Life /
Professional feminists' of Poland meet-up [631]
As a poster already pointed out, men have the highest IQ's and also the lowest. Women tend to hug the middle grounds and I suppose that is part of nature's plan. Of course most people are not in the extremes be they male or female.
Those type of statements stem from a desire to acknowledge the truth in regards to the sexes while trying to sugar coat the whole thing for female consumption. "Men are smarter, but they are also dumber!" "All innovation is the product of male aggression!"
The fear of female opinion this reveals is a testament to the power exerted by women over the whole of society, a power which has always been in their possession, despite the charge of patriarchal dominance. Truth is that men, being naturally authoritarian, are merely better at barking orders and punishing transgressors. True power is the ability to sway the herd, which is the domain of the "fairer" sex, who IS the herd.
Indeed, this is essentially where the problem lies. Individuality defines masculinity, while aggregation is the basic nature of femininity, which exists, quite literally, in a state of perpetual "group-consciousness". This is probably obvious to anyone who has at all considered the matter, but nobody ever dug as deep as Otto Weininger, who's masterpiece
Sex and Character is the final word on the "woman question" and has been for the past century.
As an epistolary, it is important to specify that masculinity and femininity are abstractions which do not exist in real life. Weininger spends considerable amount of time
arguing, quite successfully, that all human beings exist in a state of hermaphrodism, everybody being biologically both male and female,
in various degrees (Incidentally, this also explains homosexuality, which, when seen from this perspective, is in fact quite "natural"). All that follows applies to the abstractions, all though this essentially precludes the existance of exceptions, for every achievement of woman is due the "masculine" element of her biological essence and as such it is to be considered essentially male in nature. Weininger wasn't the only one to notice the "masculine" quality of all great women. In the words of Ambrose Bierce: "Women of genius commonly have masculine faces, figures and manners. In transplanting brains to an alien soil God leaves a little of the original earth clinging to the roots".
To return to our previous argument. Not all males are individuals (when the female component is high enough), but all individuality is male. It is masculinity and masculinity alone which posses the individual ego, the I, the self, the unique form of individual consciousness, the
soul that separate us from the mere emotional/instinctive state which is found in the animal kingdom. Women, by and large, do not have an individual ego, and are by extension soulless. This, of course, does not imply that women lack all reasoning powers and the ability of
thought, but they don't see themselves as individual entities disconnected from time with the ability to envision the past as well as the future (Schopenhauer), their consciousness being inextricably tied with that of
all women, so that their thoughts are the thoughts of womanhood and so are their desires, hopes and wishes. For themselves, they care not, for they have no conception of self, see nothing of the future and only live by the spur of the moment, unaffected by the realization of their own mortality, which by contrast is what gnaws at the heart of every man.
The reason this is essential in understanding why only men are capable of genius is that the latter is essentially an higher form of individual consciousness, it's a matter of fact,
the very highest. Of course, nowadays genius is misinterpreted as being some form of "super intelligence" or, in the case of art, a superior "talent". Truth is, genius has nothing to do with IQ, it has nothing to do with talent, it is merely the ultimate form of individual expression, the ultimate manifestation of the will (Nietzsche), and it's produce is a corollary to the eternal struggle of the death denial (Ernest Becker), the essential pursuit for immortality by
projecting the individual ego into the most durable and valuable (universal) truths, manifested in the great works of art, all the philosophy, religious dogma ect. which characterizes a civilization. Indeed, all cultures are a product of individual genius, by which we can all share this pursuit for immortality (as Mark Twain said : "Next to possessing genius one's self is the power of appreciating it in others").
Because genius is a form of extreme masculinity, it is impossible that woman, no matter how biologically close to man, will be able to achieve this higher state of consciousness, which is already impossibly rare among males.
So how does one recognizes genius? In principle, exposure is essentially the only mean available. Since it cannot be explained, it has to be revealed from first hand account, but that of course requires a nurturing of one's individual ego, which can only occur in isolation (Tarkovsky) . Because all genius is consciousness, we need to define what "unconsciousness" means. Weininger does this by introducing the idea of the "henid", which can be defined as "an unclarified, sub-conscious
feelingtheabsolute.net/ottow/henid.html
A vague, unformed, foggy or confused idea. A disorganized, undifferentiated thought. A proto-thought.".
He offers the following example:
"I made a note, half mechanically, of a page in a botanical work from which later on I was going to make an extract. Something was in my mind in henid form. What I thought, how I thought it, what was then knocking at the door of my consciousness, I could not remember a minute afterwards, in spite of the hardest effort. I take this case as a typical example of a henid."
And again:
"A common example from what has happened to all of us may serve to illustrate what a henid is. I may have a definite wish to say something particular, and then something distracts me, and the "it" I wanted to say or think has gone. Later on, by some process of association, the "it" is quite suddenly reproduced, and I know at once that it was what was on my tongue, but, so to speak, in a more perfect stage of development."
In short, without individual consciousness, all thoughts exist in henid form. This explains the superficiality and general
falseness of women through out their various "pretend" activities. Since they have no true understanding of things, everything for them has an
emotional value and nothing more. A work of art is said to exist in henid form when it is accused of being all "style", with no substance, the latter being defined by the specific form of consciousness which exist when the henid has developed from proto to concrete thought. The greatest civilizations are those which, thanks to their greater incidence of genius have managed to develop a large number of thoughts related to the problems of human existence (art, morality, conduct ect.) from an henid to an elevated state of consciousness. All avant-garde is a glorification of the henid, as is post-modern ideology in general, which is a direct negation there can be any other state of understanding besides the henid in the first place.
