Category: Purpose (page 1 of 1)

February 14, 2024 / 0 Comments

The Secret of Love: What we’ve always known but are only beginning to understand

An famous painting of Plato's Symposium by Anselm Feuerbach — The drunken Alcibiades joins Plato’s Symposium on love.
(Anselm Feuerbach, 1869)

Love is a sublime, but complicated, part of life. Here, though, is a secret about love that ought to be straightforward: It has always been known that authentic love requires seeing the interests of another as your own. The Buddha emphasized love focused on the good of others. Aristotle described love as one soul in two bodies. Jesus and Muhammad called on us to love our neighbors as ourselves. The German philosopher Georg Hegel wrote that “Love means in general the consciousness of my unity with another.”

Hegel by Jakob Schlesinger — Hegel (1831)

Consider, then, what Hegel had to say about women. In his Philosophy of Right, just after emphasizing unity as the essence of love, he shared this bit of patronizing profundity:

Women may well be educated, but their minds are not made for the higher sciences, for philosophy, and certain artistic products which require a universal element. Women may have insights, taste, and delicacy, but they do not possess the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the difference between animal and plant.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, (1820) para 166

Um, Georg, how is love as “unity” supposed to work under those conditions?

If authentic love between adults requires identifying with another person and taking their interests as your own, it must also require seeing the other as an equal. If their interests are just as important as yours, you must accept them on the same level, with the same standing and agency.

For most of history, however, our great (male) thinkers have insisted that women are inferior to men. Aristotle, the first person credited with the systematic study of biology, thought women were “misbegotten males,” the result of some procreative defect. He said you could tell women were inferior by the sound of their voices. After more than two-thousand years of thinking it over, the state of the art had advanced only so far as nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s confident assertion that you could tell women were inferior by the shape of their bodies.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes about as close to sainthood as Protestants allow. He is known for his resistance to Nazism and for his argument that ethics requires learning to see “the view from below.” He challenges us to overcome the ways power and privilege distort our understanding of what it means to care for others. Nonetheless, he called it a “rule of life” established by God that “the wife is to be subject to her husband,” and criticized marital equality as “modern and unbiblical.”

Bonhoeffer was surely right that women’s equality is a thoroughly modern idea. Apart from a few lonely voices, there was no organized movement for women’s equality before the nineteenth century. A full-spectrum effort for equality in the home and workplace only began to gain traction in the 1970s.

If equality is required for authentic adult love, that means that throughout history such a love was not a real option for most people. Even today, in much of the world the equality of women is more an aspiration than a reality. Authentic love between men and women remains beyond the reach of those constrained by persistently patriarchal institutions and cultures.

Given this reality, it is noteworthy that the one place love has been less encumbered by patriarchy and paternalism, even if not by other prejudices, is in same-sex relationships. Indeed, the Athenian philosophers better understood love in the context of male friendships than in relationships between men and women. Aristotle saw the pinnacle of human connection in the mutual caring between men of equal status and power.

On Valentine’s Day, let’s appreciate that the rising, if still imperfect, acceptance of women’s equality makes the possibility of authentic love between men and women widely possible for the first time in history.

The secret to authentic love has been known forever. But understanding this “secret” and giving men and women the potential to experience authentic love with each other is something new. Our world is built on thousands of years of thought and practice that rejected the equality of women. If we aspire to a world of authentic love, we must continue the hard work of personal and social change to make that possible. This means grappling with everything from who does the dishes to who serves in Congress. It particularly depends on changing the attitudes and behaviors of men.

Valentine’s Day is a fine occasion for cards and flowers, but now the secret is out. If true love is the goal, we must commit to the equality that is its essential foundation.

March 23, 2021 / 1 Comment

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better: Concluding Reflections

The Blind Leading the Blind – Pieter Bruegel the Elder – 1568

This past month, I’ve profiled four men who should have known better about the equality of women—but didn’t. Each of them had an intellectual perspective and life circumstances that should have led him to appreciate and advocate for women’s equality. Instead, however, each promulgated patriarchal, and often misogynist, views of women. These men are case studies in what I have called male pattern blindness.

The moral philosopher Alfred Schopenhauer highlighted the role of empathy. But even the exceptionally accomplished women in his own family couldn’t break through his vicious and explicit misogyny.

