certo una bagattella al confronto della produzione del quasi coetaneo teologo indo-catalano Raimon Panikkar (1918-), al quale si devono più di 60 voll. e più di 1500 articoli, ma – si sa – i teologi scrivono sotto la dettatura di Dio (ed Eliade non era un teologo, contrariamente a quanto molti pensano). Ma un numero abbastanza cospicuo per comprendere che siamo di fronte a un essere fenomenale: un individuo ossessionato da una specie di delirio della scrittura-confessione, in funzione di una fuga dalla realtà (in gergo psicologico “escapismo”), che è poi una forma estrema di svago o distrazione, il cui scopo è d’estraniarsi da un’esistenza nei confronti della quale si prova disagio.
Infinite (in svariate lingue) le monografie, le miscellanee, gli articoli, le voci d’enciclopedia, le recensioni, le tesi di laurea sui più disparati aspetti della sua vita e della sua opera. E – ed è ciò che più conta – infinite citazioni dei suoi scritti in opere di storia delle religioni e di ogni altro genere letterario; per fare un esempio, Eliade è l’unico storico delle religioni menzionato in due opere chiave di due papi, Karol Józef Wojtyła (Varcare la soglia della speranza) e Joseph Ratzinger (Fede, verità, tolleranza).
La sua vita in Portogallo
In questa sede, ci proponiamo di affrontare alcuni momenti del suo vissuto interiore nel periodo portoghese. Premettiamo che Eliade stette in Portogallo, prima come addetto stampa, poi come consigliere culturale, poi di nuovo come addetto stampa, poi come privato cittadino (in ragione dei mutamenti del vento politico romeno) dal 10 febbraio 1941 al 13 sett. 1945, esattamente 4 anni e 7 mesi: sono date che parlano da sé …
Il Jurnal portughez è il più importante dei diari di Eliade per due motivi. Anzitutto esso si diversifica da Şantier (“Cantiere”, noto in Italia come Diario d’India) e dai tre voll. di Fragments d’un journal ovvero Journalul in romeno (che vanno dall’arrivo in Francia nel ’45 alla morte dell’autore nell’86) perché non fu ridotto (e censurato) dall’Autore per la pubblicazione, sia perché non ne ebbe il tempo sia perché non si trovò mai nella disposizione d’animo adatta per fare i conti con il vissuto psichico di quegli anni colmi di avvenimenti funesti per lui, per il suo paese e per il resto del mondo. Sia chiaro: quando Eliade scrive, scrive sempre col pensiero al lettore. Una volta, infatti, osserva che solo quando lui avrà sessant’anni quei pensieri potranno essere resi di pubblico dominio, e solo allo stato di “frammenti”, estrapolati dall’insieme delle confessioni: così scrive il 5 febbraio 1945. Alla sua morte la moglie Christinel non si è mai decisa a dare il permesso della pubblicazione: solo pochissimi intimi hanno avuto accesso al manoscritto conservato nel fondo Eliade della Biblioteca Regenstein di Chicago, tra i quali l’amico romeno Matei Calinescu (1934-2009) e il fedelissimo allievo e biografo McLinscott Ricketts. Ricapitolando, il testo manoscritto è stato pubblicato così come era stato buttato giù dall’autore, e sarebbe dunque la prima volta che ci troviamo di fronte ai pensieri immediati di Eliade, un autore che anche critici benevoli come N. Spineto e B. Rennie considerano un grande bugiardo, costruttore e manipolatore del proprio personaggio per la posterità.
Abbiamo detto che il Jurnal del periodo portoghese è più importante di tutti gli altri diari per due motivi. Il primo, si è visto, risiede nel suo carattere di documento genuino, immediato, in quanto presenta i suoi pensieri senza tagli o rielaborazioni. Il secondo motivo è di ordine contenutistico, e non è meno essenziale. In esso infatti sono narrati: 1) i pensieri e le emozioni che fanno da sostrato alle due opere di Eliade (apparse entrambe nel 1949 ma cominciate in quegli anni luttuosi) di gran lunga più lette e citate, cioè il Traité d’histoire des religions (prima concepito come “Prolegomeni” e poi ripresentato in inglese come Patterns) e il Mythe de l’éternel retour (successivamente presentato in inglese col titolo più descrittivo Cosmos and History); 2) le emozioni e i pensieri generati dal progressivo disfacimento – cui seguirà un inesorabile collasso – delle due cose che al Nostro erano più care, la patria -nazione romena, neamul românesc (sotto il rullo compressore delle armate sovietiche e per la inettitudine o complicità di “piloti orbi” di varie tendenze), e la sposa Nina Mareş (in seguito agli effetti devastanti di un cancro all’utero). E – come è stato notato anche da Alexandrescu, che definisce il Diario portoghese “Apocalisse di Eliade” o “secondo Mircea Eliade” (p. 317, trad. ital.; p. 26, ed. romena) – tra le due catastrofi esiste un inscindibile nesso, quale quello che può sussistere tra le vicende del macrocosmo-mondo e quelle del microcosmo-uomo, per restare nei termini di una polarità derivata da una tradizione – quella indiana – a lui estremamente familiare (si veda, ad es. nel Diario, la riflessione del 25 sett. 1942: “Quando l’uomo scopre sé stesso, ātman, scopre l’assoluto cosmico, brahman, e nello stesso tempo coincide con esso”, p. 49, trad. it.). In queste circostanze, e da esse condizionato e afflitto, egli elabora una serie di formule ermeneutiche che anticipano la filosofia delle due opere. Da queste circostanze, in maniera ancora più evidente, nascono una serie di riflessioni assolutamente brutali sulla situazione politica del tempo e sulla propria intimità personale, riflessioni che non mancheranno di suscitare gli strilli indignati delle anime belle e dei corifei della correttezza politica. Diamo quindi la parola all’autore stesso: all’Eliade intimo.
La bella giudea di Cordova
Anzitutto una riflessione sulla donna come virtuale soggetto e oggetto di desiderio e di innamoramento. Il 5 ottobre 1944 Eliade è a Cordova per un congresso in cui avrebbe parlato di miti sull’origine delle piante. Nella piazzetta di Maimonide adocchia “dal gruppo di curiosi che ci guardano passare, una ragazza straordinariamente bella, con una macchia bruna sotto gli occhi. Un tipo marcatamente ebraico” (p. 169 trad. it.). In lui si accende la fiamma del desiderio; non lo dice – secondo lo stile reticente e allusivo che è tipico del suo diario –, ma è evidente dalla narrazione che segue. “Al Depósito de Sementales (cioè il deposito degli stalloni), perché ci vengano mostrati i cavalli. Il primo cavallo che ci presentano è da monta: poderoso, ma terribile. In effetti il sesso non è mai bello, manca di grazia, non ha altra qualità tranne quella della riproduzione potenziata in modo mostruoso. Sono convinto che la maggior parte dei cavalli arabi e arabo-ispanici che ci vengono fatti vedere, superbi, nervosi e fieri, siano impotenti, o quasi. Il pensiero che la forza generativa che sento turbarmi sin dall’adolescenza potrebbe essere il grande ostacolo tra me e lo spirito puro, l’uccello del malaugurio del mio talento, mi deprime. Che cosa avrei potuto creare se fossi stato meno schiavo della carne!”. Eliade fu certo ossessionato dall’antitesi tra libido copulandi e libido scribendi (sentite entrambe come forme di creazione potenziale), ma non ricorse mai come il giudeo greco alessandrino Origene al rimedio estremo della castrazione. Per domare le urgenze della carne dovette attendere il naturale sedarsi dell’istinto sessuale, in seguito al trascorrere degli anni e grazie alla compagnia di una donna castrante come Christinel Cottescu. Lì a Cordova, la visione in rapida successione della bella giudea e dei potenti/impotenti stalloni fa scattare nella sua mente un’intuizione sulle modalità dell’eros femminile che è certo basata sulla sua ventennale esperienza di seduttore ma anche su una raffinata capacità di cogliere gli aspetti sottili della realtà, capacità che è poi anche quella che contraddistingue la sua ermeneutica dei fenomeni religiosi nei loro aspetti simbolici. “Dubito che le donne amino la violenza come stile erotico e abbiano un debole per gli uomini brutali. La donna è sensibile in primo luogo all’intelligenza (come la intende lei, ovviamente: “vivacità di spirito”, “facezia” [spirt, drăcos, glumeţ], ecc.); più che alla stessa bellezza. In secondo luogo, è sensibile alla bontà. Tutti i racconti con donne ossessionate da uomini brutali, ecc., sono invenzioni letterarie di certi decadenti. Statisticamente, e soprattutto nei villaggi, ciò che attrae nel 90 % le donne è il “cervello” (deşteptăciunea) e la bontà. Non è la capacità generativa a distinguerci dalle donne, ma l’intelligenza” (p. 170 trad. it.).
