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>> This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming
to you from the Stanford campus.
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>> Where else friends are you going to hear
about the metaphysics of misogyny for a runaway hour?
Only here on entitled opinions, but let's double check that.
Let me type in metaphysics of misogyny here and do a Google search.
You remember Google, right?
I had the company's vice president
and chief internet evangelist, Vince Cerf,
on our show this past fall.
You cannot be serious metaphysics of misogyny,
19,600 results.
Is there really nothing new under the sun,
not even entitled opinions?
Let's have a look here.
Leading the Google list is an article,
metaphysics and misogyny, subtitle, souls, bodies,
and women in Plato's dialogues.
Sounds interesting actually.
Then let's see, there's something on Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism,
something else under the rubric container technology.
I'm reading, quote, "The problem is not just bad metaphysics
or misogyny, but the structure of production and reproduction.
The container is structurally necessary, but dot, dot, dot.
That's as much as you get without accessing the site.
Zoe Sophia.
You think that's a name?
A real name? Maybe it's an alias.
Well, I don't have time to find out right now, continuing on.
Nope.
There's really nothing in the 19,600 results,
which bears any resemblance to what we have in store for you today on entitled opinions.
It's all either metaphysics and misogyny,
or metaphysics, misogyny, and whatever.
And there's the difference.
Our show is not just about the sociological,
ideological or analogical relation between metaphysics and misogyny.
It's about the metaphysics of misogyny,
which is a separate beast altogether.
Now, the first question we should address before we get started is the following,
is your host a misogynist.
In all honesty, I can't provide you with an answer to that question,
at least not until I have a better understanding of the essence of misogyny.
In other words, it's a question I won't be able to answer until the end of our hour,
when thanks to the insights of my special guest, Adrian Dowb,
I will have a more decisive grasp of the philosophical foundations of misogyny.
We're not interested here in the vulgar run of the mill forms of misogyny.
We're interested in what I would call the misogynistic sublime.
Should I Google that term too and see if anyone's used it before?
To hell with that, I hereby claim it as my own regardless of precedent.
Where were we? I was saying I don't really know if I'm a misogynistic or not.
All I know for sure is that I'm old enough to remember how,
during my adolescence and early adulthood in the 70s,
when feminism was making such huge strides,
I welcomed enthusiastically the notion that men and women are fundamentally equal.
I always thought that women were the superior gender,
and it was edifying to think I might be their equal.
I still think women are superior,
but misogyny is a devilish thing, and it could be that my admiration and even veneration of women
is one of misogyny's many perverse guys' and a rather conventional one at that.
Joseph Conrad once called himself, quote, "agentlemen and a Catholic,"
but that's my line, or at least it would have been my line had Conrad not gotten there before me.
I don't know what Conrad meant by it, but speaking for myself,
one of the main reasons I'm a Catholic is because Catholicism founds its spirituality upon the feminine.
I don't mean upon the feminine as a principle, but upon women per se.
The presence of women in the gospels is as decisive as the presence of women in the early church
without women there is no early church, period.
If I'm a Catholic, it's also thanks to the vast army of female saints
who have laid their heads upon the breast of our pelican during the past two millennia.
Because I have this abiding belief that where women are present,
where they make their voices heard, where their spirituality is allowed to manifest itself in
its own native forms, good things invariably happen.
Just as bad things invariably happen, where women are silenced,
walled in, or rendered secondary.
None of this means, however, that I am immune to the lures of metaphysical misogyny
that I do not find something fascinating about the philosophical debasement of women.
And I think that when men and women are honest with themselves, they will acknowledge
that there is a deep reservoir of creative and/or destructive tension in the relations between the
genders, a tension that can sometimes take the form of resentment, scorn, and even hatred.
If this were not a perpetual possibility, the relations between the sexes would be flaxid and flat.
"O the et amo, I love and I hate all in one," as Catellus said.
But let's turn out in my guest Adrienne Daube, who is an assistant professor of German
studies here at Stanford. This is Adrienne's first year at Stanford.
"Pache and Nancy Ratchet." And this quarter, he is actually teaching a course on misogyny.
Adrienne, welcome to the program.
"Thank you so much, Robert."
This course you're teaching, Adrienne. Why don't you tell us what texts you start out with,
and who are the main misogynistic thinkers that you deal with?
Well, it's a course that obviously focuses on German texts of the 19th century.
So the wonderful rundown that you provided just a minute ago
actually forms essentially the first week and the Pruele Gomena.
And we move on to fix the Hege Schopenhauer Kierkegaard, Bachofen, Nietzsche,
Vininger, and we wrap up with the poet, Efte van Georga.
A lot of Germans.
A lot of Germans, I know, and it requires a certain amount of justification, I would think,
because you can accuse Germans of many things, but they do not have a sole purchase on misogyny.
Not at all, I would say.
But it's the case that you do anything with antiquity before you get to the German in the 19th century.
Well, we covered Plato and Aristotle a little bit of the church fathers, and Rousseau.
It's one of those requirements of Stanford's quarter system that you have to
move rather quickly through preliminary stages.
And it turns out, you know, it's one of those things that when you write it down on a syllabus
is, feels horrifically violent, but when we actually got to reading those texts in the class,
it became pretty clear that there wasn't really a lot of new thinking about this for about,
I would say, 1500 or so years.
