Leisure Culture

The Alpine Journey 

A process which has been in the making for decades in the Swiss transport system has recently been completed. It is something more than an economic analogy to call it the wholesale opening-up and enjoyment of nature.

Destinations that were previously only accessible by remote walks can now be reached by railways, which are appearing at an ever-increasing rate. Railways have been built where the gradients are too steep for roads to be constructed, as in the Muerren or Wanger Alps. The railway-line up the Eiger appears to have been finalized, and the same number of climbers who have scaled this difficult peak can now be brought up in a single day by rail.

The Faustian wish, 'I stand before you, nature, a solitary individual' is evermore rarely realized and so increasingly rarely declared. Alpine journeys had a pedagogic value in that they were a pleasure that could only be had by a self-reliance that was both external and internal to oneself. Now there is the lure of the ease of an open road, and the concentration and convergence of the masses colourful but therefore as a whole colourless suggesting to us an average sensibility. Like all social averages this depresses those disposed to the higher and finer values without elevating those at the base to the same degree.

All in all I accept that the advantages of this socialistic wholesale opening up of the Alps outweigh the reliance on the efforts of the individual. Countless people who previously were barred because of their lack of strength and means are now able to enjoy nature. I disagree with that foolish romanticism which saw difficult routes, prehistoric food and hard beds as an irremovable part of the stimulus of the good old days of alpine travel; despite this it is still possible for those who wish, to find solitude and quiet in the Alps. But the increased accessibility of alpine travel does cause us to question the benefit our civilization draws from it; since alpine travel has already to be seen as an important element of the psychic life (Seelenleben) of our upper strata and as such as a matter of social psychology (Volkerpsychologie).

It is said that it is part of one's education (Bildung) to see the Alps, but not education alone for its twin sister is 'affluence' (Wohlhabenheit). The power of capitalism extends itself to ideas as well; it is capable of annexing such a distinguished concept as education as its own private property. Furthermore, profound and spiritual (geistige) human beings believe they are cultivating their inner depths and spirituality when they visit the Alps. Alongside the physical act of climbing and the temporary pleasure it creates is a certain moral element and spiritual satisfaction which appears to be located outside egoistic pleasure. By distancing their own spiritual and educational values from other sensual pleasures, it seems to me that these people employ one of those easy self-deceptions whereby their own culture, which would find egoism shocking, retains a subjectivity despite its lofty sentiments and seeks shamelessly to cloak its own pleasures with objective justifications. I think that the educative value of alpine travel is very small. It gives the feeling of tremendous excitement and charge in its incomparable merging of forbidding strength and radiant beauty, and at the time the contemplation of those things fills us with an unrivalled intensity of feeling, prompting undisclosed inner feelings as if the high peaks could uncover the depths of our soul. Strangely this excitement and euphoria, which drive the emotions to a level more intense than normal, subside remarkably quickly. The uplift which a view of the high Alps gives is followed very quickly by the return to the mood of the mundane. In particular compared to travel in Italy this is very pronounced. The difference between the strength and depth of that momentary rapture and the lasting value on the formation and mood of the soul, encourages comparison between the Alps and music. In this way I also believe that music is given an exaggerated educational value. It also takes us into fantastic regions of the life of the senses, whose riches are so to speak tied to those areas; we take little or nothing from them to adorn other areas of our inner life. All of the verve and heightening that music brings out in us and which we claim as our own, fades away with the notes and leaves the state of one's soul exactly at the point where it was before. Like a talent for music, the effect of music belongs to something beyond the other faculties for learning (Bildungssphaeren). The magnificence of music should be as accessible as that of the Alps; I think that the idea that the value of both to education in its deepest sense, in its effect upon the integrity of the soul, is in need of revision.

The clearest expression of this error is the confusion of the egoistic enjoyment of alpine sports with educational and moral values. In alpine clubs there is the idea that the surmounting of life-endangering difficulties is morally commendable, a triumph of the spirit over the resistance of the material, and a consequence of moral strength: of courage, will-power and the summoning of all abilities for an ideal goal. One forgets that the forces deployed are a means to goals which have no moral claim and indeed are often unethical; as a means for momentary enjoyment, which comes from the exertion of all one's energies, from playing with danger and the emotion of the panoramic view. Indeed, I would place this enjoyment as the highest that life can offer. The less settled, less certain and less free from contradiction modern existence is the more passionately we desire the heights that stand beyond the good and evil whose presence we are unable to look over and beyond. I do not know anything in visible nature that bears the character of the materially transcendent as a snowscape that expresses 'the summits' in its colour and form. Whoever has once enjoyed this will yearn for the release in something that is simply other than the 'I' the 'I' with its melancholy disquiet, full of the life of the plains, choking the exercise of the will. This is so more with respect to the mountains than the sea, which, with its foam waiting to drain away only to come flooding back in, with the purposeless circulus vitiosus of its movement, reminds us only too painfully of our own inner life. Admittedly many are attracted by this. Since not only the addition to the 'I' through its opposite releases us, but also the sea as symbol and picture, shorn of all incidentals, mirrors our destiny and unhappiness, rather like a secret homeopathy, and discloses a reconciliation and a healing elevation over life. Nevertheless, this is only a soothing, a forgetting and a reverie and, as such, merely a passive enjoyment. From the loneliness of the icy wilderness, however, bursts out the sensation of a desire for action, that feeling of joy and being beyond life that can be derived from perhaps no other external situation, even though this is admittedly only the temporary delusion of aesthetic stimulation.

But this pleasure remains completely egoistic and, therefore, the risking of life as mere enjoyment is unethical; indeed even more unethical since for the hire of a guide for fifty or hundred francs one risks another's life through possible accident. An alpinist would be indignant if one wanted to compare him or her to a gambler. And yet both wish to place their existence at risk as a purely subjective excitation and gratification. Frequently the gambler does not look for material profit but the excitement of risk and the gripping combination of the cold-bloodedness and passion of one's own skill and the incalculability of fate. The alpinist plays for a stake which from an ethical viewpoint should be wagered for only the highest objective values and not for the sake of selfish and immediate gratification. Only a romantic excitation can delude itself that every voluntary risking of life is part of tradition when social and religious commitments could supposedly only be gained at the price of life, thereby conferring on their goals the veneer of ethical dignity.

The Adventure 

Each segment of our conduct and experience bears a twofold meaning: it revolves about its own centre, contains as much breadth and depth, joy and suffering, as the immediate experiencing gives it, and at the same time is a segment of a course of life not only a circumscribed entity, but also a component of an organism. Both aspects, in various configurations, characterize everything that occurs in a life. Events which may be widely divergent in their bearing on life as a whole may nonetheless be quite similar to one another; or they may be incommensurate in their intrinsic meanings but so similar in respect to the roles they play in our total existence as to be interchangeable.

One of two experiences which are not particularly different in substance, as far as we can indicate it, may nevertheless be perceived as an 'adventure' and the other not. The one receives the designation denied the other because of the difference in the relation to the whole of our life. More precisely, the most general form of adventure is its dropping out of the continuity of life. 'Wholeness of life', after all, refers to the fact that a consistent process runs through the individual components of life, however crassly and irreconcilably distinct they may be. What we call an adventure stands in contrast to that interlocking of life-links, to that feeling that those counter-currents, turnings, and knots still, after all, spin forth a continuous thread. An adventure is certainly a part of our existence, directly contiguous with other parts which precede and follow it; at the same time, however, in its deeper meaning, it occurs outside the usual continuity of this life. Nevertheless, it is distinct from all that is accidental and alien, merely touching life's outer shell. While it falls outside the context of life, it falls, with this same movement, as it were, back into that context again, as will become clear later; it is a foreign body in our existence which is yet somehow connected with the centre; the outside, if only by a long and unfamiliar detour, is formally an aspect of the inside.

Because of its place in our psychic life, a remembered adventure tends to take on the quality of a dream. Everyone knows how quickly we forget dreams because they, too, are placed outside the meaningful context of life-as-a-whole. What we designate as 'dreamlike' is nothing but a memory which is bound to the unified, consistent life-process by fewer threads than are ordinary experiences. We might say that we localize our inability to assimilate to this process something experienced by imagining a dream in which it took place. The more 'adventurous' an adventure, that is, the more fully it realizes its idea, the more 'dreamlike' it becomes in our memory. It often moves so far away from the centre of the ego and the course of life which the ego guides and organizes that we may think of it as something experienced by another person. How far outside that course it lies, how alien it has become to that course, is expressed precisely by the fact that we might well feel that we could appropriately assign to the adventure a subject other than the ego.

