Tag: #Schopenhauer (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

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

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

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better: Concluding Reflections

Four Men Who Should Have Known Better: Arthur Schopenhauer

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