Draft translation. “Nietzsche et l’amour,” Promenades littéraires, second ed. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1922) pp. 89–95, dated 1904. Gourmont critiques the shallowness and meanness of Nietzsche’s view of women; though his own perspective could by no means be called feminist. Rather, the text expresses a certain psycho-sexual attitude I like to think of as “Gourmontism” (by analogy with Sadism, Masochism, Retifism, etc.): that is, sexual attraction to intelligent women.
PDF of this translation at academia.edu.
Nietzsche had little
experience of love. One might even say that he never had more than friendly
relations with a woman. He wrote on love and on woman nonetheless, like every
good philosopher. One day, at Sorrento, he confided Malwida von Meysenbug with
a handwritten notebook containing the aphorisms on woman later published in the
first part of Human, All-too-human. Malwida took the notebook, read it,
and returned it to Nietzsche, smiling. He demanded an explanation for the
smile. “Do not publish this,” said Mrs. von Meysenbug. Nietzsche seemed
ruffled. He added the notebook to the rest of the manuscript and sent the lot to
his publisher.
Malwida’s advice was sound. Nietzsche’s aphorisms on woman make up the least interesting part of his work. Here I will only discuss the chapter concerning them in Human, All-too-human. There are other thoughts on women in Beyond Good and Evil, which we may examine later on.
Chapter seven of Human,
All-too-human, entitled “Wife and Child,” begins with a judicious and novel
idea: “The perfect woman is a higher type of humanity than the perfect man, and
also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds in
support of this theory” [1]. What first strikes one about this thought is its
closing phrase, where there is a magnificent intuition of scientific truth.
Indeed, in the majority of animal species, as I myself have demonstrated in a
special book [2], the woman is the superior type. Among insects in particular,
and among the most intelligent, the female alone fulfils almost all social
functions which, among mankind and among birds, are shared between the two
sexes. She is at once the builder of the nest, the Amazon who defends it
against enemies, the huntress who provides game to her progeniture: she is
everything. The male is almost nothing: he appears for an instant, fulfils his
natural duty, then disappears.
Something of this
activity remains to the female among superior species. If not the activity
itself, then the principle: if she does not build the house, it is built for
her sake. But lacking a mate, she would build it herself. Man plays an immense
part in the life of woman; but he is a passenger, while woman’s natural role is
durable. Man only represents himself; woman represents all posterity. In every
case where a woman is nothing but a woman, but fully a woman, she is infinitely
superior to man. Society is founded upon woman; she is its cornerstone. It is
for precisely this reason that she falters every time she abandons her task as
woman to imitate men.
I am far from Nietzsche’s
position when he says that the perfect woman is rarer than the perfect man. It
is difficult, I will not deny, to know what a perfect man might be. For man,
there are many sorts of perfection or, rather, of superiority. For woman,
perfection is unique: she is perfect when she is profoundly woman, from head to
toe and to the bottom of her heart, and when she fulfils all the duties of
woman joyfully, from lovemaking to childbearing.
The rest is grimace.
This opening aphorism of
Nietzsche’s would seem to indicate in him, despite everything, a certain
knowledge of woman, at least at a theoretical level; this is an illusion.
Woman, even in the most advanced civilization, is always far more natural than
man; far closer to life; in a word, more physical. One cannot speak of her
seriously unless moved by a physical sympathy for her. Those incapable of that
must abstain. To talk of woman as an abstraction is absurd. Man is no more an
abstraction than she; but he can live in abstraction, which is impossible for
woman. Nietzsche recognizes this in aphorisms 416 and 419: “Can women be at all
just, when they are so accustomed to love and to be immediately biased for or
against? For that reason they are also less interested in things and more in
persons […]” [3]. Yet he takes this to be an inferiority. No doubt, when it
comes to metaphysical ratiocination, to philosophy; but not when it is a
question of practical life. For ideas exist only inasmuch as there are men to
think them and vivify them; they must be incarnated to acquire vitality and
force. The ladies are not wrong. But was it not Nietzsche himself who said that
a philosophical system is nothing but the expression of a particular
psychology? If a woman had loved Nietzsche’s philosophy (as some do today), she
would have dropped the books at once and run to the philosopher. Men, though,
would do otherwise. Do those who admire a writer wish to see him, to hear his
voice, to shake his hand? Women are more frank and more natural: that is all.
We curse their cunning. They are only cunning once man forces them to defend
themselves against him. Many men are tricked; still more women. They know as
much, and, less bestial than men, are less given to fly into a rage.
Nietzsche understands
women do poorly that he, the great creator of ideas, of new connections, is
reduced to redrafting commonplaces in a Nietzschean form. He tells us: “Those
girls who mean to trust exclusively to their youthful charms for their
provision in life, and whose cunning is further prompted by worldly mothers,
have just the same aims as courtesans, only they are wiser and less honest”
[4]. But we have read this maxim of false moralism so many times that it makes
us smile, except when it exasperates. At other times, he very neatly summarizes
Schopenhauer’s opinions in a few lines (aphorisms 411 and 414). This is
amusing; but is it new? “Inexperienced girls flatter themselves with the notion
that it is in their power to make a man happy; later on they learn that it is
equivalent to underrating a man to suppose that he needs only a girl to make
him happy” [5].
What man of whatever
caste and of whatever country could concede this assertion? “Women’s modesty
usually increases with their beauty” [6]. This is a signature. When one writes
such a thing in a series of pensées on women, it is almost as much as to
say: “These are reflections on a subject utterly unknown to me.” If anything,
beyond education, might increase the modesty that comes naturally to women (up
to a certain point), is it not, obviously, the feeling of physical
imperfection?
Nietzsche has no idea
about marriage, but a very personal ideal. In the following there is a
confession of an almost excessive sincerity: “Marriage regarded in its highest
aspect, as the spiritual friendship of two persons of opposite sexes, […] such
marriage, which only makes use of the sensual, so to speak, as a rare and
occasional means to a higher purpose […]” [7]. I cannot cite the whole thing:
Nietzsche almost expresses the view that one cannot love physically a woman one
esteems intellectually. This is utter immorality: the naïve immorality
of a man whose senses are muted; whose sensibility is entirely cerebral.
In closing, he even
rehashes the illusion of a purely metaphysical and contemplative marriage; and
he was thinking of himself, without a doubt, when he wrote: “Thus I, too, agree
with the opinion that in matters of the highest philosophy all married men are
to be suspected” [8].
What is suspect, in
truth, is the opinions concerning women and love of a man, as great a
philosopher as he may be, who knew neither love nor women.
Notes
(All but note 2 are
the translator’s.)
1. 377.
2. Le Physique de
l’amour. [See Ezra Pound’s translation (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922).]
3. 416.
4. 404.
5. 407.
6. 398. “The opposite of
this aphorism also holds good,” says J. M. Kennedy in an editorial note to
Zimmern’s translation of Human, All-too-human (Edinburgh: Foulis, 1910).
7. 424.
8. 436.
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