1 Introduction – the Woman Question

I propose to approach the “woman question” in Schopenhauer from an original angle. It is true that Schopenhauer was deeply misogynistic, but it is not clear how philosophically interesting this accurate description might be. Questions of Schopenhauer’s misogyny focus on the extent to which he regarded women as objects of philosophical interest or of personal antagonism; I propose, by contrast, to think not just about women but as a woman, which is to say I propose to consider women not as philosophical objects but philosophizing subjects, and not with regard to “Schopenhauer,” but instead with regard to a text, The World as Will and Representation.Footnote ¹

On the face of it, this does not seem like a particularly engaging philosophical question, much less a “woman question.” Schopenhauer never denied that women are capable of thinking philosophical thoughts. However, I do not want to look at this empirically, but rather philosophically; that is, to think about the extent to which the subject of philosophy could be, not a universal subject (“a winged cherub without a body,”Footnote ² as Payne so marvelously renders it), but a gendered subject. Is the subject of philosophy sexed? Is sexual difference ontological difference in The World as Will and Representation?

The Cambridge Critical Guide series seeks to focus philosophical attention on texts rather than authors. And so the concept of this volume invites us contributors to think about The World as Will and Representation rather than about Schopenhauer. I believe it is very helpful, given the questions I wish to address, to be in conversation with a text rather than a philosopher. Indeed, this text-based approach helps remove some obstacles to a feminist appropriation – the “great man” theory of philosophy assumes just the sort of mastery relation of the philosopher over his text that I will be trying to put into question. But if, as Barthes claimed, the death of the author is the birth of the reader, it is still the case that there are different sorts of readers. I am a woman reader. Does the text belong to me? Or does it belong to me only if I promise to lose myself in the universal? What is at stake is not simply the question of women (an undefinable concept), but the question of multiplicity and difference.Footnote ³

2 Mastery

In the case of The World as Will and Representation, however much we dismiss the figure of an author looming over the text, we cannot ignore the extent to which an author figure lurks within it. Unlike major philosophical texts by Kant and Hegel, which efface their own authorship and assume an air of impersonal objectivity, WWR is strongly marked by the authorial presence of an avatar of Schopenhauer. This intrusive authorial effect directs the reader’s attention, lodges jealous accusations of plagiarism against other authors, chides us for our insufficient mastery of Schopenhauer’s earlier texts, and, most importantly, makes repeated proprietorial claims that it alone is responsible for organizing the meaning of the text. The text, it insists, is the working out of its own “single thought” (WWR 1, 284).Footnote ⁴

The result of this insistent “authorial” presence is that the text refers itself to a dominating subject voice. And there are grounds for thinking that this (constructed) subject is specifically masculine – that the philosophical subject in control of the text is gendered male. An argument can be made for this assertion on the entirely general grounds that the intellect in the tradition of European philosophy has been implicated in a power structure of dominance which has been gendered strongly as masculine.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, there is a complicity, as Rosi Braidotti says, “between the dominant notion of ‘subjectivity’ and the image of triumphant masculinity.”Footnote ⁶ The subject is conceived in contrast to a feminized irrational other, such as emotion, nature (or the body),Footnote ⁷ and valued to the extent that it can subordinate or exclude this other and assert control of the process of philosophy. In Schopenhauer’s infamous later essay, “On Women,” the excluded other is in fact women themselves. In his careful reading of the text, Thomas Grimwood argues that the essay is not simply a misogynistic screed, as is often thought, but rather a systematic attempt to demonstrate that women cannot occupy a subject position, either morally or economically.Footnote ⁸ Men, by contrast, can – moral and economic subjects must be male.Footnote ⁹

This conclusion is of great interest for the purposes of my essay, but not decisive toward resolving whether sexual difference operates on a metaphysical level in WWR. Gender is often thought of as a merely empirical difference – superficial and only contingently related to cognition or subjectivity. But if masculinity is normative, as it could well be in both texts (implicitly in WWR, by virtue of the philosophical voice being construed on a dominance model, and explicitly in “On Women,” by virtue of women being excluded), then masculinity, at least, is not contingent at all but a necessary feature of a fully constituted subject. And although this is relevant to the question of the relation between subjectivity and gender, it falls short of addressing the question of sexual difference.

