In Defense of Henry Louis Mencken
Otto Weininger was a young Austrian philosopher who, at the tender age of twenty-three, checked into a room at the Schwarzspanierstraße 15, the same building that Beethoven died in, and shot himself in the stomach. His life’s work, a “biological-psychological” “study” titled “Sex and Character” which sought “to place sex relations in a new and decisive light” had, after three years of effort and revisions, found a publisher. The work had failed, however, to achieve the critical success and social upheaval that Weininger had expected.
The heart of Weininger’s philosophy is the assertion that the soul can be considered a composite existing between two dialectical poles, the masculine and feminine. The masculine, naturally, corresponds roughly to the higher self—it strives towards justice, beauty, and God. All good qualities being thus claimed, the feminine corresponds to the lower self, to bestial passions, passivity, and amorality.
Since Goethe at least it had been a popular pastime for young men to kill themselves over the love of women. Weininger was the first, however, to kill himself out of contempt for them. This novelty was not lost on the European public, and the fact that he had killed himself in the same house where Beethoven had died only increased their esteem for him. “Sex and Character” quickly became a best seller. Women, making up the majority of the reading public, enjoyed this high-metaphysical-chastisement (and after spending so many centuries atop the artist’s pedestal it must have come as a relief) and did not take long to give their own bent to Weininger’s metaphysics. The futurist poet Valentine de Saint Point, writing less than a decade after the publication of Sex and Character, stated: “It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being.”
Arthur Schopenhauer was the first to elevate the complaints of an old bachelor to the heights of philosophical inquiry with his essay “On Women”, a scathing enditement of the so-called “fairer sex”, which states directly what had hitherto only been hinted at through fables such as the Fall of Man and Pandora’s box: “Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted — in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word” Schopenhauer begins, and continuing in this line of reasoning soon concludes that women are like “an organism that has a liver but no gall-bladder” a pitiful state which “arises from their deficiency in the power of reasoning”.
Holding women under this cold analytical gaze, Schopenhauer does not take long to declare the aesthetic, as well as moral, inferiority of women “[i]t is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex; for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in calling them the unaesthetic sex than the beautiful. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art have they any real or true sense and susceptibility, and it is mere mockery on their part, in their desire to please, if they affect any such thing.” He stops short however of outright homosexuality, granting that women, despite their many many flaws, do poses important reproductive faculties: “women in truth exist entirely for the propagation of the race, and their destiny ends here.”
Women, for their part, never took old Schopenhauer too seriously. In one instance, on a pleasure cruise at the ripe age of forty-three Schopenhauer turned his attention to Flora Weiss, a beautiful seventeen year old girl, and tried to win her favour by gifting her a bunch of white grapes. She would later write in her diary “I didn’t want them. I felt revolted because old Schopenhauer had touched them, and so I let them slide, quite gently, into the water behind me.”
One notable exception to this growing disconnect between philosophers and women was the brilliant and criminally underrated philosophin Lou Andreas-Salomé, who came of age in a generation which idolized Schopenhauer, and felt compelled to pen her own response to the “women question” in her book “Die Erotik”.
Lou Andreas-Salomé argued that there was something defective in men. Deprived of the ability to create life, men are stunted by an existential death-anxiety. To relieve themselves from the inevitability of death, they construct projects and systems which they hope might outlast them, but since no monument or opus can ever grasp them with tiny hands, or suckle sweetly at their breasts, even the best men are always left with an inadequate substitute to the generative power of women.
Which is not to say that Lou Andreas-Salomé held men inferior, in the manner of Schopenhauer, rather she offered the conciliatory statement that “There are two ways of living, two ways of giving life all its full unfolding which, without the division into sexes, would certainly have remained at the deepest level., but it is futile to discuss which one of the two forms is of greater value or importance […] one whose forces expand, or the other which contours the other, which outlines its centre, and both are thus completed in the sphere of its self-limitation.”
Incidentally, Andreas-Salomé had been friends with Nietzsche in her youth. Something that Henry Louis Mencken, America’s earliest and most enthusiastic translator of Nietzsche must have been aware of. Of Otto Weininger, Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that if one were to add a negation sign before the whole of Sex and Character it would express an important truth, Mencken’s contributions to the field is to have done exactly that. “In Defense of Women” is a thorough and passionate defense of modern women, in spite of the mountain of evidence collected against them by the philosophers of preceding generations.