The physician Charles Meigs specialized in women’s health and obstetrics. But even his life of constant interaction with women did not open his eyes to their capability for intellectual and strategic thought.

The economist Alfred Marshall wanted his work to uplift the down-trodden. But even the example of his exceptionally capable wife, the economist Mary Paley, could not convince him that women could be equal to men.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer emphasized viewing ethics from the position of the powerless and oppressed. But even this “view from below” couldn’t open him up to see beyond the biblical injunction that wives must be subservient to their husbands.

Each of these eminences was active during the period in which the idea of women’s equality was moving from the fringe of human consciousness to the core of thinking about social justice. Each was clearly aware that this had become an issue of central import.

The bright thread that runs through these case studies is the inability to see a shared humanity and equality across the gender line. I started this series with a reference to Gordon Allport’s “contact hypothesis,” the notion that sustained contact between groups can decrease prejudice and conflict. Yet, not only has this effect not worked on women’s inequality, it doesn’t even seem to have occurred to sociologists to consider the contact hypothesis in the context of gender until 2016!

Schopenhauer, of course, was perniciously misogynist. But as Dr. Meigs illustrates, even those who put women on a pedestal acted from an underlying rejection of women’s intellectual and occupational aspirations. All four men knew, and even claimed to love, women of exceptional capability, yet even that was not enough to break through the cultural hegemony of patriarchy.

Admittedly, Schopenhauer was widely regarded as something of a jerk. (Friedrich Nietzsche, who called Schopenhauer his “great teacher,” noted that Schopenhauer had no known friends and “cherished his philosophy more than his fellow men.”) Meigs, Marshall, and Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, were all thought of as caring, generous, and considerate. Each wanted to make the world a better place. Nonetheless, each failed to understand how the nature and needs of 50 percent of the population would fit into that ambition.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood the critical importance of a direct connection to other people. “We must allow,” he said, “for the fact that most people learn wisdom only by personal experience.” But here, a bit of George Orwell’s wisdom is relevant: “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Despite the resistance of these prominent men and so many others, the women’s movement began to succeed in changing attitudes and institutions. Still, as our current pandemic has vividly demonstrated, many areas of inequality remain. The same forces of culture and condescension that constrained the views of brilliant men like Schopenhauer, Meigs, Marshall, and Bonhoeffer continue to shape our norms and institutions. My hope is that reflecting on their failures can help us address our own. Until we get better at exposing, acknowledging, and confronting these social forces, both women and men will suffer the effects of our patriarchal legacy.

Moral: Seeing women as equal is the starting point for getting to social justice, rather than the other way round.

Posts in this series on Male Pattern Blindness:

Overview
1. Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of morality and misogyny
2. Charles Meigs, a prominent physician for women and proponent of their subjugation
3. Alfred Marshall, a rationalist economist who rationalized patriarchy
4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian who argued for social justice and women’s subservience

March 15, 2021 / 3 Comments

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Bonhoeffer Stained Glass Image – Johannes Basilikum, Berlin
[By Sludge G-CC BY-SA 2.0]

Women’s equality is clearly one of the most important social justice ideas of the modern era. It is a curious thing, then, that so many men who have led our thinking about ethics and social justice failed to appreciate this elemental fact. These same men had groundbreaking insights in other areas and ongoing interactions with exceptional women that should have opened their eyes to the underlying truth of women’s equality. This is a phenomenon I call male pattern blindness.

My current project on the idea of women’s equality includes discussion of some of the stupid-brilliant men who suffered from male pattern blindness and slowed the movement away from patriarchy. I am highlighting four of them in this blog. I have previously profiled the moral philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the women’s physician Charles Meigs, and the economist Alfred Marshall. This week, the spotlight turns to my final example, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945).

Bonhoeffer Statue at
Westminster Abbey
[Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas
CC BY-SA 3.0]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is broadly and appropriately revered. He is about as close as contemporary Protestants get to having a saint. He took a courageous stand against the Nazi subordination of religion in Germany as one of the founders of the Confessing Church and the leader of their underground seminary at Finkenwalde.

In 1939, with the world on the brink of war and the Nazis arresting and persecuting the leaders of independent churches, Bonhoeffer was able to leave Germany. Yet he returned, believing that he needed to be in Germany to help rebuild the church once Nazism was defeated.

