Philosophy of the Unconscious

by Eduard Von Hartmann

  I cannot refrain from quoting here the words of Schopenhauer (Parerga, ii. 313): “Whoever wishes to put to a brief trial the assertion that in the world enjoyment outweighs pain, or at least is in equipoise with it, should compare the sensation of the animal which devours another with that of this other.”—

  As for the other spring of Nature, Love, I must in regard to its theory refer to Chap. ii. B. In the animal kingdom one can hardly speak of an active sexual selection on the part of the male, even among the highest birds and mammals; of a passive selection through the struggle of the males in which the strongest remains victor only among a small part of the higher animals. For the rest, the sexual impulse is not individual, but is purely general. But now in the infinitely larger part of the animal kingdom there do not exist organs of sexual pleasure acting as stimulants to coition; without such accordingly coition is an office indifferent to the egoism of the individual which is carried on by the impelling constraint of instinct, as the spinning of the web of the spider or the building of the bird’s nest for the eggs hereafter to be laid. To the absence of enjoyment in the office of fecundation in the case of most animals also the frequently indirect form of this function deviating from direct copulation points. When in the vertebrates a personal physical enjoyment appears to occur, it is at first certainly as flat and insignificant as possible; but soon there is also added the contest of the males for the female, which in many species of animals is waged with the greatest bitterness, and has for its consequence often painful injuries, not seldom also the killing of one of the rivals. Add to that, among those animals which at the time of rut form herds led by the victorious male, the involuntary continence of the younger members, whether they separate into smaller detachments or remain with the main herd, when an invasion of the rights of the head of the family is punished in the cruellest fashion. This involuntary continence of the largest part of the males, and the pains and vexation caused the defeated by the contests, seem to me a hundredfold to exceed the pleasures accruing to the prosperous males from the sexual pleasure. As for the females, in the first place, among most animals they far more rarely couple than the privileged males; and, secondly, the pains of child-bearing in their case far outweigh the pleasure derived from copulation.

  With man, especially the cultivated, birth is more painful and more difficult than for any other animal, and mostly entails even a longer sick-bed. I need not hesitate, therefore, to declare the total sufferings of child-bearing for the woman greater than the total physical pleasures of coition. We should not be misled by the circumstance that impulse causes the woman to pronounce the contrary decision, practically, and perhaps also theoretically. Here we have a glaring case where impulse blinds the judgment. One has only to think of that woman who could not be deterred from sexual intercourse by the repetition of the Cæsarean operation, and one will estimate the value of such judgment more truly. The man seems to be better off in this respect; but he only seems so.

  Kant says in his “Anthropology” (Werke, vii, Abth. 2, S. 266): “In the former (the epoch of natural development), in the state of nature, at any rate, he is in his fifteenth year impelled by the sexual instinct and capable of reproducing and maintaining his kind. In the second (the epoch of civic development) he can (on the average) hardly venture it before the twentieth year. For although the youth has early enough the power to satisfy his own and his wife’s inclination as citizen of the world, he is far from possessing the power to maintain his wife and child as subject of a state.—He must learn a trade, obtain customers, before commencing housekeeping with his wife, when, in the more polished classes, the five-and-twentieth year may well pass before he is ripe for his destination. How now does he fill up the interval of a compelled and unnatural continence? Hardly otherwise than with vices.”

  These vices, however, soil the æsthetic sense, blunt the delicacy of the mind, and not seldom lead to immoral actions. Lastly, through their inherent immoderation, and for other reasons, they unsettle the health, and only too often sow the seeds of ruin for the following generation.

  But whoever actually and exceptionally keeps free from all the vices filling up the provisional period, and by an effort of reason overcomes the torments of aroused sensibility in ever-renewed struggle, has in the interval between puberty and marriage, the interval, if not of most endurance, yet of the most flaming sensibility, to endure such an amount of pain, that the subsequent total of sexual pleasure can never make amends for it. The age of marriage for men is, however, constantly rising with advancing civilisation; the provisional period thus becomes continually longer, and is longest precisely in the classes where the nervous sensibility and irritability, thus also the torment of privation, is greatest.

  But now in Man the purely physical side of sexual love is subordinate, far more important is the individualised sexual instinct, which promises an extravagant felicity of never-ending duration from the possession of a particular individual.

  Let us first consider the consequences of love in general. One side generally loves more ardently than the other; the less loving is usually the first to draw back, and the other feels faithlessly abandoned and betrayed. Whoever could see and weigh the pain of deceived hearts on account of broken vows, as much of it as is in the world at any moment, would find that it alone exceeds all the happiness derived from love existing at the same time in the world, for the simple reason that the pain of disillusion and the bitterness of betrayal lasts much longer than the blissful illusion. Still more cruel becomes the pain for the woman who has sacrificed everything for her lover from genuine deep love, only to live in close contact with him as a clinging plant. If such an one be torn from her stay and cast adrift, she stands truly fallen, i.e., without support in the world; deprived of her strength, robbed of the protection of love, she must, a detached flower, wither and fade,—or shamelessly plunge into the current of base life in order to attain forgetfulness.