It is important to see why this is the case. It is clear that “On Women” operates with a traditional conception of masculinity as dominance, and an equally traditional conception of femininity as deficiency. Woman are defined, certainly when it comes to cognition, not by what we have but by what we lack. Masculinity occupies the position of the universal, and femininity falls outside of the universal. Women are like men, only not very good men. Our moral and economic capabilities fall short of what is required for full subjectivity. This conception of femininity does not enable any interesting conception of sexual difference. There are no two poles that might differ – there is one normative pole, masculinity, and any given subject is either more or less proximate to that one pole. Being a female subject has no positive meaning or value – it simply marks one as deficient in whatever qualities makes male subjects so successful.

There is evidence, however, that more than this is going on, in Volume 2 of WWR at least, in the essay on the “Metaphysics of Sexual Love.” The essay verges on the suggestion that femininity might bring with it a characteristic knowledge. To begin with, the text makes explicit the masculinity of the authorial position, mentioning, for instance: “the profound sense of earnest with which we examine each of a woman’s body parts, and with which she does the same to us” (WWR 2, 564). The text explicitly aligns with masculine knowledge; there are two sides in the game of sexual desire (although a third lurks suggestively in the appendix to Schopenhauer’s essay), and the text situates its author (and its readers, who are included in the “us”) on one of them. But more significantly, a little later in the text we can note a hint of epistemic modesty attached to the masculinity of the perspective; after specifying the sort of woman that is most sexually attractive to men, down to optimal bosom size, the text states: “Naturally we cannot specify with equal precision the unconscious considerations that determine a woman’s inclination” (WWR 2, 560). It is a strange moment. There is a knowledge specific to women which is apparently (but “naturally”) unavailable to the authorial avatar in the text.Footnote ¹⁰ Nor would this epistemic deficiency be supplied simply by asking a woman, because the considerations are “unconscious” (although the avatar seems to be in possession of facts about the male unconscious). The lingering blind spot for the text is a familiar one: “What do women want?” It is in this question that the text discovers the gender-specific limitations of the subject of philosophy – the extent to which the subject of knowledge is conditioned by sexual difference.

3 Readership

It is a historical irony that Schopenhauer owed much of the popularity of his texts to women critics, readers, and translators. In her study of the reception of Schopenhauer’s texts, Brilmyer points out that British women (such as George Eliot and Helen Zimmern) were among the first to take Schopenhauer seriously, and their often anonymous work facilitated the translation and reception of his texts into English, and from England back to Germany.Footnote ¹¹ Further, Brilmyer shows how British women found Schopenhauer’s theories highly congenial, and found resources in them to articulate and develop a distinctive feminist politics through literary works. Looking at these developments can help us to understand better what a distinctive female voice in WWR might be, or at least, might say.

There were several features of WWR that these British readers and critics found appealing. One was the relative importance the text gives to the body in relation to consciousness – the repeated insistence, in the text, that knowledge is, for the most part, a function of the will, and the idea that a path to an understanding of the will can be had via our experience of our bodies, which are manifestations of will. Brilmyer writes that “Schopenhauer’s metaphysics was central to an early form of feminist philosophy, a mode of theorizing characterized by … questions concerning the materiality of desire, the experience of the body, and the importance of feeling.”Footnote ¹² This “early form of feminist philosophy” coheres quite closely with later forms of feminist philosophy. Braidotti writes that “one of the main issues for women in contemporary philosophy is the need to speak about the bodily roots of the thinking process, of all human intellect, and to reconnect theoretical discourse to its libidinal and consequently unconscious foundations.”Footnote ¹³ She focuses on Nietzsche as the first to provide a theoretical groundwork broadly accommodating of this program. However, Brilmyer’s study makes clear that the feminist potential of calling attention to the embodiment of cognition was apparently clear a century earlier, to many British readers of WWR, who argued that this text had already sketched the fundamentals of such a feminist project.