Family connections got Bonhoeffer a spot in a special unit of German military intelligence (the Abwehr). This posting allowed him to remain in touch with the global ecumenical movement and protected him from regular military service. It also connected him to the highest levels of the anti-Nazi resistance.

Bonhoeffer’s participation in the resistance led to his arrest in April 1943 for helping Jewish refugees escape to Switzerland. Later, he was tied to the failed July 20, 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. He was executed at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in April 1945, just two weeks before its liberation and one month before Germany’s unconditional surrender.

The Flossenbürg Concentration Camp
[US Army Photo]

There were several important women in Bonhoeffer’s life who should have helped him see the equality of women. Most important, surely, was his twin sister, Sabine, with whom he remained very close throughout his life.

Bonhoeffer also worked closely with two women—Elizabeth Zinn and Bertha Schulze—who had doctorates in theology and played a strong role in his intellectual development. Another close friend and confidante was Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, an outspoken and active anti-Nazi and a major sponsor of the Finkenwalde seminary.

Maria von Wedemeyer Obituary
[NY Times 11/17/1977]

Bonhoeffer never married, although he became engaged to Kleist-Retzow’s granddaughter Maria von Wedemeyer in January of 1943. Wedemeyer was just 19 years old (to Bonhoeffer’s 37) and the engagement came only three months before his arrest. This makes it difficult to assess how their relationship might have contributed to an appreciation of women’s equality. After the war, Wedemeyer did go on to an impressive career as a mathematician, computer programmer, and business executive.

In addition to this personal context, Bonhoeffer’s theological ethics—like Schopenhauer’s moral philosophy, Meigs’s medical work, and Marshall’s social-welfare economics—should have made him highly receptive to the idea of women’s equality.

Through all the trauma of his war experience, Bonhoeffer continued to develop an important and influential body of theological work. A central element in his ethics was the idea of “being there for others.” He argued for learning to see “the view from below.” This was a call for understanding the way privilege and power distort one’s sense of what it means to care for others. Because of this perspective, Bonhoeffer has often been used to advance theological conceptions of social justice, including feminist theology.

This is a reasonable appropriation, but Bonhoeffer himself was not open to the core principles of feminism. In fact, he identified the subjection of women as a mandate directly from God:

[T]his rule of life is so important that God establishes it himself, because without it everything would get out of joint. You may order your home as you like, except in one thing: the wife is to be subject to her husband, and the husband is to love his wife.

Bonhoeffer emphasized that “the equality of husband and wife … is modern and unbiblical.” Almost 100 years after the Declaration of Seneca Falls, one of the most innovative and important thinkers in the Protestant world—a man who argued for seeing the world from the perspective of those with less privilege and power—still thought it “an unhealthy state of affairs when the wife’s ambition is to be like the husband.”

Bonhoeffer had the theological tools to see the importance of women’s equality. He was prepared to apply these tools to advocate for the importance and dignity of many oppressed groups. He failed, however, to see the limitations placed on women. And he did so despite personally knowing women of exceptional abilities and aspirations. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a man who should have known better, but didn’t.

Moral: Adopting a “view from below” doesn’t help if the women around you are invisible.

Next up: Some concluding thoughts on what it all means.

Previous Profiles:

Arthur Schopenhauer, a giant of moral philosophy and misogynist prejudice
Charles Meigs, a prominent physician and a pillar of patriarchy
Alfred Marshall, an economist’s economist and chauvinist’s chauvinist

The Overview: Male Pattern Blindness

March 8, 2021 / 3 Comments

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better:
Alfred Marshall

Alfred Marshall and Mary Paley 1877 — Economists Alfred Marshall and Mary Paley (1877)

As a spin-off from my current project on the idea of women’s equality, I have been profiling four men whose circumstances and smarts should have led them to see the equality of women—but didn’t. This is what I call male pattern blindness. It is the inability of otherwise incisive men to see and appreciate that women are equal to men.

Next on the list is the great British economist Alfred Marshall (1842-1924). Marshall was the founder of neoclassical economics and deserves particular credit for insisting that economics should be concerned with social welfare rather than just wealth.

