i’ve been going through the penguin great ideas series at the pace of one a week, wanting a better grasp of the breadth of the great conversation outside my little bubble. overall it’s been an extremely rewarding experience: the curation work has already been done by someone who seems like a very thoughtful editor, llms now exist to help me interpret extremely difficult passages and trace intellectual lineages, and a wonderful and insightful friend has generously agreed to go on this journey with me, thus ensuring that i always finish a book before our standing wednesday meeting.
i have many thoughts on what i have read! stay tuned for when i pass judgement on the validity of the entire western canon in 2027, which is when this survey will conclude, inshallah.
one thing i’ll say for now, half a dozen books in, is that i really, seriously didn’t expect the misogyny to be as bad as it has been. i thought i’d be in for some paternalistic bullshit that i’d be able to handle fine. these were civilized men i was reading, after all.
i thought that the women who loudly proclaimed their disgust at these dead white guys because of their supposed rank misogyny were being a little too precious. maybe even using that as a convenient excuse?
well, mea culpa. i’m sorry, women.
i’ve now been exposed to so many entirely brand new arguments about the inadequacies of the female sex. they’re so lurid i literally don’t think any formulation of contemporary sexism can ever hurt me ever again. (please dont test this theory.)
the most gutting part of all this is that the thinkers i’m reading are, by and large, good! i like the way they think and write (or are translated), they’re clearly making a good faith effort at following good epistemic norms, and they have interesting and provocative takes that are worth pondering. i keep finding myself thinking “oh this guy would totally be a rationalist (complimentary)”, multiple guys in a row, until the figure ground inversion came for me. (like, montaigne prescribed a set of epistemic habits that gets you 75% of the way to rationalist ones literally 500 years ago!)
and then, like clockwork, all that careful reason seems to go right out the window the moment they start talking about women.
i thought i was getting the hang of it, somewhat. im developing new and ludicrously lower standards for what is acceptable and not acceptable to say about women. im learning a posture of detached ironic curiousity,”alright, lets see what weirdass allegations about womankind this next guy’s gonna punch me in the face with.” my standards are so low now, orwell has a gold star because he studiously did not talk about us at all.
im developing the requisite emotional callouses, is what im saying. i resent that i have to do so in order to engage with the canon, but at least no one can accuse me of being too precious or being unwilling to get my hands dirty, and i can at least get a sense of grim satisfaction from that.
then i got to schopenhauer, and despite all this bracing, he still kind of broke me. his essay on women was the first essay in this project that genuinely hurt my feelings. (here it is for posterity but i want no discussion of it where i can see it, please.)
i liked the schopenhauer essays that were before this one so much! i thought he had a wonderfully bleak sense of humour and was good at updating all the way, to conclusions that felt just taboo enough to be thrilling. and i thought he was maybe secretly a bit of a softie – the trick he plays on you at the end of On the Suffering of the World is adorable. then, unceremoniously, i had ice water dunked on me in the form of his hatred for my gender. and this just. sucks so bad?
it sucked so much that i started flailing around for… meaning? a reason? and developing almost like, a sense of betrayal at the curator of these volumes. i started thinking: okay, sometimes the book is just one long essay, and the misogyny inside can’t be helped. in those cases, there’s really nothing i can do except try to enjoy the occasional insane claim embedded in these genuinely fascinating theses to the best of my ability:
but in other cases, the editors handpicked 4-6 essays from oevres that spanned dozens if not over a hundred pieces of writing. and in that case, why waste the precious space inside to include one on their extremely outdated and noxious ideas about women?
well, once i calmed down from my hysterics, i realized that perhaps i had intuited upon maybe a good question to ask. perhaps they were trying to convey something, with their logical, masculine brains.
occams razor: “these essays demonstrate an essential part of their worldview and philosophy, and/or were influential at the time, and so they should be presented without comment or judgement.”
perhaps something a little more sophisticated: “look how these otherwise brilliant thinkers systematically abandon their epistemic standards when it comes to women. patriarchy is the mind-killer!”
that seems plausible as a thing a progressive-minded classicist reprinter might have thought worthwhile to communicate, in 2005.
the theory i like best (or perhaps just find the cleverest) is that the editors were trying to gesture at the limitations of even really good epistemic norms. if women were deliberately and forcefully kept intellectually stunted by their society, even the most rigorous thinker would have had very little counterevidence to really work with. the inferiority of women would have been baked right into the observable reality they were trying to analyze. and our current discourse norms are likely just as helpless against whatever blindnesses our own culture has engineered.
but also, this lets these guys off the hook too much. schopenhauer’s mother was an intellectual in her own right, and his philosophical idol, goethe, vastly preferred her company to his. wollstonecraft had also already published a vindication of the rights of woman more than half a century before, and hes clearly living in a culture where this is a live question. so there’s motivated reasoning or willful ignorance at play here, and it’s worthwhile to not minimize that.
in any case, i do kind of wish he would stop trying to hammer this point home, or whatever point he’s trying to make. because the diatribes are still pretty unpleasant to read, and there are 114 books left in the series (of which only eleven are written by women).
anyways, i’ll keep reading, and ill try to… somehow… contend with and minimize the amount of misogyny i pick up along the way. perhaps i’ll go on a two year survey of feminist writing afterwards as a corrective, starting with the scum manifesto.
