The Drama of Love and Death: A Study of Human Evolution and Transfiguration — John Shaqi
The Drama of Love and Death: A Study of Human Evolution and TransfigurationCarpenter, Edward
Philosophy
The Drama of Love and Death: A Study of Human Evolution and Transfiguration
Carpenter, Edward
Death; Love; Personality
It is curious, as we have suggested before, how married folk often
quarrel to desperation on the surface, and yet seem to have a deep and
permanent hold on each other—returning together again even after
separation. It seems in these cases as if they mutually obtained a
stimulus from each other, even by their strife, which they could not get
elsewhere. _Iræ amantium redintegratio amoris._ The idea, too, that the
great and primal object of union is to be sought in _the next
generation_ has something unsatisfactory about it. Why not in _this_
generation? Why should the blessedness of mankind always be deferred to
posterity? It is not merely, I take it, the _perpetuation_ of the race
which is the purpose of love, but the perfection of the race, the
completeness and adequacy of its self-expression, which love may make
possible to-day just as well as to-morrow. Ellen Key, in that fine book,
_Liebe und Ehe_,[32] expresses this well when she says: “Love seeks
union, not only in connection with the creation of a new being, but also
because two beings _through one another_ may become a new being, and a
greater than either could be of itself alone.”
The complementary nature of sex-attraction was made much of by that
youthful genius Otto Weininger, who in his book, _Sex and
Character_,[33] has a chapter on the laws of Sexual Attractions in
which, in the true German manner, he not only gives an algebraic formula
for the different types of men and women, but a formula also for the
force of attraction between any two given individuals—which latter of
course becomes infinite when the two individuals are exactly
complementary to each other! Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, in his very
interesting work, _Die Transvestiten_,[34] goes even more into detail
than does Weininger on the subject of the variations of human type in
special regard to sex-characteristics. Sex-characteristics, he explains,
may be divided into four groups, of which two are physiological, namely
the primary characteristics (the sex organs and adjuncts) and the
secondary (the hair, the voice, the breasts, and so forth); and two are
psychological or related (like love-sentiment, mental habit, dress, and
so forth). Each of the four groups includes about four different
elements; so that altogether he tabulates sixteen elements in the human
being—each of which may vary independently of the other fifteen, and
take on at least three possible forms, either distinctly masculine,
distinctly feminine, or intermediate. Calculating up the number of
different types which these variations would thus give rise to, he
arrives at the figure 43,046,721!—which figure, I think we may say, we
need not analyze further, since it is certainly quite large enough for
all practical purposes! And really though we may mock a little at these
fanciful divisions and dissections of human nature, they do help us to
realize the enormous, the astounding number of varieties of which it is
susceptible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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