Marshall would have first learned his economics from John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), which served as the foundational economics text of the time, before being supplanted by Marshall’s own Principles of Economics (1890).

Mill’s 1869 book, The Subjection of Women, singled him out as one of the earliest male philosophers to appreciate and promote the equality of women. As with the women of the early suffrage movement, Mill was particularly critical of laws that essentially stripped married women of the right to own property. The principle of coverture—which, by the way, wasn’t fully rejected by the US Supreme Court until 1966—held that the legal identity of females was “covered” first by their fathers and then their husbands, who gained sole control over their income and property upon marriage. Mill saw coverture as so onerous that he expected that if equality gave women any other opportunity for financial security, they would reject marriage altogether.

Marshall shared Mill’s view that women’s equality threatened the institution of marriage. But, where Mill was concerned about its disadvantages for women, Marshall came to believe that it was men who would lose interest in marriage if they couldn’t be in charge:

[Marriage is] a sacrifice of masculine freedom, and would only be tolerated by male creatures so long as it meant the devotion, body and soul, of the female to the male. Hence the woman must not develop her faculties in a way unpleasant to the man.

This was not always Marshall’s perspective. He was more open-minded in 1877 when he married his former student Mary Paley.

At the beginning of his career, Marshall had served on the committee promoting informal lectures for women at Cambridge. He owned a first edition of Mill’s The Subjection of Women, and expressed agreement with Mill that “marriage should be an equal condition … an equal contract.” On a trip to America in 1875, he wrote his mother with enthusiasm about the liberal Unitarian marriage vows he encountered there. Marshall and Paley wanted to omit the standard vow of obedience in their marriage ceremony. Paley’s father, who officiated, refused to abide this modernism and insisted on the traditional vows. In the way of economists, Marshall and Paley entered into a side-agreement contracting out of that clause.

Mary Paley was one of those exceptional women who should have made the fact of women’s equality obvious to all who knew her. She was one of the first women to attend Cambridge University as part of the small inaugural class of the Newnham College for women.

The Modern Newnham College, Cambridge
[*Cmglee, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons*]

Even with their own college, the status of women at Cambridge remained decidedly second-class. Lectures and exams for women were set informally, and women were not awarded degrees. Still, on the strength of her performance there, Paley was appointed as Cambridge’s first female lecturer in economics, though limited to working with female students.

Then, Mary Paley married Alfred Marshall.

Interestingly, it wasn’t just women who couldn’t hold full academic appointments. Married men were also barred from teaching at Oxford and Cambridge.

Alfred Marshall was sufficiently committed to Mary Paley to give up his Cambridge post for her. They moved to Bristol, where a new college was being built with the goal of educating working men and women. It was the first British college to admit women on an equal basis and was not subject to the marriage prohibition. Alfred Marshall became its first principal. He pushed for a lectureship for Mary Paley as well. This was agreed to, but with the onerous condition that her salary be deducted from his. Paley was a popular lecturer for women and men in mixed classes at Bristol.

Marshall’s reputation was established with his 1879 book, The Economics of Industry. Mary Paley was credited as the coauthor, but in actuality it had originally been her project from before they were married. The quality of the writing and the book’s accessibility contrasts with Marshall’s other books, a difference that is usually attributed to Mary Paley.

In 1882, the rules changed to allow married faculty at Oxford and Cambridge. Marshall and Paley were both hired at Oxford, though she was again limited to teaching female students. Three years later, they were invited back to Cambridge. Alfred Marshall took up a prestigious professorship in political economy. Mary Paley returned to teaching the women of Newnham College.

In his inaugural Cambridge address, Marshall expressed his desire to use economics to deal with human suffering and “to discover how far it is possible to open up to all the material means of a refined and noble life.” Nonetheless, Marshall’s attitude towards women was shifting. His concern for human well-being did not incorporate women’s equality.

Indeed, Marshall became one of the leading opponents of giving women equal status at Cambridge. As the chair of the economics faculty, he vigorously fought every initiative for women’s advancement and joined the vocal majority of Cambridge alumni in strongly opposing granting degrees to women. He lobbied fiercely against giving regular lectureships to women, arguing that lecturing to largely male audiences was inappropriate for women, and could damage their character.

The men of Cambridge University hanging a woman in effigy to protest the admission of women (1897).

