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Kant On "Woman"

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edited 8/19/11

Living a quiet and exceedingly orderly life of a professorial bachelor in the Prussian city of Konigsberg, Kant methodically created a philosophical system which revolutionized man’s view of himself and his world.

His writings for the basis of modern philosophy, and his work vividly illustrated the limitations of man’s intellect. Kant set up logical antimonies demonstrating that certain problems cannot be solved, that the essence of things cannot be grasped, and postulated faith and individual responsibility as the ultimate source and supreme guide for man’s knowledge and morality.

Kant never really desired marriage preferring the company of his devoted servant Lampe and his beloved books. His attitude toward women was ambivalent. While denying them “certain high insights,” he viewed woman as the very embodiment of the beautiful and even the sublime.

Kant

Immanual Kant (1724 – 1804)
A German philosopher who explored what it is possible to know and was one of the most influential thinkers of his or any other time.


Woman has a superior feeling for the beautiful, so far as it pertains to herself.
-- Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

Women have a strong inborn feeling for all that is beautiful, elegant, and decorated. . . . Very early they have a modest manner about themselves, know how to give themselves a fine demeanor and be self-possessed--and this at an age when our wellbred male youth is still unruly, clumsy, and confused.
-- Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

The virtue of a woman is a beautiful virtue. . . . Women will avoid the wicked not because it is unright, but because it is ugly; and virtuous actions mean to them such as are morally beautiful. Nothing of duty, nothing of compulsion, nothing of obligation! Woman is intolerant of all commands and all morose constraint. They do something only because it pleases them, and the art consists in making only that please them, which is good.
-- Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

[Woman’s] philosophy is not to reason, but to sense.
-- Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

A woman is embarrassed little that she does not possess certain high insights; that she is timid, and not fit for serious employment . . . . She is beautiful and captivates, and that is enough.
-- Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

Even if a woman excels in arduous learning and painstaking thinking they will exterminate the merits of her sex.
-- Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

Women are more inclined to be miserly than men. This is in keeping with the nature of woman, for the women have to be more sparing since they are spending money which they do not earn themselves.
-- Lectures on Ethics

Women, Jews, and priests do not usually get drunk, because they are bourgeoisly weak and find restraint necessary; for their worth rests entirely upon the belief of others in their chastity, piety, and lawabidingness.
-- Quoted in F. X. Arnold’s Woman and Man: Their Nature and Mission

Because she [a woman] is weak, she is clever.
-- Fragments

Woman wants control, man self-control . .
-- Anthropology, Scattered Observations

Man must be manly and woman womanly; effeminacy in man pleases as little as does masculinity in woman.
-- Lectures on Ethics

Man should become more perfect as a man, and the woman as a wife . .
. -- Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

Providence has put in their [women’s] breast kind and benevolent sensations, a fine feeling for propriety and a complaisant soul. One should not at all demand sacrifices and generous self-restraint [from women].
-- Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime


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