Another appealing feature of the WWR for these feminist readers was the strikingly subordinate role it gave to intellect in the constitution of personal identity, and the strikingly low value to conscious reasoning in the ordering of our affairs. In place of both of these, the text insists on the domination of the will, the prepersonal drives that govern human and natural activity: “originally and essentially … cognition is entirely in the service of the will” (WWR 1, 199). The resultant view of humanity is accordingly deflationary with respect to traditional and gendered notions of rational agency and dominance over nature; we are a part of nature, and in thrall to the same forces, not by dint of causal determinism but something more like libidinal fatalism, the inexorable pressure of will to strive to achieve its own end. And, finally, the text gives priority to forms of awareness that undercut rational knowledge, not simply in the preference it gives to intuitive over conceptual knowledge (which is a valuation that, at its basic level, Schopenhauer shares with empiricism in general), but by focusing on nonstandard forms of knowledge such as the immediate awareness we have of our bodies in cognizing the will.Footnote ¹⁴ These were some of the aspects of the texts that British women found most appealing; in appropriating these ideas for feminism they “exposed contradictions in [Schopenhauer’s] work between his ontology and his politics, reconfiguring his philosophy in order to pose challenges to masculinist models of agency, autonomy, and self-making.”Footnote ¹⁵

We don’t need to have a naïve or essentialist reading of sexual difference (men = mind/women = body) to see how these readings are in league with feminism. We simply need to understand that traditional, normative notions of agency, which align knowledge with domination, have been historically associated with masculinity – have operated in the construction of masculinity, and functioned ideologically to consolidate patriarchal distributions of power (for instance, by devaluing passivity and emotion and then describing women as passive and/or emotional). But at the same time, the mere act of challenging this model and introducing alternatives need not be remotely feminist; it could simply be the introduction of opposing philosophical ideas, motivated by opposing philosophical considerations. The question at hand was never whether there is a “women’s way of knowing” (whatever that might mean) but whether the subject of knowledge is situated, and, if so, whether gender is one of its situations. The fact that challenges to the traditional, universalizing conception of agency came from raging misogynists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche confirms the suspicion that the politics often accompanying this challenge is contingent.

I will return to this line of inquiry below. But first I want to point to Brilmyer’s observation that some of these early feminist readers did go on to extract a more essentialist feminism from Schopenhauer’s texts, by noting that they often align women fairly systematically with will. For instance, Brilmyer cites Parerga and Paralipomena’s (PP) claim that: “the ‘passions’ of women are the very ‘expression’ of ‘nature’s will’ itself.”Footnote ¹⁶ Helen Zimmern writes, approvingly, that “woman is but one remove from the will to live.” Brilmyer remarks: “Zimmern’s comments reveal that although Schopenhauer’s normative claims excluded women entirely from the picture, focusing instead on the figure of a self-controlled male subject, his ontological claims place a woman at the very base of his metaphysics, aligning them with the force that perpetuates existence.”Footnote ¹⁷

It must be said, however, that although proximity to the will is indeed a position, it is not a subject position. In some ways, WWR can be seen, not as relinquishing a conventional notion of intellectual agency as rational, masculine, and dominant, but rather as retaining this notion, and indicating its defeat. The intellect is not the master of its own house; but this is hardly a cheering thought. Rather, the defeat of the intellect seems, on the surface at least, to be yet another piece of evidence for how awful everything is. This is, after all, basically a philosophy of pessimism. The will is the feminized other that so often overpowers beleaguered cognition. Women’s agency, in this model, is like the agency of the Harpies, or Clytemnestra, or the Queen of the Night in the Magic Flute – figures of defeat of the masculine. Zimmern’s approach would lead us to the sort of feminism that retains sexist categories while reversing the valuation. The question for this essay is not whether there are different sources of power, but whether there are different subjects of knowledge. So, if we are to find female subjects of philosophy in and for WWR, I do not think we should pursue what the text says about the proximity of women to will, but rather return to a discussion of what it says about knowledge, and the possibility it holds out for different subject positions.

4 Affinities

The project of extracting resources for a nonessentialist feminism from WWR is strange enough that I wish to take a slightly more familiar task as a point of entry. As I noted earlier, Nietzsche’s texts are in the similar position of allowing for a feminist appropriationFootnote ¹⁸ that he very much did not himself authorize (and there is a well-established feminist path to his door). Moreover, Nietzsche was a devoted reader of WWR, and he drew much inspiration and many philosophical resources from that text. I believe that many of the philosophical positions that lend themselves to feminism in Nietzsche’s texts are developments of ideas that appear in WWR as well. In short, I want to start to think about the WWR’s proto-feminism by following an Ariadne’s thread laid down in Nietzsche’s texts.

