** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 749 23 November 17 SEX AND METAPHYSICS

SEXUAL ABUSE HYSTERIA WILL PUT AN END TO SEX? ONE FAMOUS PHILOSOPHER WOULD CHEER.
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Will the sexual abuse brouhaha lead to no sex at all? Douglas Murray, an eloquent gay writer, so wondered in The Spectator. Up in some implausible Heaven, a great German philosopher would rejoice at that. His name is Arthur Schopenhauer.

‘Only men besotted by the orgasmic drive would call the stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged sex the fair sex’, Schopenhauer foams. He terms women ‘the un-aesthetic sex’ and piles heaps of verbal abuse on men’s mothers, wives, lovers, sisters and daughters. Not that his opinion of female intellect is higher: ‘The mere idea of woman judge makes one laugh’, he scoffs. He is the misogynist thinker par excellence. Beyond the venom, there are deeper reasons, however.

All twists going back to the philosopher’s mother, some speculate. A fashionable novelist, the lady’s fame made the son jealous. ‘My books will be remembered when yours are forgotten’, he told her. A correct prediction. She also had lovers – a straight case of Oedipus complex? Philosopher Bertrand Russell, of opposite opinion concerning the fair sex, thought so. Regardless, the young Schopenhauer was not sexually repressed. He had many affairs and in Venice competed unsuccessfully with Lord Byron for a woman’s favours. In his old age he was flattered when a female offered to sculpt his bust. He invited her to stay in his flat and called her ‘my little wife’. Such are a great thinker’s pathetic contradictions.

To really understand Schopenhauer’s deep hatred of women you must look not at psychology but at metaphysics. He was not a modest man: ‘My system contains the solution to the riddle of existence’, he boasted. (A megalomania German-speaking philosophers are prone to. A century later, Wittgenstein claimed the same.) A solution set forth in his book, The World as Will and Idea. Kant had contended that behind phenomena – the ordinary things, tables, chairs, cats and dogs of your daily life - stood the frustratingly unknowable ‘thing in itself’. ‘I have found it!’ Schopenhauer exulted. It is the Will. A blind, mechanical cosmic force he detected throughout nature, as well as in men. Separateness, plurality, individual subjects – you and I - are illusions – there is only One Thing, One Will. And the sex drive, the instinct for reproduction, the continuation of physical life are expressions of that single, blind Force. Now, the punch line: the Will is wicked! It traps men into a
never-ending quest for the satisfaction of their desires. Like rats in a wheel. Extinction of the Will is the way-out. Stop willing and the world, the illusion will come to an end. You achieve liberation, enter Nirvana – only there is no longer any ‘you’. And that’s it.

Schopenhauer believed the insights of Hinduism and Buddhism backed him up. He invoked the Veil of Maya. Reality is like a magic show. A clumsy deception. A wicked delusion. Lift the veil and behind the manifold of appearances the sage will behold nothing. It follows that creation is bad. Religions like Judaism and Islam, which postulate the goodness of the world, are abominated. Christianity fares better, thanks to doctrines like the Fall of Man and Original Sin. Healthy, realistic pessimism for Schopenhauer. Asceticism is OK. Much married prophets like Moses and Muhammad, he intensely dislikes. Jesus, by contrast, having no wife or sex, scores higher.

Here lies the essence, the real ground, the rationale of the philosopher’s horrendous misogyny. Why are women bad? Why does their sex deserve much obloquy? Not because of broad hips and short legs but because they give life. Women are intrinsically bound up with maternity. They – well, most of them - give birth to children. Men of course, driven by their lusts, play a role but it is women who bear children and give birth. Actions that extend and perpetuate the illusion of the world. That reinforce Maya’s veil. That’s the fundamental, profound reason why the philosopher is so fiercely anti-women. Voila! J’accuse la metaphysique!

Schopenhauer penned another book, On the Basis of Morality, in which he condemns vices like onanism, bestiality and homosexuality – by which he means pederasty – as contrary to nature.  Pederasty he understood as corruption of minors, hence a crime against justice. Still, in The World as Will and Idea he asks how a practice so contrary to nature could arise from nature, i.e. be universally widespread. He argues that pederasty is chiefly an old man’s vice. Now, when oldies go to women to procreate, their offspring will usually be weak, feeble and defective. That is a danger to the species – and the species matters infinitely more than the individual – so pederasty, by inclining old codgers away from women, is ‘natural’, i.e. actually serves the purposes of Nature. A curious argument…

Pre-pubertal children, unlike women, are fine, he holds. Sensible, reasonable and eager to learn. Because their genital development is still to happen. That vehement of all manifestation of the will is still dormant. Childhood is thus the paradise of life. True?

Does the counter-sexual, feminist-driven counter-revolution fingered by Douglas Murray risk making people scared of having sex, as he humorously suggests? Not a chance. The Will to Life is too mighty. Despite the sisters’ witch hunt, the media’s hysteria, the legal prosecutions, lives and careers ruined, the sexual urge in men (and women) remains irrepressible. You might as well stop the force of gravity and water flowing downwards. No way. Too bad. Or rather…good!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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