Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is a landmark study in how western culture arrived at the state it found itself in in the 20th century, using the tools of psychoanalysis and traditional but quite politically incorrect concepts of gender. The chapter on Scientific Knowledge vs Poetic Knowledge alone is worth the price of the book. Any brief summary may do more harm than good, by making Stern sound simplistic, but it needs to be done.
Stern begins by describing a typical condition he, as a psychoanalyst, often saw in his patients at the time of his writing (1965): the restless man of action, unable to receive, not at peace with the opposite sex, skeptical of any matters requiring faith, and complaining of ulcers. Stern goes on to carefully show from the researches of psychologists and philosophers how the polarity of the sexes is more than a sexist myth. Feminity and Masculinity are not simply aspects of physical apparatus. There are legimate reasons why in cultures world-wide the masculine has been associated with analysis, science, destructiveness, working against nature to tame it, change it, etc., and why the feminine has likewise been associated with nature itself, or the soul itself, and with nurture, love, intuition, and wisdom of a different kind.
Then he spends the main mass of the book demonstrating how six influential Western thinkers demonstrated and contributed to this obsession with the masculine modes of knowing and a rejection of the feminine: Descartes, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Kierkegaard. Most of them had painful relations with the feminine in their childhoods or adolescence, which manifested in their adult years in complicated or painful relations with women, and the writings of each reflected an omnipresence of the analytic and a "Flight from Woman," a rejection of the intuitive. In an early chapter, "Psychoanalysis and Metaphysics" he addresses a possible contention, that such analysis is an ad hominem kind of attack on these men. But he ends (not sticking to a chronological order) with Goethe, who in the finale of his masterpiece, Faust, seems to have found and expressed the solution.
The flight from Woman in western culture, Stern argues, is bound up with the flight from religion, for in the Christian tradition there is no relation with God without dependence, humility, and reception of God's creative grace and allowing it to act upon us.
Of course, not long after Stern wrote, the pendulum swung the other way in Western culture. Instead of the restless and scientific man of action, we got the "sensitive New Age guy," as one song puts it. Eastern religion with its tendency toward complete passivity in action and thought became wildly popular. Science is more distrusted than ever, the rigidity of good rational thinking is nearly unknown, and religion has been traded in for an entirely subjective "spirituality." But this only validates the history preceding it, as Stern has outlined it. In a sense, it is all "footnotes to Orthodoxy," G. K. Chesteron's gem in which he pointed out that rationality taken to its logical conclusion without reference to intuition and mystery becomes irrational. Literary theory's transition from structuralism to post-structuralist thought with its outlandish and self-contradictory conclusions are only one example among many.
Despite the weighty issues it addresses, the book is written in a gentle tone with an unacademic style. Parts of it, such as the story of Kierkegaard's broken love affair, are even moving.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Flight From Woman
Get 19% OFF
0 comments:
Post a Comment