It's usually these texts provide reconfigurations of topoy that are introduced by the
ancients, essentially.
Of course, the early church offers some new impulses, and after that, essentially,
these topoy get rearranged rather than a real change.
Do you agree with me that there's something pro-feminine in the early church?
Well, this is of course, I'm poaching
on land that is not even close to my discipline, but it seems to me from my reading and
the early, especially along the agnostic gospels, that, yes, there were, there appears to have been
much more strong foundation on gender equality in the early church, which was essentially done
away with, as it consolidated into what we today call the Catholic Church, and that there is,
and of course, we know today that there is a whole bunch of texts that essentially were kicked out
of what came to be the Bible precisely because they would have had two revolutionary repercussions
on gender relations in the ancient church.
Because they were so radically, if not egalitarian, even pro-feminine.
Yeah, not in ways that we today would recognize, but in ways that were perfectly clear to
contemporaries.
I mean, the famous instance of this is the question of celibacy, which of course,
you know, today's strikes us as not particularly feminist, but the idea that this was,
that Chris Chan, he was a way for women not to marry and submit to, you know, to a role in the
family, of course, had something quite radical at the time, and there is indication that I've,
I must confess, no independent research on this, but there are many scholars who argue that
this is what led to the suppression of texts like the acts of Paul and Thecla,
that essentially they called for celibacy for both men and women, and therefore essentially
would have committed the young Christian church to, you know, shaker.
Yeah.
So, a fate of the shakers, you know.
Yes, you have to multiply.
And exactly.
That's the earth, but of course, subsequently there was the tradition of the convent where in
Christendom, women could opt out of the marriage.
Exactly.
And it seems that that is how it was understood well into the 19th century, that being the
bride of Christ was the best way to avoid being a bride of just any other guy.
And an ordinary massage.
Exactly.
And I'm sure that most of our listeners who are tuning in are going to be particularly interested
in the misogynistic aspect of our conversation and not the pro, you know, the pro feminine,
I think of the church.
So why don't we actually make this huge leap, if there's no way to do it in a non-violent manner,
but let's get to these philosophers that interest you particularly.
I don't know who would you like to start with?
Well, we could start even with someone like Higa or Feichte.
I think those two are already very good and sort of introducing what, you know, I said there was
a, this 2000 year history where, you know, it was essentially sort of moving around a certain
topo, without invigorating this debate in particular in new ways.
But of course, these Germans idea with are essentially the first who are post-feminist
misogynists.
I mean, these are, you know, don't get me wrong.
These, this was not of course not a feminism that we recognize, but this is, these are thinkers
right and think about gender relations after Wilsoncraft's the vindication of the rights of women.
They right after the French Revolution and after the Enlightenment, a time which had precisely
suggested that if social relations can't be tested by reason, they may not have any justification
at all. And of course, this was precisely what these thinkers were, we're trying to provide.
So this, this creates a very strange, puts them in a strange position.
I, I like it into kind of a rear guard action and I think that's what makes it maybe a little bit
more hopeful and a little bit less depressing than the 2000 years I came before it, that,
that in some way these, these men are fighting on, fighting a lost cause in some way, you know,
they, they understand, however subliminally that the very precepts from which they start actually
commit them to gender equality. So we're talking here about philosophers who theorized in their philosophy,
the superiority of the male gender over the female gender and that they're doing it as,
you suggest in a defensive posture, but they are trying to find philosophical
uh, justifications for the misogyny. So that's the, now we're into the metaphysics.
Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about the metaphysics of thick, they were Hegel.
Right. Well, let's start with fidget. That's a, that's a very good example.
Um, fidget is, is quite ingenious in embedding misogyny into his project. He,
is of course famous for basing his philosophy and what he would call the absolute eye,
which decomposes into something called the eye and the knot eye and the, it is the task of
the eye to determine the knot eye and he essentially borrows Aristotle's characterization of,
of the sexes as form and content, respectively. And thereby advances an argument that, in essence,
the, that essentially likens a woman to not, through the knot eye, that is to be determined.
Uh, as a passive, uh, passive recipient of, uh, an effective male form form. Right.
Right. And he does all this in a metaphysical ethics, which is important because the, the problem
he addresses is not that this is somehow wrong. The problem for him is what he calls dignity,
uh, which for him as a county and precisely had to do with human spontaneity.
Uh, he declares that reason is necessarily active. And the problem is, of course, if, uh,
it is true that woman is the knot eye and therefore essentially receptive. How can she be said to
be have human dignity at all? But is this a biological argument that he, that he's advancing
does it rely on the authority of Aristotle, but he was a great enough philosopher that he would
want to provide some foundations for this claim. That is, that is what is surprising in some ways.