Other leading economists recognized Mary Paley as brilliant and capable. John Maynard Keynes, who knew both Marshall and Paley well, puzzled over the change in Marshall’s outlook:

In spite of his early sympathies and what he was gaining all the time from his wife’s discernment of mind, Marshall came increasingly to the conclusion that there was nothing useful to be made of women’s intellects.

Cambridge economist Austin Robinson described Paley’s life as “forty years of self denying servitude to Alfred.” Why, Robinson wondered, did he “make a slave of this great woman and not a colleague?”

The eminent Cambridge historian George Macauley Trevelyan notes that “Neither in Alfred’s lifetime nor afterwards did she ever ask, or expect, anything for herself. It was always in the forefront of her thought that she must not be a trouble to anyone.” We are left to wonder how economics might have advanced had Paley decided to be a trouble.

Alfred Marshall was an innovative thinker who was committed to addressing the social problems of the day. He knew the arguments for gender equality in Mill’s The Subjection of Women and professed support for equality at the time of his marriage to Mary Paley. He then spent forty-seven years living with a woman who had proven her intellectual abilities in direct comparison to men. And yet, he reverted to the prejudices of his era. Marshall was a man who should have known better, but didn’t.

Moral: Rationalists will have their rationalizations.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer
[ Bundesarchiv, Bild
CC BY-SA 3.0 de]

Next up: Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a beloved theologian and martyr for social justice who wouldn’t accept women’s equality.

Previous Profiles: Arthur Schopenhauer, a giant of moral philosophy and misogynist prejudice, and Charles Meigs, a prominent physician and pillar of patriarchy.

The Overview: Male Pattern Blindness

March 2, 2021 / 5 Comments

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better:
Dr. Charles Meigs

The Agnew Clinic at the Jefferson Medical College (painting by Thomas Eakins, 1889)

My current project on the idea of women’s equality has led me to ponder why so many men who had both intellectual and circumstantial reasons to understand and endorse women’s equality failed to do so. I have been using this blog to briefly profile a few prominent examples of this male pattern blindness. My previous post highlighted the illustrious philosopher and infamous misogynist Arthur Schopenhauer. This time, I offer for your consideration the nineteenth century physician Charles Meigs (1792-1869).

Dr. Meigs was a distinguished faculty member at the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. In the middle of the nineteenth century he was widely considered the leading American specialist on women’s medicine and obstetrics.

A useful launching point for delving into the character of Dr. Meigs is the tragic death of pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in September 1797. Wollstonecraft, then 38 years old, was one of countless women who suffered painful deaths in childbirth from puerperal sepsis, an infection of the genital tract. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were several theories about the causes of puerperal fever, most of which were categorized as what were then called “putrid miasmas” or “atmospherical influences.” Dr. Meigs described puerperal fever as “an unspeakable terror” and attributed it to bad air and bad luck.

An alternative possibility was proposed by the physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (who was also, of course, the father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.). Early in his medical career, Holmes, Sr. published a paper advancing the argument that puerperal fever was infectious and was carried on the unwashed hands of midwives and obstetricians: “the physician and the disease entered hand in hand into the chamber of the unsuspecting patient.” Despite the strong evidence he marshalled, this thesis was surprisingly controversial.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. reading his 1843 paper on puerperal fever to the men of the Boston Medical Society

The illustrious Dr. Meigs took the intimation that doctors were at fault for the death of so many women as a great affront. In his 1854 book, On the Nature, Signs, and Treatment of Childbed Fevers, he criticized Holmes’s contagion theory as “nonsense.” Meigs offered a chilling description of his own practice: “I have proved it in my own case, over and over again, since I have gone from the houses of persons laboring under the most malignant forms of the disease, and from participating in necroscopic examinations, without carrying the malady with me.” Meigs expressed his confidence that doctors were gentlemen, and “a gentleman’s hands are clean.”

Charles Delucena Meigs — Dr. Charles Meigs

The same stubborn arrogance that contributed to Dr. Meigs’s error on puerperal fever also made him a lifelong opponent of anesthesia. Meigs was concerned about the risks of this relatively new technology, but he also argued that pain was a natural and appropriate part of childbirth. Labor-pain, Meigs wrote, is “a most desirable, salutary, and conservative manifestation of life force.”