As with WWR, there is of course no explicitly feminist politics in Nietzsche’s texts. However, unlike WWR, Nietzsche’s texts do have a very clear and explicit political agenda (political in the sense of aiming at a reconfiguration of power), that of challenging the dominance of Christianity and forging a new path for thought once it is released from hegemonic Christian structures. And one of the key structures to fall with the “death of God” is our image of thought as somehow autonomous. The texts make the argument that the distinction and domination relation between mind and body was only ever a function of the old, dualistic paradigm seen in both Christianity and Plato, and in the service of the Christian/Platonic devaluation of life. (Both Christianity and Plato devalue the body and the immanent world of sensuous reality in favor of the spiritual realm of the transcendent beyond.) Nietzsche’s texts introduce a conception of thought as a type of material force (or will), not distinct from the body, and they theorize the development of a new type of body just as much as they theorize a new type of philosophy: a new body capable of affirming life, and a system of thought that is the product of this affirmation. Accordingly, Nietzsche’s texts are not intended for a universal readership: Bourgeois, democratic, Wagner-loving decadent bodies are not in a position to be moved by such texts; they (probably “we”) don’t have ears to hear them, as the Anti-Christ complained.

As such, the texts open up a novel conception of philosophical readership – or rather return to a classical conception of readership as addressing an exclusive and elite audience. The text is no longer predicated on an Enlightenment idea of a public or an audience where anyone with the proper, universal, intellectual tools can enter into conversation with any idea and work cooperatively and in good faith toward a consensus about its truth. The text does not acknowledge a universal subject, only particular subjects. And the differences between these particular subjects are rooted in the differences between bodies and material practices. It is not even clear that the notion of the “subject” is expansive enough to survive this adventure.

The dissolution of the universal is another function of the “death of God” in Nietzsche’s texts, which present an image of monotheism as a suppression of the creative, pluralistic impulses of pagan, tragic thought. Having only one god means having only one perspective from which to pronounce judgments of value and truth; accordingly, the destruction of “monotono-theism”Footnote ¹⁹ introduces a polychromatic array of gods, values, truths, and perspectives – that is, subject positions, each rooted in whatever configuration of will characterizes any given body. It is important to understand the role played in this conception by will to power, the animating material drive that produces the characteristic differences between bodies. This concept of will to power is clearly a philosophical inheritance from WWR, and it grounds Nietzsche’s texts in similarly foundational materialist concerns as can be found in Schopenhauer’s texts, and the same conception of human practice as rooted in prepersonal material forces. At the same time, it functions in Nietzsche’s texts to produce difference – bodies with different capacities, engaged in conflicting practices.

As I said at the start of this discussion, there is clearly no feminist agenda at work in Nietzsche’s texts; but there is a general, iconoclastic challenge to a hegemonic power structure (Christianity) and a will to denaturalize and reconfigure values that had a fixed meaning for so long as to seem immutable. The notions of the universal subject, of universal structures of intellect, the repression of the body, the autonomy of thought – all of these are “idols” that fall under the critical hammer. Moreover, Nietzsche’s texts function in the service of a cautious optimism, which aims to generate (or regenerate) new values and structures of thought in the wake of the destruction (twilight/death) of the old ones – valuing the body over the disembodied mind, fertility (a term that aims to ground “creativity” firmly in the body) over orthodoxy and dogma, and promoting pluralism over the ideal of a normative universality. It is not hard to see how a feminist challenge to the traditional conception of a disembodied universal, normative subjectivity could take root here.

At the same time, we can understand Nietzsche’s avowed anti-feminism as coherent with his generally reactionary politics: He disliked democracy, and saw feminism as a democratic leveling of men and women. The reason that Nietzsche’s texts can be put in the service of a feminism is that their antidemocratic tendency led them to construct a set of tools that can be used to value difference. While feminism is not generally antidemocratic, when it involves the affirmation of the plurality of subject positions, it can seize the opportunities these texts offer.

What about the WWR? What resources does a feminist challenge find there? As I said above, this text differs from those of Nietzsche in that there is no clear political agenda – no specific power structure that the text is concerned to overturn. Unlike texts such as Antichrist, WWR does not pit its atheism against Christianity, but rather aligns with Christianity’s hostility to life while largely ignoring the otherwise important fact that it parts ways with Christianity over the question of the existence of a transcendent god. WWR has its primary antagonists (Hegel, philosophical optimism) but its antagonism is mostly on philosophical grounds; the politics of the antagonism are largely external to the text (the competition for popularity, in the case of Hegel). Within the text the tussle is primarily a philosophical one – in the case of Hegel, over the “pure nonsense” and “senseless, raving tangles of verbiage” (WWR 1, 456) of the ideas that Hegel imposes on the gullible public to general, ignorant approval.