I mean, that, that's, that's why I decided to focus on this course on the metaphysics of misogyny,
that these, these, these people make it their business after all to step away from what just
happens to exist and they are quite able to do so in astonishing ways in other fields. And yet,
when it comes to gender relations, they're often quite unable to do so. So there is some of that. I
mean, he doesn't invoke Aristotle explicitly, but he invokes an argument that from Aristotle,
via Aquinas, to Bacon had really been, uh, at the, you know, one of the go-to tricks, sort of
philosophical misogyny in the Western tradition. On the other hand, he does have, I think, a relatively
serious purpose in doing so. And that is he's also a post-russoist philosopher. I think what he's
interested in is ultimately creating a complementary relation of the sexes. And of course, the form
content relation, which, you know, are essentially reflexive determinations that cannot be thought
apart from one another, uh, provides precisely that. That is to say he is in that sense an
anti-liberal thinker because he, he is interested in providing an account of the sexes that
would allow, that wouldn't allow them to operate independently of one another. Uh, so I think that,
that, that's as far as you can go on a justification of it. Other than that, he seems to assume
that women are, uh, and I quote, you know, absolutely passive and men are, and I quote again,
absolutely active, where exactly he's getting that from and what exactly he means by that is, of course,
rather unclear. I mean, it doesn't help that the 18th century was relatively squeamish about,
you know, sexuality. We can, of course, sort of, you know, we have some ideas of what might be meant by it,
but he's certainly never explicit to see draw sociopolitical consequences from, uh,
from that principle to the effect that women's places in the home or that they're
biologically that as mothers and that they don't belong in the public sphere. Exactly.
He does. Yes. Yes. Except of course he, the, the text I've been referring to is called the,
uh, the deduction, the metaphysical deduction of marriage, uh, and he, he's of course,
ultimately concerned with vindicating marriage as a reasonable, uh, arrangement. The, the trick is,
of course, women have to have dignity. Uh, he's not going to argue that they're not human.
Uh, assist that only through love and marriage can they reconceive of their absolute
passivity as activity, uh, the act of loving someone. Again, what that means is absolutely unclear,
but the upshot is supposed to be that ultimately in monogamy, women are able to
recuperate the dignity that they're elsewhere not afforded, but, but the same token that means,
yes, woman's places and is in the family, not as they're in the home, but in the family.
Right. Sounds very boring for, yes. If not, as a metaphysical, certainly,
for the women, how does Hegel differ from a victim in this regard? Well, I mean, in terms of
very close and, in many respects, no, well, yeah, feast was a, was a important, uh, was an important
launching point for Hegel, but of course, also one of his perennial punching bags. Uh, I would say
that Hegel is in terms of domesticity. Hegel is relatively close to, he's, I mean, he,
famously claims in the philosophy of right. A woman has their substantial vocation in the family,
and her ethical disposition in family piety. So that means that essentially she obeys only
the law of the family and not the law of the city of the city. Uh, and dignity and take any
you like, and dignity is for him the case where those two come into, into, into conflict.
But with integrity, you bring up a very interesting point, which is Hegel, of course, is a
much more historical thinker, uh, famously than feast. And, and in take a news, of course, for him,
not just an example, in take a news for him, a point where it becomes clear that the law of the
state and its abstractness and its mediation, et cetera destroys to some extent the coherence of
the family. Uh, and dignity is precisely at that point of rupture where, where it turns out that
the old paternal law of crion, the king, contradicts her impulses as a family member. Uh, and
he goes point in essence is, of course, that the kind of alienation that is characteristic of
the state and of modernity in particular, uh, happens mostly in, in, in the palace, not in the
the oil costs in the, in the, in the family, either in the household. The, and that actually points to a very
interesting, uh, relationship between femininity and modernity for Hegel, because on the one hand, of
course, Hegel like the others, I'm, I suppose had an awareness that, you know, women's issues
are becoming more prominent precisely because of modernities were, uh, results of the French
revolution. Yet at the same time, he strangely enough asserts that this fear of modernity, which is
the palace, uh, you know, of, of public life that destroys the immediacy or the substantiality as he
called it, of, of family life, is in fact, close to women. So women are a symptom of modernity, but not
of it. Uh, and I think, in that way, Hegel, uh, I think goes further than fichte in moving from,
you know, sort of just legalistic theories to really a metaphysics that, that brings out the
contradictions of women's position, uh, in, you know, post revolutionary modernity.
I remember in the phenomenology, he speaks about the, um, enormous sacrifice that the man or the
head of the household, the patriarch has to undergo in order to leave the comfort and affection of
the domestic sphere and actually go out of the house into the public sphere and that if everyone had their
choice, the men would probably just assume stay home, right, then not be citizens, but there's
somehow a drive in the history of the world spirit that almost makes us the emissaries of, of this
larger project and that even though it doesn't lead to personal happiness for men, they must
nevertheless go into the public sphere for saking the household to a sense. This is actually a,
you're putting a finger on what's a bit of a strange, strange spot for Hegel because on the one hand,
he, uh, he makes precisely that argument that, but you have to see that it's not by a large and
existential argument. He really seems to think that metaphysically the family ends with their
production. What that means seeing as, you know, everybody's, um, mom and dad are essentially still,
you know, living at home is not quite clear, but it, it, he really thinks that, uh, the beginning
and the wearing of children leads the solution of the family. The same extent means that
the individual cannot go back, right, uh, but of course he, as long as it is a he, has the choice
of either just being part of the palace or being part of a, of a household, I'm guessing, even
though he seems to pretty much assume, Hegel seems to pretty much assume that anyone who has left
the, his original family will then found a new one. So this is not something that he really
questions. Well, I want to get to some of the real classical misogynists like the
show point, how it works because it doesn't get much more classic than that. Yeah,
show point hours is he's an overt misogynist. He's a proud misogynist. He's not someone who is
trying to find metaphysical, necessarily, um, idealist metaphysical arguments for the gender issue. And so
show point hour, he's 19th century, you know, German philosopher notoriously an enemy of Hegel.