La conclusione di Eliade, per quanto generalizzante, è sicuramente fondata e potrebbe assegnare al suo autore un posto d’onore tra i trattatisti dell’amore nella serie che va da un Andrea Cappellano a un Henri Stendhal, fino a un Francesco Alberoni, si licet parvis componere magnis. Merita attenzione il corollario di questa riflessione che sembra caratteristico di una mentalità tipicamente maschilista, piuttosto disinvolta nei riguardi delle capacità intellettuali del gentil sesso: “Non è la capacità generativa a distinguerci dalle donne, ma l’intelligenza”.
Intelligenza e gentil sesso
Vuole egli intendere, con questa asserzione, che le donne sono prive di intelligenza?
Probabilmente sì, nel senso che le donne sarebbero prive di quel certo tipo di intelligenza o prontezza di spirito che esse prediligono in quegli uomini che ai loro occhi ne appaiono dotati. E credo invero che quel suo insistere sulla differenza (quella certa cosa che ci distingue dalle donne, “ne distingue de femei”), debba intendersi nel senso che le donne – come del resto gli uomini – sono naturalmente attratte (per la nota legge chimico-fisica sull’attrazione tra poli contrari) da quegli uomini che possiedono in maniera marcata una caratteristica di cui esse si sentono prive: il che naturalmente è vero solo in certi casi. E sarà lo stesso Eliade a notarlo in un pensiero successivo che sembra in netta contraddizione con questo.
L’11 aprile 1945, meno di un anno dopo, il Nostro è in uno stato di acuta irritazione nei riguardi dei suoi compatrioti maschi (in particolare i funzionari del ministero degli Esteri, pronti a inchinarsi di fronte al nuovo padrone sovietico) e in più soggetto a una crisi nevrastenica, “alimentata in modo naturale dalla mia insoddisfazione erotica”. Il suo pessimismo “per quel che riguarda la condizione attuale dell’uomo” lo induce ad impietose considerazioni che smascherano la (presunta) superiorità dell’intelligenza maschile. “Certe volte mi deprime l’enorme ruolo che continua a svolgere la vanità nella vita di quasi tutti gli uomini; superiore a quello del sesso, della fame o della paura della morte. Mi convinco egualmente che il maschio ‘in generale’ è di gran lunga più stupido di quello che ritenevo sino a qualche anno fa. La lucidità del maschio è una leggenda. Conosco, oggi, moltissimi uomini che sono stati scelti, menati per il naso e ‘acchiappati’ da donne completamente prive di ogni tipo di attrattiva – senza che essi avessero anche solo il sospetto del ruolo passivo che hanno avuto. (…) In moltissime coppie che ho conosciuto negli ultimi sette, otto anni, le mogli sono molto al di sotto del livello dei mariti, ma infinitamente più intelligenti e abili di loro, prova ne sia il fatto che se li tengono. Al contrario, quasi tutte le donne ammirevoli che ho conosciuto in questo lasso di tempo sono rimaste senza marito, perché nessun uomo ha saputo sceglierle. D’altronde, credo che quasi nessun uomo scelga. È sempre scelto. Come spiegarmi, altrimenti, tante coppie assurde che conosco? La stupidità dei maschi non è mai tanto evidente come quando, dopo molti amoreggiamenti e avventure, decidono di sposarsi. Quasi sempre la sposa ‘scelta’ è di gran lunga inferiore alle donne con le quali hanno flirtato, ecc.” (p. 264-265, trad. it.). Sei mesi prima, come abbiamo visto, pare che egli pensasse esattamente il contrario. Anche se sembra evidente che nell’un caso egli si riferisce alle condizioni in base alle quali la donna si lascia sedurre, nell’altro alla strategia che mette in atto per sedurre – a fini matrimoniali. Sulla donna, sul mistero della mente femminile, comunque, fa cilecca la razionalità di Mircea Eliade, come faceva cilecca la razionalità di un Platone o di un Schopenhauer.
L’eros come emozione
e orgasmo
E dall’eros come “innamoramento” passiamo a un’altra serie di riflessioni attorno a un altro aspetto paradossale della tematica erotica: l’eros come emozione legata all’evento fisiologico dell’eccitazione e dell’orgasmo, di nuovo da un punto di vista prettamente maschile. Tra il 2 e il 3 di febbraio del 1945, quando la disperazione per la “sparizione di Nina” gli pare intollerabile, quando la lettera di quasi licenziamento del Ministero degli Esteri lo getta praticamente sul lastrico, egli giunge, come avrebbe detto Eschilo, al mathein attraverso il pathein: a un intuizione geniale attraverso l’angoscia e la sofferenza (p. 227, trad. it.). Egli si domanda: “Che cosa significa la perdita di tua moglie, in confronto alla grande catastrofe mondiale, nella quale lasciano la vita decine di migliaia di persone al giorno, che annienta città e strema nazioni?”. La risposta che Eliade dà è lucidissima, e getta, per così dire, un ponte tra il macro- e il microcosmo; e significa, nel fondo, che la massa non è che una somma di individui tra loro incomunicabili. “Gli risponderei: immaginati un giovane innamorato da tanto tempo, che, un bel giorno, riesce a far sua la donna amata. È felice, e nel vederlo traboccare di felicità tu gli dici: ‘Che interesse può avere il fatto che tu oggi abbia posseduto una donna! Alla stessa ora, in tutto il mondo, almeno un milione di coppie stavano facendo, come te, l’amore. Non c’è nulla di straordinario in quello che ti è successo!’. E, malgrado ciò, lui, innamorato, sa che ciò che gli è successo è stato straordinario”. In questa minirealtà – che poi tanto minima non è – Eliade dà mostra di una capacità introspettiva che gli fa cogliere quel tanto di banale e di balordo che è implicito nell’atto della consumazione, che assume significato solo attraverso l’amore, amore che è in grado di produrre una trasformazione quasi alchemica dell’evento fisiologico. Una capacità introspettiva che è in fondo in sintonia (ci sia concesso questo accostamento che ad alcuni potrà apparire irriverente o impertinente) con la sua riflessione su tempo ed eternità, quale si ritroverà appunto nel libro alla stesura del quale si accingerà il mese successivo e che apparirà in Francia quattro anni dopo col titolo Le mythe de l’éternel retour. Archétypes et répétition (Paris 1949). Per il resto della notte lo rode l’insonnia, durante la quale si accavallano pensieri dominati da una disperazione atroce e senza apparente via di uscita (“sento che qualsiasi cosa faccia il risultato è la disperazione”). E di nuovo si rifugia nell’escamotage del libertinaggio fine a se stesso, svuotato di ogni dimensione romantica.
“E ho un’alternativa: se mi getterò di nuovo in esperienze (leggi: erotismo), mi consumerò invano, perché nessun piacere fisico può essermi di consolazione una volta estinto (può forse consolarmi l’aver stretto tra le braccia Rica, Maitrey, Sorana e qualche altra? Mai un ricordo erotico consola; tutto si consuma per sempre nell’atto; si ricorda l’amore, l’amicizia, la storia legata a una donna, ma ciò che è stato essenzialmente erotico, il fatto in sé diventa nulla nell’istante successivo alla sua consumazione). Così, mi dico che devo accontentarmi di un equilibrio fisiologico acquisito senza grattacapi (un’avventura qualunque e comoda) e concentrarmi sulla mia opera, lasciandomi passare accanto la vita senza sentirmi costretto ad assaporarla, a cambiarla né ad avvicinarmela”. Alla lucidità della diagnosi (effettivamente è così: il ricordo erotico non consola, tutto si consuma per sempre nell’atto, da cui il pessimismo sull’eros come adempimento fisiologico frustrante di Lucrezio nel IV libro del De Rerum Natura e l’insaziabile concupiscenza di Don Giovanni nel mito e nella letteratura) segue la banalità della terapia: “un’avventura qualunque e comoda”, cioè evidentemente mercenaria.