Cast out from the Garden
(William Foster, 1891)

Meigs connected his acceptance of painful labor to the biblical decree that suffering in childbirth would be the punishment for Eve’s original sin. He warned against the “doubtful nature of any process that the physicians set up to contravene the operations of those natural and physiological forces that the Divinity has ordained us to enjoy or to suffer.”

In addition to his callous endorsement of women’s pain, Meigs expressed the soft misogyny of putting women on a pedestal. In a medical school lecture on “Some Distinctive Characteristics of the Female,” he warned that without the influence of women, society would relapse into “the violence and chaos of the earliest barbarism…. It is not until she comes to sit beside him… that man ceases to be barbarous.”

The connection between Meigs’s caricature of women on a pedestal and their subjugation was made clear in the same medical school lecture. Surrounded by his eager male students, Dr. Meigs shared his deep insights into the female character: “she has a head almost too small for intellect but just big enough for love.” His description of woman’s “intellectual nature” follows along this line:

She has nowhere been admitted to the political rights, franchises, and powers that man arrogates to men alone…The great administrative faculties are not hers. She plans no sublime campaigns, leads no armies to battle, nor fleets to victory. The Forum is no theatre for her silver voice, full of tenderness and sensibility. She discerns not the courses of the planets. Orion with his belt, and Arcturus with his suns are naught to her but pretty baubles set up in the sky.
C. D. Meigs, “Some Distinctive Characterstics of the FEmale” (1847)

Dr. Meigs surely knew women whose intellect and character could have disabused him of this prejudice. On the subject of “pretty baubles in the sky,” for example, he could have turned to Hannah Bouvier, a fellow member of the small and insular “Old Philadelphia” elite. Bouvier was a popular science writer and the author of a leading astronomy textbook.

And, of course, there was Meigs’s wife, Mary, who was described as having “great intellectual powers and common sense, with a strong love of justice.” The Meigses began their life together in Georgia, where his father was the first president of the University of Georgia. After two years in the South, however, Mary was revolted by slavery and had the fortitude to insist that they move to Philadelphia.

Charles Meigs dedicated his life and his science to the health of women. That is an admirable thing, to be sure. Nonetheless, his experience and expertise failed to open his eyes to the equality of women. Dr. Meigs was a man who should have known better, but didn’t.

Moral: A scientific disposition is a weak competitor to cultural hegemony and pig-headed stubbornness.

Next up: Alfred Marshall—a social scientist who urged economics to turn toward social welfare, but turned away from the brilliant woman standing next to him.

Previous Profile: Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of morality and misogyny.

The Overview: Male Pattern Blindness

February 22, 2021 / 10 Comments

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better: Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer: moralist and misogynist — Arthur Schopenhauer (1852)

In my previous post on male pattern blindness—a bit of collateral from my current project on the idea of women’s equality—I promised profiles of four influential men whose failure to appreciate the equality of women was particularly striking. In each case, their principles and positions should have helped them to know better. But they didn’t.

My first subject is the renowned German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). The competition is stiff, but Schopenhauer is probably the most egregious misogynist in the Western philosophical tradition.

In 1851, three years after the American suffragist movement was launched with the Declaration of Seneca Falls, and the same year as Harriet Taylor Mill‘s “The Enfranchisement of Women,” Schopenhauer published “On Women.” In this notorious essay, he wrote that women:

are “inferior to men in matters of justice, honesty, and conscientiousness”
“exist entirely for the propagation of the race, and their destiny ends there”
“remain children all their lives, for they always see only what is near at hand, cling to the present, take the appearance of a thing for reality, and prefer trifling matters to the most important”
are “by nature intended to obey”

Arthur Schopenhauer
thinking some thoughts (1859)

Contemporary Schopenhauer scholars have been embarrassed by this misogynist screed. But here’s the thing: Schopenhauer’s misogyny is largely consistent with the main currents of Western philosophy from its birth in classical Greece right up to—well—right up to not very long ago. Aristotle wrote that you could tell women were inferior by how they sounded. Two thousand years later, Schopenhauer had progressed to assessing women by how they looked:

“One only need look at woman’s shape to discover that she is not intended for either too much mental or too much physical work.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, On Women, 1851

Schopenhauer should have known better for reasons both situational and philosophical.