Absolutely. Uh, famous for offering his lecture course at the same time as he goes. Of course,
the joke turned out to be on show point, however, because no one showed up. He would lecture to
empty row. Apparently he would insist on lecturing with no one in the room. It's true. It's true.
And one has to say, of course, he's a misogynist, but he's really a, uh, an equal opportunity offender.
I mean, this, this, this, this, this, exactly is a mis-unthrope. The very, um, the very, uh,
episode that you referred to, uh, with lecturing to empty, uh, lecture halls is precisely also instilled
in him a undying hatred of academic philosophy. So he really, there was a, he had an enemies list
worthy of, uh, you know, Richard Nixon, but it's true. Women were came in for particular scorn.
What was his argument about the ontological status of women? Well, that's a very interesting thing.
As far as, as his misogyny is concerned, it is closer to something we call, uh, you know,
anthropological misogyny. Uh, it, show point hour fancy himself, something of a scientist,
uh, absolutely without any justification as far as I can tell. And he essentially refers not to
like, fish the, you know, the constitution of our subjectivity or transcendental philosophy. He,
when he puts down women, it really is on physical, physiological grounds. I mean, I think the,
I think the very famous quote that I, I remember as, uh, that he calls women, you know, big children.
Uh, and you have that quote with, sure, sure. Let me see. This is on women. This is, uh,
it's appeared in the Paraga and Paralipomena from 1851. They're big children all their life long.
They kind of intermediate stage between the child and the full grown man who alone is human
in the strict sense of the word. And, uh, of course, and this, our, in this brief piece on women,
men come in for particular scorn as well, but not so much, you know, for their essence,
but for the fact that they essentially fall for, you know, these children. But why are men the only
human beings in the strict sense of the word for showpanew. I think he would, I mean,
showpanew is a proto evolutionist. Uh, he, I think he really thinks of this in the terms of the
great chain of being, uh, men are for him more advanced than he will, you know,
do things like no structure and hip bones and that kind of thing. I mean, this is very different from
Higa and fix that. Uh, and, you know, I'll read you another quote, you know, it is only the man
who's intellect is clouded by his sexual impulses that could give the name of the fair sex
to that undersized narrow, shoulder broad, hip and short, legged race.
I guess my intellect is clouded. Exactly. I mean, it's, uh, he's not, you know,
men don't come, men don't come, come off very good either. And in a, in one of the famous chapters
of his, you know, Magnum Opus, the world is willing representation, showpanew are
ridicule men alongside women, essentially human beings insofar as they are sexual or appear to be
fools for showpanew. It's very different from fix it, by the way, who, if you think through this
idea of activity and passivity actually ends up saying that only women have trouble with their
humanity. Men can be rational and sexual at the same time, which of course for us post Freudian
seems very strange. And showpanew is much more on our wavelength. He thinks the moment you think
erotically you go into act, ironically. Well, um, there's, there's a way in which showpanewers,
theories there about the intellect being clouded by the sexual impulses are as related to his
metaphysics of the will as well. Absolutely. Because the world is will and representation. I don't
know, is that a, are those two gendered concepts in that dialectic? I don't, I don't think so. I don't
think so. But they are related. And, and, and here's how he does it, because of course, as I say,
he's an evolutionist. And, and this is where showpanew are strangely close to something like Richard
Dawkins. He thinks that why are we acting like fools in love? Well, it's because the species, the will
of the species, asserts itself through us. But of course, this is not something that men and women
fall differently prey to. Say we all are stuges of the will. And it is the mistake of love is not that
you don't follow your instincts. You should follow instincts. He thinks. But the problem is that
we think that this is my one true love. This is the one for me, my better half, etc, etc.
The, the fact is he says it could be anyone. What matters is, you know, object choice, what matters
is ultimately passing on away. He doesn't call a genetic material, but you know, creating a good,
and really is it object choice. Because I remember, I don't know if it's on women, I think
there's another essay called the metaphysics of sex. Sexual love, yeah, sexual love. That's
that chapter in chapter 44 of the world as well. That's what I was referring to. And I remember
I'm saying there that it's actually not we have only the illusion of choosing. Absolutely.
To make that it's actually nature. All of a sudden the attraction between a man and a woman
is some third thing that is neither one nor the other is not identical to either of them,
but is the this yet unrealized unborn child. The will of the child is a will of the unborn child,
which would result from the union that pushes the two towards one another. Because it's this
blind will to exist on the part of the unborn. Exactly. You know, I know that that's reductive and it's
dockings like, but I think it's so much more elegant than the geneticist or language. Absolutely.
Absolutely. And you know, there's there's something about it that has a certain metaphysical elegance.
Absolutely. And I mean, just played us there, there are two things cannot come together
unless a third thing unites. Absolutely. He kind of literal. And that's that's something that, of course,
you know, that stands behind the, you know, fitter and halo as well. There's this idea of
unification, always already having to underpin what they think of as the union of the sexes.