We ascribe to an adventure a beginning and an end much sharper than those to be discovered in the other forms of our experiences. The adventure is freed of the entanglements and concatenations which are characteristic of those forms and is given a meaning in and of itself. Of our ordinary experiences, we declare that one of them is over when, or because, another starts; they reciprocally determine each other's limits, and so become a means whereby the contextual unity of life is structured or expressed. The adventure, however, according to its intrinsic meaning, is independent of the 'before' and 'after'; its boundaries are defined regardless of them. We speak of adventure precisely when continuity with life is thus disregarded on principle or rather when there is not even any need to disregard it, because we know from the beginning that we have to do with something alien, untouchable, out of the ordinary. The adventure lacks that reciprocal interpenetration with adjacent parts of life which constitutes life-as-a-whole. It is like an island in life which determines its beginning and end according to its own formative powers and not like the part of a continent also according to those of adjacent territories. This factor of decisive boundedness, which lifts an adventure out of the regular course of a human destiny, is not mechanical but organic: just as the organism determines its spatial shape not simply by adjusting to obstacles confining it from right and left but by the propelling force of a life forming from inside out, so does an adventure not end because something else begins; instead, its temporal form, its radical being-ended, is the precise expression of its inner sense.

Here, above all, is the basis of the profound affinity between the adventurer and the artist, and also, perhaps, of the artist's attraction by adventure. For the essence of a work of art is, after all, that it cuts out a piece of the endlessly continuous sequences of perceived experience, detaching it from all connections with one side or the other, giving it a self-sufficient form as though defined and held together by an inner core. A part of existence, interwoven with the uninterruptedness of that existence, yet nevertheless felt as a whole, as an integrated unit this is the form common to both the work of art and the adventure. Indeed, it is an attribute of this form to make us feel that in both the work of art and the adventure the whole of life is somehow comprehended and consummated and this irrespective of the particular theme either of them may have. Moreover, we feel this, not although, but because, the work of art exists entirely beyond life as a reality; the adventure, entirely beyond life as an uninterrupted course which intelligibly connects every element with its neighbours. It is because the work of art and the adventure stand over against life (even though in very different senses of the phrase) that both are analogous to the totality of life itself, even as this totality presents itself in the brief summary and crowdedness of a dream experience.

For this reason, the adventurer is also the extreme example of the ahistorical individual, of the man who lives in the present. On the one hand, he is not determined by any past (and this marks the contrast between him and the aged, of which more later); nor, on the other hand, does the future exist for him. An extraordinarily characteristic proof of this is that Casanova (as may be seen from his memoirs), in the course of his erotic-adventurous life, every so often seriously intended to marry a woman with whom he was in love at the time. In the light of his temperament and conduct of life, we can imagine nothing more obviously impossible, internally and externally.

Casanova not only had excellent knowledge of men but also rare knowledge of himself. Although he must have said to himself that he could not stand marriage even two weeks and that the most miserable consequences of such a step would be quite unavoidable, his perspective on the future was wholly obliterated in the rapture of the moment. (Saying this, I mean to put the emphasis on the moment rather than on the rapture.) Because he was entirely dominated by the feeling of the present, he wanted to enter into a future relationship which was impossible precisely because his temperament was oriented to the present.

In contrast to those aspects of life which are related only peripherally by mere fate the adventure is defined by its capacity, in spite of its being isolated and accidental, to have necessity and meaning. Something becomes an adventure only by virtue of two conditions: that it itself is a specific organization of some significant meaning with a beginning and an end; and that, despite its accidental nature, its extra-territoriality with respect to the continuity of life, it nevertheless connects with the character and identity of the bearer of that life that it does so in the widest sense, transcending, by a mysterious necessity, life's more narrowly rational aspects.

At this point there emerges the relation between the adventurer and the gambler. The gambler, clearly, has abandoned himself to the meaninglessness of chance. In so far, however, as he counts on its favour and believes possible and realizes a life dependent on it, chance for him has become part of a context of meaning. The typical superstition of the gambler is nothing other than the tangible and isolated, and thus, of course, childish, form of this profound and all-encompassing scheme of his life, according to which chance makes sense and contains some necessary meaning (even though not by the criterion of rational logic). In his superstition, he wants to draw chance into his teleological system by omens and magical aids, thus removing it from its inaccessible isolation and searching in it for a lawful order, no matter how fantastic the laws of such an order may be.

The adventurer similarly lets the accident somehow be encompassed by the meaning which controls the consistent continuity of life, even though the accident lies outside the continuity. He achieves a central feeling of life which runs through the eccentricity of the adventure and produces a new, significant necessity of his life in the very width of the distance between its accidental, externally given content and the unifying core of existence from which meaning flows. There is in us an eternal process playing back and forth between chance and necessity, between the fragmentary materials given us from the outside and the consistent meaning of the life developed from within.

The great forms in which we shape the substance of life are the syntheses, antagonisms, or compromises between chance and necessity. Adventure is such a form. When the professional adventurer makes a system of life out of his life's lack of system, when out of his inner necessity he seeks the naked, external accidents and builds them into that necessity, he only, so to speak, makes macroscopically visible that which is the essential form of every 'adventure', even that of the non-adventurous person. For by adventure we always mean a third something, neither the sheer, abrupt event whose meaning a mere given simply remains outside us nor the consistent sequence of life in which every element supplements every other toward an inclusively integrated meaning. The adventure is no mere hotch-potch of these two, but rather that incomparable experience which can be interpreted only as a particular encompassing of the accidentally external by the internally necessary.

Occasionally, however, this whole relationship is comprehended in a still more profound inner configuration. No matter how much the adventure seems to rest on a differentiation within life, life as a whole may be perceived as an adventure. For this, one need neither be an adventurer nor undergo many adventures. To have such a remarkable attitude toward life, one must sense above its totality a higher unity, a super-life, as it were, whose relation to life parallels the relation of the immediate life totality itself to those particular experiences which we call adventures.

Perhaps we belong to a metaphysical order, perhaps our soul lives a transcendent existence, such that our earthly, conscious life is only an isolated fragment as compared to the unnameable context of an existence running its course in it. The myth of the transmigration of souls may be a halting attempt to express such a segmental character of every individual life. Whoever senses through all actual life a secret, timeless existence of the soul, which is connected with the realities of life only as from a distance, will perceive life in its given and limited wholeness as an adventure when compared to that transcendent and self-consistent fate. Certain religious moods seem to bring about such a perception. When our earthly career strikes us as a mere preliminary phase in the fulfilment of eternal destinies, when we have no home but merely a temporary asylum on earth, this obviously is only a particular variant of the general feeling that life as a whole is an adventure. It merely expresses the running together, in life, of the symptoms of adventure. It stands outside that proper meaning and steady course of existence to which it is yet tied by a fate and a secret symbolism. A fragmentary incident, it is yet, like a work of art, enclosed by a beginning and an end. Like a dream, it gathers all passions into itself and yet, like a dream, is destined to be forgotten; like gaming, it contrasts with seriousness, yet, like the va banque of the gambler, it involves the alternative between the highest gain and destruction.

Thus the adventure is a particular form in which fundamental categories of life are synthesized. Another such synthesis it achieves is that between the categories of activity and passivity, between what we conquer and what is given to us. To be sure, their synthesis in the form of adventure makes their contrast perceptible to an extreme degree. In the adventure, on the one hand, we forcibly pull the world into ourselves. This becomes clear when we compare the adventure with the manner in which we wrest the gifts of the world through work. Work, so to speak, has an organic relation to the world. In a conscious fashion, it develops the world's forces and materials toward their culmination in the human purpose, whereas in adventure we have a non-organic relation to the world. Adventure has the gesture of the conqueror, the quick seizure of opportunity, regardless of whether the portion we carve out is harmonious or disharmonious with us, with the world, or with the relation between us and the world. On the other hand, however, in the adventure we abandon ourselves to the world with fewer defences and reserves than in any other relation, for other relations are connected with the general run of our worldly life by more bridges, and thus defend us better against shocks and dangers through previously prepared avoidances and adjustments. In the adventure, the interweaving of activity and passivity which characterizes our life tightens these elements into a coexistence of conquest, which owes everything only to its own strength and presence of mind, and complete self-abandonment to the powers and accidents of the world, which can delight us, but in the same breath can also destroy us. Surely, it is among adventure's most wonderful and enticing charms that the unity towards which at every moment, by the very process of living, we bring together our activity and our passivity the unity which even in a certain sense is life itself accentuates its disparate elements most sharply, and precisely in this way makes itself the more deeply felt, as if they were only the two aspects of one and the same, mysteriously seamless life.

