THE RESURRECTION OF OSIRIS
We have already studied many variants of love: according to the number
of partners, the
duration of the relation and the
content of the relation. Before tackling
monogamy as a next variant, it is perhaps not superfluous to
give a short recapitulation.
From a social point of view, we can classify love relations on a
continuum with on the one end reciprocal polygamy and on the other
reciprocal monogamy, and in between one-sided polygamy of
the male (polygyny) and one-sided polygamy of the female (polyandry).
This continuum extends quantitavely from relations of one with one, over
relations of one with many, to relations of many with many.
From a contentual point of view, love appears under ever new forms: now
as seduction, then as lovemaking, then as the desire to become father
and mother, and finally as cooperation.
From a temporal point of view, love can endure a whole
lifespan or last for only a single moment. The duration of every social
pattern can be placed on a continuum between absolute faithfulness and
absolute promiscuity (or unfaithfulness). That results in a continuum
with on the one side absolutely faithful and reciprocal monogamy, on the
opposite side absolute reciprocal promiscuity, and in between serial
monogamy, serial polygamy, serial polyandry or serial reciprocal
polygamy.
We can ask ourselves whether we are dealing
here with random continua or with
continua with an inbuilt direction.
In our contentual analysis
of love, we were talking about the severing of the tie between
lovemaking and fertilisation, about the reduction of lovemaking to
seduction, and about the
removal of cooperation from the sexual
relation. We understood such threefold uncoupling in terms of Freud's
concept of 'perversion', and that implies a converse move in the
opposite direction. A similar directionality appeared in our analysis of
promiscuity, which, as the absolute negation of faithfulness, betrayed a
desire for absolute faith in the cult of the decapitated virgin. A
similar directionality is, finally, contained in the irrevocable law
that a multiplication of relations comes down to a diminution of their
quality and intensity. It is obvious, then, that these three continua do
not
just represent steps on a scale between two poles, but
rather describe
movements away from a point of departure.
That starting point is the same in the three movements: multiplication
of relations means shortening of their duration, and the combination of
both leads to contentual narrowing. Thus, we can represent the whole as
a combination of three coordinates converging in one and the same
kernel.
Within this set of coordinates, we can arrange all the 'ek-stases' of
love, like nebulae in an
ever
expanding cosmos of Eros, wherein love is
centrifugally propelled in a three-dimensional space, more or less like,
on a horizontal plane, the body of Osiris, after having been torn
apart in its 'membra disiecta', was dispersed over the
four quarters of the two-dimensional surface of the
earth.
Time has come to recompose these 'membra disiecta'
into the
restored body of Osiris, by having them implode into
a kernel, as in a reversed
Big
Bang. Let us examine, than, what a threefold reversal
of the perverse, promiscuous and polygamous trend will yield.
REVERSAL OF THE PERVERSE TREND
Already with the first reversal, we are caught by an irrevocable logic.
With the solemnity of a sarabande,
an inexorable
progression unfolds
from reciprocal seduction to lovemaking, over
fertilisation to
pregnancy, from
the feeding and educating
of the children
to the cooperation between man and
woman.
The four parts of sexual love unite
into one single organic whole,
into a
resurrected body, of which they merely constitute
the four members. Rather
than
the centrifugal dispersion of the perverse move, we now witness
the
centripetal integration in one complex,
many-sided whole.
It is not so evident that living beings
engage in such a complex relation. It is true that the extension of fertilisation to parental care
creates new chances of
survival. But there are two ways of organising the division of labour in
that case. A first possibility consists in producing new kinds of
specialists for every new specialised task, as in the beehive or the termite
hill. This leads to a complex social organism, held together
by a series
of one-sided love-relations. A second possibility is that, when there
is need of new specialised task,
the partner that already performed a first
task now also provides in the new need. In that case, the species does
not fall apart in a series of one-sided specialists: the
degree of specialisation remains the same, but the specialists become
more
ever more many-sided. When
the latter solution is chosen, love, which
already endorsed
a first
form of cooperation, becomes the starting point for ever new forms of
cooperation. The dependency within one and the same relation becomes
ever more many-sided, so that the corollary
love has to
strengthen in proportion. We have seen how, along such lines, mere
fertilisation is
extended to cooperative parental care. In a first phase of
the development of parental care, the begetter
can also become the
feeder and protector of the mother. In a second phase, he may develop
into a father that cares for his offspring. In a third phase, cooperation
between parents in view of the welfare of the children can extend to
cooperation that makes it possible for the parents to survive themselves
in the first place. This last phase is typical for the evolution of man,
who cannot survive outside the frame of
sexual cooperation, and with whom parental
care only intensify
the cooperation between man and woman.
It is obvious that human love is of the second, many-sided type - even
when the increasing socialisation produces specialised seducers, lovers, begetters, educators and workers, who cannot fail to conjure up the
spectre of the termites and the bees. But, otherwise than
her
specialised counterparts in the beehive and the termite hill, a
specialised photo-model has also private relations,
where the other
aspects of the loving relation come to the fore. The same goes for male
or female whores, who may
have their private lovers or children, and also for sperm donors who
may have children of their own. A similar
many-sidedness is also strived for in the non-socialised relations, when
these are perversely reduced: think of
the
man who has children with one woman and makes love with another.
As opposed to the specialised forms of love in the beehive and the
termite hill, we cannot give human love a proper,
functionally determined
name: the term 'love' remains
general. That we nevertheless call it 'sexual' love, is misleading:
the adjective 'sexual' has nothing to do with its
function - that it should owe its existence to sexuality - but with the
mere fact that all additional roles have been divided
between man and woman, the primeval specialists, who
owe their existence to the first form of
division of labour, that was necessary to enable sexual reproduction.
REVERSAL OF THE PROMISCUOUS TREND
Der abgerissene Strick kann wieder geknotet werden.
Er hält wieder, aber
Er ist zerrissen.
Vielleicht begegnen wir uns wieder, aber da
Wo du mich verlassen hast
Triffst du mich nicht wieder.
B. Brecht
When reversing the promiscuous
trend, we get increasing and eventually lifelong faithfulness. Also this
reversal unveils an irrevocable logic. It suffices to have a closer look
at the evolution of love as such (and not at the evolution of particular
kinds of love, as we did in the chapter on 'homo economicus', where we
described the evolution of parental and sexual love).
An isolated attraction exercised by some partner is merely a rudimentary preliminary
stage of love: it is nearly distinguishable form the need that is to be
satisfied. The child that looks for its mother to satisfy his need for
milk, loves the mother only in function of the nipple and the milk. Such
rudimentary love does not survive hunger. But the feeling of being
hungry will soon come back, again and again. With each reappearance of
hunger, the child could look out for another mother. In that case, all
the children would have to oust their
competitors, until every child would have found an own mother. It seems
more reasonable that each child goes back to one and the same mother - that it becomes faithful. With animals that are able to
learn, faithfulness facilitates the relation, in that it makes familiar
with the idiosyncrasies of the partner. And, finally, faithfulness is
compulsory when the synchronisation between the needs of the child and
the satisfaction provided by the mother becomes more and more
complicated as a consequence of prolonged growth. To be able to
breastfeed a child, there has to be milk in the breast in the required
amount. A child cannot just go to whatever mother. And that
applies especially to the far more subtle
synchronisation that is needed when learning a
child to sit, to stand, to walk, to speak.
That is why faithfulness becomes increasingly obligatory and why it gives birth to love in its
turn. Faithfulness favours spatial nearness. When the partner is always
in the vicinity, there is no need to look around where he is when a need crops up. To
warrant such spatial nearness, a need for staying in the vicinity of the
partner has to develop, not only when needs crop up, but also when needs
are satisfied and before they reappear again: in the
intermediary periods of satisfaction. The new need is a need for permanent perception of
the partner, preferably from skin to skin, but when that turns out to be
impossible: at least for the nose, for the eye or for the ear. The child that is fed by the breast of the mother wants his
mother as such to stay in its vicinity, also when it is not hungry. Only such
'disinterested' need for the presence of an individual as such is real
love, and that is why the essence of love is: being there!
Faithfulness is not some accidental trait of love, but its very
foundation. That is why promiscuity is the first step that leads to the
"beyond" of love, to the preliminary form of it: pure desire out of
need. And the next step on this road is ascetism: overall independence
from others.
In this context, it is not superfluous to discern ordinary needs (for
instance for milk: hunger) from the need for
perceiving the partner.
There is a fundamental difference between both, and that is not
understood by most theories
of needs. With the satisfaction of an ordinary
need, the disappearance of the need entails the disappearance of every
stimulation ('hunger') and of every activity that leads to its
discharge. This is at total variance with the
gratification of love: here, every perception only stirs
the longing for additional stimulation. The
stimulus wants to be felt instead of discharged,
and is thereby
transformed into
pleasure. Only absence of stimulation and pleasure leads
to dissatisfaction. To phrase it with Nietzsche: 'Alle Lust will
Ewigkeit'! It is completely erroneous, then, to compare the need for
making love with the need for food, like Freud
and so any others
do. Even
more erroneous is it to assert
that the
orgasm discharges sexual
stimulation: as we have seen, it rather sparks the desire to see how
one's beloved is setting out for a next - this time economical -
orgasm!.
