Aphoristic Writings, Notebook, and Letters to a Friend, by Otto ...

The sadist lives discontinuously in individual moments of time, he never
understands himself: for him, every moment already has reality in itself; that is why
he makes decisions easily, while the masochist can always only act on the basis of
everything. The masochist is never in a position to ask himself, “How could I ever
have done that? I don’t understand myself!” This is the sadist’s usual attitude to his
past, which still does not, for that reason, lose its punctuated reality for him in the
slightest. The sadist has the finest capacity for perception and the best memory for
every momentary particular; his senses are continually engaged because all
particulars have reality for him. The masochist suffers from long pauses, which he
cannot fill with any reality.
The masochist suffers from what is unreal to him as from guilt. That is why he
feels embarassed in front of women, the sadist never. He is passive toward women, as
toward every sensation, which he can only make real for himself through association
that in the end leads to concept formation. The sadist does not make associations: in
the face of a sensation he is breathless, ready and willing to plunge himself into it
completely, to be totally absorbed in a sensation.
The masochist can, therefore, never love a picture or a statue: here there is all too
little reality (activity) for him. The sadist can very well love them; he is also, of
course, gallant, and gallantry is primarily the adornment of statues, from which one
later removes the ornaments, or which one smashes, when there is no more reality to
be sucked from them.
The true concept of God is incomprehensible to the sadist; in art he is an oversensitive
person, constantly focussing everything, and unjustly, on a man, on a
moment, on a situation. He can tell stories; the masochist never (not even jokes),
because no particular is real enough for him to be able to be lovingly absorbed in it.
To the masochist, the character of Napoleon is a starting point from which he
distances himself in order to think, and to comprehend him through thought: for the
sadist, all the world lies in such a figure.
The masochist is thus helplessly weak in face of the sensory world: the sadist is
strong in it. The masochist seeks to assert himself against appearance, against change:
only he understands the concept of the Absolute (of God, of the idea, of meaning).
The sadist does not question things about their meaning. For him, “Carpe Diem!” 13 is
the command of his I; change appears real to him. What strikes him about time is not
change, but rather duration (“aere perennius” 14 ).
Rhythm, which attends precisely to every individual note, every individual
syllable, is sadistic; harmony is masochistic, as with true melodious vocal music (in
which the individual notes do not emerge as such).
The mystic (whether a theosophist like Böhme, or rationalist like Kant) is identical
with the masochist; 15 the amystical man is the sadist. The Northerners are masochists
(as well as the Jew); the Southerners are sadists. Among Germans and Greeks are
13 Carpe diem! = Seize the day! [Trans]
14 Aere perennius = for the ages. [Trans]
15 Philosophers with sadistic (unmystical) inclinations are Descartes, Hume, Aristippus. [Rappaport]
17