If the adventure, furthermore, strikes us as combining the elements of certainty and uncertainty in life, this is more than the view of the same fundamental relationship from a different angle. The certainty with which justifiably or in error we know the outcome, gives our activity one of its distinct qualities. If, on the contrary, we are uncertain whether we shall arrive at the point for which we have set out, if we know our ignorance of the outcome, then this means not only a quantitatively reduced certainty but an inwardly and outwardly unique practical conduct. The adventurer, in a word, treats the incalculable element in life in the way we ordinarily treat only what we think is by definition calculable. (For this reason, the philosopher is the adventurer of the spirit. He makes the hopeless, but not therefore meaningless, attempt to form into conceptual knowledge an attitude of the soul, its mood toward itself, the world, God. He treats this insoluble problem as if it were soluble.) When the outcome of our activity is made doubtful by the intermingling of unrecognizable elements of fate, we usually limit our commitment of force, hold open lines of retreat, and take each step only as if testing the ground.

In the adventure, we proceed in the directly opposite fashion: it is just on the hovering chance, on fate, on the more-or-less that we risk all, burn our bridges, and step into the mist, as if the road will lead us on, no matter what.

This is the typical fatalism of the adventurer. The obscurities of fate are certainly no more transparent to him than to others; but he proceeds as if they were. The characteristic daring with which he continually leaves the solidities of life underpins itself, as it were, for its own justification with a feeling of security and 'it-must-succeed', which normally only belongs to the transparency of calculable events. This is only a subjective aspect of the fatalist conviction that we certainly cannot escape a fate which we do not know: the adventurer nevertheless believes that, as far as he himself is concerned, he is certain of this unknown and unknowable element in his life. For this reason, to the sober person adventurous conduct often seems insanity; for, in order to make sense, it appears to presuppose that the unknowable is known. The prince of Ligne said of Casanova, 'He believes in nothing, except in what is least believable'. Evidently, such belief is based on that perverse or at least 'adventurous' relation between the certain and the uncertain, whose correlate, obviously, is the scepticism of the adventurer that he 'believes in nothing': for him to whom the unlikely is likely, the likely easily becomes unlikely. The adventurer relies to some extent on his own strength, but above all on his own luck; more properly, on a peculiarly undifferentiated unity of the two. Strength, of which he is certain, and luck, of which he is uncertain, subjectively combine into a sense of certainty.

If it is the nature of genius to possess an immediate relation to these secret unities which in experience and rational analysis fall apart into completely separate phenomena, the adventurer of genius lives, as if by mystic instinct, at the point where the course of the world and the individual fate have, so to speak, not yet been differentiated from one another. For this reason, he is said to have a 'touch of genius'. The 'sleepwalking certainty' with which the adventurer leads his life becomes comprehensible in terms of that peculiar constellation whereby he considers that which is uncertain and incalculable to be the premises of his conduct, while others consider only the calculable.

Unshakeable even when it is shown to be denied by the facts of the case, this certainty proves how deeply that constellation is rooted in the life conditions of adventurous natures.

The adventure is a form of life which can be taken on by an undetermined number of experiences. Nevertheless, our definitions make it understandable that one of them, more than all others, tends to appear in this form: the erotic so that our linguistic custom hardly lets us understand by 'adventure' anything but an erotic one. The love affair, even if short-lived, is by no means always an adventure. The peculiar psychic qualities at whose meeting point the adventure is found must be added to this quantitative matter. The tendency of these qualities to enter such a conjuncture will become apparent step by step.

A love affair contains in clear association the two elements which the form of the adventure characteristically conjoins: conquering force and unextortable concession, winning by one's own abilities and dependence on the luck which something incalculable outside ourselves bestows on us. A degree of balance between these forces, gained by virtue of his sense of their sharp differentiation, can, perhaps, be found only in the man. Perhaps for this reason, it is of compelling significance that, as a rule, a love affair is an 'adventure' only for men; for women it usually falls into other categories. In novels of love, the activity of woman is typically permeated by the passivity which either nature or history has imparted to her character; on the other hand, her acceptance of happiness is at the same time a concession and a gift.

The two poles of conquest and grace (which manifest themselves in many variations) stand closer together in woman than in man. In man, they are, as a matter of fact, much more decisively separated. For this reason, in man their coincidence in the erotic experience stamps this experience quite unambiguously as an adventure. Man plays the courting, attacking, often violently grasping role: this fact makes one easily overlook the element of fate, the dependence on something which cannot be predetermined or compelled, that is contained in every erotic experience. This refers not only to dependence on the concession on the part of the other, but to something deeper.

To be sure, every 'love returned', too, is a gift which cannot be 'earned', not even by any measure of love because to love, demand and compensation are irrelevant; it belongs, in principle, in a category altogether different from a squaring of accounts a point which suggests one of its analogies to the more profound religious relation. But over and above that which we receive from another as a free gift, there still lies in every happiness of love like a profound, impersonal bearer of those personal elements a favour of fate. We receive happiness not only from the other: the fact that we do receive it from him is a blessing of destiny, which is incalculable. In the proudest, most self-assured event in this sphere lies something which we must accept with humility. When the force which owes its success to itself and gives all conquest of love some note of victory and triumph is then combined with the other note of favour by fate, the constellation of the adventure is, as it were, preformed.

The relation which connects the erotic content with the more general form of life as adventure is rooted in deeper ground. The adventure is the exclave of life, the 'torn-off' whose beginning and end have no connection with the somehow unified stream of existence. And yet, as if hurdling this stream, it connects with the most recondite instincts and some ultimate intention of life as a whole and this distinguishes it from the merely accidental episode, from that which only externally 'happens' to us. Now, when a love affair is of short duration, it lives in precisely such a mixture of a merely tangential and yet central character. It may give our life only a momentary splendour, like the ray shed in an inside room by a light flitting by outside. Still, it satisfies a need, or is, in fact, only possible by virtue of a need which whether it be considered as physical, psychic, or metaphysical exists, as it were, timelessly in the foundation or centre of our being. This need is related to the fleeting experience as our general longing for light is to that accidental and immediately disappearing brightness.

The fact that love harbours the possibility of this double relation is reflected by the twofold temporal aspect of the erotic. It displays two standards of time: the momentarily climatic, abruptly subsiding passion; and the idea of something which cannot pass, an idea in which the mystical destination of two souls for one another and for a higher unity finds a temporal expression. This duality might be compared with the double existence of intellectual contents: while they emerge only in the fleetingness of the psychic process, in the forever moving focus of consciousness, their logical meaning possesses timeless validity, an ideal significance which is completely independent of the instant of consciousness in which it becomes real for us. The phenomenon of adventure is such that its abrupt climax places its end into the perspective of its beginning. However, its connection with the centre of life is such that it is to be distinguished from all merely accidental happenings. Thus 'mortal danger', so to speak, lies in its very style. This phenomenon, therefore, is a form which by its time symbolism seems to be predetermined to receive the erotic content.

These analogies between love and adventure alone suggest that the adventure does not belong to the life-style of old age. The decisive point about this fact is that the adventure, in its specific nature and charm, is a form of experiencing. The content of the experience does not make the adventure. That one has faced mortal danger or conquered a woman for a short span of happiness; that unknown factors with which one has waged a gamble have brought surprising gain or loss; that physically or psychologically disguised, one has ventured into spheres of life from which one returns home as if from a strange world none of these are necessarily adventure. They become adventure only by virtue of a certain experiential tension whereby their substance is realized. Only when a stream flowing between the minutest externalities of life and the central source of strength drags them into itself; when the peculiar colour, ardour, and rhythm of the life process become decisive and, as it were, transform its substance only then does an event change from mere experience to adventure. Such a principle of accentuation, however, is alien to old age. In general, only youth knows this predominance of the process of life over its substance; whereas in old age, when the process begins to slow up and coagulate, substance becomes crucial; it then proceeds or perseveres in a certain timeless manner, indifferent to the tempo and passion of its being experienced. The old person usually lives either in a wholly centralized fashion, peripheral interests having fallen off and being unconnected with his essential life and its inner necessity; or his centre atrophies, and existence runs its course only in isolated petty details, accenting mere externals and accidentals. Neither case makes possible the relation between the outer fate and the inner springs of life in which the adventure consists; clearly, neither permits the perception of contrast characteristic of adventure, namely, that an action is completely torn out of the inclusive context of life and that, simultaneously, the whole strength and intensity of life stream into it.