However, the animosity against Hegelian philosophy is worth looking at more closely. The philosophical critique that Hegel’s system is “hollowest verbiage” (WWR 1, 18) points to a political dimension of the critique. If Hegel has nothing to say, why does he write? Schopenhauer answers this question, and does so with considerable derision and resentment: Hegel lives off rather than for philosophy. He is a careerist, a mercenary in the search for truth, whose primary motivation is his own fame and fortune (WWR 1, 19). He is promoting his own interests under cover of the pursuit of truth. In other words, his intellect is enslaved to his will – his philosophy is just a bid at professional advancement. The intellect is not only enthralled to the will when choosing a sexual partner, it can produce philosophy under the influence of desire, and this is the case with Hegel. By contrast, WWR claims on behalf of its noble avatar, Schopenhauer: “I am not the sort of person whose pen is swayed by personal ambition: I strive only for truth, and I write as the ancients wrote, with the sole intention of preserving my thoughts so that they can someday benefit those who understand how to think about them and to value them” (WWR 2, 478). Of course, the accusation that one’s philosophical rival is careerist is not an invention of WWR. What is new is a metaphysics to filter this accusation through – a philosophy that focuses on the subjugation of intellect to the will.

This brings the text into immediate proximity with those texts of Nietzsche that aim to “diagnose” the sort of will that drives different philosophers. Socrates (in Twilight of the Idols) is motivated by ressentiment against the well-constituted Athenian aristocrats. Kant (in Beyond Good and Evil) is motivated by pride at having written something so intensely complicated as the Critique of Pure Reason. This latter analysis is worth a closer look. Beyond Good and Evil rapidly discards (as nonsensical) the suggestion that the Critique of Pure Reason might be true, arguing instead that it is entirely vacuous and begs every important philosophical question (“answers like this belong in comedy”Footnote ²⁰). Rather, the text is motivated by, and attractive on account of, the pride that Kant took in its production.

Beyond Good and Evil does not waste time condemning Kant for his self-deception, but instead takes time to admire his charisma and its salutary effects. Socrates, on the other hand, is judged harshly for destroying the healthy Greek body by defending the slave morality of dialogical reasoning (“I recognized Socrates and Plato as symptoms of decay, as agents of Greek disintegration”Footnote ²²). Despite this difference, the relevant similarity is that both philosophies (that of Kant and that of Socrates) are symptomatic of different configurations of will – they can only be assessed in reference to the will that motivates them. Precisely the same thing is true for the critique of Hegel in WWR, which is similar, in particular, to the critique of Kant in Beyond Good and Evil. As with the critique of Kant, WWR condemns its target’s philosophy as vacuous, a lot of words with no philosophical substance. As such, the argument goes, the motivation of the author to philosophize needs to be sought elsewhere – in the case of Hegel, in a narrowly self-interested desire for intellectual prestige. Thought is referred to its material conditions, which are the object of critique (in the philosophical sense). We saw this earlier, when Volume 2 of WWR admitted its materially grounded epistemological blind spot in the case of sexual desire. And now, in the case of Hegel, we can see again that the philosophical subject is not a universal subject, but is conditioned by the particularities of its individual will, perhaps even will to power.

5 Plurality

This discussion has suggested some ideas to explore, in looking to WWR for a foothold for a feminist reader. The text does not have the rich array of resources that Nietzsche’s texts offer, with their open attack on the universal subject and the autonomy of thought, and their loud valorization of the body and fertility. But we can discern, in WWR, not only a challenge to the traditional (masculine) conception of subjectivity (an individualistic notion where the intellect wields agency by virtue of a mastery relationship over nature and the body) but a conception of thought as sometimes determined and restricted by its material conditions; indeed, the text engages in a recognizably genealogical critique that pins philosophy to its material origin in the will. So following the somewhat unexpected procedure we have established, of taking Nietzsche’s texts as our model of an accomplished feminism and looking to WWR for the seeds of this nascent feminism, we can ask: How far on this path does WWR go?

