Kurt Taylor Gaubatz

Scholar, Analyst, Author.

Tag: #Bonhoeffer (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

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.

Charles Delucena Meigs (1846)

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.

George Orwell, 1945

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.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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:

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

The Overview: Male Pattern Blindness

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