In youth, the accent falls on the process of life, on its rhythm and its antinomies; in old age, it falls on life's substance, compared to which experience more and more appears relatively incidental. This contrast between youth and age, which makes adventure the prerogative of youth, may be expressed as the contrast between the romantic and the historical spirit of life. Life in its immediacy hence also in the individuality of its form at any one moment, here and now counts for the romantic attitude. Life in its immediacy feels the full strength of the current of life most of all in the pointedness of an experience that is torn out of the normal run of things but which is yet connected with the heart of life. All such life which thrusts itself out of life, such breadth of contrast among elements which are penetrated by life, can feed only on that overflow and exuberance of life which exists in adventure, in romanticism, and in youth. Age, on the other hand if, as such, it has a characteristic, valuable, and coherent attitude carries with it a historical mood. This mood may be broadened into a worldview or limited to the immediately personal past; at any rate, in its objectivity and retrospective reflectiveness, it is devoted to contemplating a substance of life out of which immediacy has disappeared. All history as depiction in the narrower, scientific sense originates in such a survival of substance beyond the inexpressible process of its presence that can only be experienced. The connection this process has established among them is gone, and must now, in retrospect, and with a view to constructing an ideal image, be re-established by completely different ties.

With this shift of accent, all the dynamic premise of the adventure disappears. Its atmosphere, as suggested before, is absolute presentness the sudden rearing of the life process to a point where both past and future are irrelevant; it therefore gathers life within itself with an intensity compared with which the factuality of the event often becomes of relatively indifferent import. Just as the game itself not the winning of money is the decisive motive for the true gambler; just as for him, what is important is the violence of feeling as it alternates between joy and despair, the almost touchable nearness of the demonic powers which decide between both so the fascination of the adventure is again and again not the substance which it offers us and which, if it were offered in another form, perhaps would receive little heed, but rather the adventurous form of experiencing it, the intensity and excitement with which it lets us feel life in just this instance. This is what connects youth and adventure. What is called the subjectivity of youth is just this: The material of life in its substantive significance is not as important to youth as is the process which carries it, life itself. Old age is 'objective'; it shapes a new structure out of the substance left behind in a peculiar sort of timelessness by the life which has slipped by. The new structure is that of contemplativeness, impartial judgement, freedom from that unrest which marks life as being present. It is all this that makes adventure alien to old age and an old adventurer an obnoxious or tasteless phenomenon. It would not be difficult to develop the whole essence of adventure from the fact that it is the form of life which in principle is inappropriate to old age.

Notwithstanding the fact that so much of life is hostile to adventure, from the most general point of view adventure appears admixed with all practical human existence. It seems to be an ubiquitous element, but it frequently occurs in the finest distribution, invisible to the naked eye, as it were, and concealed by other elements. This is true quite aside from that notion which, reaching down into the metaphysics of life, considers our existence on earth as a whole, unified adventure. Viewed purely from a concrete and psychological standpoint, every single experience contains a modicum of the characteristics which, if they grow beyond a certain point, bring it to the 'threshold' of adventure. Here the most essential and profound of these characteristics is the singling out of the experience from the total context of life. In point of fact, the meaning of no single part of life is exhausted by its belonging in that context. On the contrary, even when a part is most closely interwoven with the whole, when it really appears to be completely absorbed by onflowing life, like an unaccented word in the course of a sentence even then, when we listen more closely, we can recognize the intrinsic value of that segment of existence. With a significance which is centred in itself, it sets itself over against that total development to which, nevertheless, if looked at from another angle, it inextricably belongs.

Both the wealth and the perplexity of life flow countless times from this value-dichotomy of its contents. Seen from the centre of the personality, every single experience is at once something necessary which comes from the unity of the history of the ego, and something accidental, foreign to that unity, insurmountably walled off, and coloured by a very deep-lying incomprehensibility, as if it stood somewhere in the void and gravitated toward nothing. Thus a shadow of what in its intensification and distinctness constitutes the adventure really hovers over every experience. Every experience, even as it is incorporated into the chain of life, is accompanied by a certain feeling of being enclosed between a beginning and an end by a feeling of an almost unbearable pointedness of the single experience as such. This feeling may sink to imperceptibility, but it lies latent in every experience and rises from it often to our own astonishment. It is impossible to identify any minimal distance from the continuity of life short of which the feeling of adventurousness could not emerge as impossible, to be sure, as to identify the maximal distance where it must emerge for everyone. But everything could not become an adventure if the elements of adventure did not in some measure reside in everything, if they did not belong among the vital factors by virtue of which a happening is designated a human experience.

Similar observations apply to the relation between the accidental and the meaningful. In our every encounter there is so much of the merely given, external, and occasional that we can, so to speak, decide only on a quantitative basis whether the whole may be considered as something rational and in some sense understandable, or whether its insolubility as regards its reference to the past, or its incalculability as regards its reference to the future, is to stamp its whole complexion. From the most secure civic undertaking to the most irrational adventure there runs a continuous line of vital phenomena in which the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, that which can be coerced and that which is given by grace, the calculable and the accidental, mix in infinitely varied degrees. Since the adventure marks one extreme of this continuum, the other extreme must also partake of its character. The sliding of our existence over a scale on which every point is simultaneously determined by the effect of our strength and our abandonment to impenetrable things and powers this problematic nature of our position in the world, which in its religious version results in the insoluble question of human freedom and divine predetermination, lets all of us become adventurers. Within the dimensions into which our station in life with its tasks, our aims, and our means place us, none of us could live one day if we did not treat that which is really incalculable as if it were calculable, if we did not entrust our own strength with what it still cannot achieve by itself but only by its enigmatic cooperation with the powers of fate.

The substance of our life is constantly seized by interweaving forms which thus bring about its unified whole.
Everywhere there is artistic forming, religious comprehending, the shade of moral valuing, the interplay of subject and object. There is, perhaps, no point in this whole stream where every one of these and of many other modes of organization does not contribute at least a drop to its waves. But they become the pure structures which language names only when they rise out of that fragmentary and confused condition where the average life lets them emerge and submerge and so attain mastery over life's substance. Once the religious mood has created its structure, the god, wholly out of itself, it is 'religion'; once the aesthetic form has made its content something secondary, by which it lives a life of its own that listens only to itself, it becomes 'art'; once moral duty is fulfilled simply because it is duty, no matter how changing the contents by means of which it is fulfilled and which previously in turn determined the will, it becomes 'morality'.

It is no different with adventure. We are the adventurers of the earth; our life is crossed everywhere by the tensions which mark adventure. But only when these tensions have become so violent that they gain mastery over the material through which they realize themselves only then does the 'adventure' arise. For the adventure does not consist in a substance which is won or lost, enjoyed or endured: to all this we have access in other forms of life as well. Rather, it is the radicalness through which it becomes perceptible as a life tension, as the rubato of the life process, independent of its materials and their differences the quantity of these tensions becoming great enough to tear life, beyond those materials, completely out of itself: this is what transforms mere experience into adventure.

Certainly, it is only one segment of existence among others, but it belongs to those forms which, beyond the mere share they have in life and beyond all the accidental nature of their individual contents, have the mysterious power to make us feel for a moment the whole sum of life as their fulfilment and their vehicle, existing only for their realization.

Simmel On Culture: Selected Writings
Theory, Culture & Society

The Nature of Women - the article plus selected quotes

“But what really matters is not what you believe but the faith and conviction with which you believe…”  – Knut Hamsun

Contents:
1.) Introduction
2.) Dissociative Rationalisation aka Hamstering
3.) Mental Gymnastics
4.) Dissociation, Her Substitute for Psychopathy
5.) Women, Words, Beliefs & Lies
6.) Her Fluidity of Truth
7.) In Closing
8.) Relevant Reading

1.) Introduction:

To understand women with at least some degree of competence, one must firstly understand Machiavellianism. Once they understand Machiavellianism, they must come to understand dissociation. After understanding dissociation, the next logical step is to understand dissociation’s relationship with rationalisation, for rationalisation is reason built upon fantasy. A hoax, but one that can only be identified as such once you have investigated its origin.

Most within the red pill community come to know of rationalisation before dissociation; I suspect many know not what dissociation is in spite of its relation to rationalisation. Without dissociation, the reality removing mechanism on which feminine solipsism is predicated, rationalisation lacks the conviction needed to be convincing. The most compelling of a woman’s performances thus requires dissociation to masquerade as truth. If she did not believe her lies, neither would you.

2.) Dissociative Rationalisation aka Hamstering:

If womankind did not possess an infinite capacity for dissociation, the effectiveness of her manipulations would be greatly vitiated. Such a woman would be unable to leverage her sexuality into attaining commitment once she’d had more than a few partners. Her sexuality would be utilised and disposed of like something to be consumed, as once perceived a whore, she would become her sexuality and deemed to lack essence in absence of it. All too aware of this, dissociation is women’s primary coping mechanism.

If a woman cannot sell herself a false narrative, she cannot manipulate men into holding her in higher regard. Her worthiness of this bothers her not, her only concern is to obtain her ends. Although man is romantic, he does not easily trust or forgive women of dubious history. Such women are objectified in great ubiquity, for no value is seen in a whore outside the physical pleasure her flesh can offer. Some women set out to commodify themselves in this manner, we call them prostitutes.