  How much married and domestic peace is not destroyed by clandestine love! What colossal sacrifices of paternal happiness and well-being in other respects does not the unblessed sexual impulse demand! Father’s curse and expulsion from the family circle, even from the social circle in which one has become rooted; such is the price paid by man or maiden in order merely to be united to the beloved one. The poor seamstress or servant-girl who consumes her joyless existence in the sweat of her brow, she, too, falls one evening a prey to the irresistible impulse; for the sake of rare brief joys she becomes a mother, and has the choice either of committing infanticide or of spending the largest part of her earnings, scarcely sufficient even for herself, on the maintenance of the child. Thus for long years she must bear care and want with threefold severity, if she will not throw herself into the arms of a life of vice, which secures her for the years of youth a less toilsome livelihood, only to be followed by an age of the more frightful misery; and all this for the little bit of love!

  It is a pity that there are no tables of statistics showing what percentage of all love-affairs in every rank of life lead to marriage. One would be horrified at the small percentage. Leaving out of sight old bachelors and maids, even among married couples one will find the number by no means large of those who have not behind them a little broken-off affair; many, however, who could tell of several. Of the concluded marriages, again, only a very small part are concluded from love, the rest from other considerations: one may gather from that how small a part of all love-affairs terminate in the haven of marriage. Of this small part, however, again, very few attain a so-called happy marriage, for happy marriages are altogether much rarer than one might think, in consequence of the make-believe in order to keep up the appearance of happiness; but, in fact, the happy marriages are least of all to be found among those concluded from love, so that of the small part of the amours terminating in the haven of marriage, the majority again comes worse off than if they had ended in marriage. Those few, lastly, which lead to the happy marriage attain this not through love itself, but only
by this, that the characters and persons happen so to fit that conflicts are avoided and love passes into friendship. Those rare cases in which the happiness of love gently and imperceptibly glides into that of friendship, and all bitter disillusion is spared it, are so rare that they are even balanced by those bad marriages, which are concluded from love. Of all love-affairs not terminating in marriage, however, the larger part does not attain its goal at all, and the smaller part, which does attain it, makes the people, at least the female part, still more unhappy than if they had not attained it.

  After these general considerations we cannot be doubtful that love prepares for the individuals concerned far more pain than pleasure. Hardly anywhere will instinct so much oppose this result as here, and perhaps few will grant it but those in whom instinct has lost its power through age.

  Let us, however, consider the process in satisfied love in detail, in order to see that even here pleasure rests substantially on illusion. Undoubtedly, in general, the quantity of the pleasure is proportional to the strength of the satisfied will, provided that the satisfaction falls in its full extent into consciousness,—a supposition which, in perfect strictness, is so much the less admissible the more obscure is the will and the more its contents extend from the region of unconsciousness into that of consciousness.

  But let us leave this on one side, and grant that a very strong will, no matter how arisen, to possess the beloved object is consciously present; then undoubtedly must the satisfaction of this will be felt as intense pleasure, and that the more the more clearly the person concerned becomes conscious of the fulfilment of his wish as of a fact dependent on external circumstances; the greater therefore is the contrast of the fulfilment with a preceding recognition of difficulties and obstacles. A caliph, on the other hand, who is conscious that he has only to issue his commands in order to possess any woman that pleases him, will hardly be at all conscious of the satisfaction of his will, however strong it may be in any particular case. Hence it follows, however, that the pleasure of satisfaction is only purchased by preceding pain at the supposed impossibility of attaining possession; for difficulties whose conquest one foresees as certain are already no longer difficulties.

  But, according to our previous general considerations, the preceding pain through the certainty or probability of non-success will be greater than the corresponding pleasure in fulfilment. But now, as certainly as the final enjoyment on fulfilment is a real one because it depends on the satisfaction of an actually existing will, so certainly is the idea on which the enjoyment depends an illusion. Consciousness, namely, finds in itself a violent longing for the possession of the beloved object, which surpasses in intensity and passionateness every phenomenon of will else known to it. Since, however, at the same time, it does not suspect the unconscious goal of this will (which lies in the nature of the child to be created), it supposes a prospective extravagant enjoyment to be the goal of that extravagant longing; and instinct supports this illusion, since the man, if he should mark that there is a cheating of his egoism for the sake of alien ends, would soon seek to suppress the instinct of passionate love. Thus comes to pass the illusion with which the lover proceeds to the sexual act, and which may be experimentally proved to be such by this, that the satisfaction of the will on the possession of the loved one remains just the same if a counterfeit, from whom his will would recoil with disdain and abhorrence, be successfully imposed on the lover without his knowledge.

  Nevertheless the pleasure in the satisfaction of the accomplished will is quite real,—but this pleasure was indeed not in the mind of the lover, but rather that extravagant bliss by which he thinks the violent will for possession set in motion!