The more multifaceted
satisfaction, the stronger the need to remain faithful, the stronger
love. Love in the beehive or in the termite hill is as weak as it is
one-sided and distributed over separate specialised animals. Love of the
general type, on the other hand, becomes all the more intense as it
becomes multifaceted and concentrated in one and the same individual.
That goes especially for man. The cooperation between father and mother
during the care for themselves and the children is an enduring, intensive
and multifaceted undertaking. The sexual love that evolved to
endorse
such long-lasting and complex cooperation had to be accordingly strong.
Which it obviously is: not for nothing does the world of the baby
collapse when his mother
turns out to be absent. And not for nothing does every
adolescent lose every desire to live when he loses love.
This reversal of the promiscuous trend
is also propelled
through the previous
one. Since one aspect of love develops out of the
other, love
requires the necessary time to unfold. A
relation must necessarily last longer as it becomes more complex. Only
those who want to spare time,
isolate love from fertilisation and
fertilisation from education. Lovemaking and seduction
take minimally
one night and maximally seven years. A relation between cooperating
parents lasts at least until the children have grown up, and it comes to
encompass the post-fertile period, which is so typical of humankind (see
previous chapter), in which the now ageing lovers have to care for each
other in the first place. Such a relation will have to last for a
lifetime
- till death doth them part.
What we said above about the
function of faithfulness in the relation
between parent and child, holds especially for the sexual relation
between man and woman. Also here does faithfulness economise on the cost
of competition. Add to this that faithfulness economises on the
cost of seduction.
Faithful partners need not go on the hunt for a partner,
they are
always within each others reach. Those
who
set out for the eternal hunting grounds, forget that they couldcreate
heavens of delight where a mere hug suffices
to invite a body to further intertwining. The eternal hunting grounds
is where
the ascetics of love roam around, like in another
inferno the ascetics of labour, who only hoard money without remembering
that it is meant to buy
goods. That one must not hunt for
what one has, makes time free for the cultivation of
other aspects of the relation: cooperation and education. To most
authors, such time-saving aspect of faithfulness is only known in its
ascetic caricature: that monogamy makes fit for social labour. Only for
this version does Unwin's thesis hold: that the permanent hunt for woman
makes unfit for culture, which would be evidenced by the correlation
between monogamy and cultural level. Finally, faithfulness has the
advantage that it saves ontrial and error. Not only cooperation,
but foremost lovemaking itself is a very complex affair, where learning
and acquaintance play and important part. The whole process runs through
many phases, and for every phase, especially
for the final orgasmic phase, a
subtle synchronisation is required. And that supposes the necessary
acquaintance with each others reactions. Add to this that man,
especially in matters of sexuality, displays a lot of variability, so
that the partners have to
discover each others predilections and preferences.
Only after much trail and error do lovers become tuned to each other and
can love unfold fromclumsy bungling to refined art. That is already
apparent on an elementary level from the finding of Kinsey that female
orgasms increase with the duration of a relation. The satisfaction one
can get from an familiar lover cannot
compare with
that from a one night stand, that rather resembles a first talk,
usually about the weather. Besides, it is not uninteresting to remind of
the fact that there is a close relation not only between lovemaking and
fertilisation, but also between lovemaking and birth giving: Masters and Johnsen mention that mothers are more orgasmic than young girls.
REVERSAL OF THE POLYGAMOUS TREND
With the reversal of the polygamous trend, finally, reciprocal polygamy
develops into one-sided polygamy ((polygyny with monandry or polyandry
with monogyny) and in reciprocal monogamy of both sexes. Also here does the reversal lay bare an unshakable logic. The
increasingly multifaceted and increasingly frequent cooperation demands
not only increasing faithfulness, but also an increasing limitation of
the number of cooperating partners. We can talk of an tendential
monorelationality.
As far as parental relations are concerned, such tendency is apparent
form the evolution of the quantitative relations between the parents and
their offspring. There is a steady reduction of the number of offspring
and an increasing dependency on the parents: from the swarms of sperm
and eggs that fish spawn into the water, over the already less numerous
eggs of the terrestrial animals, over the even less numerous nests
of breeding animals, to the
separate births of higher mammals. With
humans, the complexity of parental care is such that the birth of a new
child can no longer be postponed until the previous is grown up. The
dependency of the human child is strong and almost complete. The
human child has a quasi pathological need of enduring presence of his
parents. The parental bond of the mother and/or the father develops
accordingly into a eventually exclusive tendential 'monopaedic' interest
in one single child (on which we shall come back in the next chapter).
The trend towards monorelationality applies a fortiori
when there is
cooperation between parents. As long as there is only pure fertilisation
and expulsion of eggs, there is practically no contact between the
sexes. Such contact only is only necessary when conception
takes place inside the body. Also then, the sexual
relation is not more than a furtive encounter. A
genuine sexual relation between parents develops only
when the care for the offspring (or the eggs) requires the help of the
other sex (as a rule
of the male). The
more the father becomes a man, the smaller the number of women that he
can turn into mothers. And that goes especially when the father is
needed not only for the feeding, but also for the education of the children,
as is the case with man (see next chapter). Siring the children that one
begets with one single women requires so much effort, that the problems
are only multiplicated with polygyny.
Thus, intensification of cooperation
leads to tendential monogamy. We have already seen
how polygamy was hindered through the difference in attractiveness and
through the decrease of quality with increasing numbers of partners. The
complexity of a relation is a third, fundamental obstacle for the
realisation of polygamy. Every additional partner entails a
duplication of four roles. The only remedy is to reduce the number of
roles. We then have multiplication after division
- after reduction to lover or seducer. Next to this
possibility of additive polygamy, there is also that of complementary
polygamy, where
each role is assigned to a different partner. The
price for the safeguarding of polyvalence is the one-sidedness of the
monogynous or monandrous partner. That fact is overlooked by those who
invoke the many-sidedness of sexual intercourse as an argument to hold
more than one partner. Those who
would enjoy having a second partner, do not fail to run
into problems when (s)he also wants to have post-coital talks or when
(s)he wants to cooperate the morning after, not to mention
nine-months-later pregnancies andtwenty-years-later education.
The evolutionary trend towards monorelationality should remind us of the
fact that the emergence of individual preferences in matters of love is
not a product of recent developments in the modern history of mankind,
let alone of the emergence of subjectivity, as many would have us
believe. It is rather an old evolutionary sore.
ROMANTIC LOVE
AND EUPHORIA
The reversal of the perverse, promiscuous and polygamous trend results
in a relation that lasts for a
lifetime
from a temporal point of view, is all-encompassing and socially
monogamous from the point of view of content: lifelong monogamy in all respects. The question remains
whether there is a subjective desire that corresponds to this objective logic. The
analysis of romantic love can provide an answer. We shall proceed in three
phases: romantic love as euphoria, romantic love and exclusivity,
romantic love as hypnosis.
A first characteristic of romantic love is its euphoric nature. Such
euphoria roots in the unbridled desire to gratify the
partner as much as possible in all respects, and in the expectance to be
gratified as much as possible and in all respects by the partner. That implies that,
form a subjective point of view, the lovers expect that love will unfold into an all-encompassing relation.
Such desire of the lovers will be met in so far as they let their love unfold.
Through the ever renewed economical and sexual gratification,
expectations become realities ever again and on ever new domains,
and that only increases the readiness to cooperate and the
longing for sexual intercourse. It is not so easy to keep the whole
process going, but in as far as the lovers
succeed, the many-sided relation continues to have the character of
romantic love. No only the relation will last for a lifetime, but romantic love
as well. Romantic love is only a
transient state when the unfolding of love is curbed through its reduction to
seduction or isolated sexual intercourse. Only then is it doomed to
wither away. And since society makes the unfolding of love impossible
principally - through arranging marriages or to bereave it of its
economical basis - we only know romantic love as a furtive dream.
The unfolding of love is often not even strived for. When
strived for, the effort is doomed to fail ever since the development of
society. Not surprising that many come to believe that the euphoria of
romantic love is a delusion. They have to look elsewhere for the causes of
the withering away of romantic love: in
'habituation', in the disappearance of 'sexual hunger', in the
transformation of romantic love in 'real love' and, finally, in the course
of chemical processes in the brain. Let us give an overview.
A first series of authors holds that romantic love loses its power as a
consequence of habituation. The feeling can only be renewed through
new experiences. We already gave an overview in our chapter
on 'promiscuity'. In that same chapter, we promised to discuss a variant
of the theory of the 'stimulus of the new'. We postponed that discussion
because we could formulate our criticism only after having reversed the
promiscuous, perverse and polygamous trend. This variant explains the
euphoric and transient character from the fact that the egoistic
individual, that is out at self-preservation, is deceived by the
species, that is out at reproduction. The species has to impose its will
on the individual and does so by promising ultimate happiness in the
orgasm. When the species has reached its goal, the delusion disappears
and the individual feels betrayed. That is the theory with which
Schopenhauer debases romantic love to a delusion. The theory is taken
over byHartman. In modern versions, the species is replaced by
the genes. Authors like J. en C. Gould believe that the midlife
crisis is only a trick of evolution to propel husbands to leave their
wives, who have become too old for reproduction, and to look out for new
reproductive partners. Also Margulis holds that interest of women in men with power and prestige, and of men in
beautiful bodies, is due to the fact that they sacrifice themselves
in view of transmitting their genes to the next generation. This theory
forgets that the goals of reproduction are only realised when the
children are grown up, and that even adults need the help of
grandparents. It should rather have to explain why romantic love
disappears long before that goal is achieved. It also overlooks the fact
that lovers not only want to make love with each other, but that they
also want to become father and mother. Both desires do not in
oppose each other as the desire of the species versus the desire
of the individual, rather are they two desires that serve the same
purpose: that of reproduction.