And yet a prostitute would not be able to engage in the mental gymnastics necessary to forgive herself her promiscuity if she were chained to decision-making in a way that reason absent dissociation necessitates. In order for a woman to opportunistically capitalise on her sexuality, she must be capable of great dissociation. With dissociation, she can avoid consequences for her life choices, enabling her to convince a man she possesses an innocence and chastity she has long lacked.

A woman would get what she deserves, rather than what she wanted or needed if she could not dissociate. Luckily, nature has equipped women with an instinctual proclivity to dissociate. Women have evolved to become humanity’s most competent liars, in spite of themselves, for their own sake. Rather than striving to be better than she is, womankind has become competent in pretending she need not be better because she already is what she isn’t – better.

3.) Mental Gymnastics:

Machiavellianism, dissociation and rationalisation lie at the root and core of female behaviour. Female manipulation is about as natural as much as it is instinctual. It comes easily. Some women are comfortable with this aspect of themselves, others are not. Some may freely admit this to themselves, others may need to see themselves as good; such women seek to maintain a pretence of virtue in order to prop up whatever semblance of sanity they possess. When a woman cannot accept what she is, she lies to herself about who she is until she believes in her lies. A lie told long enough feels like the truth, women know this truth quite intimately.

Of course, there are women who are at peace with their nature and do not care, their rationalisation merely a method of safeguarding reputation – a neurotic means to a rational end. These women are far more dangerous than their in-denial counterparts, for they are cognisant but seek not to mitigate their nature. This is to say that all women are Machiavellian, but some are so with more zeal and aggression. Effectively, some women value altruism in spite of themselves, so upon introspection deceive themselves about themselves with great conviction. Others do not care, so they do not.

All women are similar, but likewise within that similarity, there is difference as there is with men. The difference may not be as emphatically noticeable as it is within the diversity of man, but it is there. If the rather drawn out discussion on morality we’ve been having has taught you anything recently, it’s that although we all value the ideas discussed by the red pill, each of us will act upon this knowledge differently. Women are much the same with their capacity to manipulate and dissociate. Sometimes they indulge in it and weaponise it, other times they deny reality and live a lie as a means to cope. In spite of how they use it, they all use it.

What one must realise is that woman’s capacity to rationalise away anything she doesn’t like is one of the greatest tools she has in amplifying her manipulative prowess. If women couldn’t dissociate and rationalise to the point she can pass a lie detector test, she’d be far less proficient in manipulating man. And a woman who cannot manipulate a man is a vulnerable woman, for she is completely reliant on the volition and altruism of man rather than possessing any for herself. As such, women are not built to live and hunt alone, but to attach themselves to man. Conversely, man does not need women, but rather he covets her for all her ostentatious adornment and lustful appeal. Woman’s need is greater, but owing to the libido of testosterone, man’s is more pressing.

4.) Dissociation, Her Substitute for Psychopathy:

I find female dissociation to be something tantamount to psychopathy in the absence of psychopathy. Women can do great evil by act of self-compulsion, effectively inculcating themselves to believe the abhorred acts they have engaged in are without dishonour. In this aspect, honour is a uniquely male abstraction that women do not hold themselves to. Even if a woman does believe in honour, she may as well not; for she will find a way to pervert the truth and clutch at any justification necessary to make an act of dishonour seem honourable. They hold onto such clutched straws with a delusional sincerity that belies falsehood. And all this occurs to ensure her interests – at any cost.

I see a utilitarian parallel between female nature and psychopathic moral reasoning, in fact, I see many similarities between the two, but one must be careful not to confuse correlation with causation. It is not that women as a group are psychopathic, not at all, but rather, that dissociation allows them to behave as if they were by completely twisting reality.

The histrionic self-delusion inherent of women is an effective substitution for psychopathy if you need to get something done at any cost, but aren’t actually a psychopath. Man has always been baffled by how someone who feels great sympathy for others can seemingly, as if by choice, turn off such sympathy without a shred of guilt. This is a behavioural observation unique to women noted by many men in many places. What they are observing is a woman dissociating in order to withdraw sympathy where she once felt it. Even after reading red pill material man does not completely understand this aspect of women, the moral and logical gymnastics native to womankind continues to baffle man because man is a creature of reason and morals more than he is pragmatism. For women, this is not so.

The greatest irony is that man ponders women with a consciousness bound to reason, endeavouring to find the reason for the unreasonableness of the opposite sex, repeatedly failing. In this pursuit he encounters great futility and frustration, for even if the opposite sex did possess the required self-awareness to explain herself, which she does not, she would not be inclined to explain such a thing, for it would not serve her.

5.) Women, Words, Beliefs & Lies:

I don’t assign any real value to what a woman says when she speaks of morals or loyalty or other such topics. This may sound harsh or undue, but I believe it necessary. Knowing someone can dissociate in order to hold incredibly strong convictions and then likewise do the same to dispose of said convictions when they are no longer useful means that person will never have any credibility or sway with me. Someone who is too fluid in their views and convictions is someone who does not have strong views or convictions. Because even though these things may seem plausible and compelling in the moment, they are too temporary to carry any real depth. In essence, women have mastered the aesthetics of depth – to seem deep without being deep.

I regard such things to be nothing more than pretty aesthetics, an extension of what she does with her physical appearance manifesting in the mental. The female word is much like the female form, covered by makeup, nothing more than mere pretension, a distorted augmentation of who she really is. Much like man wishes to believe the woman he lusts for would be just as pretty without the makeup, he falls victim to this same line of thinking when assessing her mentality. And so as a man it takes me far too much work to ascertain whether her asserted beliefs are things said to please me, to deceive me or to otherwise please or deceive herself. And I know it is always one of these things, and never not one of these things, because if it were not one of these things, she would be not a woman.

As such one should judge a woman how one would judge any character so flexible as to be scrupulous. Ascertain whether what she says benefits her to be seen and heard saying, or whether her beliefs assist her goals in spite of reputational considerations. If it does not aid her goal, and yet she claims it, it is likely a lie.

For example, if she claimed to be unconditionally loyal, ask yourself if she needs to be loyal to get what she wants? No, you say? You say she ensnared a man who cannot maintain her respect to marry her? You find it likely she would get everything in the divorce? Then she claims what she does to safeguard her reputation or because she is otherwise invested in ignorant self-delusion. The delusion that she is incapable of the betrayal that any man of sound mind knows her to be capable of. Such a woman is not self-aware enough as to be in touch with her nature, but rather she is enamoured with the false image she has created for herself to look at. She believes she is the thing she tells herself she is, rather than the thing her behaviour tells us she is.

How does she so convincingly dissociate you ask? Women are good at transference, a term I use to refer to “reverse-projection.” Essentially, she believes a man’s loyalty to her is important, and so through cognitive transference can borrow the devoutness of that belief and appear, at least superficially, to hold herself to the same standard. She will temporarily believe she is loyal due to the conviction of her dissociation, much like you would temporarily believe an ugly woman is pretty whilst possessed by bourbon. Dissociation is intoxicating, and whilst under its influence, her shallow nonsense will sound devout.

Women have an innately powerful capacity to be entirely delusional in a self-serving manner, unhindered by logic and aided by dissociation, women are masterful liars. They are so good at lying to themselves, that lying to you is simply a by-product of their own delusion.

6.) Her Fluidity of Truth:

Women blend truth with convenient lies as to be deliberately confusing in a way that is nothing if not self-serving. The less intelligent amongst them forget what the truth really is, because it’s only ever what they need it to be.

Women are poor at rational abstraction, which means “their truth,” like them, is fickle. The more intelligent women can keep up with their own lies, and on some level know they do not entirely believe what they compel themselves to portray. But in spite of such cognisance, such women still possess a prowess in compartmentalising just enough to maintain the deception necessary to ascertain their goals. Women are greatly goal orientated and will jump through huge cognitive hoops to get what they want. Logic, valued by man as sacrosanct, is a sordid obstruction to the mechanics of the utilitarian female mind. When logic is inconvenient to a woman, dissociation takes its place.

And this way of being that possesses women is so innate it is not even calculated. It is a truly remarkable thing to behold, as to be a man, no such method of mind is inherent. Your beliefs, your sense of identity, it is neither so fluid nor so flexible as to constantly complement and adapt to your moment’s desires. You are not so free in your beliefs because your beliefs are not so fickle, they have merit, structure and a root reasoning for existing outside the immediate utilitarian aim that you seek. Again, I see great similarity between female and psychopathic morality. This is not to say all women are psychopaths because that is an incorrect diagnosis, but rather, although through different mechanisms, they equally possess a ruthless pragmatic morality.

