Tuesday, March 21 – Sunday, April 9:
Acireale.
On Male and Female in Culture and Art
The inadequacy of the causal form of perception of the nature of things may become thoroughly apparent to us on examination of the priority in space and, particularly, time, of male and female considered together. — Is man ‘earlier’, or woman? An idle question, conception without procreation, like procreation without conception, being inconceivable; according to which we have before us merely a division of the genus, again conceivable only as a unity, which through the act of the suspension of this division gains its reality as well as ideal dignity.
So long as for the judgement of natural and human things the division of sex is discernible to us solely in its dissimilar efficacy, the genus remains far removed from the ideal. Culture and art, too, could only be perfect if a product of the act of that suspension of the divided unity of male and female.
Act: — the perfectly matching marriage. — Plato: — his state defective and impossible. — However, the bad experience of historically propagated humanity stands as a constant warning to us as racial decline through wrong marriage: physical decline combined with moral. Plato’s fall into error must not deter us from the problem he saw so clearly; accordingly it is our task to recognize as infallibly certain that marriage without mutual affection for the human race has been more pernicious than anything else.
Gobineau: definition of the reasons for the superiority of the white race: trend towards beneficial through recognition of the pernicious in unbridledness of will. To be precise: cautious exploitation of power of violence for enjoyment of possession. (Male). Apparently: correction of — again only apparently — purposelessly formative nature; at same time, however, incomprehension of nature’s true purpose which aims at deliverance from within itself: (Feminine.)