Facing death—and escaping death—makes everything seem so precious, so sacred, so beautiful, that I feel an urge to love it, to embrace it, to be engulfed by it more intensely than ever before. My river has never been so beautiful... Death, and the possibilities it presents, makes passionate love more likely, and I don't know if we can love passionately, if we can be fascinated, whether we know that we will never die.
—Excerpt from Abraham. Letters written by Maslow during his recovery from heart disease
Now we want to talk about the roots of the tragic side of love. We are created as male and female. This makes us always long for each other, a desire destined to be temporary in pursuit of completeness. This is another source of happiness and disappointment, ecstasy and despair.
Here we need to introduce a difficult concept — existentialism: the word really means "the science of existence," but this definition doesn't do much to understand it, especially since we post-19th century Americans weren't used to existentialism. I'll never forget Paul. Tillich described a class of shock to a class when he was confronted with the question "Why does this thing exist and not exist?" when he was a philosophy major. This question pushes man to the level of existentialism. Why is there such a thing as existence? Why not be sexless, why can't we reproduce like grasshoppers or earthworms and chop off a part of ourselves to generate a new life? We cannot simply answer that this is because of "evolution" – which is how it develops, nor can we use the "divine will" – we are made so by a teleological "cause" – the equally simple answer, and both answers – albeit diametrically opposed – avoid the question. No, we have to ask existential questions directly, examining the existence of what we have at hand — in this case, sex — to find convincing answers. If "sex is a replica of the human cosmic process," we obviously can't conclude based on what hairstyles boys and girls have had over the past decade. Existentialism seeks to discover the basic structure of existence—a structure that consensus gives to everyone at all times.
This male-female existence, from an existential point of view, is a fundamental polar manifestation of all reality. The smallest molecular particle is also able to move because it is composed of positive and negative charges. There is a voltage between the positive and negative charges before there is movement. Using this molecular substance and energy as an analogy, Alfred. Norn. Whitehead and Paul. Tillich believed that reality had positive and negative polar existential characteristics. Whitehead and many contemporary thinkers (for whom his work is important) see reality not as a fixed state of matter, but as a process of dynamic motion between the two poles. This is why Whitehead was able to develop a philosophy of course. In fact, it can be said that all realities have hermaphroditic characteristics – indeed, we can find In this view Hegel's "positive", "negative" and "conjunct" arguments. Paul. Tillich points out that Hegel's students are well aware that he was a philosopher of love in his early formulation of fragmentary and incomplete views, and it is no exaggeration to say that Hegel's system of debate was extracted from a keen intuition about the nature of love's separation and reunion.
During sexual intercourse, we experience this bipolar rhythm directly and intimately as the most powerful representation of sexual activity in relation to each other. It is a play that depicts approaching, entering, fully uniting, then partially separating (as if the lovers don't believe it's true and eager to take a lot of each other's lives) and then reuniting again. In the activity, intimacy and withdrawal, union and separation, renunciation of the ego and self-giving again fully united, we arrange this sacrament in this way is not a natural accident. Because this constant repetition of mutual participation, contact and retreat, even in the initial hesitation, is the birds and animals, but also the most basic behavior of men and women in the process of courtship. In the rhythm of the two people's participation in the union and the final separation of individual independence are contained the two necessary poles of human self-existence, which are fully revealed in sexual intercourse.
It is quite possible that these distinctions reinforce the myth that sex is combined with one's other half. They arise spontaneously in different cultures. The most famous of these is Aristophanes' myth of the two sexes in Plato's Drinking. But the most important point is formed in the Upanishads, which resemble this myth, which recounts the man's relationship to his creation, "but he is not happy." So lonely people don't feel happy. So, "a wife was created to fill the void."
But we need not use myths to support the value of these two polarities. I spent two weeks in Mount Atto, a small county in northern Greece, about 12 miles from the Aegean Sea, inhabited only by monks, and about fifteen to twenty monasteries. Since the 12th century, women have been barred from entering. But the monks' posture, tone of voice, gait, etc. all imitated women. When I saw the monk walking past and walking to the village street, I thought it was a woman. The same happened in a completely different group of men, the French mercenaries, whose soldiers would dance in arms on the decks of French ships in the Mediterranean. The occurrence of homosexual behavior here is not the main problem, and in any case, it cannot explain this phenomenon. I'd rather say that when there are no women, it doesn't matter to play a male role, and vice versa. When there are women around, we become more masculine, and they are more feminine. Both sexes have a gender-specific role in reinforcing each other.