7.) In Closing:

It doesn’t matter how much conviction a woman speaks with, for she can delude herself to believe whatever is necessary with uncanny prowess. She can pervert the truth so much so, that any old nonsense she says can speak with the conviction of truth even if it is an absolute perversion of it. This is woman’s greatest power, other than of course, her sexuality. And it is that element unique to women that makes her as effortlessly Machiavellian as she is. As I have said before, women are nature’s Machiavellians.

https://illimitableman.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-nature-of-women/

***
Intellectually, a certain inferiority of the female sex can hardly be denied. . . . Women are intellectually more desultory and volatile than men; they are more occupied with particular instances than with general principles; they judge rather by intuitive perceptions than by deliberate reasoning.

Women will avoid the wicked not because it is unright, but only because it is ugly . . . Nothing of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation! . . . They do something only because it pleases them . . . I hardly believe that the fair sex is capable of principles.
Immanuel Kant
*
In general, it can be said that feminine mentality manifests an undeveloped, childlike, or primitive character; instead of the thirst for knowledge, curiosity; instead of judgement, prejudice; instead of thinking, imagination or dreaming; instead of will, wishing. Emma Jung
*
To men belong law, justice, science, and philosophy, all that is universal and rational. Women, on the other hand, introduce into everything favour, exception, and personal prejudice.

Women are certainly capable of learning, but they are not made for the higher forms of science, such as philosophy and certain types of artistic creativity; these require a universal ingredient. Women may hit on good ideas and they may, of course, have taste and elegance, but they lack the talent for the ideal.
Hegel

It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.
Charles Darwin

A woman's appearance depends upon two things: the clothes she wears and the time she gives to her toilet . . . Against the first we bring the charge of ostentation, against the second of harlotry.
Tertulian

The best couturiers, hairdressers, home designers and cooks are men. I suspect that were it biologically possible men would make better mothers.
Ida Alexa Ross Wylie

The opinion I have of the generality of women - who appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a sugar plum than my time, forms a barrier against matrimony which I rejoice in.
John Keats

Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly with them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it.

Such is the stupidity of woman's character that it is incumbent upon her, in every particular, to distrust herself and to obey her husband.
Confucius

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them very little.
Samuel Johnsen

Women have no sympathy . . . And my experience of women is almost as large as Europe. And it is so intimate too. Women crave _for being loved_, not for loving. They scream at you for sympathy all day long, they are incapable of giving _any_ in return for they cannot remember your affairs long enough to do so.
Florence Nightingdale

The great question... Which I have not been able to answer...is, "What does a woman want?" - Freud

I have found one good man in a thousand, But not one good woman among them.
Ecclesiastes 7:28

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can attain - whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.
Charles Darwin

In addition, women are in truth not normally capable of responding to such familiarity and mutual confidence as sustain that holy bond of friendship, nor do their souls seem firm enough to withstand the clasp of a knot so lasting and so tightly drawn. And indeed if it were not for that, if it were possible to fashion such a relationship, willing and free, in which not only the souls had this full enjoyment but in which the bodies too shared in the union – where the whole human being was involved – it is certain that the loving-friendship would be more full and more abundant. But there is no example yet of woman attaining to it and by the common agreement of the Ancient schools of philosophy she is excluded from it.
Montaigne ↓

The only, essential, proper form of nobility in France is the profession of arms. It is probable that the first of the virtues to appear among men, giving some of them superiority over others, was the one by which the stronger and the more courageous made themselves masters of the weaker and so acquired individual rank and reputation, from which derive our terms of honour and dignity; or else those nations, being most warlike, gave the prize and the title highest in dignity to the virtue which they were most familiar with. So too our passion, our feverish concern, for the chastity of women results in une bonne femme (‘a good woman’), and une femme d’honneur, ou de vertu (‘a woman of honour’ or ‘of virtue’) in reality meaning for us a chaste woman – as though, in order to bind them to that duty, we neglected all the rest and gave them free rein for any other fault, striking a bargain to get them to give up that one.

It is dangerous to leave the superintendence of our succession to the judgement of our wives and to their choice between our sons, which over and over again is iniquitous and fantastic. For those unruly tastes and physical cravings which they experience during pregnancy are ever-present in their souls. They regularly devote themselves to the weakest and to the feeblest, or to those (if they have any) who are still hanging about their necks. Since women do not have sufficient reasoning-power to select and embrace things according to their merits they allow themselves to be led to where natural impressions act most alone – like animals, which only know their young while they are still on the teat.

Queen Margaret of Navarre relates the tale of a young ‘prince’ – and, even though she does not name him his exalted rank is quite enough to make him recognizable; whenever he was out on an assignation (lying with the wife of a Parisian barrister) he would take a short-cut through a church and never failed to make his prayers and supplications in that holy place, both on the way there and on the way back. I will leave you to judge what he was asking God’s favour for when his soul was full of such fair cogitations! Yet she cites that as evidence of outstanding devotion. But that is not the only proof we have of the truth that it hardly befits women to treat Theological matters.
Montaigne

Do people blush with shame in the dark? That people become pale with fright in the dark, I believe, but not that they blush with shame. For they become pale on their own account, but they blush on account of themselves as well as others.—The question whether women blush in the dark is a very difficult one, at least one that cannot be answered with the lights on.
Lichtenberg

One must make choice between loving women and knowing them; there is no middle course.
Chamfort ↓

Apparently nature, in giving man an absolutely irradicable taste for women, must have foreseen that, without this precaution, the contempt inspired by the vices of their sex, vanity in particular, would be a great obstacle to the maintenance and propagation of the human species. 

A man who professed to esteem women highly was asked if he had enjoyed the favours of many. “Not so many as if I had despised them,” he said. 

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.

A witty woman told me one day what may well be the secret of her sex: it is that every woman in choosing a lover takes more account of the way in which other women regard the man than of her own.

“He who has not seen much of demi-mondaines does not understand women at all,” gravely remarked to me a fond admirer of his own wife, who was unfaithful to him.

I remember to have seen a man forsaking the society of ballet girls because, so he said, he had found them as deceitful as honest women. 

Women only give to friendship what they borrow from love.

The woman who esteems herself more for her gifts of soul or intelligence than for her beauty is above her sex. She who esteems herself more for her beauty than for her intelligence or soul is of her sex. But she who esteems herself more for her birth or rank than for her beauty is outside her sex, beneath it.

A woman was at a performance of the tragedy of Mérope, and did not weep: surprise was expressed. “I could cry my eyes out,” she said, “but I have to go out to supper to-night.”
Chamfort

The punishment of those who have loved women too much, is to love them always.
Joubert ↓

Women think that whatever they dare do they may do.

In the uneducated classes, the women are superior to the men; in the upper classes, on the contrary, we find the men superior to the women. This is because men are more often rich in acquired virtues, and women in natural virtues.

Power is a beauty; it even makes women like old age.
Joubert

The male sex is not merely superior in relation to the female but acquires the status of the generally human, governing the phenom- ena of the individual male and the individual female in the same wa y. In various media, this fact is grounded in the power position of men. If we express the historical relationship between the sexes quite grossly as that between master and slave, then it is one of the privileges of the master that he does not always need to think about the fact thathe is master. The position of the slave, on the other hand", ensures that he will never forget his status. There is no doubt that the woman loses a conscious sense of her being as a female much more rarely than holds true for the man and his being as a male. There are innumerable occasions on which the man appears to think in a purely objective fashion without his masculinity concurrently occupying any place in his perceptions. On the other hand, it seems as if the woman never loses the feeling-which may be more or less clear or obscure-that she is a woman. This forms the subterranean ground of her life that never entirely disappears. All the contents of her life transpire on its basis.

Georg Simmel ↓

For the man, there is a sense inwhich sexuality is something he does. For the woman, it is a- mode of being. And yet-or, rather, precisely for this reason-the significance of the sexual difference is only a secondary fact for the woman. She reposes in her femininity as if in an absolute substantial essence and-somewhat paradoxically expressed-indifferent to whether men exist or not. For the man, this centripetal and autonomous sexuality simply does not exist. His masculinity (in the sexual sense) is much more pervasively bound up with his relationship to the woman than the femininity of the woman is determined by her relationship to the man. Th-enaive presupposition (which is precisely what is at stake here) is an obstacle to the acknowledgment of this consideration, and perhaps even to its comprehension: the assumption that femininity is a phenomenon determined only by its relation to the man, and that if this relation no longer obtained, nothing would remain. In fact, what remains is not a neutral "human being" but a woman. The autonomy of the sexual in the woman is exhibited most extensively in the course of pregnancy, which is independent of any further relationship to the man, and also in the consideration that, in the prehistory of humanity, obviously a very long time passed before there was any recognition of the causation of pregnancy by the sexual act.