A second theory explains the euphoric and transient character of love by
comparing them with other needs. Some - like Reik - think of excretion,
others prefer hunger. Just as hunger is the best cook, just so would
loneliness be the big sorcerer who transforms every partner in a prince
or a fairy. And just as, after eating, every interest in food disappears,
or even turns into disgust, just so would every interest in the beloved
disappear as soon as (s)he is lying in our arms. Montaigne has the story
of Thrasonides who was so enamoured that he refused to possess his
mistress to keep the fire burning. We find the same idea with Freud.
Also Forel holds that sexual ratification dissolves the spell into a
fata morgana. Tennov asserts that romantic love increases when it meets
obstacles and pleads for postponing surrender: romantic love dwindles when
love is reciprocated.
A third series of authors discerns love from romantic love, whereby love
is described also the afterglow of the once blazing fire of romantic love. In its full
version, this theory ascribes the shift to the transition from sexual to
reproductive interest. Thus, for Westermarck, sexuality cannot
constitute an enduring bond because sexual attraction is not permanent.
The enduring 'matrimonial instinct' is rather based on the parental
instinct. Also Havelock Ellis describes how the sexual element whithers away and how love between the parents makes
place for love between parent and child. Ortega y Gasset believes that
every love begins with romantic love, but that love is a deeper and less
stormy feeling. Tennov says that, in the best case, romantic love is
transformed in an increasingly stronger love. Liebowitz and H. Fisher
describe the transformation of romantic love in kindness. For Alberoni,
love is romantic love institutionalised. A variant of this third theory
sees the metamorphosis of romantic love in love especially in women.
Whereas, as we have seen, Schopenhauer holds that the love of the male
disappears after coition, female love is only ignited by fertilisation.
Nature is out at reproduction, and the male can beget more than hundred
children in a year, while the woman has to restrict herself to one
single child. Darwin formulated similar ideas. In 1972, Trivers
reformulated this theory in terms of 'differential parental
investment'*. Ever since, countless authors regard differential parental
investment as the explanation for male polygamy or promiscuity. They
overlook that there is a difference between fathers, who want to produce
a proliferous offspring, and man who want to seduce females. The males
they are talking about, are not out at a proliferous offspring, but
rather to get rid of mothers who are not particularly fond of having
intercourse with them. Neither does the theory hold in the supposition
that men are out at reproduction rather than sexual pleasure. As we
shall demonstrate in the next chapter, men that want to become fathers
have more to do than merely planting seeds. A father has only sons when
he also educates them. A variant of this theory holds that woman is only
interested in motherhood, while man's interests are more varied. Thus, Krafft Ebing writes that, after coition, love is referred to the
background by other vital and social interests'. Weininger had
similar ideas as we have seen. What Michelet writes about women is
typical: 'What is her goal? The first: to love. The second: to love a
single one. The third: To love always', whereas man is driven by mere sexual
desire: 'Man desires, woman loves'. With women, Freud misses the
overestimation which is so typical of man, and explains that by the fact
that she only overestimates her child. Modern authors like Money and Ehrhardt, and also Tennov on the other hand claim that there are no
differences between the sexes in matters of romantic love.
A forth series of authors seeks the explanation in chemical processes in
the brains. Thus, Liebowitz ascribes the shift from romantic love to
kindness to an irritation of the brains caused by the shift from the
production of stimulating amphetamines to calming endorphins, and that
is also the opinion of. H. Fisher.
After this overview over the theories that try to explain the transience
of romantic love, we have two remarks left. Falling in love means that one
is prepared to submerge in an supra-individual organism that ascribes
different tasks to each constituent part. What one partner does, releases
the other from that task. Or to phrase it with Marx: the specialisation of the
one is the de-specialisation of the other. Such unity has been described
by many authors. Ortega y Gasset writes that lovers feel united with the
object of their love. In a metaphysical sense the lover becomes
permeable and he finds his satisfaction only in an 'individuality with
two'. Many are those who experience such unity as 'slavish dependency',
as a 'loss of autonomy'. Thus, Sally Cline praises the sensational freedom of the celibate to do what she wants and when she wants.
Exemplary is the case of Freud, who interprets falling in love as a form
of narcissism: as a projection of the 'Ideal Ich' with the concomitant
self-humiliation as a form of narcissism. Only when we realise that this
process takes place with both partners, do we understand that the relegation of tasks to the partner is compensated with the
acceptance of tasks relegated by the partner. Not only my estimation of
the partner increases, but also the
partner's estimation of me, and
above all the estimation of both partners of the couple, the
supra-individual organism in which they submerge. There is no talk
of 'a transfer of libido', but rather of a concentration of it in
complementary halves in view of their submersion in a more encompassing
whole.
Let us finally point to the fact how much the conception of romantic
love
as a blind delusion implies that the choice of the partner should be
made on rational grounds, like with Havelock
Ellis, Fromm, A. Ellis. These authors overlook that making a rational choice
presupposes clairvoyance: the ability to foresee all the vicissitudes of
future life. The merit of romantic love is precisely that it remedies the
impossibility of making a rational choice by an unconditional confidence
in the justification of the choice. As long as both partners behave
according to that belief, they create a self-fulfilling prophecy, that
would be totally u predictable on rational grounds, or even be
considered as chanceless. Also parents and children do not choose each
other, but live in the certain belief that they are the first and only
for each other. Tennov is right when she holds that falling in love
unites people who do not know each other and who otherwise would perhaps
have no reason to meet each other .
ROMANTIC LOVE AND
EXCLUSIVITY
Falling in love corresponds subjectively to our reconstruction not only
as euphoric expectance of all-encompassing reciprocal
gratification, but
also in that it is monogamous in principle: one falls in love only with
one partner, never with two at the same time, let alone with an entire
harem or commune. This aspect of the loving relation is not unique, not
for man nor for the loving relation. In the animal kingdom there is the phenomenon of irreversible imprinting of parents to children and vice
versa. A similar imprinting occurs also in humans. There is no previous
choice: parents can decide to have a child, but not what kind of child
it will be. Neither can the child choose its parents. With a
sexual
partner, a conscious choice is possible in principle, but, as rule, a
partner is imposed on us through the strange phenomenon of 'love on
first sight' of which we already analysed the aspects of
'over-estimation' and 'euphoria'. For reasons unknown to us, we suddenly
feel attracted to one particular person. We can discern many grounds for
such fascination, but whatever the reason might be, the fact is that one
out of many possible candidates is imposed on us. Blind attraction
makes us insensitive to the possible charms of all
other candidates. In that respect, a partner is imposed on us in the same way as a
child.
B. Shaw said that falling is nothing more that unjustifiably
preferring one woman above another. This
contention is widespread, but
nevertheless mistaken. It only applies to potential partners. As a
matter of fact, the preference is justified as soon as love is
reciprocated. Precisely that tiny difference - the jump from potentiality
to reality - makes in fact the big difference. For it is the herald of
a difference that grows increasing in as much as the relation becomes more
gratifying in ever more respects. Once the choice made, the real and
increasingly many-sided gratification not only strengthens the
attractiveness of the beloved, but makes it also irreversible: the more love unfolds, the
less attractive other partners become, for the simple reason that, with
them, gratification is only a promise. Strangers are maybe attractive as
such, but their appearance also betrays that they are not ready: not
every beautiful mouth is prepared to kiss. Compared with the
appearance of the beloved, the appearance of strangers becomes
increasingly poor, not so much because it is only a promise, but
foremost because it also rejects and is thereby rather a threatening
reminder of the absence of the beloved. Also herein do lovers not differ
from the little baby, who turns his head
towards his mother when confronted with a stranger. It would be as
nonsensical to hold that love of a child for his mother consists of
unjustifiably preferring the woman out of whose womb it
happens to be born. Just like lovers for each other,
so are mother and child the one and only for each other. Countless parents
could raise a child, but only its own parents do it effectively. The
love of a child for his parents is therefore even less based on overestimation as that of sexual
lovers.
The above holds only in so far as the relation continues to unfold
satisfactorily. As soon as it becomes structurally unsatisfying, the
reverse is true: the sight of the beloved becomes the very symbol of
dissatisfaction. A new relation now becomes a promise, that can perhaps
be kept, and such promise comes to contrast with
the certainty that the
existing relation will remain unsatisfying. The pace in which
romantic love dwindles is an index for the degree in which love remains
unfolded.
This approach sheds a new light on theories that want to understand
polygamy or promiscuity in terms offamiliarity and the appeal of
novelty. Rather than dwindling way, love tends to become ever more
intense. The thrill of novelty does not outweigh the efficiency, the
fullness and the tangibility of the familiar, on the condition that the
familiar is really familiar and has not surreptitiously turned strange. The
statement that novelty appeals holds only when formulated somewhat more
explicitly: that estrangement stirs the desire for novelty. Whoever is
familiar, becomes all the more selective, demanding. He does not
get excited on every occasion.