Schopenhauer did not lack for extraordinary female role models. His sister, Adele, spoke several languages and was a poet, author, and artist. Her papercut silhouettes were published as book illustrations, and on their own. The German literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was inspired to write poems to accompany some of her papercuts.

Schopenhauer’s mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, was also a woman of considerable accomplishment. She was the first woman in Germany to publish under her own name. She wrote twenty-four books on a wide range of subjects, including several well-regarded works on art history. Her books remain in print to this day.

Despite the accomplishments of his mother and sister, Schopenhauer could still write that “women are and remain, taken altogether, the most thorough and incurable philistines.”

Schopenhauer’s blindness to the abilities of the women around him was a significant failing. It is made worse when we consider it in the context of his moral philosophy.

Schopenhauer built his ideas about ethics on a foundation provided by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant liberated morality from its religious moorings with his notion of the categorical imperative. This is mostly just a fancy way to say that there are some things that are right to do in and of themselves, rather than as a means to something else. Kant believed these imperatives could be sorted out with a universalized version of the Golden Rule: morality requires acting in the ways that you think everyone should act towards everyone else.

Schopenhauer argued that reason wasn’t sufficient for implementing Kant’s moral philosophy. He made the interesting point that our bodies are the only thing that we can perceive both from external observation and from internal feeling. That’s pretty cool in itself, but Schopenhauer also posited that this leads to a sense of empathetic knowledge. Empathy—the ability to understand and feel the needs of others and the effects of events on their internal feelings—is the touchstone for a humanist morality.

Empathy should have given Schopenhauer the key to seeing women’s equality. But in both his principles and his practice, Schopenhauer saw women as so different from himself that he was unable to make that empathetic connection. As a result, he failed to incorporate fifty percent of humanity into his moral schema. In addition to making him look ridiculous, Schopenhauer’s misogyny fundamentally overshadowed important parts of his contribution to philosophy.

The examples in Schopenhauer’s own family and his philosophy of empathy should have made him an advocate for women’s equality. Instead, he promoted a particularly vicious misogyny. Schopenhauer is a man who should have known better, but didn’t.

Moral: Advocating empathy is not the same as having empathy.

Charles Delucena Meigs - A man of medicine and misogyny. — Dr. Charles Meigs

Next up: One of the nineteenth century’s leading physicians, Dr. Charles Meigs—a proponent and practitioner of women’s medicine and misogyny.

The Overview: Male Pattern Blindness

February 15, 2021 / 7 Comments

Male Pattern Blindness

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates, 1787

Our culture is built on a patriarchal foundation. The “great men” of the past, the leaders in philosophy, science, and religion, have been unable to see that the women around them—women they often claimed to love—could be their equals. Their brilliance and their blind-spots shaped our world.

Drawing from my current project on the idea of women’s equality, I want to spotlight four intellectual leaders who represent the failure of men to respond constructively to the rise of the idea of women’s equality in the critical period from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century.

These four men—the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the physician Charles Delucena Meigs, the economist Alfred Marshall, and the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer—are interesting because in each case there are strong reasons we would have expected them to have known better.

Title plates from books by Schopenhauer, Meigs, Marshall, and Bonhoeffer. — Four Books by Four Men Who Should Have Known Better

These men had a worldview or professional position that should have made them more likely to see the equality of women. Each contributed significantly to the moral evolution of humankind; but they were unable to use their critical faculties to see beyond their cultural constraints to appreciate the importance of gender equality.

The enduring failure of these and so many other men to appreciate the interests and equality of women is striking in light of what sociologists call the “contact hypothesis.” This theory, which is generally credited to the psychologist Gordon Allport, holds that conflict, prejudice, and misunderstanding can be reduced when groups are engaged in long-standing contact.

The strongest validation for contact theory has been the rapid change in attitudes towards the LGBTQ community over the past twenty years. There is a large literature showing that people who have had personal interactions with someone who is gay or lesbian are more likely to be open to normalizing same-sex relationships. Learning that a friend or relative identifies as LGBTQ is a particularly potent agent for attitude change.

Contact theory does not seem to have worked its magic for the acceptance of women as equals. Women and men have lived in close proximity as long as there have been men and women. Having mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters did not make men more sympathetic to the opportunities and aspirations of women.