Growing up in a bourgeoisie German family in Baltimore, Henry Louis Mencken described his childhood as “placid, secure, uneventful and happy”. At an early age he had already decided that he would be an author, and read every book he could get his hands on. After graduating from the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute he enrolled in a free correspondence class on writing given by Cosmopolitan magazine, eventually being hired part time by the Morning Herald. For six years he worked with them as a reporter, before moving to editorial work at the Baltimore Sun. It was at this time that his first book was published, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays (1905). Three years later, at only 27 years old, he wrote The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, which quickly established Mencken’s literary reputation and did much to popularize Nietzsche in English, being one of the first books written on the man.
Ten years later, Henry Louis Mencken would write the first Enlgish translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. In it Nietzsche rails against decadence, compassion, weakness, and most of all the hostility towards life found within the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Instead he calls for people to embrace life as it is, to love their fate. He foresees a new generation of men who would usher in a transvaluation of values which says yes to life in all it’s complexity. It was during this time that Mencken also penned “In Defense of Women”, a bombastic, funny, deeply cynical transvaluation of gender relations as they existed in 1920s America.
At the time of it’s publication in 1918, gender relations were a topic of hot contention. Although women had briefly gained the right to suffrage in as far flung places as the Kingdom of Hawaii (1840) and the Islamic Republic of Azerbaijan (1918) in most places the right to political enfranchisement was restricted to men. It would take a full two years after “In Defense of Women” was published for women’s suffrage to be expanded federally in the United States. In Europe the Principality of Liechtenstein would not grant this right till the 1980s.
This anxiety over the changing role of women in society, over the emergence of a distinctly modern women who exercised political and economic autonomy and participated in public life, was a source of existential dread for those such as Weininger, and a question which demanded answers from the brightest minds of the time.
Henry Louis Mencken, a lover of all things new and modern, did not hate modern women. “In Defense of Women” is exactly that, a defense of women against their many detractors. Where Mencken differs, however, is that he doesn’t establish his argument from a place of unreality. There are no ridiculous appeals to women’s innate nature, no reference to virtues that almost always leave readers scratching their heads and wondering if the author has ever met a woman before. Instead, Mencken defends women in the most American way possible, that is to say with a mixture of pragmatism and “telling it straight”. Mencken describes women as self serving and calculating, perfect rational agents in the modern economy, men their unsuspecting dupes. “A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity. His most gaudy sayings and doings seldom deceive them; they see the actual man within, and know him for a shallow and pathetic fellow.” Mencken begins, and continues by lamenting that “[n]o observant person, indeed, can come into close contact with the general run of business and professional men—I confine myself to those who seem to get on in the world, and exclude the admitted failures—without marvelling at their intellectual lethargy, their incurable ingenuousness, their appalling lack of ordinary sense.” Women, on the other hand, are described with few exceptions as shrewd, calculating, and self-serving.
Mencken, a truer disciple of Nietzsche than N. himself on this topic, takes women at their worst, and loves them anyways. Taking for granted Schopenhauer’s most venomous criticisms of them, “In Defense of Women” is an assault against all the idols of romanticism, a defense of women’s Rights and Wrongs.
In recent years the differences between men and women have again become an issue of much debate. The recent election has seen a growing political divide between the genders hitherto unseen in politics. Discussions around reproductive freedoms have re-emerged as a political wedge issue after years of seeming consensus. As social media allows the world to be more connected than ever, it also allows for the formation of tribal identities on a scale never before experienced; it should surprise nobody that gender differences would emerge as one such identity.
Much more than a defense of women, “In Defense of Women” is a chastisement of both sexes. But it is a loving chastisement. Rooted in an appreciation of both genders in their Platonic forms, Mencken doesn’t attempt to argue for equality—he is unequivocally for the superiority of women on this issue—but he does make a compelling defense of them. And he does so with a philosophical grounding and good-old-fashioned American common-sense that is a pleasure to read.