It follows from the foregoing that the fascination of the obscene can
only be fully felt by one who has completely acknowledged the principle
of personality in eroticism, and who has also latent within him the
possibility of erotic dualism. The more highly evolved the emotional
life of a man (all these considerations apply only to a man in whom the
possibility of dualism is latent), the more will he realise the purely
sexual, the emphasis of the element of pleasure, as something unseemly
and disagreeable; something which he ought to deny himself, but which
attracts him with the irresistible fascination of the obscene. The man
who surrenders himself naively to sensuality does not realise it as
obscene, but the man who, conscious of his higher concept, strives
against it, experiences the reaction of sensuality with the full force
of its perverse seduction. Even if only for a brief space, he
annihilates the higher element and gives himself up to the pleasure of
the base and degraded.
In this connection we are face to face with the strange but still
logical fact, that a man who has completely attained to the third stage
of love, feels even the purely spiritual love as odious in its
incompleteness. It strikes him as unnatural and forced, a feeling which
must, however, not be confused with the ordinary contempt of spiritual
love.
Primitively constituted man knows only undifferentiated sexuality. He
enjoys the nude, and sees no difference between a Venus by Titian and an
ordinary photograph of a nude figure; the aesthete, and more especially
the artist, can never understand that a work of art may be sensually
stimulating. That it may be so will always be bluntly denied by an
individual capable of enjoying a beautiful form, but to the uncultivated
mind the picture of the female body will only evoke memories of
pleasure. This feeling, however, is quite distinct from the obscene; it
is neither hostile to the higher spiritual life, nor is it criminal; it
is natural and harmonious. But the same feeling may become obscene if a
man, aware of higher aesthetic values, ignores art and enjoys the
picture merely as a representation of a nude figure. Here, too, the
seduction lies in a demoniacal element, namely in the destruction of the
aesthetic value. The destructive characteristic of the obscene wars
against all higher conceptions; it is the revenge of chaotic sex
deposed by a higher principle, and has the special charm of secret
wrong-doing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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