That provides a new key to the understanding of
'impotence', of which a first riddle has been solved in chapter III
on 'The beautiful
woman'. And this sheds also a new light on the potency of chain-lovers
as it is embodied in Casanova's organ. They are not (yet) selective:
they prefer their lovers faceless or masked, pure bodies without soul.
Besides, the argument of novelty sounds rather hollow in the mouth of
those who do not allow real novelty to develop in an unfolding
relation, and who thereby condemn themselves to the one-sidedness of an
exclusively sexual relation. And that holds especially for those who
want to legitimate their polygamy by contending that they search for
another aspect of womanhood in every other woman.
The exclusiveness of romantic love sheds also a new light on the pyramids
of attractiveness. Not everybody can choose the preferred partner. On
the other hand, every relation begins with blind romantic love. As soon as
the fuse is lit, the relations in the pyramid
are changing: the more concrete and complete a relation, the more the
other partners move to the bottom and the own partner moves to the top,
where he becomes the 'only and only', regardless of the place he took in
the beginning of the process. As love can unfold undisturbed, the
structural damage
of love that results from the sheer existence of pyramids
dwindles. There are only
second hand partners before the game is played. That there are pyramids
at all, presupposes a perverse refusal to engage in an enduring relation,
or a return to the amphitheatre. Only there do we have the
necessary broad
perspective. Only to the degree that the perverse move is allowed to
become predominant, does the conflict between first and second choice
join the inability to let the relation develop. That goes especially for
economical attractiveness, which is not inborn, like the beauty of a
body, but can be learned by all people of good will. No genes are
blocking our way here: a sovereign decision suffices to turn living
together into a veritable 'coitus' in the true sense of the word, and to
turn what is commonly despised as daily drudge into a permanent orgasm.
That the exclusiveness of romantic love implies monogamy is not evident.
Only authors like Kraft Ebing write: 'The fascination through one single
person of the other sex with a concomitant indifference to all other
partners, as we can find it with true lovers, could be a marvellous
trick of nature to realise the monogamousrelations
which further her aims'. From the fact that
there always are only two beings who match each other, Weininger
concludes that marriage is legitimate and that 'free love' must be
rejected from a biological point of view. Ortega y Gasset is less
explicit when he remarks that nothing makes a man more indifferent
to the attractiveness
of other women than being in love. Against the
same background, he discerns general beauty from the individual
characteristics with which one falls in love. Only authors who want to
escape from lifelong monogamy along perverse, promiscuous or polygamous
coordinates are alarmed: because of its selectiveness, romantic love
cannot but be suspect in their eyes. All those who
depart from polygynous, polyandrous, communist or promiscuous
primeval times, have to deny the existence of
individual preferences. With many authors, this is only apparent from
the fact that they try to find an explanation for the emergence of
individual love. With other authors, it is formulated plainly. To
the last category belongs Freud, who sees the orgy as a regression to a
former state of sexual relations, where romantic love did not yet play a
role and where all the sexual partners were considered as equal.
Anticipating what follows, we can mention already here that that
romantic love is not at all some recent of Christian invention. There is
mention of it in the oldest texts and anthropologist found it in every
corner of the world. H. Fisher justifiably holds that 'this ecstasy
cannot but be a universal human trait'. And what is more: personal
preference is not at all an invention
of humankind, but a phenomenon that can be found with many animals.
That the 'first sight' of romantic lovers
seems to be a divine inspiration induces
many an author to find a rational foundation for this choice.
Their
theories
prefer to overlook that the 'coup de foudre' precisely has to compensate
for the impossibility to make a rational choice. One of the oldest
of these theories is the
well known story of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposion: how
double-beings are cut in two halves that henceforth are desperately
searching for their lost counterpart. This theory is echoed in the
eugenetic theory that partners make their choice in view of obtaining an
average, like in Campanella's City of the Sun. With Schopenhauer, it
is the sense of beauty which thereby guides the sexual drive. Galton
made a composite photograph of many faces and found the all composites
are more beautiful than the separate elements, because all the
irregularities are wiped out. The theory became popular among
philosophers of art (Groos, Taine, Baine, Guyau enz.). In the wake of
Schopenhauer, Weininger formulates a law
of attraction which allows to predict that there are always two beings
who are the best match. With Jung, the choice is made in view of
flattening the opposition between extraversion and introversion, as well
as between the four ways of perceiving (intuition, feeling, thinking and
sensation). Symons believes Galton is right in putting that sexual
selection tends to reduce variability and to reduce the extremes in the
distribution over the population. Money is talking of 'love maps'. Al these theories survive in popular thinking in
the form of the belief in 'types' in all kinds of forms and in
the feeling
that partners are predestined to each other, the feeling of always have
know each other.
A second series of theories focuses not so much on the quest for
complementarity, but rather for identity ('homogamy'). Westermarck
proclaims the 'law of identity, as when Japanese marry exclusively
Japanese. Wundt refines Westermarck's theory. With him, one chooses
a
partner which is identical enough, but no too identical in view of
stimulus of novelty. Havelock Ellis thinks that there must be
sufficient similarity in religion, artistic predilection, nationality
and class. Small differences are welcome, but big differences lead to
alienation. Dawkins holds that too much and too little differences are
genetically deleterious. Ortega y Gasset holds
that lovers choose a partner that corresponds to their deepest being. A variant of this theory poses that there is a predilection
for similarity, but this time not between the partners, but between the
partners and/or
their parents. Thus, Freud holds that love is
directed to the parents in a first phase, and then to a strange sexual
partner.
Both theories are only seemingly irreconcilable. The heterogamous choice
betrays a longing for homogamy in the fact that the opposition is merely
complementary. When both complements are united, we get the same ideal
(realised in the child). Thus, Ortega y Gasset holds that most people
choose an average that corresponds to the ideals of a race. It is
remarkable how, conversely, the homogamous theory is mitigated by some heterogamy: the most homogamous partners are members of the family, so
that straight homogamy would come down to incest. Thus, Wundt writes
that lovers are attracted by partners of the same race, tribe or family,
but that there is, on the other hand, an instinctive rejection of
marriage with parents or siblings. In our first chapter, we described
how, for Freud, primeval love was incestuous. We come back on the
relation between romantic love and incest in chapter XII.
A third theory, finally, ascribes the choice to chance and thus
denies the existence of the problem. Krafft Ebing is talking about 'fetishism'
which he ascribes to a purely associative connection between sexual
arousal and a particular sexual appearance.
ROMANTIC LOVE
AND HYPNOSIS
We already described how the lovers have to become each others
complement as economical gratificators and each other mirror image as
consumers. The blind choice of romantic love can create
the
required
favourable conditions, but there remain always differences to be
bridged. No wonder that lovers adapt themselves
to each other with a sometimes
astonishing willingness, and that they thereby often yield in points
that were breaking points
in previous
relations with other lovers or their parents. It is as if they hypnotise each other to
flatten the differences: just like hypnotisers, they give each
other 'suggestions', which they expect to be blindly obeyed,
and, just like the hypnotised, there are willing to submit
themselves to whatever
suggestion. From this point of view, we should
question the widespread belief in the statement that romantic love would
make blind for the shortcomings of the partner. Nothing is less true:
every lover does his utmost to remedy the shortcomings of himself and
his partner, and that presupposes that he perceives them and hence is
not blind for them. Lovers are
aware of the shortcomings, but are
euphorically convinced that they
will be able to wipe them out: exemplary
in the defloration and orgastification of the woman, and in the
reciprocal adjustment of the frequency of lovemaking. Love has to surmount
all kinds of obstacles in order to realise adaptation. Only in as
much as
it fails, begin the lovers to overlook the shortcomings. Stendhal speaks of 'crystallising': to see advantages in every trait.
The phenomenon is far more positively approached by Ortega y Gasset, who
remarks that a lover can asses the qualities of his mistress far more
accurately that the outsider.
The hypnotising of the partner often seems to extend to self-hypnosis.
Lovers not only want to exhibit their beauty to
each other, they often become
really more beautiful. Already Michelet writes that a lack of
beauty is often the effect of a lack of love. As soon as
a woman is
loved, she becomes more beautiful, to the point that you often do not
recognise her any longer. Also Havelock Ellis describes how a new
beauty appears in the face of a woman in love and a how new force
radiates from all her activities: 'Such is the exquisite flowering of
love'. Such reciprocal suggestibility
is of crucial importance for
the persistence of romantic love. Only when hypnosis is turned into its
opposite -
quarrels -
do the minor differences grow out
to unbridgeable gaps and to grounds for divorce. The counterpart of
romantic love isquarrelling
or divorce. We can compare this with the shift from
'positive transference' into 'negative transference' in the
psychoanalytic cure.
This aspect of romantic love has been more than neglected from a
theoretical point of view. Some authors are talking about the one-sided
education of the woman by her lover. Thus, Michelet bluntly
writes that
the lover has to create his mistress and has to transform her into
his
better self, without asking himself whence the educability comes from.