Insomma, per salvarsi dalla depressione conseguente alla débacle sua personale e della sua patria, Eliade (in fondo ha solo 38 anni, un’età in cui gli ormoni sono ancora assai attivi) si rifugia nel sesso come atto biologico di puro consumo. Nei giorni e nelle notti che vanno dal 5 marzo al 15 aprile 1945, mentre la storia macina gli eventi (per usare un’espressione carducciana) come in nessun altro momento del secolo testé trascorso, il Nostro macina i propri testicoli con accanimento per così dire terapeutico. Negli intervalli della cronaca del pellegrinaggio a Fatima, “per il riposo dell’anima di Nina e la salvezza della mia integrità spirituale” (18 marzo, p. 252, trad. it.), e del successivo ritorno a Cascais ove si ritrova a lottare con i tira e molla del Ministero degli Esteri romeno e con i fantasmi del proprio passato, è tutto un susseguirsi di annotazioni di eventi crudamente neurologici e fisiologici (p. 249-269 trad. it.). Il 5 marzo egli comincia a sperimentare la sua inedita tecnica di liberazione dalla crisi nevrastenica dando briglia sciolta alla sua sensualità e ad una sfrenata ginnastica sessuale. “Oggi – annota – sono tornato alla fisiologia. In un’ora ho fatto l’amore tre volte con la stessa donna, un po’ meravigliata, bisogna dirlo, del mio vigore. Domani o dopodomani consulterò un neurologo: voglio tentare tutto. Mi affliggerebbe apprendere, ad esempio, che la mia nevrastenia e la mia melanconia sono dovute alle adorabili funzioni seminali” (p. 249, trad. it.).  Il 14 marzo, alla vigilia della partenza per Fatima, annota: “Ripeterò la mia arcinota tecnica di liberazione attraverso l’eccesso, di purificazione attraverso l’orgia. (…) Voglio sapere se la mia melanconia ha o no radici fisiologiche. Voglio liberarmi da ogni influenza seminale, anche se questa liberazione implicherà sedurre un centinaio di donne” (p. 251, trad. it.). Il 16 marzo riceve dal neurologo la risposta che si attendeva: “le melanconie dipendono da cause spirituali”, ma la crisi generale ha motivazioni più biologiche, legate alla sua ipersessualità insoddisfatta: “non posso raggiungere l’equilibrio se non solo dopo la realizzazione di quello erotico” (p. 252, trad. it.). E durante il viaggio, nonostante le consolazioni spirituali del paesaggio “archetipico” si ritrova a lottare coi soliti fantasmi ormonali: “Tutto ieri e oggi ossessionato dal sesso” (22 marzo, p. 257, trad. it.). L’11 aprile, di nuovo a Cascais, ripete a sé stesso che la crisi nervosa è basata sull’insoddisfazione erotica. Ma i rapporti saltuari, per quanto spinti al massimo della sollecitazione ormonale, non lo soddisfano abbastanza: “avrei bisogno di un’amante giorno e notte” (11 aprile, p. 264, trad. it).
La politica, la pausa,
il lavoro
Il 15 aprile finalmente il Nostro riprende a lavorare (dopo la crisi di melanconia del giorno precedente in cui ha vissuto “un distacco definitivo dall’opera, dalla cultura, dalla filosofia, dalla vita e dalla salvezza”), ed è alle prese con la rilettura di Isabel şi apele diavolului (1929/30), in vista di un’eventuale nuova edizione. E allora, quasi proustianamente, riaffiorano in lui sensazioni e ossessioni che lo perseguitavano al momento della stesura del libro e immediatamente dopo la sua apparizione in Romania. “Un particolare mi turba: l’accento che pongo sulla sterilità, sull’impotenza. … Mi sono chiesto se il mio rifiuto (nel romanzo) di possedere Isabel non potrebbe interpretarsi psicoanaliticamente come un’ossessione di impotenza. Visto che non ho mai avuto tale ossessione, mi chiedo da dove provenga il rifiuto di possedere una ragazza che ti si offre, complicato dalla gioia sadica di vederla posseduta da un altro. È probabile che questa domanda se la siano posta anche gli altri. Rammento che Sorana, dopo una giornata eroica [meglio: “brava”, romeno: zi de vitejie] nel rifugio di Poiana Braşov dove feci dieci volte l’amore con lei, mi confessò che il mio vigore l’aveva sorpresa; perché, dopo aver letto Isabel, mi credeva quasi impotente. Ma, spaventata dalla mia energia, si confidò con Lily Popovici, che lei riteneva avesse avuto più esperienze in fatto di uomini. Lily le disse che, se non mi avesse conosciuto, avrebbe pensato che mi fossi drogato, che avessi preso delle pillole, ecc. La cosa più divertente è che io neppure mi rendevo conto d’essere in realtà messo tanto “bene”. Mi sembrava che qualsiasi uomo, se una donna gli piaceva, ed era rilassato, poteva fare l’amore dieci volte! Più tardi, ho capito che questo è un privilegio abbastanza raro” (p. 268, trad. it.). Questa ossessione della virilità, presente nella sua narrativa giovanile, è certo esistente allo stato latente nella sua psiche (per quanto egli si affretti a precisare il contrario: “Il problema della potenza o dell’impotenza non mi ha mai preoccupato”), altrimenti mal si spiegherebbe questa sua ricorrente, quasi puerile compiacenza nell’esibizione delle sue prodezze priapiche, ed è da Eliade ricollegata a un rifiuto ben più radicato e conscio: il rifiuto di generare prole, che si lega poi al lacerante senso di colpa prodotto dalla morte di Nina per cause probabilmente legate a un aborto violento che lui stesso le aveva imposto.
In queste meditazioni di un Eliade alla soglia dei quarant’anni è teorizzata, sul piano individuale, una tecnica di liberazione dall’angoscia (in altre parole, una tecnica di “salvezza”), basata sulla ginnastica copulatoria e l’estasi eaiaculatoria, senza che si tenti di elevarla su un piano di trascendenza metafisica o di stabilire alcun rapporto con i valori catartici e salvifici dell’orgia, temi peraltro assai familiari all’Eliade autore, nel 1936, di Yoga, essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne. L’aggancio di questo tema con più ampie realtà filosofiche e storico-religiose sarà invece compiuto da un altro storico e pensatore che è stato un suo dialettico compagno di strada in varie imprese, l’italiano Julius Evola (1898-1974), in Metafisica del sesso (1958; II ed. 1969). Un libro, questo, anch’esso frutto di una catastrofe personale mirabilmente metabolizzata, un libro che Eliade non avrebbe mai potuto scrivere, anche se fu testimone della sua gestazione in un incontro avvenuto nel maggio del 1952. In esso, in particolare nel terzo capitolo (Fenomeni di trascendenza nell’amore profano), Evola tratta dell’amplesso da un punto di vista superiore, cercando di cogliere quegli effetti trascendenti che rappresentano l’acme dell’atto sessuale. Come ha scritto Franco Volpi nel Dizionario delle opere filosofiche (Milano 2000, p. 357), nella voce appositamente dedicata a quest’opera apparentemente così poco filosofica, “Evola sviluppa una considerazione metafisica del sesso, ritenendo tale fenomeno un elemento troppo importante nella vita degli esseri per lasciarlo a spiegazioni semplicemente positivistiche e sessuologiche. Il sesso è la forza magica più intensa della natura, capace di esercitare su tutti i viventi un’attrazione irresistibile e tale da fornire, secondo Evola, l’occasione per trascendere la mera corporeità ed elevarsi fino al piano dello spirito. Il fenomeno del sesso implica dunque un potenziale estatico, iniziatico, che può essere portato alla luce soltanto guardando a esso dalla prospettiva metafisica”. E, conclude Volpi, “nell’eros – nei suoi attimi sublimi, ma a volte anche in esperienze d’amore quotidiane particolarmente intense – balugina la trascendenza, la quale può infrangere i limiti della coscienza quotidiana e produrre un’apertura spirituale. Il fenomeno del sesso getta così un ponte tra la fisica e la metafisica, tra la natura e lo spirito”. Ma queste cose l’Eliade del 1945, innamorato senza speranza di una donna che è ormai un fantasma e soggetto ancora a violente tempeste ormonali, non poteva o non voleva dirle.

