Kurt Taylor Gaubatz

Scholar, Analyst, Author.

Tag: The Idea (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

November 2, 2020 / 8 Comments

The Idea

Masthead for Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s “The Revolution” [Public Domain Image via Wikimedia.org]

My new project is a book making the argument that women’s equality is the most important idea in all of human history. On the face of it, this would seem a difficult argument, given the very many important ideas that have popped up throughout the human experience.

Obviously, an idea-by-idea competition is impossible. Instead, I rely on a bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu. I propose that an idea that makes realization of the purpose of life possible for the first time in history is clearly the most important of all ideas.

Building an argument on the purpose of life, I know, sounds like the proverbial leap from frying pan to fire. In fact, though, most everyone knows that for most people most of the time the purpose of life is to love and be loved.

The most important kind of love, in turn, is long-term partnership love between two people. Without diminishing the importance of same-sex relationships (which play a role in my argument), for most people this is about love between a man and a woman.

While historically, our great philosophers, theologians, and scientists have been, at best, thoroughgoing advocates of patriarchy, and more commonly misogynists, they have nonetheless understood that love between adults requires taking the interests of the other as your own.

Seeing the interests of another adult as your own, I propose, cannot be authentic unless you see the other as an equal. Thus, the argument is made that gender equality is essential for authentic partnership love and for realizing this core life purpose.

It is all very straightforward, though of course, there is a bit more to it than that, which is what makes it a book.

Click Here for a Chapter Outline

October 23, 2020 / 0 Comments

Changed Priorities Ahead

My favorite British road sign.

Let me admit up front that my academic interests have been, depending on your perspective, admirably diverse or annoyingly dissolute. I started my college career as a music major, but then discovered economics and political science. I started graduate school in international law. After a detour into theology, I finished my Ph.D. in political science and international relations. Along the way I picked up enough statistics and game theory to teach and publish in those areas as well. And my work has always been informed by a strong interest in political philosophy.

All this is to introduce another turn in my intellectual interests. A few years ago, I got a bug in my brain about the importance and centrality of women’s equality to my life individually, and to our world more generally. Running this down led me to the conclusion that women’s equality is not just an important idea, but really is the most important idea.

My work on this project corresponded with a decision to leave the comforts of a tenured academic position and move to Washington, D.C., which offered better career opportunities for my wife. In addition to the joys of the Jefferson reading room at the Library of Congress, the free museums of the Smithsonian, and a national park three blocks from our house, this shift has given me the latitude to turn to several intellectual adventures that fit less well into a narrow academic silo.

You can read more about the project on women’s equality here.

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