Michelet correctly describes the meaning of this transformation (which
should, of course, be reciprocal): it will keep the fire burning. In the
same spirit, Havelock Ellis holds that the choice of a partner is only
one part of the story. The other part is the 'art of love' which
strives
to reciprocal adaptation in marriage. The countless hidden qualities are
brought to development in a 'constructive selection'. He gives the (one-sided) example of a woman, who in a first marriage became an expert in
literature and in a second in politics. Let us remind also of Chapter
III, in which we mention the fact that many a man thinks he has to
sexually educate his wife.
Other authors acknowledge in addition the 'hypnotic' character of
reciprocal adaptation. Forel thinks that the sexual drive inspires
reciprocal feelings of sympathy which act like magnetic forces and
points to the resemblance between hypnosis and love. Tennov puts that
the continuous emergence of thoughts of the beloved is typical for
romantic love, and compares with the hypnotiser who asks to concentrate
all thoughts
on him. Freud describes the role of hypnosis in romantic
love
and in the psychoanalytic cure, but reduces it to the relation between
the primeval father and his horde. .
Still other authors describe the willing adaptation to each other as a
kind of alienation, as a loss of identity. Already Capellanus is talking
about a kind of slavery. above all psychoanalysis has contributed to
making the adaptation of lovers suspicious. As is well know, Freud
replaced
hypnosis through the spontaneously emerging romantic love of the
patient in the analyst (transfer). Such romantic love ensures the willing
cooperation of the patient and the expectation that the analysis will
work the miracle, but it should gradually be replaced through the will
to solve the problems on ones
own. From romantic love to rationality: such
conception of therapy has its roots in the ideals about romantic love, and
had an influence on them in their turn. Reik thinks that one falls in
love as one discovers a shortcoming in oneself and understands
romantic love as a kind of masochistic submission. Maslow rejects 'M' love as a state
of dependence and puts that people should pursue 'S'
love, a state of
individual autonomy
and independence. The same goesfor other 'humanists' like A. Ellis. Bach and Deutsch (Pairing) hold that partners
should show their 'true face' and should not try to adapt to one
another. This is also the case with Robert Rimmer. Such
psychoanalytical prejudice spread also in the world outside
psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in general. Via Schilder,
these ideas
reach Ortega y Gasset. He comparesromantic love with hypnosis:
Tristan's
love potion is an old symbol for the psychic process in question.
All these theories are the corollaries of the principial and increasing
refusal to submerge in a more encompassing super-individual organism. Tennov says that there are many people who do not know the
bliss of
romantic love. That only reminds us of the countless people who declare that
they do not dream, although they do so every night for several hours. In
the same vein, there are many who do not allow themselves to fall in
love. And there are also those who, when their relationdeteriorates, are no longer
able to remember the days when they were in love, again:
just like with dreams that tend to be forgotten.
DER LIEBESTOD
Nie wieder erwachen,
wahnlos hold bewusster Wunsch!
Wagner, Tristan und Isolde
Romantic love, hence, is not blind, neither in the sense that it would
create unrealistic expectations, nor in the sense that we would erroneously prefer one partner above the other, nor in the sense that we
would submit ourselves slavishly to the desires of the partners at our
own detriment. But, perhaps it is blind in the sense that many
lovers are not prepared to comply to the norms of society and in as far
as they prefer to withdraw within the confines of the couple. The
phenomenon is described
by many authors. Ortega y
Gasset writes: 'For the lover, the beloved is always and everywhere
present. Apparently, the whole world is condensed in
the partner. Basically, there is no longer a world
for the enamoured'. To Ortega y Gasset, romantic love is not only a
narrowing of consciousness, but a kind of 'psychic angina' at that. Alberoni is talking about the
complete erotic indifference
to
social position, rank, prestige, fame.
In the arts, such social blindness is depicted in Romeo and Julia,
Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, Strindberg's 'Fraulein Julie' and in Elvira
Madigan.
In how far are we dealing with blindness here? Meanwhile, it will have
become apparent that economic imperatives and above all the development
of social cooperation
are the arch-enemies of love. from way back, again and
again there appear individuals, who resist the subduing of their love
or who refuse to have their love disturbed through engaging in
the
social
division of labour. That is apparent already from the
bits on the side in
a marriage that has been reduced to a purely economical relation,
and from the promiscuity of Don Juan and his followers, who are no
longer prepared to engage in an
enduring
economical relation.
Promiscuous lovers have their total lack of
consideration for economical imperatives in common. On a tribal level, they
leave aside the constraints imposed by the marriage classes, and on
later levels the constraints imposed by
a 'marriage de raison' or their profession. It suffices to refer to legendary examples
like Abélard en Héloise, King Eduard who resigned the throne in
order to marry Wally Simpson and so on. Many promiscuous do not go so
far: they are not prepared to resign an economic marriage. Their
'romantic love' is restricted to sexual relations and their imposture is
directed solely against the restraints on sexual contact. Others are not
prepared to engage in relations as such, and their protest is situated
beyond all the
obstacles
that oppose a completed relation. As opposed to the merely
sexually promiscuous, lovers are out at an enduring and complete
relation, and are not prepared to compromise with a
'marriage de raison'.
Everywhere where marriages are arranged, there are lovers who
cannot reconciliate
their love
with
their regard for the demands of
their parents, exemplary in Romeo and Julia. Their appearance is an
heroic endeavour to reverse the world-historic trend whereby the social
division of labour cannibalised the sexual division of labour. In that
sense, romantic love is the counterpart to the 'resexualising' of social
relations described
it
in chapter VII (Homo Economicus). The
extent to which romantic love opposes socialisation is historically
determined: the more developed the society, the stronger the
breakthrough of love
unfolding
has to come to conflict with the socially
organised labour.
Romantic love is historically determined only in so far
as it becomes increasingly anti-social. Apart from that, it is a
universal (in principle).
Unfortunately, these breakthroughs of the desire for complete love have
to necessarily fail . Initially, love can fluently unfold, because
it
is initially primarily sexual. The
economical
cooperation can remain
restricted to minimal
sexual division of labour, or even to rudimentary
forms of social labour performed together (even when it is only robbery,
like with Bonny and Clyde). The possibility to survive outside society
becomes increasingly restricted, and, as soon as there is talk of
children, there is no room at all. Hence the many double suicides
of
lovers, like the 'shin yu' in Japan, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde or
Elvira Madigan and her lover.
The widely heard criticism that such romantic love is insane, is only
founded in so far as people are no longer able to survive without social
labour.
Romantic love is only misleading in as far as it creates the
expectation that the beloved will gratify all his needs, whereas society
is increasingly usurping this task. Only this expectation has to be
mitigated. The reluctance of lovers against society is constructive in
as far as it leads to consumptive ascetism. The desire to live from love
alone
stems the tide of
total socialisation. If all people would
be in love, society would befall the fate that it wants to bestow on
love: dying out ! That lovers become indifferent
to
social
relations
and social labour finds its counterpart in the fact
that
they submit
themselves slavishly to the command of their beloved. Only those who do
not realise how much they
are subordinated to the slavery of money, can
find it estranging that lovers submit themselves to each other out of
love. Only when the exchange between money and beauty is called love,
must the completed love which is called 'romantic love' seem blind
insanity.
Not only towards work do lovers become indifferent, but also towards
friends. Already Capellanus mentions the phenomenon. It is as if the
same
love that binds the couple undermines the bonds to the community.
Conversely, ascetism seems to be a fertile soil for sometimes
overwhelming feelings of communality: just think of the already
mentioned chant in orthodox cloisters. That the couple
comes to oppose
the community, has more to do with the fact that the community
more often turns itself against the couple, as we shall demonstrate in
chapter XI on the orgy.
All these forms of 'blindness' are in so far clairvoyant as they lay
bare the wounds that have been inflicted on love. No wonder that
romantic love is often experienced as a threat to the established order,
as an anarchistic force. No wonder that 'free love' has been suspect
from way back.
The above does not imply that there is not something like neurotic
romantic love. This is so common, that it obfuscates the existence of true
romantic love as described above. A rather common form of neurotic
romantic love is the shift from
admiration for an ideal
to
falling in
love with it: the sexualisation of a pedagogic relation. A
legendary example is the relation between Camille Claudel and Rodin.
Another form of neurotic romantic love is romantic love that endures without
being reciprocated. This is pure phantasmagoria,
the emotional
counterpart of masturbation. Just like the coitus, real romantic love is
reciprocal per definition. Alberoni thinks that romantic love can be
one-sided. Neurotic is also falling in love in order to get the feeling
of still being attractive or to prove that one is more attractive than a
competitor (Mantegazza and Stendhal's 'amour-vanité'). Neurotic is also
falling in love with falling in love because of the euphoric feeling of
redemption: falling in love as a drug that makes insensitive for social
pain (not otherwise than mysticism). Therein, romantic love is the prefiguration of incest!
PRIMEVAL MONOGAMY
Time has come to approach monogamy from a broader perspective. If it is
true
that the desire for a lifelong and complete monogamous relations is
so deeply rooted in man,
their should be ample historical evidence to it. Many authors are convinced there
is. As opposed to the many
authors who contend that, in primeval times, humankind
ha been polygamous or
promiscuous, there is a whole series of authors who descry in monogamy
the primeval form of all human loving relations.
In the Christian West, these theories are of course the oldest, and they
used to refer to the primeval couple, Adam and Eve. A milestone is
'History of Human Marriage', published by Westermarck in 189.