*Ordinario di Storia delle Religioni all’Università di Salerno

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T. Sunic: Sex and Politics

Ex: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Sunic-Sex&Politics.html#TS

Sex and Politics

Tom Sunic

May 29, 2010 

Political mores often reflect sexual attitudes. Conversely (and more commonly) political environment affects sexual mores. In our so-called best of all worlds, “free love” has become an aggressive ideology transmitted by left-wing opinion makers. The underlying assumption, going back to the Freudian-Marxist inspired student revolts of 1968, is that by indulging in wild sex a muscled regime can be muzzled and any temptation for an authoritarian rule can be tamed.  

Palaver about “free love equals no war” is still a prevalent dogma in the liberal system. Hans Eysenck, the late psychologist and expert on race and intelligence (also occasionally defamed as a ‘racist’), deconstructed the Freudian fraud in his book The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire: “Freud’s place is not with Copernicus and Darwin but with Hans Christian Andersen and tellers of fairy tales.  Psychoanalysis is at best a premature crystallization of spurious orthodoxies; at worst a pseudo-scientific doctrine that has done untold harm to psychology and psychiatry alike” (1990, p. 208). One could infer from Eysenck’s statement what a great many Whites have known for decades, but have been afraid to utter aloud: Freudianism has been an excellent tool for pathologizing Whites into feelings of guilt in regard to their traditional attitudes toward sex and politics.  

Politically correct — sexually incorrect 

Freudianism, instead of curing alleged sexual neuroses and phobias, has ended up creating far more serious ones. Fifty years after the “sexual revolution” the West is replete with men suffering from sexual impotence, with an ever growing number of women and men indulging in odd, perverted and criminal sexual behavior. Yet, despite the fact that the quackery of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich is no longer trendy, the topic of sex continues to play a crucial role in social interaction. In order to liberate White youth from their feelings of traditional European shame (which is not the same as the Judaic concept of guilt), the non-stop media parading of geometric Hollywood beauties makes many young Whites develop the inferiority complex about their own sexual equipment — or performance in the bedroom.  As a result, a classical nucleus of society — the family — falls apart. 

There is a widespread assumption fostered by liberal and leftist opinion-makers that right-wingers and nationalists are sexual perverts, misogynists, or wild macho-types suffering from a proto-totalitarian Oedipus complex — which accordingly, must lead to proverbial anti-Semitic pogroms. Such a diagnosis of the White man was offered by Erich Fromm in his famed The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, a book in which the ultimate symbols of evil, the incorrigible Hitler and Himmler, are routinely depicted as “case studies of anal-hoarding-necrophilic sadists.” (1973, pp. 333–411). Fromm’s and Freud’s avalanche of nonsense may tell us more about their own troubled childhood and their obsession with their own misshapen anal-nasal-oral-circumcised-penile-protrusions than about the non-Jewish objects of their descriptions. 

Once could invert the Freudian dogma regarding the alleged pathogenic sexuality of young Whites and supplant it by solid empirical data offered by renowned sociobiologist Gérard Zwang,  an expert on sex and sexual pathologies and a contributor to European New Right journals — and someone who enjoys the occasional privilege of being labeled a ‘racist’.

