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Introduction All thinking begins with intermediate generalizations and then develops in two different directions, one toward concepts of ever higher abstraction, which encompass ever larger areas of reality by registering properties shared between ever more things, the other toward the intersection of all conceptual lines, the concrete complex unit, the individual, which we can only approach in our thought with the help of an in¤nite number of quali¤cations and which we de¤ne by adding to the highest generalization, a “thing” or “something,” an in¤nite number of speci¤c distinguishing features. Thus ¤sh were known as a class of animal separate from mammals, birds, and worms, on the one hand long before distinctions were made between osseous and cartilaginous ¤sh and on the other hand long before it was felt to be necessary to include ¤sh with birds and mammals within a larger complex through the concept of the vertebrate , and to distinguish that larger complex from worms. This self-assertion of the mind over the innumerable similarities and differences that make reality so confusing has been compared to the struggle for life among all beings.1 We fend off the world through our concepts.2 Slowly and gradually we bring the world under the control of our concepts, just as we ¤rst restrain a madman’s whole body in a rough and ready fashion in order at least to impose some limits on his ability to be a danger, and only restrain his individual limbs once we feel comparatively safe. Two concepts are among the oldest used by mankind to eke out a makeshift intellectual existence. They have often undergone minor corrections and been taken to the workshop in order to be patched up, after a fashion, when a wholesale reform was needed. Odd bits have been removed or added, reductions made in some cases and enlargements in others, just as new needs gradually assert themselves against an old electoral law, which is forced to unfasten one leash after another. On the whole, however, we believe that we can still manage along 1. Spencer’s model of the world, based on differentiation and integration, can also be readily applied at this point. 2. This is true of concepts, but only as objects of a psychological, not a logical way of looking at things. Despite all modern psychologism (Brentano, Meinong, Hö®er), the two cannot be lumped together without damage to both. familiar lines with the concepts that I have in mind here, the concepts of man and woman. We talk about lean, thin, ®at, muscular, energetic “women,” “women” of genius, “women” with short hair and deep voices, and about beardless, garrulous “men.” We even accept that there are “unwomanly women,” “masculine women,” and “unmanly,” “feminine” “men.” Concentrating on one characteristic alone that is used to assign a person to a sexual category at birth, we even dare to combine some concepts with attributes that actually negate them. Such a state of affairs is logically untenable. Who has not listened and contributed to heated discussions about “men and women” or “the liberation of women” in a circle of friends or in a salon, at a scienti¤c or public meeting? In such conversations and debates “men” and “women,” with dreary regularity, were placed in total opposition to each other, like white and red balls, as if there were not the slightest difference between balls of the same color. There was never any attempt to discuss individual issues as such; and since everybody had only his own individual experiences to go by there was naturally no possibility of agreement, as is always the case when different things are described by the same word, when language and concepts do not coincide. Is it really the case that all “men” and all “women” are totally different from each other, and that all those on either side of the divide, men on the one hand, women on the other, are completely alike in a number of respects? This is assumed, of course most of the time unconsciously, in all discussions about sexual differences. Nowhere else in nature are there such glaring discontinuities . We ¤nd continuous transitions between metals and non-metals, chemical compounds and mixtures, and intermediate forms between animals and plants, phanerogams and cryptogams, mammals and birds. Initially it is only because of a very general practical need for an overview that we create divisions , set up boundaries by force, and distinguish separate arias within the in-¤nite melody of...

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