I want to start by pushing a bit more on the notion of pluralism, the dissolution of the universal notion of subjectivity. For there to be such things as female subjects of philosophy, there need to be multiple subjects – that is, we need to challenge the notion of a universal normative subjectivity. Nietzsche’s texts present just such a challenge, and defend pluralism at the level of will. Although WWR does not pluralize will in the same way as we see in Will to Power (as well as in many of Nietzsche’s published works), which present “will to power” as multiple and dispersed, there is certainly scope for pushing WWR in that direction. For one thing, the will in WWR demonstrates plurality in the form of the Ideas, which the text describes as struggling among themselves for power.Footnote ²³ Despite the metaphysical inconsistencies that the doctrine of Ideas introduces into WWR,Footnote ²⁴ the text makes foundational and extensive use of the notion, not least because it accounts for conflict on a metaphysical level. WWR is quite ambiguous, however, when it comes to thinking about the Ideas in relation to human beings. On the one hand, it equates the Idea with the species and discusses the Idea of humanity (for instance, in the discussions of poetry and historical painting in Book 3). But elsewhere the text clarifies that each individual has their own Idea, which is identified with intelligible character (WWR 1, 183). This would be grounds for a pluralism, but not necessarily of a sort that lends itself immediately to a feminism. In his article on anti-semitism in WWR, Bob Wicks argues that intelligible character is beneath the level of “historical contingency.”Footnote ²⁵ In other words, these differences don’t account for identity. Wicks means religious and ethnic identity. But what about sexual identity? Is that similarly contingent? If so, the will is not sexed.

On the other hand, the plurality of Ideas in WWR is needed to account not just for conflict in the will but for its perpetuation – the will to life needs to generate sexual difference to perpetuate itself on the level of animal life. This is a state of affairs that apparently perplexed Kant. Ursala Pia Jauch cites a letter written by Kant in the 1790s, stating, “the fact that not unity but difference is necessary for the reproduction of the human species … had ‘always’ struck him as ‘amazing and as a sort of chasm of thought’ for reason.”Footnote ²⁶ The hostility to embodiment characteristic of Kant’s writings – his inability in general to conceive that thought might have material conditions – prepares us to expect him to be amazed by this fact. Sexual difference can hardly be deduced from pure reason – it is a brute anthropological circumstance that must be invisible from the perspective of a nonmaterialist transcendental philosophy. WWR, by contrast, has resources that none of Kant’s texts apparently had, to allow thought to negotiate this chasm, though only on condition that we see sexual difference as intrinsic to the will. The metaphysical essence of humanity (the Idea of humanity) is not one but multiple, and some (half, approximately) of those multiple essences are female. There needs to be sexual difference at the level of will – sexual difference needs to be ontological difference in the WWR. Not just sexual love, but sexual difference, has a metaphysics. And not just a metaphysics, an epistemology as well; in section 2 above, we saw how there is sexually situated knowledge in WWR, specifically in the “Metaphysics of Sexual Love.” This detour through Nietzsche’s texts has enabled us to see not just how such situated knowledge is actual, but how it is possible. That is, Nietzsche’s texts allow us to notice how, in WWR, philosophy is grounded in material conditions (which is to say the will), and those material conditions can include sexual difference.

6 Not Willing

Despite the affinities that I have indicated between WWR and Nietzsche’s texts, and the use I have been able to make of their juxtaposition, it remains the case that there are stark and important differences. Nietzsche’s texts explicitly reject a normative/universal subject of knowledge, and introduce a successor notion in the image of a joyful (gay), fertile, multitude of wills to power, overflowing with abundant strength in the service of the creation of new values. This image is utterly foreign to the way in which WWR describes our grounding in the will, where we are mostly just struggling, unsuccessfully, to find enough alms to throw to the beggar so her agony is prolonged until tomorrow. If WWR contains the tools to reject a normative/universal subject of reason and to ground thought in will in ways that produce a multitude of knowledges, it is deeply unaware of that fact. Ultimately, it is not looking to situate knowledge in the will so much as it is looking to escape the will altogether; and it introduces a vehicle for this escape in the form of a pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject (WWR 1, 201).

This is why, when On the Genealogy of Morals states the case for rooting knowledge in will, it does so in clear and pointed opposition to WWR.

