Mating Women

When we travel on the MTR, we find that the walls at the entrances, corridors, arrival and departure halls and the station platforms and even the insides of train compartments are all lined with big and small advertisements. Prominent amongst them in nearly all of such locations are advertisements seducing women with hour-glass shaped female forms in profile with confident smiling faces proudly displaying the prominences and curves of their bodies and limbs with words at suitable spaces suggesting that it is not just a dream but can be converted into a workable plan within a short time and at prices as attractive as the female specimens on display.Why? If we are honest, there can only be one answer. Women want to attract men. 

Do women want to attract men with their bodies? Why else do you think advertisers would want to part company with their hard earned cash? Despite the most vigorous protests to the contrary by "intellectual" type women like Simone de Beauvoir or Iris Murdoch or George Sand or by "sensitive" women who wish to claim that they wish to attract man not just with their bodies but also with qualities of their mind, their talents for dancing, music, art, flower arrangement or other handicrafts or their ability for loving and caring, are the protesters entirely right? No, says Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) , a German philosopher. This is the gist of the talk I heard last Saturday at the HKSHP given by Dr. Ip Tat Leung, a lecturer in Philosophy at the HKCU. Dr. Ip studied 10 years in Germany and is one of the few lecturers who studied philosophical texts in the original Greek and German lanaguages and when he quoted from the relevant passages, he quoted them in the languages in which they were first written!

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Schopenhauer is "among 19^th century philosophers...the first to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place. Inspired by Plato and Kant, both of whom regarded the world as being more amenable to reason, Schopenhauer developed their philosophies into an instinct-recognizing and ultimately ascetic outlook, emphasizing that in the face of a world filled with endless strife, we ought to minimize our natural desires to achieve a more tranquil frame of mind and a disposition towards universal beneficence. Often considered to be a thoroughgoing pessimist, Schopenhauer in fact advocated ways — via artistic, moral and ascetic forms of awareness — to overcome a frustration-filled and fundamentally painful human condition. Since his death in 1860, his philosophy has had a special attraction for those who wonder about life's meaning, along with those engaged in music, literature, and the visual arts." His principal work is his Die Welt als Wille un Vorstellung (The World as Will /Reality and Representation/Appearance or The Inner and Outer Nature of the World) 1819. To him the world is blind, absolutely free, endlessly striving without purpose, self-determining and almighty and hence beyond good and evil. It just is the way that it is. His aphoristic writing style and thoughts have influenced many later philosophers, artists, scientists and writers including  Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Wittgenstein, Erwin Shrodinger, Einstein, Freud, Otto Rank, Jung, Tolstoy and Jorge Luis Borges. He is also influenced by Hindu Upanishadic writings and also Buddhist thoughts.

Whatever might have been his later influence, Schopenhauer was greatly affected in his thinking by the rising science of biology. To him, the most potent force in the world is biological. He did not agree with Plato, Aristotle and the rationalists that man is basically a rational animal. He wishes to emphasize the "animal" rather more than the "rational" part of man, which he thought Western philosophy has ignored up to his time. To him, man is subject to a "blind" will struggling for expression within himself which he calls Wille um Leben ( Will to Life) . That will is given to him by Nature. He is born with it. He did not ask for it. Yet he is controlled by it. The will is not entirely subject to his reasoning powers. That blind will however, does not work for the benefit of the individual controlled by it. It works for the benefit of his race. We see this will in action not only in man, but also in the animals and plants. Here do we not see a trace of the origin of Richard Dawkins' idea about The Selfish Gene?  We may also see here the origins of Freud's idea of the libido and the Jungian idea of the collective unconscious. and the shadow. To Schopenhauer, the purpose of all what he calls "transactions" or "dealings" or "exchanges" about "love", which he regards as "more important than all other aims in man's life"  is the propagation of the species and the "composition of the next generation". All man's struggle for money, for power, for fame etc can ultimately be traced to this primal instinctual but blind urge. To put it bluntly and even brutally, even the basis of all art may be sex! To Schopenhauer, human desires and willing causes pain and suffering but man may for brief moments, escape this pain through esthetic contemplation. This paves the way for Freud's conception of art as sublimation of the sexual desire. Art is a disguise for sex or sexual display in one form or another and diverts man attention from the grave everyday concerns and the seriousness of practical living into a world which consists of mere play of images especially in the form of music which does not imitate any other images in life and which engrosses itself with the play of the pure forms of the will itself.  Music is not mimetic, it does not copy ideas, as realistic literature or realistic forms of painting do.But here sex must be understood to include also an element of power. Art is here seen as a means of escape. Another way is through '" total absorption" in the world as
represention. Whilst art and esthetics may suspend the Will temporarily and ethics may mortify it, the ultimate solution is not esthetics nor ethics but ascetics which annhilates it. But that is a different matter. Although sex, which is the manifestation of the Will to Life in an individual, may be important, not many understand their own bodies and how their sex hormones may affect their own psyche. Scientists have found that when ovulating, women prefer their men to be hard and tough but when they are menstruating, they wish them to be soft and sensitive. Hence the perpetual perplexed expressions on men's face: what do women want ! ?! The image of  Rex Harrison's face and his song in My Fair Lady would then appear in my mind's eye.