If one was to assume that traditional child rearing is conducive to a White man’s sexual aberrations and his violent behavior in the political arena, then one should start with Oriental and African practices of circumcision first — which in Europe, ever since the ancient Greeks and Romans has been viewed as an act of morbid religious fanaticism.  

Back from the Exodus, 500 years later, the "dictatorship" of Moses established circumcision as an absolute obligation, for fear of being excluded from the Chosen People. The prescription is still valid for the Orthodox Jew and for Israelis. ... In France, the pro-circumcision followers argue that the prepuce would be a parasitic remnant of the femininity inside a masculine body. The myth of "native bisexuality" is an old craze with disastrous consequences. … In our territory (France), the very numerous circumcisions requested by Jewish or Muslim parents are often paid by the Social Security of a so-called secular country!  ... The ideal should obviously be one day the definitive extinction of the dismal monotheistic religions, of their unacceptable dogmas, and of their ridiculous prescriptions. (G. Zwang, “Demystifying Circumcision”)

 

 

Auguste Rodin, „The Kiss,“ 1889 

Liberal pontificators are quick to denounce the practice of infibulation (female mutilation of clitoris) on many immigrant African women residing in Europe, but hardly will they utter a word to denounce equally painful circumcision on new-born Jews or Muslims. 

With or without this strange Levantine make-believe metaphysical mimicry of penile pseudo-castration, unbridled sexual activity has become today a quasi categorical imperative, largely dependent on the whims of the capitalist market. According to the logic of supply and demand one should not rule out that the liberal system may soon issue a decree for mandatory multiracial marriages. Marriage of White couples may be “scientifically” attested as an “unhealthy union at variance with democratic principles of ethnic sensitivity training.”  Never has the West witnessed so much psycho-babble about “love”, “interracial tolerance,” “gender mainstreaming,” “women’s rights,” “gay rights,” etc. — at the time when suicidal loneliness, serial divorces, sexual narcissism, and sexual violence have become its only trademarks of survivability. 

The Ancients were no less sexually active (and probably even more so) than our contemporaries, as testified by their plastic art showing naked women in warm embrace of their men, or as depicted by Homer in his numerous stories of cupid gods and goddesses. Apuleius, a Roman writer of Berber origin, writes explicitly about a woman enchanted by the sex act. From the 14^th-century ItalianBoccaccio, to modern Henry Miller, countless European authors offer us graphic stories of love making between White women and White men. But there is one crucial distinction. In the modern liberal system sex has become an aggressive ideology consisting of mechanistic rituals whose only goal is a “dictatorship of the mandatory orgasm,” thus becoming the very opposite of what sex once was.  

In societies marked by the Puritan spirit, which is still the case among large segments of the White American population, the century-old scorning of sexual encounters has had its logical postmodern backlash: prudishness, promiscuity and pornography. The English-born poet and novelist, D. H. Lawrence was a remarkable man who is close to what we call today a “revolutionary conservative” and is highly popular among European White nationalists. In his essayPornography and Obscenity he wrote how one must reject Puritanism and sentimentalism. “Puritan is a sick man, soul and body sick, so why should we bother about his hallucinations. Sex appeal, of course, varies enormously. There are endless different kinds and endless degrees of each kind.”  (The Portable D.H. Lawrence, 1977, p. 652,). 

Despite globalization, “Americanization” and the increasing difficulty to distinguish between sexual mores in White America and in White Europe, some differences are still visible and often lead to serious misunderstanding among transatlantic partners. This time, the inevitable cultural factor, and not a genetic factor, takes the upper hand. 

White Spectral Lovers  

What may be viewed as vulgar sexual conduct from the perspective of WhiteAmerica is often hailed as something natural in Europe. A sharp and well-travelled European eye, even with no academic baggage, notices a strong dose of hypermoralism and sentimentalism among White American males and females. Examples abound. For instance, public tearful confessions by an American male, either on the podium or at the pulpit about cheating on his wife, while viewed as normal in America, are viewed as pathetic in Europe. Many European White males and women, when visiting America, are stunned when an intelligent American speaker, gripped by emotions, starts shedding tears on his microphone, regardless of whether the theme of his allocution is the plight of Jesus Christ or the predicament of the White race.  

One might explain this phenomenon by suggesting that on a psychological level White Americans, given the early and strong influence of the Old Testament, have been more influenced by the Judaic spirit of guilt than White Europeans, who have traditionally been far more obsessed with a sense of shame. Judaic feelings of guilt were, in the 20th century, successfully transposed in a secular manner by the Marxist Frankfurt School on the entire White population all over the West, and particularly on the German people. By contrast, in the ancient Greek drama and even later among heroes of the Middle Ages, one can hardly spot signs of guilt. Instead, characters are mostly immersed in endless introspective brooding about some shameful act they may or may have not committed. 

Conversely, many White American women rightly conclude that sexual behavior of European males is often erratic, quirky and disorderly. European males are often poorly groomed when dating or mating, often lacking respect for their female partners. For a newcomer to Europe, the overkill of pornographic literature all over public places and the torrents of x-rate movies aired on prime time are indeed unnerving. There is also a different conceptualization of sex and decadence by White Europeans and White Americans respectively.  

Many European White nationalists like to brag about their Dionysian spirit, which often borders on undisciplined behavior. Numerous Catholic holidays in Europe, such as St. Anthony’s day in June, St. Patrick’s day in March, St. George day in April etc., are celebrated from Ireland to Flanders. Typical are Flemishkermesse celebrations depicted by Pieter Breughel.  

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, „The Kermesse of St. George“ (1628)

These celebrations are not meant for Bible preaching, but rather as an occasion to release residual, primordial and pagan feelings. The pent-up sense of the tragic, the accumulated sorrows that come along with age, must be wildly vented, even at the price of appearing grotesque in foreigners’ eyes.

The duration of such mega-feasts is strictly limited. Over the centuries, the Catholic Church has been shrewd enough to incorporate the pagan heritage into Catholic feasts, because otherwise its monotheistic dogma would not have lasted long. Not surprisingly, kermesses and carnivals are in reality far more prophylactic and effective for good sex than all the Viagra and Freudian shrinks combined. On such occasions, still alive in Catholic rural Europe, everybody revels, drinks, everybody pinches each other’s backside, as shown long time ago on Rubens’ and Breughel’s paintings. However, when the fun is over the same revelers go back to their traditional family chores.      

It is a common practice among high intellectual classes in Europe for a married man to flirt with an unknown attractive woman at a social gathering — even in the presence of his own spouse. In fact, for a married man in Europe courting an intelligent woman is considered a sign of good upbringing and chivalry — with a tacit ocular understanding between the two that they may end up in bed together — but with no strings attached. On public beaches from France’s Saint Tropez to Croatia’s Dalmatia, all the way to public parks in Copenhagen, it is normal in hot summers to observe naked women of all ages sunbathing and skinny-dipping in the presence of young children. This is something unimaginable on the Santa Cruz Riviera in California, as it would immediately attract a crazed local peeping tom or a stern-faced police officer. 

