Archive for January 1st, 2008
Sigmund Freud’s views on women
The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’”
-From Sigmund Freud: Life and Work by Ernest Jones, 1953
Opposing Viewpoints:
- Karen Horney – Freud’s concept of penis envy was criticized in his own time, most notably by psychoanalyst Karen Horney. She suggested that it is men who are adversely affected by their inability to bear children, which she referred to as “womb envy.”
- Freud’s Response – Freud responded, although indirectly, writing, “We shall not be very greatly surprised if a woman analyst who has not been sufficiently convinced of the intensity of her own wish for a penis also fails to attach proper importance to that factor in her patients” (Freud, 1949). According to Freud, Horney’s concept of womb envy emerged as a result of her own supposed penis envy.
- Sophie Freud – While Freud’s notions of female sexuality often ran contrary to the patriarchal tendencies of the Victorian era, he was still very much a man of his time. His work is often dismissed as misogynistic and his own granddaughter, Sophie Freud, described his theories as outdated. “His ideas grew out of society. He mirrored in his theories the belief that women were secondary and were not the norm and didn’t quite measure up to the norm,” she explained (Gretel, 2003).
- Final Thoughts – Even Freud himself admitted that his understanding of women was limited. “That is all I have to say to you about femininity,” he wrote in 1933. “It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly… If you want to know more about femininity, enquire of your own experiences of life, or turn to poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information” (p. 362).
Add a comment January 1, 2008
Kant on Rape
Kant on Rape
According to Immanuel Kant, it is better for a woman to die resisting rape than suffer the ‘dishonour’ of submitting to her attacker:
No matter what torments I have to suffer, I can live morally. I must suffer them all, including the torments of death, rather than commit a disgraceful action. The moment I can no longer live in honour but become unworthy of life by such an action, I can no longer live at all. Thus it is far better to die honoured and respected than to prolong one’s life … by a disgraceful act … If, for instance, a woman cannot preserve her life any longer except by surrendering her person to the will of another, she is bound to give up her life rather than dishonour humanity in her own person, which is what she would be doing in giving herself up as a thing to the will of another.1
Kant had earlier offered a case-study of a woman who killed herself out of shame after being raped:
Lucretia . . . killed herself, but on grounds of modesty and in a fury of vengeance. It is obviously our duty to preserve our honour, particularly in relation to the opposite sex . . . . [B]ut we must endeavour to save our honour only to this extent, that we ought not to surrender it for selfish and lustful purposes. To do what Lucretia did is to adopt a remedy which is not at our disposal; it would have been better had she defended her honour unto death.2
So, it was morally wrong for Lucretia to commit suicide after suffering a brutal assault; far better that she should have resisted to such an extent that her attacker was forced to kill her. Any woman who survives an attack should, in addition to the physical and emotional suffering she has already experienced, feel guilt in her own complicity (in that Kant regards death as a real and preferable option). In Kant’s view, she is party to the crime she has suffered. As Alan Soble notes in his article ‘Kant and Sexual Perversion’, “Kant is genuinely stubborn about the moral significance of such duties-to-self.”3 Perversely stubborn, I would say.
CITATIONS:
1. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1963), p. 156. Quoted in Alan Soble, ‘Kant and Sexual Perversion’, The Monist 86:1 (Jan. 2003), pp. 55-89. [Available at Soble’s website.]
2. ibid. p.149-50. [Also in Soble]
3. See Soble [link above]. The article is highly recommended.
Add a comment January 1, 2008
Nietzsche on Women
Nietzsche on Women
After a lonely decade in his mountaintop cave, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra descends from the clouds to reveal the fruits of his meditations to the intellectually impoverished masses. In the section ‘On Little Old and Young Women’ he shares his insights on females:
“Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one solution—that is pregnancy. Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man?
“A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. Man shall be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly. [ … ]“The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills. ‘Behold, just now the world became perfect!’—thus thinks every woman when she obeys out of entire love. And women must obey and find a depth for her surface. Surface is the disposition of woman: a mobile, stormy film over shallow water. Man’s disposition, however, is deep; his river roars in subterranean caves: woman feels his strength but does not comprehend it.1
Expressing views remarkably similar to Schopenhauer’s and Hegel’s (or any other 
‘cultured’ male of the same era), Nietzsche’s comments represent a fairly standard outburst of misogyny. The section ends with one of Nietzsche’s most notorious lines, the frequently cited “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!” It has been argued that this comment refers to the famous photo of Nietzsche and his friends Lou Salomé and Paul Rée (posted here for those who have never seen it before—both of you) in which—shock!—Lou is seen holding the whip. However, even without the ambiguity of this line, the rest of the passage is clear enough about the relative position of women.