To Schopenhauer, what is important is not man's individual happiness but the happiness of his species, the need to preserve "the special qualities" of one's race. All man's sufferings and all his strifes are thus ultimately  "transcendental"  and tracebale to this blind will to life and which is expressed in man as his sexual drive. In the case of an individual, this universal and general sexual drive is directed at a specific object, a specific target: their lover for the time being. If man thinks otherwise, the reason could only be that he has been "deceived" by Nature. To him, to achieve its purpose, Nature is deceitful. And as between the two sexes, women are closer to Nature than men, women are more naturally deceitful than men. If women also appear to be "equally" attracted to reason, to abstract thoughts, to science, to the arts like music, painting, sculpture, to literature etc., they seldom or rarely do so for their own sake, but only for the sake of making themselves more attractive to those men who appear to them to be more genuinely attracted to those things.They put them on as they put on their dresses, their shoes, their jewellery and their make-up to present themselves in a more "refined"  light.  Women have a proverbial love of beauty. To Schopenhauer, they do so only for the purposes of attracting the kind of men they want to copulate with and to bear their children. Here I can anticipate the cries of "male chauvinist pigs" or worst from those who wish to continue to deceive themselves and those whom they wish to attract.

To Schopenhauer, the essential of "love" is not loving back but mere physical possession. All the rest of the deceiving paraphernalia of "care and concern" are merely instruments for the achievement of this ultimate object. The ultimate object of all the desires of the lovers for merging, of infatuation in the object of their love is not for that object in himself/herself, but for the ultimate object of their union: their baby. To him, women do not have any innate sense of justice. Once her desire for procreation and for mating is involved, all sense of justice, of fairness will have to step aside: she will not hesitate to lie, to threaten, to wheedle, to seduce to get her way! To the woman, that ultimate aim overrides and justifies all her deception and all her selfishness. But man is not much better. He too is equally controlled by this blind biological urge but because he is not directly involved in actually giving birth, he has to give to the woman the kind of protection she needs in terms of power, money, status, fame etc so that theoretically she may nurture her young and he is even more direct in the expression of his physical need. Once his sexual urges are triggered, all his thoughts, his reason, his other passions fly through the window!  He is concerned only with the satisfaction of his sexual urges!

To me, there is a great deal of truth in Schopenhauer's observations about the differences between the sexes. Of course, there can and always will be exceptions. But in general, I think he has pointed correctly to an area which too many men and women, especially moralists, have chosen to consciously or unconsciously ignore: the fact that at the end of the day, we are all biological creatures, animals with a need to procreate. Our civilizations are ultimately premised upon our continuation as a species. All our economies, our social organizations are merely more or less elaborate structures we have managed to build up through our different civilizations to support this ultimate goal of all life: the generation of more life. In building my own theology, I have now found an ally in Schopenhauer.  I must read him in more depth.