Several years ago a scandal broke out in the USA caused by the former US President William Clinton’s sexual escapade with a Jewish woman, Monika Lewinsky. Clinton’s sexual adventures literally became a federal case in America, with many American journalists across the political spectrum demanding his resignation. In Europe, Clinton’s extramarital affair was received by many with a shrug of shoulders. One can hardly imagine a voter in Europe asking for the president to be removed from office just because he was cheating on his wife. Having a mate, a concubine a maitresse has been an age-old practice among European politicians, deliberately ignored  by their spouses, approved by their constituencies, and tolerated by the Church, and in no way seen as a sign of character weakness.  

Thousands of Western scientists, artists and poets, who had an organic view of love making, have disappeared now from the academic radar screen. The antebellum South, still demonized as a backward place, was the last place in the West that had at some point in history salvaged White European medieval customs of honor, virility, generosity and chivalry. This can be seen in the tragic poetry of unreconstructed Southerners, such as John Crowe Ransom.  

By night they haunted a thicket of April mist, 
Out of that black ground suddenly come to birth, 
Else angels lost in each other and fallen on earth. 
Lovers they knew they were, but why unclasped, unkissed? 
Why should two lovers be frozen apart in fear? 
And yet they were, they were.

(John Crowe Ransom, “Spectral Lovers”)  

An iconic French nationalist scholar, an artist, and a political prisoner in France after WWII, Maurice Bardèche  was well aware of the slow coming darkness in the West following the defeat of the South in the Civil War:

Firstly, to be a Southerner is to see and feel that one of the biggest catastrophes of our times was the capture of Atlanta. The defeat atSedan is for me nothing more than an event of history; a sad event, but as any other event colorless and historical.  As for the defeat atWaterloo – I cannot convince myself that it has changed the destiny of the world. Even the collapse of Germany, although it seems to me an injustice, a bad whim of God and as any other appearance against all good sense — I do not consider irrevocable.  But the capture of Atlanta — this is for me an irreparable event, the fatal beacon of History. It is the victory of the Barbarians. (Sparte et les Sudistes, 1969, p. 96). 

  

Tom Sunic (http://www.tomsunic.info; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com) is author, translator, former US professor in political science and a member of the Board of Directors of the American Third Position. His new book, Postmortem Report: Cultural Examinations from Postmodernity, prefaced by Kevin MacDonald, has just been released. Email him.  

Permanent link: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Sunic-Sex&am...

La sexualité est-elle soluble dans le libéralisme?

 

 

La sexualité est-elle soluble dans le libéralisme ?

Mardi, 02 Juin 2009 - http://unitepopulaire.org 

« À mesure que la société s’est affranchie des non-dits et des pudeurs, le sexe, entendons par là la sexualité, est devenu un enjeu de débats d’idées. Et de s’indigner de ce que le sexe soit sous le joug du libéralisme et réduit à un utilitarisme. Bien vu. Le libéralisme moderne fait en sorte qu’aucun domaine n’échappe à son emprise. Son idéologie est que la vie sociale est mue par le seul intérêt et par le plaisir. Du point de vue du libéralisme, tous les domaines de l’activité sont amenés à être régis par ces principes.

 

Le public et le privé sont ainsi tous concernés et la frontière entre les deux tend à s’estomper. Ainsi des coachs et des "spécialistes" du "développement personnel" expliquent comment faire du travail salarié, qui par nature relève d’un rapport de contrainte et de subordination, un espace de réalisation de soi. Dans ces conditions, il n’est pas étonnant que le sexe soit inclus dans le système des intérêts et des plaisirs. Si ce qui est utilitaire comme le salariat doit aussi être agréable, ce qui est a priori non utilitaire comme le sexe doit maintenant devenir utile et être valorisé, évalué, rentabilisé. Telle est la logique du libéralisme. Comment cela devient-il possible ? Pour le comprendre, il faut revenir aux fondements.

 

Le principe du libéralisme est l’absence de limites et l’inscription de chaque activité humaine dans le registre de la consommation. Le libéralisme y travaille sous divers aspects. L’un de ceux-ci est le passage de l’idéologie du "droit" au devoir-être et au devoir faire. On affirme d’abord le droit à une sexualité épanouie, et on développe ensuite l’idée que cela passe par le devoir de tout mettre en œuvre pour obtenir celle-ci. Il faut donc "forcer le destin". Ainsi, la majorité des rencontres se font maintenant par le web. Par ce biais, les rencontres se marchandisent puisque les hommes paient pour s’inscrire. Mais la démarche va au-delà. Ces rencontres se rationalisent à outrance et deviennent quelque chose d’équivalent à la recherche d’un emploi. Elles s’inscrivent dans la recherche d’une adéquation offre-demande. Alors que dans une rencontre, celle-ci ne peut être complètement prévue puisque la rencontre est censée faire changer l’un et l’autre, et donc créer une situation nouvelle. Désormais, chacun est censé être prêt au bonheur et doit en tout cas s’y préparer. Pour cela, des coachs psycho-sexuels proposent leurs services. Leur idée : chacun dispose d’un capital personnel et donc sexuel qu’il s’agit de faire "fructifier". Une sexualité réussie doit s’afficher, c’est un élément de visibilité sociale.

 

Nous sommes dans l’air du temps. On passe ainsi du droit au bonheur au devoir de le montrer pour prouver son efficience. Ceci se fait au nom d’une équivalence générale des valeurs – ou encore marchandisation de toutes les valeurs. Du point de vue libéral, on ne voit en effet pas très bien pourquoi quelqu’un de performant sur le marché du travail, de l’argent ou du pouvoir ne le serait pas dans sa vie sexuelle. Et réciproquement. Ce qui veut dire que la preuve de l’un tend à conforter la preuve de l’autre.

 

Si le corps est un capital, il est tout à fait normal d’en tirer profit en fonction des souhaits de chacun. Ainsi la prostitution devient un métier comme un autre, et le ou la prostitué devient un "travailleur du sexe". Une conception qui occulte le fait que si la prostitution est bien l’un des plus vieux métiers du monde, elle n’a jamais été un métier comme un autre. Après le puritanisme, le libéralisme produit ainsi une vision pseudo-décomplexée du sexe qui, en fait, le banalise et, même dans le cas de la prostitution, rabat une relation marchande mais complexe sur une pratique hygiéniste et strictement marchande.

 

Un autre aspect de la sexualité en régime libéral est particulièrement destructeur du lien social. C’est le fait que l’axiomatique libérale de l’intérêt et du plaisir aboutit à imaginer une sexualité sans l’autre. C’est ce à quoi s’emploie la pornographie. Elle a bien sûr bénéficié pour se développer de la grande peur du sida, dont elle est contemporaine. Mais son impact ne s’explique pas principalement par cela. Elle s’est développée parce que c’est un marché qui a pu prospérer sur l’isolement et la destruction des liens sociaux, stigmates manifestes de la société mondialisée. À cela s’est ajouté le culte de la performance qui, mis en scène dans la pornographie, tend à dévaloriser la sexualité réellement vécue puisque celle-ci risque d’être moins "réussie" techniquement que la sexualité visionnée. C’est l’effet de la spectacularisation de l’intime. L’idéal-type d’une sexualité comme exploit quasi-sportif – une sexualité compétitive – a remplacé l’hédonisme gentiment libertin et égalitaire des années 68.