Westermarck launched the first attack against the tidal wave of theories
on primeval polygamy and promiscuity through putting that, in primeval
times, one man used to live together with one woman, to have sexual
relations
with a single partner and to raise their children
together. His position was endorsed by many others. Crawley declares triumphantly
that promiscuity belongs to a mythological phase in human thinking. Wundt descries a trend towards monogamy in higher animals, which
culminates in humans with permanent monogamy. Malinowski writes a
foreword to the umpteenth edition of Westermarck, and in which the
asserts that a union between man and woman, based on personal affection
derived from sexual attraction, on economical cooperation and reciprocal
services, but above all on a common relation with the children, is the
origin of the human family. Murdock praisesWestermarck and puts
that the nuclear family is universal. Also Lévi-Strauss pays a tribute
to Westermarck on occasion of his death and repeats that the modern
pattern of monogamous marriage, independent
residence of
the young couple, warm relations between parents and children is also
the prevalent pattern in cultures that did not evolve or returned to the
most elementary level of civilisation.
This tradition receives strong opposition in 1927, when Briffault
strongly defends the idea of primeval communism, and thereby criticises
especially the position of Lowie. The debate withers as a result of the
increasing success of Malinowski's anti-evolutionism, that made any
speculation about the evolution of marriage increasingly suspect.
After the Second World War, the debate that had been abandoned by the
anthropologists, is taken up on a more primitive level by the
biologists. Lorenz descries in the behaviour of goose a parallel to
human monogamy. D. Morris contends that the most successful people are
monogamous and, to him, societies that promoted other forms of
marriage are
dead ends of human evolution. Wilson
holds that humans are programmed to form groups with the couple as a
kernel. Also H. Fischer concludes that humans are monogamous, although
they are also programmed for divorce (serial monogamy).
APPARENT POLYGAMY AND APPARENT PROMISCUITY
The authors in this tradition are not at all blind to the fact that not
all people have been monogamous at all times. They have different
explanations for this phenomenon.
With many authors, it is not precisely clear whether they are talking
about reciprocal monogamy. The unfaithful or polygamous behaviour of
predominantly males is made consonant with their theory by silently
assimilating monogamy with monandry. The full text of Westermarck'
quotation above reads: 'a man and a woman (or many
women)'. D. Morrris ascribes the common unfaithfulness to the fact that
behavioural mechanism that has to assure monogamy is not yet
firmly stabilised
from an evolutionary point of view. Wilson thinks that monogamy is
disturbed by the greater sexual desire of the male.
A second reaction consists in reading polygamy as a form of disguised
monogamy. Murdock describes non-monogamous relations as composite forms
of the family: in polygyny, one husband is considered to play the role
of father and husband in more than one family, thus uniting them in one
encompassing family. Sexual relations with the sisters of the husband
are considered as 'extensions' of the marital relation. We find a
similar approach in Lévi-Strauss, who puts that, in most cases,
polygamous families are not more than a combination of
monogamous families, even when one single person plays the role of
several
husbands, on the sole ground that, for example with the Bantu, the women
live in separate huts. Also the Mormons would then be monogamous because
their wives equally live in separate houses. And also in a harem, every
woman uses to have her own room.
We already described a third reaction: sexual relation are not reckoned
with and only the economical relation is taken into account. There
is no
problem, then, in calling the Westerners monogamous, nor harem keepers
who are only married with one of the women in the harem.
A fourth reaction, finally, consist is considering the non-monogamous
forms of marriage as special adaptations or as cases of degeneration or
sophistication: think of the degeneration of the biblical monogamy of
Adam and Eve into the 'depravity and grossness of manners' in Sodom and
Gomorra, as described by the Jesuit Lafitau. Müller thinks that polygamy
is a phenomenon of degeneration. The most sophisticated version of this
theory is formulated by Wundt. This author turns the hypothetical
development from agamy over group marriage and polygamy to monogamy
upside down in an involution from primeval monogamy, over polyandry, a
combination of polyandry and polygyny (group marriage) to monogamy.
All the other forms of marriage are to be analysed as derivates of
monogamy caused by power relations (polygyny)
or scarcity of women (polyandry) or both. Deviations of monogamy are time and again
described in terms of degeneration and placed in the same category as
pederasty. Wundt is talking of motives that go against human
nature and against which legal restrictions
have to be imposed. Lévi-Strauss asserts that the monogamous family is practically
universal, except in some very specialised and sophisticated societies,
and not, as previously supposed, in the most crude and simple types.
DOGS, GORILLA'S, BEES OR
TURTLE DOVES?
Let us remark that authors who defend primeval monogamy, tend to regard
it as a kind of victory over the polygamy or promiscuity, this time not
of primeval man, but of our animal forebears. They
situate polygamy and
promiscuity (just like incest) in a prehuman phase and have the birth of
mankind coincide with the emergence of monogamy and the incest taboo.
The triumph is this time not historic, but moral (Weininger),
evolutionary (Westermarck), or cultural (Lévi-Strauss). Typical is the
way in which Lowie refers a phase of uncontrolled promiscuity to a phase
between the oldest anthropoids and the precursors of the hominids. This
old theory on promiscuity survives also in the way in which
Lévi-Strauss descries the transition of 'nature' in 'culture' in
the imposition of the taboo on incest and the corollary exogamy rules.
Polygamy and incest are thus unjustifiably referred to the animal
kingdom, according to the old practice of rejecting unwanted sexual
practices as 'beastly'.
In their fervour, other authors go so far as to see human monogamy
announced in the animal kingdom. The would like to recreate the entire
animal kingdom in a kind of ark of Noah, filled with monogamous
animals. This fervour can take rather ridiculous forms: the gorilla,
which happened to be the harem keeper with Dr. Savage, is promoted as a
monogamous example for man by Westermarck, Wundt and B. Russell. Wundt
even asserts that Darwin held that monogamy was the primary form of
human marriage. For Wundt, there is no polygamy whatsoever in the animal
kingdom. 'In nature, there is no intermediary polygamous phase between agamy and monogamy, but merely transitory phases formed by the
increasing duration of marriage'. Murdock goes so far as to put forward
that the nuclear family is older than humanity. H. Fischer mentions
robins and foxes.
FROM PRIMEVAL PROMISCUITY OVER PRIMEVAL
POLYGAMY TO MONOGAMY.
The counterpart of the authors who defend the thesis of primeval
monogamy are the countless advocates of primeval polygamy or
promiscuity. Whereas the apologists of monogamy have to explain the
existence of polygamy and promiscuity, they have to account for the
'degeneration' or the 'elevation' of polygamy in - mostly 'Western' or
'Christian' - monogamy. There are diverse explanations: the monogamous
propensity of humans that could only unfold in the higher states of
cultural evolution, the imposition of the incest taboo, economical motives
(becoming sedentary, private property) and the male obsession with
paternity. Since the diverse explanation often go combined, we give a
global survey.
With Vico, the 'promiscuous' Gigantes began to develop love for one
single woman as soon as they became sedentary. Fourier descries an
evolution of the free love (= reciprocal polygamy) of primeval times
over polygyny to monogamy under the influence of the development of
private property. Bachofen describes how women, after the agricultural
revolution, installed monogamy as a reaction against their 'zum Tode
beschlafen werden' of men. With McLennan
it is, conversely, the men who were
out at abducting women, to isolate themselves, and to found a family,
but they were not able to realise their goals, because they could not
maintain their independence against their competitors. Lubbock thinks
that primeval men began to abduct women to be able to monopolise them,
and that this custom spread because of the increased possibilities of
affection, comfort, the natural wishes of women and better education.
Only in 1873 does Morgan introduce the incest taboo, which was imposed in view of the amelioration of the race: the incestuous
primeval communism is gradually replaced by monogamy through increasing
restrictions. The theory is taken over by Engels, but here it is the
advent of private property - and the necessity of ascertaining paternity - that is responsible for the advent of
(compulsory) monogamy and the corollary unfaithfulness.
Elimination of
private property in the era of socialism will enable the unfolding of
true - free - monogamy. Krafft Ebing sees monogamy emerge as a
consequence of the feeling of shame and the advent of agriculture.
Weininger describes the victory of monogamy after a matriarchal and
polyandric primeval period, as a creation of men whose individuality can
only be completed with a single being of the other sex. Frazer talks of
a transition from promiscuity, over group marriage to monogamy a
consequence of increasing restrictions on incest in view of
(unconscious) eugenetic motives. Freud takes over his theory of the
restrictions on incest, but does not believe in motives of eugenetics.
The installation of the incest taboo is a consequence of the murder on the
primeval father. Feelings of guilt (as a psychological factor) and the
will to continuate the cooperation between the brothers (as an
economical factor) made the brothers resign from incestuous partners, so
that they had to look for sexual partners elsewhere. Like Engels,
Briffault understands the dawn of primeval communism as a consequence of
private property (from clan to family) and of the decline of the
economical importance of women since the agricultural revolution. The
explanations of biologists come down to a regression to a more primitive
level. According to R. Smith, monogamy is the result of the endeavours of
homo sapiens to contain the reciprocal polygamy of homo erectus in view
of control over the women. That is also the opinion of Margulis. Sherfey
holds that patriarchy had to repress female sexual freedom in view of
ascertaining paternity. And that is also the view of Hrdi.