Evidently the typical situation is this: The fulfillment of sexual desire tends to free the man from the relationship and bind the woman to it. The external reasons for this are obvious. For the man, the motive that impelled him to the woman has disappeared with the satisfaction of the impulse. For the woman, on the other hand, the need for a protective relationship arises from pregnancy. Here as well, however, the general pattern is that for the man, the sexual question is a relational question. Thus it disappears completely as soon as he no longer has any interest in the relationship. His absolute is not bound up with his sexual being. For the woman, this is a question of her nature, which her absolute also secondarily translates into the relationship that proceeds from it. The man may be brought to madness or suicide as a result of erotic experiences. However, he feels that they are of no significance to what concerns him most deeply, insofar as we may be permitted to speak of matters that cannot be proved.

The man is much easier to arouse sexually because arousal is not an excitation of his total being but only of a partial function. Thus for him, only a quite general stimulus is necessary. As a result, we can understand that the woman is more dependent on the individual man, and the man more dependent on women in general. On the basis of this fundamental structure, it becomes understandable, on the one hand, that a psychological instinct has always characterized the woman as the sexual being and, on the other hand, that women themselves frequently resist this characterization and feel that it is somehow mistaken. This is because we generally understand a sexual being-from the male standpoint-as primarily and fundamentally oriented to the other sex. Typically, however, this does not hold true for the woman. Her sexuality is so much an aspect of her immanent nature and it so unconditionally and directly constitutes her ultimate being that it is quite impossible for it to develop merely in the intentionality of her relationship to the man, or as this intentionality; nor could its nature be acquired in this. way.

As a type, the woman stands beyond this dual relationship to things. The idealism of pure theory, which signifies a relationship to that with which one has no relationship, is not her affair. If she does not feel that she is connected with something-either as regards its external or ethical-altruistic instrumental purposiveness, or as regards its significance for inner well-being-then it really does not concern her. It is as if she lacked what might be called the telegraphic connection which establishes the purely objectivistic interest. With respect to formation, on the other hand, male work-from that of the shoemaker and the carpenter to that of the painter and the poet-is the complete determination of objective form by means of subjective energy. But it is also the complete objectification of the subject. The woman may be completely and selflessly active, she may be quite fully productive and "creative" in her sphere, and she may have a thoroughly resolute ability to tune a home and even an entire area according to the timbre of her personality. Nevertheless productivity in the sense of the interpenetration and simultaneous autonomy of subject and object is not her concern. Knowledge and creation are dynamic relationships in which our existence is-as this might be put-drawn out of itself. They represent a displacement of the center, an annulment of that ultimate self-contained completeness of being which constitutes the meaning of life for the female type, even with all its external activity and its devotion to practical tasks.

Regardless of the extent to which man may live and. die for an idea, he always juxtaposes himself. toit. For him, the idea is an infinite task, and in the ideal sense, he always remains the solitary individual. Since this juxtaposition and opposition represent the only form in which the man can conceive and experience an idea, it seems to him as if women were "incapable of having any ideas" (Goethe). For the woman. however, her existence and the idea are one and the same. In spite ot a fateful isolation that may occasionally master her, typically she is never as solitary as the man. She is always at home with herself. However, the man has his "home" beyond himself.

In the domain of knowledge, logic represents-in relation to the immediacy of vital, psychic reality-the most complete differentiation and independence imaginable of the normative and the ideal. Whoever regards himself as bound by logic sees himself to a certain extent as confronted by the domain of truth, which demands conformity from his actual thought. Even if our thought completely diverges from the domain of truth, there is no sense in which it forfeits its inner validity or its claim on our mental processes. As a result of this quality of logical norms, the idea and the reality of our thought are placed in absolute opposition. The latter does not satisfy the demand imposed on it directly and automatically. The former exercises no unquestionable real power. However, such a dualism conflicts with the female principle.

Although genuine genius rarely oceurs among women, it has frequently been noted that genius has something of the feminine about it. This remarkable phenomenon clearly does not pertain merely to the production of the work, whose unconscious ripening, nourished by the total being of the personality, is analogous to the growth of the child in the mother. On the contrary, it is the a priori unity of life and the idea, on which the female nature rests. The genius repeats this unity on the highest level, where the object is produced. Thus consider the obscurity of that metaphysical relationship, the earlier form of the instinct which the conscious procedure of logic endeav- ors to replace, correct, and secure. Under these circumstances, it is understandable that the female instinct and unmediated female knowledge can be just as frequently in error as correct.

So there is no sense in which the so-called logical deficiency is a simple defect. On the contrary, it is only the negative expression of the quite positively determined female mode of being. This very mode of being is repeated in another phenomenon which translates that logical deficiency into another dimension. It is said that women are not fond of offering "proofs." Logic and proof rest on that tension between the real process of our thought and objective truth, the validity of which is independent of this process and the attainment of which is the aim of thought. As I indicated, the duality of this relationship is expressed in logic: the fact that in all of our actual thought we know we are bound by a norm which does not belong to this reality but rather to an autonomous realm of truth. In proof, the other feature comes to the fore: the indirection, which in countless cases is the only basis on which our actual thought process can arrive at self-sufficient truth. (...)

The woman perceives the primary and unprovable element in every thema probandum. There is a sense in which she does not need and cannot use the roundabout method of proof. The general submersion of the female type in existence allows her instinct to speak out, as if from an existential unity with objects that requires no mediation. It is as if her knowledge resided-and resided exclusively-in that ultimate datum on which all proofs are based and in which they rest, as if in nuce. As a result, the form of method that is characteristic of all our discursive knowledge is unnecessary and irrelevant for her. Thus consider all the inadequacies of knowledge that are a consequence of this matter-for there are countless occasions on which the problems of inquiry can be solved only discursively and not in the coincidence of the beginning point and the end. The entire fact, so frequently criticized, that women do not like to undertake proofs and do not want to have something proven is not an isolated deficiency, but is rooted in the fundamental mode of her type of being, and its relationship to existence in general. It will become increasingly clear that the authentic definition of the female nature, in its metapsychological sense, is the following: The purely immanent significance of its subjective structure which does not extend beyond the limits of the psyche possesses, as such and immediately, a metaphysical connection or unity with existence in general, with something that we are obliged to call the ground of things.

This stands in the most profound contrast to the male nature. The true, the being of the cosmos, and the norm do not yet reside in the immediate and immanent psychic reality of the man's nature. On the contrary, from the standpoint of its own structure, the man's nature sees itself as juxtaposed to all this, as something to be accomplished or something that cannot be accomplished, as an imperative or an intellectual task. The spiritual expression of this nature is logic, which rests on the dualism between the real psychological world and the ideal world of truth that it does not touch, and proof, which presupposes the discursive character of knowledge and the necessity of method and of the roundabout method.

Insofar as the woman-with that inner unity that transcends the need for logic-is somehow. immediately situated in the things them- selves, in the truth and above reality, she is indifferent to proof, which is only supposed to lead us to this reality in the form of method. The one refusal exhibits the immanent formation, the other refusal the transcendent formation, of the female nature. This formation can be grasped in an extremely schematic and epigrammatic fashion, and in opposition to masculinity as such, in the thesis that its transcendence lies precisely in its immanence.

This distinctiveness of the woman, independent of any relationship to the masculine, is most complete and significant in the ethical domain. Here the dualism of reality and the idea clashes so forcefully, and the entire sphere of the ethical seems to be so exclusively erected upon this abyss as if on its own foundation, that it seems as if the form of the male nature alone would correspond to the depth and seriousness of the problems. This is why a thinker such as Weininger, who is thoroughly committed to an extreme male dual- ism and the unabashed conflation of the male and the human ideal, begins precisely at the point of the ethical in order to prove the absolute value nullity of the female nature on this basis. Moreover, he undertakes this in a thoroughly logical fashion, so that this nature seems to him to be not evil or immoral but rather simply amoral, detached from the ethical problem in general.