The reason why I wanted to bring up this illusion of object choice is that they can strike a bridge to
his, his metaphysics. Because of course, show upon how our, and I'm going to, you know, Mr.
President him horribly here, but in essence, things that there's this,
per
he thinks that's an illusion. It's a necessary illusion that keeps us from, you know, from, from not being able to function in the world, but it is an illusion nonetheless.
And love for him functions apparently analogous to that in the sense that if we just figured out that all we were trying to do was create
allow this new life to be born so that the species can live on and we can die quickly. None of us would would go out presumably and go to, to, you know,
bars or restaurants at all. And his point is that there is a Percipium Individo etsionis at work there too.
It's quite fascinating because it leaves no room for homosexual love. And yet in the tradition, of course,
the grand platonic tradition, the, the ultimate ideal for of love was homosexual. How's it not reproductive? Well, it's funny you should bring that up because
Schopenhauer is, I think, as far as I'm aware, the, the first to offer a, well, not at a fence, but an explanation of homosexuality. Pretty much since the Greeks. And he in fact opens it by saying, you know, I can't tell you how many people will talk about the Greeks and not address the fact that when they speak of love, they mean homosexual love. That is,
essentially, you want to get away from having sex with women as quickly as humanly possible and, and, and turn your, your life towards be getting and with respect to the soul, which is, you know, the,
for the tonic, which is sort of educational arrows. Schopenhauer is the first to really suggest a totally different solution. He says, well, homosexuality essentially allows for people who wouldn't have had good offspring to, you know,
essentially get busy with one another rather than messing up, well, he doesn't say the, the gene pool, but something like that, messing up the species as a whole. I mean, so far, I guess it's not unlike some evolutionary
or maybe a couple of generations ago.
But on the other hand, he adds a distinct layer of craziness to it,
by insisting that the reason why Greek love apparently always transpired
between older men and younger men, much younger boys essentially,
was that their semen wasn't quite up to snuff.
Because either too early or too late,
the quality of the semen is lackluster,
and therefore homosexuality is a way of keeping them busy until they hit their window,
where essentially they're going to produce the primo semen.
And you're talking in the case of the boys now?
Both of them.
He thinks that after the age of, let's say it's 54, it's very specific.
And also one should add younger than he was at the time,
that he thinks that essentially homosexual urges once again set in.
I don't know where this comes from.
Because in the Greeks, of course, homosexuality was not a category of identity.
Because many of them were engaged in what we call homosexual practices,
and were married with offspring and children of their own.
Or is it for showpaneward?
Because it's a thing you do for a particular stage of your life.
Again, it runs very much counter to modern identitarian conception.
But homosexuality or sexuality in general.
Well, there's plenty of other characters on our list here.
Absolutely.
Yeah, we gotta move on to.
Should we?
If you don't mind taking another leap to go back to the German music.
Absolutely, yes, yes.
Because, of course, obviously from Hegel's showpaneward and Nietzsche,
it's all one kind of genealogical line.
Absolutely.
The sort of ethical strife between, of course, showpaneward was a huge influence on Nietzsche.
Absolutely.
And then Nietzsche turns against him and so forth.
Do you have a sense that Nietzsche's misogyny,
and Nietzsche's misogyny, I'm thinking of the quotes that Nietzsche's sometimes most famous for.
Right.
When you go to see a woman, don't forget your wit.
Right.
You think that's showpanewardian in essence, or is there something else going on in his,
in his, the delight he takes in debasing the status of women in certain of his aphorism.
Exactly.
That doesn't talk about the way he exalts him in others.
Right.
The strange thing, of course, about the famous whip aphorism is that it comes from Zarathustra.
So it is Zarathustra's discourse to some extent and not Nietzsche's.
And secondly, that it's not actually said by Zarathustra himself, and old woman tells him.
She asks him, you speak to us women a lot, but you never speak of women.
And actually, I think Zarathustra's reply to it is pretty much in the encapsulation of what is 19th century misogyny.
He says, and I quote, "About women one should speak only to men."
So a woman in general must speak only to men.
That is, that is misogyny, I would say.
This course about women with a capital W among the boys, the boys club, the old boys club.
But the whip suggestion is one that she offers.
That's her little truth, as she says.
Well, you know, this is very fascinating to me because it raises this other interesting issue that takes us a little bit outside now at the sphere of the metaphysics.
My godmother was a German woman who would often quote that line of Nietzsche's in German, "approvingly, almost."
And I know of other, I have a friend whose aunt would teach her son how to, what would be misogynistic and would teach him how to beat Barbie dolls.
Because they felt that this was the kind of education that boys had to under-year.
So I just wanted to throw this out as misogyny not being strictly the domain of males.
The males, yeah.
But that there is such a thing as female misogyny.
They're on their own gender.
And for Nietzsche to put the whip dictum into the mouth of the old woman is quite revealing.
Right, right.
Although it is him doing it.
Right.
On the other hand, though, the whip, of course, is also not as straightforward in Nietzsche's hands than in another thinkers, I'd say.
Nietzsche exalts relations of dominance.