  Of such a bliss or pleasure there exists, however nothing at all since the enjoyment is purely compounded of the satisfaction of that violent will for possession to be first set in motion, and of the common physical sexual enjoyment. When the violence of the impulse allows consciousness to a certain extent to breathe again and to attain some clearness, it becomes aware of the disillusion of its expectation. Every disillusion as regards an expected enjoyment is, however, a pain, and indeed a so much greater pain the greater was the expected enjoyment, and the more certainly it was expected. Here, then, when an extravagant bliss, expected with absolute certainty, turns out to be pure illusion (for the two real moments of the enjoyment were indeed as a matter of course expected besides this blessedness), the pain of disenchantment must reach a high degree; so high a degree that it perfectly counterbalances, when it does not outweigh, the really existing enjoyment. Certainly the impulse, not annihilated at a stroke, but continually renewed for some time, although with generally decreasing strength, prevents this disillusion from being apprehended immediately and in full extent by consciousness; the renewed pining after satisfaction perverts the judgment, and obstinately keeps up the illusion of the contrary experience for the future.

  But this duping of the conscious judgment by impulse does not last for ever. The attained possession soon becomes customary property. The idea of the contrast with the difficulties of the attainment disappears more and more; the will for possession becomes latent, as no disturbance of possession is threatened, and the satisfaction of this will becomes ever less felt as pleasure. Now the disenchantment finds for itself a way more and more into consciousness.

  But this disillusion is not the only one that attains to consciousness, but there are many others. The lover had fancied he was entering on a new era, to be transported by possession, as it were, from earth to heaven, and he finds in his new state all the old surroundings and daily drudgeries. He had thought to gain in the beloved one an angel, and finds now, when the impulse no longer distorts his judgment, a human being with all the human faults and weaknesses. He had imagined that the state of extravagant felicity would be eternal, and he now begins to doubt whether he has not been very much deceived as regards the expected bliss of possession. In short, he finds that everything is as before, but that he was a great fool in his expectations. The only real enjoyment in the first time after acquiring possession, the satisfaction of the accomplished will, has disappeared, but on the ecstasy supposed to be eternal has supervened sorry disenchantment yielding a lasting pain, which is only very slowly extinguished by the accustomed devotion to the common daily round.

  Undoubtedly very rarely on the conclusion of a marriage, at least on one side, are there not sacrifices made, were it only of liberty; these sacrifices now emerge into consciousness, and increase the displeasure at the disillusion. If elsewhere only vanity succeeds in hiding pain and misfortune and vaunts a non-existing happiness and pleasure, here also shame co-operates to the same end, since one would hardly ascribe the disenchantment to one’s own stupidity. The erewhile lovers seek to hide the pain of disenchantment not only from the world and one another, but if possible also from themselves, which again contributes to enhance the discomfort of the situation.

  Thus then the real enjoyment in the union of lovers must not only be paid for in advance by fears, anxiety, and doubt, nay, often temporary despair, but subsequently again with the pain of disenchantment—that enjoyment, the perception of whose illusory character at the moment of enjoyment itself can only be averted by the violence of the impulse suspending, or indeed corrupting, the judgment.

  But now we have so far paid little attention to the state before the union of the lovers, and yet it is just here where the tenderest, most blissful sensations are found, as, in particular, those in the first flush of the dawn of the newly opened heaven. On what does that unquestionably real pleasure depend? On hope, on nothing but hope, which only anticipates a future good, and only imagines that that will be ecstatic bliss; on a hope which is hardly conscious of itself as hope, but with every moment is revealed in a truer light. The greatest difficulties opposing union cannot destroy this hope and its felicity; but that it is really nothing but hope is proved by this, that the lovers despair, and even destroy themselves, when the impossibility of their union
has become certainty. If, now, this love-happiness preceding union is only hope of the happiness to be expected after union, it becomes illusory when that is seen to be illusory.

  This is the reason why only first love can be true love; in the second and after loves the impulse meets with too great resistance from the consciousness, which now more or less clearly perceives the illusory nature of the first love. Thus Goethe says in “Truth and Fiction,” speaking of “Werther”: “Nothing, however, gives more occasion to this weariness (this loathing of life) than a return of love. … The thought of the Eternal and the Infinite, which peculiarly elevates and supports it, has vanished; it appears transient, like all that recurs.”

  Whoever has once understood the illusory nature of successful love after union, and therewith also of that before union, whoever has come to see the pain outweighing the pleasure in all love, for that man the phenomenon of love has no more health, because his consciousness offers resistance to the imposition of means to ends that are not his ends; the pleasure of love has been for him undermined and corroded, only its smart remains to him unrelieved. But although such an one will not be able entirely to resist the impulse, this will yet be the endeavour of his reason, and he will be, at any rate, successful in any particular case in moderating the fervour of love into which he fell as ingenuous youth, and in reducing accordingly also the degree of pain and the excess of pain over pleasure which would otherwise have fallen to his lot. He will, however, at the same time be conscious that he is entangled against his will in a passion that causes him more pain than pleasure, and with this perception from the standpoint of individualism the doom of love has been pronounced (comp. i. 231–233).

  These last reflections refer only to that love which is so fortunate as to attain its end; but if we include all cases, this account of the worth of love wears a very unfavourable aspect. Illusory pleasure and predominant pain, even in the most successful case; generally thwarting of the will without attaining of the goal, accompanied by grief and despair; annihilation of the future of so many women by loss of chastity, their sole social support,—these are the results we have found.