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IX Male and Female Psychology It is time to return to the real task of this investigation in order to see how far it has been advanced by my lengthy digressions, which often seemed to distract from it rather substantially. The principles I have developed are of such radical consequences for a psychology of the sexes that even those who have agreed with my deductions so far may shy away from these conclusions. We have not yet reached the point where we can analyze the reasons for this alarm, but in order to protect the thesis which now follows against all the objections that it will provoke, I will substantiate it in this section as fully, and with as many conclusive arguments, as possible. Brie®y, this is what it is all about. I found that the phenomenon of logic and that of ethics, which join together to form the highest value in the concept of truth, force us to assume the existence of an intelligible self, or a soul, as an entity of the highest, hyper-empirical reality. In the case of a being which, like W, lacks both logic and ethics, there is no reason to make that assumption. The complete female knows neither a logical nor a moral imperative, and the words “law,” “duty,” “duty to oneself” are the words that sound most alien to her. Therefore the conclusion that she lacks a suprasensory personality is perfectly justi¤ed. Absolute Woman has no self. There is a sense in which this concludes my investigation, having reached the ¤nal point to which any analysis of Woman leads. Although this insight, articulated so tersely, seems hard and intolerant, as well as paradoxical and too starkly novel, given such a subject matter, the author is unlikely to have been the ¤rst to arrive at this view, even if he was obliged to ¤nd his way to it independently before he could grasp the aptness of similar statements made by others before him. The Chinese have denied Woman a soul of her own from the earliest times. If a Chinese is asked how many children he has, he will only count the boys, and if he only has daughters he will say that he is childless.1 It was probably for 1. Cf. also Ecclesiastes, 7:28: “One man among a thousand have I found; but a woman among all those have I not found.” a similar reason that Mohammed excluded women from Paradise and thus is partly to blame for the degrading position of the female sex in Islamic countries. From the ranks of philosophers it is above all Aristotle who must be named here. According to him, in the process of procreation the male principle is the formative, active element, logos, while the female element represents passive matter. If one considers that for Aristotle the soul is identical with form, entelechy , primal motive force, it becomes clear how close he is to the view expressed here, even though his opinion only comes to the fore when he talks about the act of impregnation. Elsewhere, in common with almost all Greeks apart from Euripides, he does not seem to think about women and therefore never adopts any position on the properties of Woman as such (and not only with regard to her role in the act of copulation). Among the Fathers of the Church, Tertullian and Origenes in particular seem to have had a very low opinion of women, while St. Augustine must have been prevented from sharing their views at least by his close relationship with his mother. In the Renaissance the Aristotelian view was frequently taken up again, for instance by Jean Wier (1518–1588). At that time this view seems to have been better understood at both an emotional and an intuitive level, and not regarded as a mere curiosity, as is common in today’s science, which will certainly be obliged one day to bow to the anthropology of Aristotle in various ways. In recent decades the same view has been expressed by Henrik Ibsen (through the characters of Anitra, Rita, and Irene) and August Strindberg (The Creditor [translated by Mary Harned, Boston 1911]). But what made the idea of the soullessness of Woman most popular was the wonderful fairy tale of Fouqué, the romantic writer, who owed the subject matter to his assiduous study of Paracelsus, and through E. T. A. Hoffmann, Girschner, and Albert Lortzing, who set it to music. Undine, soulless Undine, is...

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