And he, and of course, there's this famous picture of him dragging a cart, carrying Luandre Asalome, who is, in fact, holding a whip.
Now, who is Luandre Asalome for our listeners?
She was a Russian aristocrat and woman about Europe who pierced of been the smartest and most attractive woman of the later 19th century.
And Rilke was in love with her, Freud.
I mean, everybody was incredibly impressed.
Nietzsche, horribly, hopelessly.
Hopelessly.
Unlike Rilke, they didn't even come close to ever consummating that.
He proposed to her.
Oh, absolutely.
If he can't that.
I knew you were right.
That picture, she, it's one who has the whip.
That's the whip.
And of course, Zarathustra offers this inchomium, with this anti-enchomium of woman.
Right after his inchomium to the friend, where he says essentially that a friend also, I mean, I'm quoting from memory now, but
a friend has to also be a potential enemy.
So it's not quite clear whether we're dealing with straightforward wife beating here.
I mean, of course, there is some of that.
And I think we shouldn't talk that.
The fact that when we hear women in whips, it's not usually highly metaphysical, but rather in a police
blotter somewhere, we shouldn't eclipse that.
But the fact that with Nietzsche, it's never quite as simple as that.
But that for him, friendship, which he exalts also has relations of some kind of violence built in.
So whether or not this woman is saying, you go to a woman and you want to beat her,
or whether you better suit up.
I think that might be sort of the question.
I'm not sure if that's what's going on there, but all I'd caution against would be to say that this is a very straightforward
statement about subjugating women.
It's quite possible it's saying something not necessarily the opposite, but something very different from that.
It's not the only place where he has highly misogynistic statements on the women.
It keeps props up throughout.
And some of the unpublished aphorism, particularly vermin, that regard.
I mean, it makes it clear that it's not just a mask that he's wearing in terms of their through-strap,
but that this is something that he's, of course, to some extent preoccupied with.
Yeah, and I wanted to raise this question given his authorship of the birth of tragedy,
his first book, and the relationship between Apollo and Dionysus.
And the way in which there's some people have seen in the Dionysian a distinctly feminine power.
Absolutely.
And Apollo being the god of measure and of illusion, order and restraint.
And there have been people, a philologist who have even interpreted the evolution, cultural evolution from patriarchy into patriarchy.
He has something as a triumph of what Nietzsche would have called the Apollonian principle over the Dionysian.
And yet he was famously sympathetic towards the Dionysian.
Absolutely. And therefore towards the feminine, and this conjugates well with some of his statements, certainly later in his active life,
where he claims that philosophers, hitherto, have been very clumsy with women.
Right.
And that they haven't known how to deal with her within a nuanced enough way truth is truth is a woman who has her reasons for hiding her reasons.
Right.
And that he claimed to be a philosopher who knew his way with women, whereas most of his predecessors didn't know how to deal with it.
Yeah, one can only guess that that's only a philosophical point.
Of course.
It's absolutely correct. I think. And I think what you're saying about Nietzsche and the Dionysian is particularly apropos.
And if I may just give you a somewhat longer answer, this brings up a figure that's also on my docket for this course, which is
Yuanyak of Bajol from which probably the one that your listeners are least familiar with.
He's the Bajolf.
A professor at Baja and in fact a friend of the Yang Nietzsche and in fact the originator of this terminology of Dionysian and Apollonian.
And he's famous particularly for having written this book, The Mother Right, which argues precisely as you were saying, this idea, which proposed that there had been a matriarchal society that was betrayed by and violently overthrown by this masculineist Olympian regime.
Sometimes male sky gods.
Exactly. And essentially, and this is the move from the lunar gods to the sun god Apollo.
And so I mean, this is for him, the Apollonian.
Now Bajolf is interesting. I mean, but what's much more interesting is his reception because Bajolf and himself, of course the sun god eventually leads into the Christian god, etc.
So you can see why Nietzsche would read this and think, wow, this is a really wonderful way of, you know, of undercutting Christianity.
Bajolf didn't mean it that way at all.
It's every indication that Bajolf and a very devout Christian, it was somewhat horrified by this idea of a maternalistic society.
Of course none of his readers appeared to have gotten that.
And Nietzsche is only the first and a long line of people who take from Bajolf and precisely these rhapsodic descriptions of what it was about.
The descriptions of what it must have been like on this pre-marital, pre-classical Greek hippie commune, essentially that he describes.
And indeed, even in reading the man himself, it is difficult to see how this isn't enormously appealing.
But he appears to have not, at least in his outward statements, it doesn't appear to have appealed to him very much.
So the idea that with the triumph of patriarchy over matriarchy, this was an advance in civilization, it was almost like the precondition for specifically of the true civilization.
That's how Bajolf wants to see it exactly.
Nietzsche reverses that and says it's the betrayal, essentially, of the dynasty and inside.
Of course, his ultimate point and the birth of tragedy is that the two need to be in some kind of dialogue.
And that absolutely is probably not the way to long-life and good health either.
But it would appear that he took something very different away from Bajolf and then was intended.
Another person that I could bring in very briefly is the poet, Stefan Guillagre, who in the 20th century took Bajolf the way he had intended, but two very different ends.
More in the direction of Plato, as you mentioned earlier, in the sense that he understands this progress of civilization to be necessary and a domination of women.