There is a sense in which this is logically expressed in the fact that the male nature is much more difficult to determine and define than the female. The generally human, of which sexual specificity should be a special case, is congruent with the masculine in the respect that no specific difference from the masculine can be identified in the generally human. The general as such cannot be defined. Yet suppose that certain features are cited as distinctively male. A closer examination establishes that these features are always intended only as differences from specifically female features. However, the nature of the latter features is not identified in an analogous fashion, purely on the basis of an opposition to the masculine. They are perceived, rather, more as an intrinsically exisiting and intrinsically defined entity, as a distinctive type of humanity which, however, is in no sense fixed exclusively by means of an opposition. Consider the old idea which extends from the level of brutal and ignorant self-aggrandizement to that of the most sublime philosophical speculation: that only the male is the genuine human. This idea finds its conceptual pendant in the greater facility with which the nature of the woman, compared with that of the man, is defined. For this reason, there are innumerable psychologies of women, but hardly one psychology of men.
Simmel

There are few wives so perfect as not to give their husbands at least once a day good reason to repent of ever having married, or at least of envying those who are unmarried.
La Bruyere

Most women have hardly any principles; they are led by their passions, and form their morals and manners after those whom they love.

Would I had the liberty of shouting, as loud as I could, to those holy men who formerly suffered by women: “Flee from women; do not become their spiritual directors, but let others take care of their salvation!”

A man who is vain, indiscreet, a great talker and a mischievous wag, who speaks arrogantly of himself and contemptuously of others, who is boisterous, haughty, forward, without morality, honesty, or commonsense, and who draws for facts on his imagination, wants nothing else, to be adored by many women, but handsome features and a good shape.
La Bruyere

In opposition to a very common prejudice, women — at least in their judgment of persons — are universally more objective than men. The typical man, when in love, invariably exalts the object of his love and debases the object of his hatred, and consequently in this sphere tends strongly towards the formation of “illusions.” A typical woman, on the other hand, may be passionately in love with a man, and yet have a keen eye for his faults; but she does not love him the less. And she may detest a rival, and yet fully recognize her mental and bodily superiority: but she detests her nonetheless. It may be objected: but surely man as judge is universally fairer than woman, and, if women had to administer the office of judges, would we not have to fear innumerable subjective judgments? This would indeed be the case; but the reasons lie elsewhere, and not where they usually were sought.
Klages↓

A young man runs a greater risk of over-esteeming the singing of the girl he loves than would a loving girl in a converse and similar case; but the girl, if, for example, she is a student, is more likely to prefer one lecturer among others, because she is interested in him and not in his lectures. But then we would have to assume that a female judge would be likely to have far more cause than a male to judge not “without respect of person” because she feels sympathy or antipathy for the accused; for the non-personal fact of the law might, though its content were valued adequately, become negligible in comparison with the personal fact of “accused.”

As we hinted above, it is true that women even more than men tend to demand the possession of love: and if this is true, then the faculty for jealousy must be looked for among women rather than among men. This is in fact the case, and is generally overlooked, chiefly because the jealousy of woman is more skilled in hiding itself than that of man, and manifests itself much less actively. Meanwhile, feminine inclination towards — and capacity for — intrigue in nine cases out of ten is rooted in jealousy.

A woman can love a man without discovering in him any extraordinary beauty, or interest, or goodness; for her his value consists of the fact that she loves him. Thus the potential injustice of man consists especially in a distortion of his estimates of value in favor of his personal feelings, while that of woman consists in an unconscious refusal to attribute significance and binding force to universal values, personal feeling being made the sole criterion. It is incorrect to say that feeling rules women, and reason men; the fact is that with typical women, personal feeling, and with typical men, general feeling, is decisive. But this does not prevent his estimations of value from being corrupted by his personal feelings.

I have been involved for many years with the characterological study of problems relating to the distinctions between the sexes, and I must say: even among the most outstanding women whom I have known, I found none who possesses a consequential power of imagination. Now someone might object that the psychology of women may well have altered since primitive times. I respond: yes, but men have undoubtedly changed to an even greater degree. If you ignore the so-called “emancipated” variety, you will certainly ?nd that, in important matters, contemporary woman more closely resembles her ancestors than contemporary man resembles his forbears. e lack of imagination in women is obvious throughout recorded history, and one must doubt that the situation has changed since prehistoric times. In the whole of recorded
history, there have been only two supremely gifted poetesses: Sappho and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff!
Klages

Why are women ordinarily malicious, sly, tricky, deceptive, sharp, imposters, both in love and in devotion, and in everything they undertake, and in whatever occupation they begin? Why do they acquire so early the inclination for and the art of deceiving, dissimulating, pretending, seizing the opportunity, etc. etc.? Why does the cleverness of a woman of mediocre talent and experience of the world very often defeat the skill and cunning of a man who by nature and practice is the most able? Do we believe that the mind of women is naturally and automatically disposed to want and easily acquire these qualities, unlike the spirit of men? Do we believe that these faculties (since they are really faculties) are produced in females more than in males, and are characteristic of a [2260] womanly nature? No, indeed. The natural, primitive spirit of women has no trace of those faculties, or disposition to acquire them, any more than men have. Rather, the ease and perfection with which they acquire them has no other cause than their natural weakness, and the inferiority of their strength to that of men, and their being able to rely only on art and cunning, since they are inferior in strength, and inferior, too, in the rights that law and custom distribute between men and women. That’s all there is that is natural and innate about the malicious character of women. That is to say, neither the character nor any particular disposition to acquire it exists in the female nature. Rather, there is only a quality, a circumstance that causes it, which is, in fact, extraneous to the nature, the spirit, the working of the intelligence and the mind. In fact, place women in other circumstances, [2261] that is to say, assume that they never entered any kind of society, especially with men; or that laws and customs did not make their condition inferior to that of males (which happened in primitive times, and which perhaps happens today, too, in some barbarous countries); or that the said laws and customs favored them somewhat more, or even placed them above men (I know of a country where they are considered sacred beings); or that, owing to certain circumstances (as was told of the country of the Amazons, etc.), they are generally or individually either equal or superior to the men they deal with, as a result of physical or intellectual force, natural or acquired, as a result of wealth, or rank, or birth, etc. etc.—and you will find their art and cunning either nonexistent or negligible, or not superior or inferior to that of men, at least those they deal with; or in any case proportionately less, depending on the quality of the said circumstances, than that of women [2262] placed in the opposite circumstances, even if they are less clever and less malicious, etc. Daily experience demonstrates this. Not only in women but also in men who are weak, or poor, or ugly, or flawed, or uncultured, or inferior in some way to those whom they deal with, such as courtiers, who are used to dealing with superiors, and so are always cunning, and deceitful, and dissemblers, etc. And not only in men but in entire nations (like those subject to despotism), cities or provinces, families, etc., as history, travel, etc. etc., demonstrate. And change the circumstances and the times, and that same nation or city or individual, male or female, loses, diminishes, gains, increases in cunning and duplicity, which are believed to be in their character when observed superficially. Savages are ordinarily duplicitous, dissembling, false toward strangers who are physically or morally stronger than they are. And observe that cunning is a characteristic of their intelligence. Now, it is very often greater precisely in those who, because of their intelligence or culture and the exercise of it, [2263] are at a disadvantage compared with others. (Thus, in women generally, since they are less cultured than men, in plebeian or badly educated individuals, male or female, in savages with respect to the civilized, etc.) What greater, clearer proof that the mind, understood as a whole, and its faculties are the work of circumstances, when we see that the very circumstance of having a limited mind gains for it a faculty (which belongs entirely to it) that larger minds do not have, or have in a lesser degree?
Leopardi ↓

Hence overall, in my view women really are generally and by nature more egoistic, and therefore less merciful (especially in terms of effective compassion) and less charitable than men. For intensity, strength, abundance of life and therefore of self-love have a much greater part in charity, in the disposition toward and the act of sacrificing oneself, and in excluding egoism, than do delicacy, and sophistication of mind separated from the strength, energy, activity, and vivid inner life of self-love. And this not just in men compared with women, but generally in whoever, compared to whomever. According to such arguments, an old woman, especially if she has lived in high society, must be the most egoistic human being imaginable (by nature, and speaking as a rule).

I have made about the natural compassionateness in the strong, and the natural mercilessness and harshness of the weak, etc., and vice versa those observations are to be applied to these. It is frequently claimed, and there are quite a few examples in histories, that women if they become powerful in any way, have generally been and are, inasmuch as they are cunning and wicked, to the same degree more cruel and less compassionate toward their enemies, or more so generally than men have been or are, or would have been or would be, all other things being equal.
Leopardi

Mme G. started to insist they be given nothing. Rien! Why is it that women who get involved in charity work so often become particularly nasty and heartless? This perfectly sweet, soft woman of Flemish plumpness all of a sudden revealed a harshness and lack of pity.
Bobkowski

What I say about women’s sexual instincts is meant to apply to all women, or at least to all normal women; but my criticism of contemporary female behavior refers only to women emblematic of the current Zeitgeist, those who have “liberated” themselves from the normal duties incumbent upon their sex in any healthy society. The objection that “not all women are like that” is always valid, of course, but a bit like defending the Black Death on the grounds that it did not, after all, kill everybody.
Devlin