Portrait of German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer — Arthur Schopenhauer

As I discuss in this new book project, ours is a history of stupid brilliant men who could not see the truth about fifty percent of the people around them. This persistent inability to see the basic equality of the women with whom they interacted is what I call male pattern blindness. It is a remarkable and yet nearly universal dysfunction that has afflicted both the man in the street and the great men of philosophy, science, and religion from the earliest time until the present.

In the next few posts I will briefly profile four of these great men. First up: Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of morality and misogyny.

Posts in this series on Male Pattern Blindness:

Overview
Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of morality and misogyny
Charles Meigs, a prominent physician for women and proponent of their subjugation
Alfred Marshall, a rationalist economist who rationalized patriarchy
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian for social justice and wifely subservience
Some concluding thoughts

December 17, 2020 / 0 Comments

Grievance as Gospel

Hieronymus Bosch – Hell from the Garden of Earthly Delights Triptych (1500)

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis spins a story of hell as a place that souls inhabit by choice. One of the common motivations for remaining in hell is for the nursing of grievances. The same principle is made explicit in his preface to The Screwtape Letters:

We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, (1961 Preface p. IX)

In a previous post I reflected on Galen Guengerich’s new book on gratitude as a spiritual practice. Grievance is the opposite of gratitude, and, alas, can also take on the character of a spiritual practice. That is, it becomes a motivating value on which our minds fixate.

James Kimmel, Jr, the director of Yale Medical School’s Collaborative for Motive Control Studies, argues that grievances fire up the brain in a way that is very similar to addictive drugs. Dwelling on a grievance activates the same neural reward circuits as narcotics.

A Festivus Pole ready for the airing of grievances
(cc Wikimedia)

There is also a social element to grievance. Grievances help bind communities together. They can spread from one person to another. The desire to share grievances can lead to a kind of grievance evangelism. Groups with a shared sense of grievance can become an echo chamber that amplifies a grievance fixation.

There has been much speculation on the spiritual commitments of Donald Trump. He does come across as the poster child for the grievance-centered life. The Washington Post reports today that “In a cascade of tweets sent after midnight, [President Trump] shared more dubious claims of electoral fraud and falsely insisted, yet again, that he was the true victor.” This leads the mind rather quickly to C. S. Lewis’s description of the “ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self which is the mark of Hell.”

Following this line, Kimmel puts grievance at the core of Trumpism. Trump built his movement around a populist resentment of “liberal elites.” Now, the myth of a stolen election is becoming a binding belief for the true faithful (and a creedal test for cowed Republican officials).

We shouldn’t pretend that grievance doesn’t help bind Democratic partisans as well. Anti-Trumpism is clearly the glue for the diverse views that gathered in the big tent of the Democratic Party of 2020.

Kimmel argues that grievance as a motive force can be highly destructive. This is certainly true, but it’s also essential to recognize that grievances can be about real injustices. The civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter movement today could certainly be characterized as organized around grievances. So too, the centerpiece of the American Declaration of Independence was a list of grievances.

John Trumbull’s painting of the Declaration of Independence, being presented to Congress. [Wikimedia – public domain]

There are, then, two key questions to confront. The first is: how do we identify legitimate, and even urgent grievances? The second is how do we manage the pathologies of grievance both on an individual and collective level?

Part of the answer to both of these questions on a social level is that this is precisely what our political and legal institutions are for. That they aren’t always that good at it is a reflection of their inevitable imperfections, and of the enduring difficulties of solving these core human problems.

At the individual level, introspection and self-care are essential. But, let’s also return to gratitude. More important than its place as the conceptual opposite of grievance, a focus on gratitude can serve as an antidote to a grievance-fixation.

And, going back to C. S. Lewis’s description of hell as a place of interminable self-centeredness, work to address the legitimate grievances of others may be a healthy road map for a life of purpose.

Meanwhile, this ties to a central point in my new book manuscript: that the purpose of life is to love and be loved, and that an essential characteristic of love is taking the interests–and thus the grievances–of others as seriously as your own.

The bottom line, still, is the need for an appropriate balance between attention on the important work of addressing legitimate grievances and on a life perspective of gratitude.

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