We all have a common experience that when you put a group of men together — like in the army, in a brotherhood or a convent — you might be able to get them to concentrate on the work at hand, but on the other hand, strangely enough, they lack a kind of vitality. We see a lifeless, lack of a changing response. They will accept the procedures of resistance without resistance. But as soon as women appeared, as in the Garden of Eden, consciousness became sharper, a sense of morality developed, and even rebellion began to sprout. In a real sense, the sexes seem to be able to burn each other, providing a sense of vitality and strength—and even better ideas.
The combination and reproduction of the sexes can produce kaleidoscopic results. The mixture and combination of hermaphrodite genes infinitely increases the diversity of their results; the combination of originality and new possibilities emerges. Only the lowest organisms, such as grasshoppers, reproduce by branching from the same organism. One study showed that Americans were higher than people in other regions, and we think one of the reasons for this is that locals interact with ethnic groups of immigrants who move to the area. At the same time, it is well known that intermarriage between siblings or other members of the same family is prohibited in almost every society, even if they do not cause physical damage. Because the disappearance and depletion of distinctions hinders the development of races.
We adapt to the rhythmic processes that take place with the different muscle tissues of men and women, the Dutch philosopher Butindyak concludes. He pointed out that men's bones and muscles are inherently straight, almost at right angles — more suitable for stabbing, punching, and other rigid attacks by men. And women are born with curved, rounded lines —better suited to opening themselves up, nurturing and nurturing the next generation, giving and receiving special female pleasures. Our society associates male virtue with action and female behavior with passivity – on this obvious level, it is easily misunderstood and wrong. That is to say, women are born as if they were protecting peace, while men are born for war. In fact, both men and women exist in their own active and passive ways.
These characteristics are exaggerated and unfair in our society. But that's not a reason to forget the real differences between the sexes. Indeed, the so-called masculine character was so highly regarded in the 19th century that the man, in order to prove his power, conquered not only nature, but also himself and all the women he met. The standards customized for women are gentle, with sweet smiles, unable to take care of themselves... The response was that there had been a campaign to eliminate gender disparities; the slogans shouted were no longer "gender differences" but "everyone is the same". Both sexes react the same way to the same thing. To our horror, we find that we have discarded the gender differences that give us pleasure along with unfair repression.
The last fact we observe in sex is both simple and fundamental. This is the fact that sex is for reproduction, it can create a new life, a child, and the fact that a woman's body and life will undergo profound changes for at least nine months, whether the man is there or not. In addition to the morbid situation, this will make women completely different for a longer period of time than before, and a noblewoman in Abyssinia described the situation in plain language:
The day a woman enjoys her first love she splits in two... And after the man's first love, it is still the same as before. Women change as individuals from the first day of a relationship, and this is the case throughout their lives. The man and the woman left overnight, his life and body were always the same, and the woman was pregnant. As a mother she was different from the childless woman. Her body will carry the fruits of that night for nine months. Something was growing, something was growing in her life, and it could no longer be separated from her. She was a mother, and even when her children died, even when all her children died, she was still a mother. Because at some point she had put the child in her heart, and she could never be separated from her again, even if the child died. All this men don't know... He didn't know how love was different before and after, or how it was different before and after motherhood. Only a woman can know, can say... She must always be a virgin, always a mother, she is a virgin before every love, she is a mother after every love...
There are also those who disagree with this, such as Karen. , who believes that women can have children and men can't, provokes jealousy among men, which makes them struggle hard and try their best to prove their creativity in the activities of cultural operation and civilization building. In psychoanalysis, this jealousy leads to personal shame and despair in men. Over and over again in a South American patient shouted in his recliner that he could never forgive his mother for giving birth to him and he had to suck her nipples – he was convinced that every man must have the same jealousy as him. The archetypal roots of this conflict are much deeper than our current social or "Western" problems. It is rooted in human history and existence itself.
But the opposite of this is repression, and when I say in the previous chapters that "the worldly man of the new age is afraid of his fertility," I mean it literally: he is anxious because of the deep ambivalence about his ability to create another life. One of my patients suffered from periodic impotence, and every month he became impotent when his wife was ovulating, although he claimed to have a child with his wife all the time, it turned out that in his fantasies, he did not want to be a father, he was afraid that the child would compete with him for love, and he wanted to be both her child and her husband.
This ambivalence is reflected in Freud's word "castration." He thinks all anxiety can be traced back to this primitive fear. Furstein means differently from what most people call "castration"—circumcision of a man. That should be meant by the word "nultilation." Castration should refer to cutting off the testicles and becoming a eunuch. It contains the meaning of loss of reproductive capacity. Although the concubines of the harem could have affairs with them, the bloodline could remain pure. I don't think Freud realized how smart he was here. Because anxiety about fertility – despite people using contraception – is indeed fundamental.
(End)
Text | 【Beauty】Logue. Mei "Love and Will"
Hongmei Liang Hua / Translation
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