Next to these psychological, eugenetic and economical explanations,
there are also more 'idealistic' ('cultural') ones, where moral,
religious, literary or scientific influences are held responsible for
the spread of monogamy. Already in the 'Symposium' of the Early
Christian Methodius is it written that mankind had to exchange marriage
between brothers and sisters for marrying women from other families;
that they had subsequently to give up plural marriages; that they had to
stop being unfaithful, to resign from intercourse and finally to remain in
the state of virginity. The idea of an evolution toward an increasing
respect for individuality is formulated by Jean Paul (1804) and further
developed by Hegel (the so called 'romantic period' in his
world-historic model). Krafft Ebing states that the moralisation of
sexuality received a strong impulse from Christendom, which elevates
woman to the same level as man, and concludes that Christendom is
superior to polygamous cultures, especially to Islam. Bloch descries the
first traces of individual love in the time of the troubadours and
minstrels and sees it develop further with Shakespeare, in Rousseau's
'Nouvelle Héloise' and Goethe's 'Werther', to come to its apogee
in Friedrich Schlegel's 'Lucinde'. Lucka points to the influence of courtly love. Briffaul reminds, next tot the already mentioned
economical factors, of the influence of Christendom, which completed
'romantic love' by insisting on the transformation of the heathen Celtic
literature to Courtly Literature. Also Russell refers to
the influence
of courtly love. Havelock Ellis situates the origin of personal love in the Hellenistic period and sees it appear in the West only with the
(Celtic) story of Tristram. The most influential representative of this
trend is Denis de Rougemont. In 1939, the year of
Freud's death, this author publishes a book
wherein he describes the relation between the advent of 'romantic love'
and the spread of courtly love. Schelsky
holds that individual love is an invention of Christendom and of the
cultivation and adoration of woman by the Troubadours and Minstrels in
the 11th and 12th century. The O' Neills assert that the idea that one
can only love one person at a time originates in Courtly Love and
acquired scientific respectability through Freud's doctrine that an
individual disposes only of a limited amount of love. Tannahill adds to
the influence of Courtly Love the cult of Mary, imported from Byzantium.
J. Cleugh points to the fact that the first love affair in China appears
only in 'The Red Chamber' in the 18th century. Barash ascribes the
repression of polygamy to our Jewish-Christian addiction to the nuclear
family.
We will come back on the incest taboo as an explanation. As a
counterpart against becoming sedentary (agriculture) and private
property, we stressed (next to the natural perverse trend) the
development of society, the consequences of which turned out to be far more complex than described above. Our
criticism on 'the discovery of individuality' can be found above
(reversal of the polygamous trend). Why, finally 'idealistic'
explanation fail, will become apparent below.
How much the theories on primeval monogamy may differ from those about
primeval promiscuity and primeval polygamy, they agree in one aspect: if
monogamy has not been universal from the beginning, it triumphs at least
in the present, and referred promiscuity and polygamy to primeval times.
TRISTAN EN ISOLDE
Wo bleibt denn der 'Wo du hingehst,
da will auch ich sein' Text?
Bertolt Brecht, Dreigroschenoper.
The countless authors who see romantic love appear only in the age of
Tristan, overlook the fact that there are many literary, and even
mythological sources which
glorificate romantic love. The counterpart of
Freud's primeval horde are the many primeval loving couples in the
beginning of the world or of mankind: just think of the Biblical Adam
and Eve, not to mention the many mythologies where the world owes its
emergence to a coitus of the primeval couple.
Also after the creation, there is mention of many a couple in love. In
the stories a man primitive tribes, also the polygamous ones,
romantic love is often depicted. From the German
mythology stems the story of Siegfried and Sieglinde, and from the
Celtic that of Tristan and Isolde.
With the higher (monogamous and polygamous) civilisations, the oldest
scriptures describe romantic love. Sappho is one of the oldest texts in
Greece, where romantic love flourishes in Hellenism. The story of
Narcissus teaches us how, already more than two millennia ago, one
could starve for love, and all the symptoms of romantic love are described
in the Indian Kama Sutra. Let us also refer to the Indian story of
Sakuntala. The 'idealistic' theses like those of Rougemont are not
tenable, were it alone for such testimonies in the oldest texts.
Not only in myths and literature, but also in philosophy is the theory
of monogamy to be found from the very beginnings: just think of the
story of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposion.
As we have often seen in this book, art is far more clairvoyant than
science. It should not escape our attention, however, that the
glorification of the couple in love does not coincide with a glorification of monogamy. Quite the contrary: the entire profane
literature seems one continuous praise of unfaithfulness. Another music
drama of Richard Wagner can serve as paradigm here: this time not his
Parsifal, but his Tristan and Isolde, perhaps the most completed version
of the story. Its counterpart for polygamous unfaithfulness is
Sheherazad. Countless are the stories of lovers who know to penetrate
the harem, like in 'Die Entführung aus dem Serail'. In the already
mentioned 'Swan Lake', the couple in love triumphs over the polygamous
subordination of women. The same goes for the whore that has to be
rescued from the brother, like in Verdi's Traviata.
THE
WORLD-HISTORIC TRIUMPOF MONOGAMY
AS THE WORLD-HISTORIC TRIUMPH OF UNFAITHFULNESS
So unter Sonn und Monds wenig verschiedenen Scheiben
Fliegen sie hin, einander ganz verfallen.
Wohin ihr? Nirgendhin. Von wem davon? Von allen.
Ihr fragt, wie lange sind sie schon beisammen? Seit kurzem.
Und wann werden sie sich trennen? Bald.
So scheint die Liebe Liebenden ein Halt.
Die Liebenden', Bertolt Brecht.
Artistsuse to associate romantic love with unfaithfulness. And that
reminds us of the difference between factual and (desired) form of
relations. It is immediately apparent, then, that the historians of
monogamy give a misleading account of the facts by forgetting to make
that distinction. Factual monogamy can be the realisation of the desire
for monogamy, or the factual appearance of desired polygamy or
promiscuity that is out of reach. Briffault could be right in stating
that, in a polygamous society, the majority has still only one woman;
and not unjustifiably could Lévi-Strauss call monogamy'abortive
polygamy'. And that would be a real problem for all those who refer to
the overwhelming universality of factual monogamy as evidence for the
monogamous nature of man.
The history of factual monogamy testifies
to the unstoppable advent of
this form of marriage indeed. We can surely take for granted that
factual
polygamy has been the rule in many hordes and tribes, at least in the
upper layers. For the majority at the bottom, the rule has surely been
monogamy. With the advent of commerce and cities, there came more room
for polygamy in the higher strata of the population, whereas the
increasing poverty on the base will have resulted in increased factual
polygamy, if not for compulsory ascetism. Already under August,
universal monogamy is pleaded for (Lex Julia against divorce, celibacy
and unfaithfulness). Especially Christendom tried to contain factual
polygamy. In Paulus and his followers, as well the little man as the
neglected found a strong spokesman for factual monogamy. In the wake of
Christendom, Islam was out at containing polygamy by imposing a maximum
of four women. The westernisation of the world since colonialism and the
development of capitalism completes the triumph of
factual monogamy. Pitt
Rivers describes how missionaries tried to eradicate polygamy. Bourgeois
and socialist political theories had the same effect. In Turkey,
polygamy was forbidden from 1926 onwards (Ataturk) and other progressive
regimes followed suit. More important than a legal
ban is that the
increasing development of social cooperation, especially since the
advent of capitalism, diminishes the room
for polygamy
in the long
term. Briffault rightly points to the increased costs of living. On top
of that, the same development favoured the accessibility of marriage.
That appears positively from the fact that the increased welfare of the
proletariat in the Western world lead to an unparalleled boom in
marriages, and negatively from the fact that only poor whores (Thailand,
Philippines, and now also the Eastern Block) and slaves are disposable
for the market of unfaithfulness. Whereas the division of the world in
states internally leads to a diminishment of the economical differences,
the differences between the states only increase. That only troubles the
view on the long term development. In a world-historic perspective, it
cannot be denied that there is an unstoppable tendency towards factual
polygamy.
The overwhelming success of factual monogamy is overshadowed by an equally
overwhelming success of unfaithfulness. The increase in marriages goes
hand in hand with an increase in divorces. Kinsey stated that only 33%
of the American men was 'monogamous'. In all the industrialised
countries, the percentage of male unfaithfulness is about 70 %. Also
female unfaithfulness goes increasing. In as much as married women can
protect themselves better against unwanted pregnancy, they can live
longer periods of their live without children, and in so far as they
engage in social labour, they become more independent of the sexual
division of labour in marriage. Recent data point to more and earlier
unfaithfulness of women. It seems that women are taking the lead. To the
real unfaithfulness must be added the increase of unfaithfulness in
fantasy with imaginary partners in novels or with images.
Thus, the word-historic triumph of monogamy is equally the
world-historic triumph of unfaithfulness.
The procession of the monogamous
couples is threatened from all sides, formerly
through harem keepers, then through pimps who begin to sell their ware
alongside the road, increasingly also by seductive don Juans, and
finally by the marchers themselves who begin to make eyes at each other
and increasingly begin to change places. The path along which the
procession
marches becomes increasingly steeper as the peaks of society begin to
loom up at the horizon. Although every participant began his journey
with the greatest expectations, the enthusiasm in the procession is not
precisely great. And the participants look rather stern: not only for
themselves, but for the competitors at the
sides of the road. Secretly, they would like to stay
aside, in so far as they would rather have preferred to stay in the
valley, to pluck the flowers in the green meadow.