But for him, that means that ultimately you want to do away with heterosexuality altogether and that really the ultimate end point of this process would have to be a completely homo-social community, a kind of monkish monastic order that you wanted to form.
Of course, you deal with the Huthorne question and whether there's something misogynistic about homosexuality in your course.
I do. I do.
That too touchy.
Well, we will deal with that. I mean, Guillagre is the classic place to look for that.
And I think the answer is for some thinkers, they absolutely was.
For others, not so much. It depends on whether you think of homosexuality as Guillagre did as hyper-masculinity, hyper-virality, which is, you know, at least I think for Americans often someone counterintuitive.
I mean, I think the prejudice is that prevail in the United States, so you run to the opposite direction.
And the ones that say that, for instance, binding are being, who we're going to get to, I guess, towards the end of this hour is, you know, they end up allying homosexuals with women.
And so at that point, whatever my misogynistic thing you want to say about women is true of gay people as well.
But there are in modern and German modernism currents and Guillagre, I think, is one of the most famous that go the opposite way.
And essentially argue that homosexuality is a form of hyper-virality and essentially the ultimate razzio of this project, masculine is project of subduing the mother right.
Reminds me of Italian fascism to a certain extent.
Yeah, an exaltation of this hyper-virality that also adopts intensely homo or rata-f
Absolutely.
It's not only sexual undercurrent to it.
Right, right.
You mentioned Vinegure, he is a very fascinating figure. I'm not sure many of our listeners are deeply familiar with him.
Can you speak a little bit about this character, Otto Vinegure, who was the author of a book called Sex and Character?
Sex and Character, exactly.
He was Austrian.
He was Austrian, born in Vienna in 1880 and died there in 1903.
And he's famous for a book.
So he was 23 years.
He was 23 years old.
He had written this famous book Sex and Character.
I think a year prior, and it was a revised dissertation.
And he had published it in March of 1903 and shot himself on October 3rd, shot himself on the heart.
The book was sort of a success gone die, especially after his suicide.
And if any of the listeners want to check it out, it is available in relatively good English translation.
And you'll be struck by the fact that this is an adapted dissertation.
Anyone who's ever read an adapted dissertation will be be fuddled by what exactly the standards of academic stringency were applied to this thing,
but allow someone to get a PhD for it.
It is essentially a...
But we're reading it a hundred years later.
Absolutely.
But I mean there are many of our rigorous dissertations will not be read ten years later.
No, it's true.
It was certainly it hit like a lightning bolt.
It really synthesized a lot of discourses that were in currency.
Some of them, you know, the metaphysical misogyny of 2000 years ago,
but with supposedly new insights garnered from evolutionary theory, from physiology,
from psychology, Freud was immensely impressed with it, though he refused to procure a publisher for it,
which I think tells you something.
And Wittgenstein, I think he was interested in listening to find a publisher for that.
They met once.
I don't think it really...
I mean, I guess the Vinening I had had hopes in that direction that doesn't appear to...
Freud entirely got that.
And Wittgenstein was very impressed with Vineningers work.
Even though, of course, not by its rigor.
And he says, it is his enormous mistake, which is great.
I mean, he really admired, you know, the Hutzba.
He admired the...
I liked that quote actually.
...vigor rather than anything that he was saying.
And I think that's outside of extreme right-wing circles that was essentially how Vinening was received.
As someone who was just being incredibly bold, and then had sort of blown up before his time.
He was very interesting psychologically because he had...
He was Jewish, absolutely.
His...
His share was an unceations in this book from what I recall are of women, but how more sexual and Jews.
Which for him tend to be not entirely distinct.
So, I'll give it a rundown of his theory.
And I mean, this is the work of a 23-year-old.
It's not... you know, it feels like one of those term papers that you feel like you have to do a few more revisions on.
So, it isn't entirely coherent.
But the general idea is he takes an idea from Schopenhauer, namely that masculinity and femininity are distributed.
Can be distributed differently in men and women.
That is to say, there are degrees of masculinity and femininity in each person.
He radicalizes that notion.
Instead of postulating a man and a woman, he postulates a male and female principal, M&F essentially.
And he claims that every individual has a complementary distributions of M&F.
No one is completely male or completely female.
Everybody has a distribution as a ratio of M&F.
And moreover, in some chapters, he seems to claim that not just you as a person, I don't know, 75% M, 25% F, or whatever,
you are... even your different body parts that are differently gendered.
So, I mean, he really takes this idea of pulling more of his perversity to a extremely strange and suggestive place.
And he thinks that precisely a femininity is essentially allied with passivity and receptivity,
whereas masculinity is allied exactly with activity just like in Fichte.
And his ultimate claim is that women, Jews, and homosexuals are alike in that.
And he is a lack of activity in a sort of indolence and an excessive receptivity.
How do you explain the enormous appeal at this book had at the time for a while anyway?
Well, I think his life helped.
I think this was just a very interesting life story.
And of course, there are some on the right side of the spectrum that, of course, were delighted to have a Jewish anti-Semite
who also committed suicide. I mean, that's in some way, you know, that's an anti-Semite stream come true.
On the other hand, there were very serious people like Wittgenstein, like Freud, who took this book with a great deal of interest.