“Castration” is a striking image for the text to use in this context. Not only does it immediately identify the body with sexuality, but it appears to imply that the only sexuality that would need removing to make knowledge possible is stereotypically male sexuality. We can also note that as much as the Genealogy of Morals might correctly identify the “castrated intellect” as the ideal that is promoted in WWR, it is apparently not the reality for the authorial avatar in the “Metaphysics of Sexual Love.” There, “Schopenhauer” does not have an “eye turned in no particular direction” but rather an eye that looks women squarely in the chest, and admits it doesn’t know how women look at men. (And it bears mentioning that when push comes to shove, as it were, the author–effect would rather admit to ignorance and partiality, showing itself not to be the untarnished mirror of the world, than disavow its masculinity.)

Nevertheless, as manly as this ignorance might be, it remains ignorance, and the text still promotes the ideal that it does not achieve, of unbiased knowledge held by a castrated intellect. And here, on the level of the ideal, the distinction between WWR and Nietzsche’s texts becomes most visible. Optimal knowledge, for WWR, comes not from an intellect working within the constraints of the body as a medium, but from a will-less, sex-less subject whose objectivity is gained by purifying subjectivity of the epistemic blinkers of the body. I want, in conclusion, to look at the way the text presents this ideal “pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject,” to see whether it represents an affirmation of the sort of implicitly masculine, universal/normative, disembodied subject of knowledge of the sort that I have been trying to distance WWR from.

There are at least two places in the text that answer to this ideal, which is to say at least two models of this will-less subject of pure knowledge: the artistic genius and the ascetic saint. The text describes genius as a “pure cognitive subject,” possessing “the most perfect objectivity”; it is “the clear eye of the world” and “the bright mirror of the essence of the world” (WWR 1, 209). The saint is also a mirror: “a pure, cognizing being … an untarnished mirror of the world” (WWR 1, 417). It is worth noting that the genius and the saint are types distinct from the philosopher, because their knowledge is grounded in an intuitive graspFootnote ²⁸ of the object that has not been (in the case of the genius) or cannot be (in the case of the saint) raised to a discursive level of conceptual understanding. This does not mean their knowledges are deficient – rather, they are different. As Shapshay argues, “Schopenhauer takes the knowledge of intuition or feeling to be genuine theoretical knowledge.”Footnote ²⁹

The text refers to the ascetic as an “altered” or “entirely different mode of cognition” (WWR 1, 430). As for the genius:

Philosophical access to the knowledge of ascetics is even more mediated: “[Ascetic] experience is not open to all, rather it is shared by only a favored few, and is therefore described as the effect of divine grace … To understand all of this you must read [the texts of the ascetics] yourself and not make do with second-hand reports” (WWR 2, 629–30). The intuitive knowledge of the ascetic, by contrast, is bound up in ascetic practice – in “deeds and conduct” (WWR 1, 410). Because it has an irreducibly practical component it cannot be reproduced conceptually, although it is consistent with the abstract philosophical knowledge the text (“Schopenhauer”) has itself produced. Even then, the text depreciates the “feeble tongue” with which it describes saintliness (WWR 1, 409).

The figures of the genius and saint demonstrate the presence in WWR of different subject positions from which different types of philosophically relevant knowledge can be generated. The knowledge of the genius (knowledge of the Ideas) is different from the knowledge produced by the “altered” cognition of the saint (practical knowledge of the negation of the will to life). What this means is that, even if we focus on the WWR’s non-Nietzschean strategy of generating knowledge by pitting intellect against the will, a direction that does not seem friendly to the type of subject-pluralism generated by Nietzsche’s texts (which are able to ground multiple knowledges in multiple forms of will), there seems to be at least three (perhaps fourFootnote ³⁰) subject positions in WWR. In introducing alternative subject positions, the text is in league with the sort of challenge to a normative, universal conception of subjectivity that we will only find clearly developed in Nietzsche’s texts.

Another key feature of the traditional conception of subjectivity is its implicit masculinity, and I will now look to see if it is possible to distance WWR from this feature as well. We noted the explicit masculinity of the subject of philosophy in WWR in section 2 of this essay, and the text extends this masculine privilege to the figure of the genius, declaring (unoriginally, and in league with traditional theories of geniality) that “females can have significant talent but not genius” (WWR 2, 409). By contrast, it is striking how many women are cited as prominent ascetics – Madame de Guyon, for instance, is one of the key references here. This has led John Atwell to write that: “Schopenhauer believes women to equal, or even to excel, men in two of the highest forms of human existence, namely, asceticism (or saintliness) and morality – both of which require a sort of knowledge exceeding that of cold, cool, deliberative rationality.”Footnote ³¹ It would certainly be convenient for me to accept Atwell’s claim, which gives me a shortcut to my desired conclusion, that there are female subjects of knowledge in WWR. But this is an unsatisfyingly empirical way to resolve the issue: The fact that a significant percentage of the individuals who (empirically) occupy a given subject position are women, does not in itself feminize the subject position.