Maintenant, beaucoup d’adolescents connaissent la pornographie avant de connaître réellement la sexualité et donc abordent celle-ci avec une vision parfaitement technicisée et selon un schéma de figures érotiques ou plutôt machinales imposées. Ceci provoque évidemment des troubles narcissiques et des troubles de la relation à l’autre. Dans les films porno, la femme est insatiable et les acteurs sont tous performants et interchangeables. Pas dans la vraie vie. La pornographie est aussi une métaphore de la transparence. On y montre tout ce qui est possible et seul existe ce qui est montré. Si la pornographie est une sexualité sans l’autre, le libéralisme pousse de toute façon à n’utiliser l’autre que comme un investissement. Et à se retirer de celui-ci si l’investissement ne s’avère pas rentable.

 

La logique est celle du zapping. Sachant que, à la limite, l’autre n’est pas indispensable et les sex toys sont faits pour le prouver. C’est "le plaisir à portée de soi-même" dit la publicité. Une certaine Anne Lolotte, qui donne des "consultations" à des "patients" (sic) explique : "À partir du moment où une patiente ou un patient accepte d’utiliser un sex toy c’est déjà un pas fait vers l’autonomie, la capacité au jeu et au plaisir." Nous sommes dans une logique libérale : dans une société de défiance généralisée, le contrat le plus fiable n’est-il pas celui que l’on fait avec soi-même ? Chacun est alors responsable et en quelque sorte propriétaire de son propre plaisir. Jouir ? Yes I can. La société du libre-échange devient celle où l’autre n’étant jamais que le même il n’y a plus rien à échanger et l’autosuffisance affective et sexuelle devient un idéal. […]

 

Culte de la performance et réduction à l’objet caractérisent donc la vision libérale de la sexualité. Alors que le puritanisme dévalorisait le sexe, la société de la transparence, dont la pornographie est l’une des manifestations, se propose de l’aseptiser, de le neutraliser, et de le marchandiser. Le sexe, y compris la séduction, est réduit à des performances à maximiser ou n’est rien. La société des ego fait ainsi de la sexualité une pratique diabolique – au sens étymologique de "ce qui sépare" – alors que la sexualité relève normalement du symbolique, c’est-à-dire d’un signe de reconnaissance, de ce qui donne un horizon commun à un couple ou à une collectivité. La sexualité n’est pas un capital à faire fructifier. C’est une pure dépense. Ce n’est pas non plus un ensemble de techniques. C’est une réalité têtue qui ne se laisse pas réduire à une fonctionnalité. »

 

 

Pierre Le Vigan, "Une nouvelle guerre du sexe ?", Europe Maxima, 8 mars 2009

L'âge de la pornophagie

L’ÂGE DE LA PORNOPHAGIE

Trouvé sur: http://www.unitepopulaire.org/

« Il y a eu le développement d'internet, l'accès facile à des scènes pornographiques, le fait que les jeunes peuvent se filmer avec des téléphones portables en train d'avoir des relations sexuelles reproduisant ces scénarios. Sans qu'aucun adulte ne leur dise que le porno, ce n'est pas la réalité, que l'acteur joue, qu'il est dopé. … Il fallait donc se demander ce qui avait changé pour qu'une petite minorité croissante de jeunes se comporte de cette manière. Des études sont en train d'être menées, notamment sur le contenu des téléphones portables. A Zurich, elles ont démontré que 60% des garçons interrogés, mais aussi 40% des filles, détenaient de la pornographie. (...)

Certaines valeurs, en particulier le respect de l'enveloppe charnelle, peuvent être altérées chez des individus n'ayant pas les outils et les accompagnements nécessaires pour gérer ce type d'images. Un certain nombre de garçons se mettent en scène comme de véritables machos. Et certaines filles consommant du porno adoptent cette image. Elles se considèrent comme un morceau de viande, un consommable.

Je parle dorénavant de pornophagie. Il y a une cinquantaine d'années, la pornographie était relativement confidentielle. Des hommes allaient au sex-shop pour en consommer. Avec l'apparition du magnétoscope et des cassettes vidéo, le porno est entré dans les foyers, l'homme l'imposant à sa conjointe. Actuellement, avec internet, il y a suroffre. On surconsomme, ce qui mène à la surstimulation, puis au mimétisme… (...) Il s'agit d'une sexualité désincarnée, sans amour. Le viol est relativement rare entre adolescents. Souvent, la fille acceptera ce que les garçons lui imposent, pour se faire adopter par le groupe. (...) On est dans une sexualité débridée, car exempte de valeurs. C'est le modèle du macho et de la salope sur MTV. (...) Pour voir quelle était la place de la pornographie chez les jeunes, je me suis intéressé à ce qu'ils achètent : du rap. Sur internet, j'ai trouvé des centaines de groupes de rap utilisant des actrices porno pour tourner des clips ! Le porno est devenu un argument marketing sur le marché jeune, ça fait vendre. (...)

Beaucoup de jeunes transportent en outre sur leur téléphone portable des images de pornographie illicite. Récemment dans le district de Boudry, trois mineurs arrêtés détenaient une vingtaine de films, dont la moitié contenaient des actes de torture ou de zoophilie. (...) Pourquoi ne pas mettre la pression sur les providers internet, afin de les contraindre à mettre à disposition de leurs clients des abonnements familiaux, avec des filtres installés automatiquement afin d'éviter les contenus pornographiques ou violents ? »

Olivier Guéniat, chef de la police de sûreté neuchâteloise, interviewé par L’Express, 21 novembre 2008

Note sur Otto Weininger

 

Note sur Otto Weininger (1880-1903)

 

 

«Quel homme étrange, énigmatique, ce Weininger!», écrivait August Strindberg à son ami Artur Gerber, immédiatement après le suicide d'Otto Weininger, âgé de 23 ans. «Weininger mi ha chiarito molte cose» [= “Weininger m'a éclairé sur beaucoup de choses”], avouait Mussolini dans son long entretien avec Emil Ludwig. Pour Ernst Bloch, l'ouvrage principal de Weininger, Sexe et caractère,  était “une unique anti-utopie contre la femme”, Weininger était dès lors un “misogyne extrême”, un misogyne par excellence. Theodor Lessing posait le diagnostique suivant: il voyait en Weininger la typique “haine de soi” des Juifs. Rudolf Steiner voyait en lui un “génie décadant”. Il fut admiré par Karl Kraus, Wittgenstein et Schönberg; Mach, Bergson, Georg Simmel et Fritz Mauthner l'ont lu et l'ont critiqué. Son ouvrage principal a connu quelque trente éditions, a été traduit en vingt langues; en 1953, il a même été traduit en hébreu malgré son antisémitisme. Plus d'une douzaine de livres ont été consacrés jusqu'ici à Weininger seul.