And not agree with it, but I think the idea of a bisexual predisposition was only now taking hold in the wider populace.
And I think Binder is one of the first to really write excessively about that, and what that might mean.
And he is also one of the first to offer an explanation of homosexuality.
You know, not in terms of nature or in terms of natural and unnatural, he instead relies on something like...
Yeah, it was actually all these natural. It's just degenerate, essentially, for finding out.
Well, before we close, you mentioned Freud. I suppose that he could be amalgamated within this tribe of people we've been discussing today.
Yes, I think, I mean, certainly some of his...
Some of his more misogynistic statements could easily be understood in that way.
And of course, especially this insistence on women as both mysterious and profoundly legible.
Right? As someone who needs figuring out, but who you shouldn't really ask about it herself, because she doesn't know.
That's certainly something that comes straight out of show-up and how out of nature, you know, truth as a woman.
This is also something that simply was a big part of the intellectual climate at the time.
On the other hand, I think he's not a metaphysician in the sense of a show-up and how are the sense of a fiestense, in the sense of a higa anymore, precisely because for him, you know, sexuality is profoundly made.
Right? And that's something that kind of forbids...
You know, he still operates with a strong, gendered economy, but that economy is essentially narratively explained.
So I would have to say that he provides many ways of coda, but he also points far beyond what someone like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche would have thought about sexuality.
Even though, of course, he really picks up on a lot of thought from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, but he simply doesn't quite...
He doesn't do it on their terms anymore.
I'm trying to think just to conclude up a counter figure within this arena and just, I'm wondering if good day could be the other story in this...
Certainly, I think...
If you were going to look for counterweights, they would be in literature, I guess.
Precisely because that is also where women became most active at the time in Germany, and it is a frequent occurrence that women that had read very carefully these philosophers would provide
fictions that suspiciously resembled these philosophers' discourses about gender and yet undercut them in very strange and interesting ways.
I think that's clear, it's a fista because he had the most immediate resonance where Schopenhauer, of course, labored in obscurity for about 20 years before he got any kind of attention.
But yeah, I think it is as good as maybe one good example, but I would say that people like Doteer Schleger, the wife of Friedrich Leger, or with Hina Bonnano von Alnam,
that really both turned to literature to critique these guys, but also by moving to literature very,
and that's a very common move against this metaphysical misogyny, I would say, because of course, how else are you going to argue against it?
If you can attack misogynists historically, logically, all that will work, but with the metaphysics it's more difficult, and so what they end up doing is simply saying what you're spinning our bunch of fictions.
Well said, we've been speaking with Professor Adrian Daupe here on the entitled "Pinnance by Amos Robert Harrison" will be with you again next week, but in the meantime I think Adrian we're going to leave our listeners with a little Janice Jopland.
Oh, lovely.
What a nice voice, a big.
I don't know if you like her, but...
Oh, how could I not?
Was she once voted the "Gleus Man"?
At least man at UT Austin is what I heard.
I knew she was a local girl too, she was in San Francisco for quite a while.
Thanks for coming on.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
You're on again in the future.
Bye-bye.
Thank you so much for having me.
Bye-bye, Peter.
Oh, well done.
[MUSIC]
(upbeat music)
♪
All around I felt it.
All I could see was a ray-eye.
♪
Something right a hole in me.
♪
Filting me.
♪
On a laggle, on a ball too.
♪
Hey, get out of pain.
Let's wait too heavy for you.
You can't hold it alone.
Say hello, hello, hello.
On a laggle, can't play you just because I got the world.
You'll now play me.
♪
Wow.
♪
Wow.
♪
Wow.
On a laggle, can't play just because I got to need your day.
♪
Please don't turn that way down now.
♪
Hey!
♪
Hey!
♪
Hey, you go today.
What I wanted to love you.
I wanted to hold on just, yeah.
Do the day I die.
I did.
Because I did.
Yeah.
Hey!
All right.
(upbeat music)
( larger, happy music)
One of them from the other body in the world
was the same daily.
Whenever in the world we need the same lobby.
When I want a work for your love then,
when I want a try for your love then
I don't understand how come you go, man.
(audience cheering)
I don't understand why half the world is still crying, man.
When the other half the world is still crying too, man,
I can't get it together.
I mean, if you got a cat for one day, man,
I mean, say maybe you want a cat for 365 days, right?
You ain't got it for 365 days.
You got it for one day, man.
Well, I'll tell you that one day, man, better be your life, man.
Because, you know, you can say, oh man,
you can cry about the other 364, man.
But you're gonna lose that one day, man.
And that's all you got.
You gotta call that love, man.
That's what it is, man.
If you got it today, you don't wear it tomorrow, man.
(audience cheering)
'Cause you don't need it.
'Cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered in the train,
tomorrow never happens, man.
It's all the same fucking day, man.
(audience cheering)
So you gotta, when you wanna hold someone,
you gotta hold 'em like it's a last minute of your life.
You gotta hold,
(audience cheering)
Hold it.
'Cause somebody's the way you're gonna come on your shoulders, babe.
It's gonna feel too heavy.
It's gonna wear in your, it's gonna feel just like a boy.
(audience cheering)
Wow!
O'Datta in a chain.
O'Datta in a chain?