It is more interesting, therefore, to think about the implicit masculinity of the traditional subject position. This implicit masculinity, according to Rosi Braidotti’s criterion, comes from its implication in a mastery relation with its other. There is certainly a model of the triumphant philosopher-subject in operation in the WWR (that of “Schopenhauer,” laying claim to mastery over its text). It is a form of cognition that, the text says, “is in conflict with the will to life and our judgment applauds the victory of cognition over the will” (WWR 2, 40). But there is an alternative model in the text as well, in which knowledge looks more like passive resistance. The subject position of the saint derives its agency not from dominance but instead from standing still – it is the agency of quietism, “i.e. the cessation of all willing, asceticism, i.e. the intentional extirpation of one’s own will” (WWR 2, 48). Certainly there is a paradox in the notion of resisting the will (isn’t resistance just more will?) but this reinforces the point I am making, by signaling a problem with the continued vocabulary of mastery and dominance.

Finally, the traditional conception of subjectivity was problematic in being disembodied, with what On the Genealogy of Morals described earlier as a view from nowhere. Indeed, the models that WWR presents of pure will-less subjects of knowledge might appear to dismiss the body. The text cites philosophers who “deplor[e] the communion of the soul with the body and wish to be free of it” (WWR 2, 623). But, looked at more carefully, we can see that the insight ascetics have into the will, and geniuses have into the Ideas, is very much conditioned by their embodiment. The relation to the body might be one of antagonism or hard-won indifference, but these are still relationships, attitudes to embodiment rather than an achieved transcendence. Shapshay cautions us not to mistake the embodied subject in WWR with the type of subject evident in Kant’s texts, who resemble “a disembodied, rational entity, ‘a winged cherub without a body’ ” (WWR 1, 99).Footnote ³² As Shapshay says:

In other words, WWR contains the resources to address the problem of epistemic motivation. If resistance to the will is what makes knowledge possible for the genius and the saint, embodiment is what makes this knowledge matter. In sum, the accusation in the Genealogy of Morals that WWR promotes a disembodied subjectivity is inaccurate. WWR contains a conception of subjectivity that is neither masculine, universal, normative, dominating, nor disembodied.

7 Final Thoughts

What can we conclude from all this? I started this essay by pointing to a problem that many feminist scholars have noted: that most historical texts in philosophy privilege an implicitly masculine subject position. That is, most canonical philosophical texts illegitimately universalize a particular view of subjectivity – they take the position of their author, of a socially elite cis masculinity, and normalize it, treating it as emblematic of humanity. This canonical subject position is generally developed by centering rationality and othering nature, emotion, the body, etc. It privileges mastery, autonomy, and ownership and devalues interconnectedness and situated knowledge – it treats its own mode of knowledge as unsituated – a view from nowhere. And it functions politically (ideologically) to justify the way in which power is unequally distributed between men and women.

As I have said, there is nothing intrinsically masculine about reason or independence, and nothing intrinsically feminine about relationships or nature. To found a feminism on the equation of women and nature is to accept and help consolidate the terms of the old system of oppression. And the problem with the old conception of subjectivity is not only that it devalued women, but that it was wrong. It took a parochial conception of what it meant to be a person, and illegitimately universalized it. There is nothing specifically feminist about contesting the traditional notion of subjectivity in favor of an acknowledgment of embodiment and a pluralism of subject positions. It has fallen to feminism to do so only because of the ideological function the traditional view serves. In meeting this challenge, however, feminism works to liberate not only women but people in general, who are constrained by the normalizing presuppositions of this normative subjectivity. And once we have started to unravel the old conception, we can break down some of the old barriers and realize that there are many subject positions that we can occupy as knowers, and that the body – even the sexed body, whether male, female, or nonbinary – is not extrinsic to thought.

Again: This conclusion works not just in the service of liberation, but in the service of truth; there are sufficient, non-political, “purely” philosophical motivations for this view. And so feminists have found unlikely and inadvertent allies who have aligned with this critical project. The argument of this essay – all I have been trying to show – is that WWR is among the texts that we have to thank for this service to our cause.