Or is it? Other Nietzsche scholars go to great lengths to clear him of misogynism by highlighting the poetic, subjective nature of his work. Take, for example, this apologetic:
Taken out of context, this sounds like Nietzsche is advising that a man should consider women as machines for making babies, and to modern ears this sentence is ugly and daring in its defiance of civility. But the context complicates matters. Whose pregnancy, for example, is being discussed? We know elsewhere that Nietzsche believes that the attraction of women, or of truth, can impregnate man with intellectual curiosity, making a man pregnant with new ideas.2
Granted, at other points in Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche’s trope-drunk alter-ego uses images of fecundity and pregnancy as metaphors for human creativity, but there is absolutely no indication that he is doing so with in ‘On Little Old and Young Women’. The context does not ‘complicate’ anything. The context in fact indicates that the only plausible interpretation is the literal interpretation: women are baby-making machines that are utterly subordinate to the desires and goals of men.
CITATIONS:
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Little Old and Young Women’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufman, in The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Penguin Books, 1954, p.178-9. [Online (different translation) here.]
2. Robert John Ackermann, Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1990, p.123.
Add a comment January 1, 2008
Plato on Women
Plato on Women
The lengthy and expansive discourse Timaeus is Plato’s account of the formation of the universe out of chaos by the Demiurge. Towards the end, he discusses the origin of women:
A brief mention may be made of the generation of other animals, so far as the subject admits of brevity; in this manner our argument will best attain a due proportion. On the subject of animals, then, the following remarks may be offered. Of the men who came into the world, those who were cowards or led unrighteous lives may with reason be supposed to have changed into the nature of women in the second generation.1
Women, it seems, are the reincarnations of unworthy or criminal men.
In attempts to counterbalance the comment in Timaeus, it is often noted that the views put forth in Plato’s earlier work The Republic are considerably more egalitarian. The Republic clearly states that females must receive the same training as males and does not place limitations on how high a woman can rise within society. Nonetheless, Socrates concludes:
There is therefore no administrative occupation which is peculiar to woman as woman or man as man; natural capacities are similarly distributed in each sex, and it is natural for women to take part in all occupations as well as men, though in all women will be the weaker partners.2
The Republic is egalitarian inasmuch as it argues that women shouldn’t be
excluded from education or any other opportunities that men are provided, but it nonetheless maintains the position that women are inferior 
to men. Note that Socrates does not (as some commentators claim) make the more defensible claim that women are, on the whole, physically weaker than men. He does not qualify their ‘weakness’ in any way—it applies to all areas and pursuits. Plato is in general more concerned with differences between the souls of men and women (the metaphysical differences) and considers the physical differences to be minimal. Thus, despite their equal ‘natural capacities’ women will still perform less well than men. This view is explicit once more in the Laws, when he writes of
“… that part of the human race which is by nature prone to secrecy and stealth on account of their weakness—I mean the female sex—has been left without regulation by the legislator, which is a great mistake.” 3
The comments on women in The Republic and Laws are entirely consistent with those made in Timaeus. Although generally more charitable and less offensive than the later work, they appeal to the same underlying assumptions. Though women should be given the same opportunities to be reunited with the Forms (the goal of life in Plato’s philosophy), it will be harder for them because of their ‘weakness’, the clearly misogynistic claim that women are an inferior incarnation of men.
CITATIONS:
1. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett. [Online here, third paragraph from bottom. For a detailed account of Timaeus, visit the SEP entry.]
2. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee , London: Penguin Books, 2003, p.164. (455d). [Online (different translation) here.]
3. Plato, Laws, trans. Benjamin Jowett , (781a). [Online here.]
Add a comment January 1, 2008
Hume on Women
Hume on Women
In his 1783 essay On the Immortality of the Soul, David Hume presents the following, somewhat unexpected, argument:
On the theory of the soul’s mortality, the inferiority of women’s capacity is easily accounted for. Their domestic life requires no higher faculties either of mind or body. This circumstance vanishes and becomes absolutely insignificant on the religious theory: the one sex has an equal task to perform as the other; their powers of reason and resolution ought also to have been equal, and both of them infinitely greater than at present.1
So, an argument in favor of the no-immortal-souls position is that it would make it
easier to account for women’s natural inferiority, as being a housewife requires no great intellectual or physical gifts. Immortal souls, it would seem, are above such terrestrial concerns and therefore more egalitarian. Interestingly, this argument comes form a section of the essay entitled Moral Arguments.
There may well be other passages from Hume that mitigate or contradict these opinions—and if so please bring them to light here—but at this point the great sceptic’s assessment on traditional gender roles seems fairly straightforward. In the meantime you can find a few comments regarding the passage where I first spotted it at Siris.
CITATIONS:
1. David Hume, On The Immortality of the Soul, §II, 1783 (originally written in 1755). Online here.
<!– –>
Add a comment January 1, 2008