UNFAITHFULNESS AS
FAITHFULNESS TO LOVE
The triumph of unfaithfulness testifies to the fact that people do not
want lifelong monogamy and compels us to regard
the omnipresent monogamy a mere factual monogamy. Is Briffault right when he contends
that monogamous people are not yet polygamous? Or not yet promiscuous?
The very romantic love that induces lovers to be unfaithful
testifies to the contrary: enamoured lovers want lifelong and complete
monogamy. But, we are faced with the paradox, then, that the same
romantic love that is out at lifelong monogamy is at the same time the
main cause of unfaithfulness. On what grounds,
then, did we call the
real existent monogamy as factual monogamy?
The paradox that monogamy is at the same time wanted and unwanted, is
solved as soon as we remember the obstacles
that prevent the unfolding of
love. Ever more monogamous relations begin as wanted monogamous
relations, but they have of necessity to end up as unwanted relations.Only
unfaithfulness is, as already Engels remarked, the true testimony to the
monogamous nature of man. Or, to phrase it with Havelock Ellis:
that marriages today seem often so unhappy, is because we are no longer
prepared to be unhappy and keep up appearances.
Unfaithfulness can lead either to serial monogamy, and then dissolves
into promiscuity, or to an engagement in a second relation next to the
first one, and then dissolves into polygamy. Only then do we begin to
understand that something like factual monogamy does not exist at all:
every monogamous relation sooner or later becomes a part of a polygamous
or promiscuous network. Only when we restrict polygamy to harems, and
loose the brothels and one night stands out of sight, can we oppose
monogamy to polygamy. And only when we want to overlook that lifelong
and reciprocal faithfulness scarcely exist, can we oppose promiscuity
and monogamy. What exist, hence, is not monogamy, but merely a
combination of polygamy and promiscuity.
But, at the same time, something other begins to dawn on us: that the
polygamous and promiscuous fabric is woven from the accumulation of countless outbursts of romantic love, that would like to
endure lifelong and become complete in principle, but that, for reasons
meanwhile well known, sooner or later cannot but
lose their élan.
Only now do we understand how much the decapitated maiden testifies to
monogamy. That goes especially when the execution is postponed: for the
mitigated forms of relative promiscuity, which manifest themselves in
divorce followed by new relations: the serial monogamy that H. Fisher
wants to sell us as human nature. In the face of an ever worsening
relation, many give up their intention to remain faithfulfor a
whole life and begin a new relation with the same hope. One step further
leads to promiscuous relations combined with an enduring relation, which
is continued solely for economical or pedagogical reasons (alimentations
as an economical contract and co-parenthood included).
Not only promiscuity, also polygamy is the negation, and at the
same time the secret
testimony of the monogamous fervour. We already mentioned how
the separate parts that normally are integrated in one and the same
relation, are distributed among several specialised partners and thus
turn out to be hidden monogamy. We can even deepen this analysis. The
desire for monogamy creates at the same time the
inability to divorce the partner whom one loved ànd the desire to begin
a new relation. A first monogamous relation is extended with a second
one. Often a new wife is taken when the first turned out to be infertile
or was unable to give birth to a boy. Often it is not so much better mothers who
are looked for, but better sexual partners. When also the second does
not meet the expectations, a third partner is taken, and so on, as far as the economical,
fertile or sexual potential reaches. According to this pattern,
most harems are built up, just like the more hidden forms of it:
monogamous marriages with side relations or whoredom. In that sense,
polygamy is a condensation of the conflict that originates in the
monogamous desire. How much this analysis is right, is apparent from the
fact that nobody falls in love with more than one partner and begins a
lifelong relation with each of them, whereby each partner would be at
the same time his lover and the mother of his children. That is why
harems (or polygamous relations in general) are built out stepwise as
serial monogamy. No doubt, such relation between polygamy and
unfaithfulness inspired Mahomed Effendi, Turkish ambassador in France,
to say to Hume that Christians spare themselves the trouble of keeping a
harem by housing their seraglio in the houses of their friends.
Thus, the world-historic triumph of monogamy is not only the word
historic triumph of unfaithfulness, but at the same time also
that of polygamy and promiscuity. And only this triumph testifies in
unison: not to the polygamous or promiscuous nature of man, but to the
primeval desire for a lifelong and complete monogamy!
Certainly, man has a 'primeval nature' in matters of love, but that
nature is malleable in the perverse, promiscuous and polygamous
dimension. There is nothing wrong in looking for a human nature,
only in conceiving this nature in terms of 'drives' and not alo
in terms of
'higher functions', and above all in taking this nature as unalterable. The diverse values on the three coordinates along which primeval love
varies, offer diverse people on diverse places and times diverse
possibilities of satisfaction. And, since there is something like
primeval love, there is no such thing as a history of love, but only a
history of the way in which love deviates in various degrees from point
zero in three dimensions. Primeval love is not something that existed in
a lost Atlantis. It rather seems that its deformation, first through the
struggle against nature, but increasingly through society, can be
restored only in a utopian future. In expectance of this omega of
history, primeval nature realises itself only in promiscuous, polygamous
and perverse variants. History does not change our nature, rather does
our nature demand history to be realised. Perhaps, what Nietzsche said
about God holds for love in the first place: that 'this is so
great an event, so far away and so beyond comprehension, that times
cannot possibly be permeated by it yet'. The wait
is for willing ears....
Meanwhile, it will have become clear that faithfulness to love can only
consist in attempting to approach, alongside the three coordinates, the
kernel as near a possible, and not through imposing lifelong monogamy.
Only through resigning from the centrifugal lure in a this time
genuine ascetism, an ascetism that understands itself as ascetism, and
not a completeness, can faithfulness to love be realised.
THE NECESSARY FAILURE
OF LOVE
Meanwhile, we have sufficiently analysed the causes of the necessary
failure of lifelong monogamous romantic love. We deem a whole series of
factors responsible. Let us sum them up once more: the eclipse
through
competitors on the pyramids of attractiveness leads to self-contempt and
makes one's partner second choice; the
reluctance to be abducted from the exhibitionistic amphitheatre and to
submerge in pregnancy ignites the perverse move; through the advent of
society, intercourse is reduced to the simultaneity of rape and theft;
the necessity to engage in social relations makes that all continue tohobble on one leg, so that
no one is the first and the last; and, finally, the dwindling of sexual
division of labour makes it possible to survive without a sexual
partner.
After our analysis of romantic love, we have to add two more obstacles.
Nothing warrants that there is a becoming partner for every body, like
in Aristophanes' story, nor that one would find him
if he existed.
Nothing warrants that the propriety that seems to be there at the moment
of romantic love, will last forever. A beautiful woman is not necessarily
a good co-operator, a good mother or a good helper of the aged. And from
the first sight on which we fall in love, these qualities can not be
read. Nothing warrants, finally, that the history of social relations
will follow the same course
with
both partners (qua
prestige for instance). Pregnancies affect women otherwise than men, man
and woman have a different career and become acquainted with different
friends, and so on. That is a fourth theory, which, this time on
justified grounds, explains why romantic love is transient. Ortega y
Gasset thinks that love is eternal in principle, but that is fades away
because of the changes in personality during life. Also Alberoni holds
that partners cannot but change in an ever changing world. Or to phrase
it in somewhat more real terms with F. Giroud: 'You loved a fiery
young man that wanted to become a writer, and end up with an industrial,
worrying
about taxes. You were in love with a romantic and vulnerable
woman, and end up with a Boeing pilot in your bed'
A second important obstacle, that we now can appreciate in its full
weight, is the increasing cultural diversity, which reduces the
chance
of stumbling on equals.
Romantic love begins
with the perception of
identity and ignites the desire to flatten the differences In uniform
hordes, there will not have been much to flatten. In our age, people are
exposed to such different influences, that looking for a kindred spirit
is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Michelet is one of the few
who recognised this problem, and who, in contrast with figures like Alberoni concludes that identity has to be brought about: 'In our modern
time love does love what it finds, but what it creates'. That holds
especially for the differences in matters of opinions about the relation
itself: the most diverse views are
in
circulation. It is already quite a
task to find out how the partner imagines a relation, let alone to find
a partner who holds the same view. And what is
more: every partner can
relapse in previous models or become susceptible to new ones. One
starts
with the idea to have a good housewife, but she suddenly want to engage
in social labour; one starts with the idea that labour has to be
distributed equally, but one of the partners is no longer prepared to do
something in the household; one has made children, but suddenly wants to
behave as if they were not there; one starts with the idea of
faithfulness, but one of the two suddenly wants to switch to an open
marriage; or one of the partners discovers his homosexual or her lesbian
nature; or one of the partners suddenly proclaims that relations with
friends or with parent prevail, and so on. That there circulate so many
different views on love, would not be so dramatic, were it not that they
are often rather the cause than the remedy...
In the nine previous chapters, we have described and analysed all the
aspects of the sexual misery. Only in the next three chapters, one and
another will be placed in a broader perspective.