 

Otto Weininger est né en 1880 à Vienne. Très tôt, il a été marqué par le souffle, d'abord fort léger, de la décadence imminente. C'était la Vienne fin de siècle, avec Hofmannstahl, Schnitzler et Nestroy, Wittgenstein et le Cercle de Vienne, l'empiro-criticisme et la psychanalyse freudienne, Mahler et Schönberg, Viktor Adler et Karl Lueger: une grande richesse intellectuelle, mais marquée déjà du sceau de la fin. L'effervescence intellectuelle de Vienne semble d'ailleurs se récapituler toute entière dans la personne de Weininger: il développe des efforts intellectuels intenses qui finissent par provoquer son auto-destruction. Et il a fini par se suicider le jour de sa promotion, ce Juif converti au protestantisme, ce philosophe qui était passé du positivisme à la métaphysique mystique et symbolique; en peu d'années, cet homme très jeune était devenu une sorte de Polyhistor qui naviguait à l'aise tant dans l'univers des sciences naturelles que dans celui des beaux arts, qui connaissait en détail toutes les philosophies d'Europe et d'Asie, qui savait toutes les langues classiques et les principales langues modernes d'Europe (y compris le norvégien, grâce à son admiration pour Ibsen).

 

Pourquoi ce jeune homme si brillant s'est-il tiré une balle dans la tête le 4 octobre 1903, quelques mois après la parution de son ouvrage principal, dans la maison où mourut jadis Beethoven?

 

«Seule la mort pourra m'apprendre le sens de la vie», avait-il un jour écrit. Et il avait dit à son ami Gerber: «Je vais me tuer, pour ne pas devoir en tuer d'autres». Bien qu'il ait toujours considéré que le suicide était un signe de lâcheté, il s'est senti contraint au suicide, tenaillé qu'il était pas un énorme sentiment de cul­pabilité. Ce qui nous ramène à son œuvre et à sa pensée, où la catégorie de la culpabilité occupe une place centrale. La culpabilité, pour Weininger, c'est, en dernière instance, le monde empirique.

 

Après avoir rapidement rompu avec le néo-positivisme de Mach et d'Avenarius, Weininger développe tout un système métaphysique, une philosophie dualiste au sens de Platon et des néo-platoniciens, du chris­tianisme et de Kant. D'une part, nous avons ce monde de la sensualité, de l'espace et du temps, c'est-à-dire le Néant. De l'autre, nous avons le monde intelligible, soit le monde de la liberté, de l'éthique et de la logique, de l'éternité et des valeurs: le Tout. Le monde empirique, selon Weininger, n'a de réalité que sym­bolique; c'est pourquoi, inlassablement, il approfondit la signification symbolique de chaque chose empi­rique, de chaque plante, de chaque animal, au fur et à mesure qu'elle se révèle à son regard mystique. Ainsi, la forêt est le symbole du secret; le cheval, le symbole de la folie (on songe tout de suite à cette ex­périence-clé de Nietzsche, se jetant au cou d'une cheval à Turin en 1889!); le chien, celui du crime; et ce sont justement des cauchemars, où des chiens entrent en jeu, qui ont tourmenté Weininger, tenaillé par ses sentiments de culpabilité, immédiatement avant son suicide.

 

Ce qui est caractéristique pour tous les efforts philosophiques de Weininger, est un élément qu'il partage avec toutes les autres philosophies dualistes, soit une nostalgie catégorique pour l'éternité, pour le monde de l'absolu et de l'immuable. En guise d'introduction à cette métaphysique, citons, à partir de son ouvrage principal, cette caractérologie philosophique des sexes, aussi bizarre que substantielle. Cette caractérologie reflète finalement son dualisme métaphysique fondamental. Le principe masculin est le re­présentant du Tout. Le principe féminin, le représentant du Néant. Cette antinomie, posée par Weininger est à la source de bien des quiproquos. En fait, il ne parle pas d'hommes et de femmes empiriques, mais d'idéaltypes. Tout être empirique contient une certaine combinaison de principe masculin et de principe féminin, de “M” et de “F” comme Weininger les désigne. Cette notion d'androgyne, il la doit à Platon (Sym­po­sion)  et il cherche à expliquer, par les différences dans les combinaisons entre ces deux élé­ments, quelles sont les lois régissant les affinités sexuelles, notamment l'homosexualité et le féminisme.

 

Sur base de son analyse des deux idéaltypes, Weininger voulait jeter les fondements d'une psychologie philosophique et remettre radicalement en question la psychologie de tradition anglo-saxonne, qu'il ju­geait être dépourvue de substance. Le principe “M” est donc l'idée platonicienne de l'homme et le véhicule du génie, qui, grâce à sa créativité, sa logique et son sens de l'éthique, participe au monde intelligible. Le principe “F”, en revanche, n'est que sexualité, au-delà de toute logique et de toute éthique; en fin de compte, il est le Néant et la culpabilité qui tourmente le principe masculin. Le principe “F” est incapable d'amour, car tout amour véritable naît d'une volonté de valeur, ce qui manque totalement au principe fé­minin. En conséquence, pense Weininger, la véritable émancipation de la femme serait justement de dé­passer et de transcender ce principe féminin; le raisonnement de Weininger est très analogue à celui de Marx dans La question juive,  quand l'auteur du Capital donne ses recettes pour résoudre celle-ci.

 

Weininger consacre tout un chapitre au judaïsme et, en lisant, on s'aperçoit immédiatement qu'il ne s'agit pas seulement d'une manifestation de “haine de soi”, typiquement juive, mais, bien plutôt d'une analyse profonde, introspective et psychologique de l'essence du judaïsme. Weininger pose la question de savoir si sont exactes les théories qui affirment que les Juifs constituent le plus féminin et le moins religieux de tous les peuples; certaines de ses analyses en ce domaine, comme du reste dans les chapitres sur le crime et la folie, la maternité et la prostitution, l'érotisme et l'esthétique, sont magistrales, véritablement géniales, mais aussi, en bien des aspects, déplacées, naïves ou exagérément exaltées.

 

Ce qui en impose dans l'œuvre de Weininger, c'est qu'il tente de penser à fond et d'étayer son anti-fémi­nisme et de l'inclure dans un système métaphysique de type néo-platonicien. Certes, il y a eu des doc­trines anti-féministes à toutes les époques, et qui n'exprimaient pas seulement une quelconque misogy­nie, mais qui apercevaient clairement que le féminisme était une de ces idéologies égalitaires qui entravait le chemin des femmes vers une réelle affirmation d'elles-mêmes. Mais, à l'exception des idées de Schopenhauer, jamais l'anti-féminisme n'a été esquissé avec autant de force et de fougue philosophiques que chez le jeune philosophe viennois.

 

Mladen SCHWARTZ.

(texte issu de Criticón, n°64, mars-avril 1981; trad. française: Robert Steuckers).