“ The difference between man and woman is like that between animals
and plants,’ he said. ‘Men correspond to animals, while women correspond to
plants because their development is more placid and the principle that
underlies it is the rather vague unity of feeling. When women hold the helm of
government, the state is at once in jeopardy, because women regulate their
actions not by the demands of universality but by arbitrary inclinations and
opinions. Women are educated—who knows how?—as it were by breathing in
ideas, by living rather than by acquiring knowledge. The status of manhood,
on the other hand, is attained only by the stress of thought and much
technical exertion.’ “
“Thank you, that will be quite enough. I’d rather not hear any more
statements like that.”
“But it is a striking example of how people’s views of what is rational
change all the time. It shows that Hegel was also a child of his time. And so
are we. Our ‘obvious’ views will not stand the test of time either.”
“What views, for example?”
“I have no such examples.”
“Why not?”
“Because I would be exemplifying things that are already undergoing a
change. For instance, I could say it’s stupid to drive a car because cars
pollute the environment. Lots of people think this already. But history will
prove that much of what we think is obvious will not hold up in the light of
history.”
“I see.”
“We can also observe something else: The many men in Hegel’s time
who could reel off gross broadsides like that one on the inferiority of women
hastened the development of feminism.”
“How so?”
“They proposed a thesis. Why? Because women had already begun to
rebel. There’s no need to have an opinion on something everyone agrees on.
And the more grossly they expressed themselves about women’s inferiority,
the stronger became the negation.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You might say that the very best that can happen is to have energetic
opponents. The more extreme they become, the more powerful the reaction
they will have to face. There’s a saying about ‘more grist to the mill.’ “
“My mill began to grind more energetically a minute ago!”
“From the point of view of pure logic or philosophy, there will often be a
dialectical tension between two concepts.”
“For example?”
“If I reflect on the concept of ‘being,’ I will be obliged to introduce the
opposite concept, that of ‘nothing.’ You can’t reflect on your existence without
immediately realizing that you won’t always exist. The tension between ‘being’
and ‘nothing’ becomes resolved in the concept of ‘becoming.’ Because if
something is in the process of becoming, it both is and is not.”
“I see that.”
“Hegel’s ‘reason’ is thus dynamic logic. Since reality is characterized by
opposites, a description of reality must therefore also be full of opposites.
Here is another example for you: the Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr is
said to have told a story about Newton’s having a horseshoe over his front