The Philosophy of Friedrich NietzscheMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Philosophy
The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900; Philosophy, German -- 19th century
cunning buys his wife in a sack."[8]
As has been noted, Nietzsche was by no means a declaimer against women.
A bachelor himself and constitutionally suspicious of all who walked
in skirts, he nevertheless avoided the error of damning the whole sex
as a dangerous and malignant excrescence upon the face of humanity. He
saw that woman's mind was the natural complement of man's mind; that
womanly guile was as useful, in its place, as masculine truth; that
man, to retain those faculties which made him master of the earth,
needed a persistent and resourceful opponent to stimulate them and so
preserve and develop them. So long as the institution of the family
remained a premise in every sociological syllogism, so long as mere
fruitfulness remained as much a merit among intelligent human beings
as it was among peasants and cattle--so long, he saw, it would be
necessary for the stronger sex to submit to the parasitic opportunism
of the weaker.
But he was far from exalting mere women into goddesses, after the
sentimental fashion of those virtuosi of illusion who pass for
law-givers in the United States, and particularly in the southern
part thereof. Chivalry, with its ridiculous denial of obvious facts,
seemed to him unspeakable and the good old sub-Potomac doctrines that
a woman who loses her virtue is, _ipso facto_, a victim and not a
criminal or _particeps criminis_, and that a "lady," by virtue of being
a "lady," is necessarily a reluctant and helpless quarry in the hunt
of love--these ancient and venerable fallacies would have made him
laugh. He admitted the great and noble part that woman had to play in
the world-drama, but he saw clearly that her methods were essentially
deceptive, insincere and pernicious, and so he held that she should be
confined to her proper role and that any effort she made to take a hand
in other matters should be regarded with suspicion, and when necessary,
violently opposed. Thus Nietzsche detested the idea of women's suffrage
almost as much as he detested the idea of chivalry. The participation
of women in large affairs, he argued, could lead to but one result:
the contamination of the masculine ideals of justice, honor and truth
by the feminine ideals of dissimulation, equivocation and intrigue.
In women, he believed, there was an entire absence of that instinctive
liking for a square deal and a fair fight which one finds in all
men--even the worst.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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