Chapter II. A woman’s intelligence and/or beauty
Male intelligence + female beauty = mankind
The differences between man and woman are determined by nature itself, which produced the chromosome difference: women have an identical pair (XX); men have two different ones (XY). Humanity’s two genders reflect more general regularity of nature’s development, one that is seen in every sphere of the material world. (There are exceptions, but they are usually anomalies.) Why are there exactly two sexes – not one, or three, four or five? This question has been discussed for decades now.
The Russian biologist Vigen Geodakyan believes that bi-sexuality proved to be an effective version for fulfilling the alternative evolutionary tasks: change (masculine) and conservation (feminine). This is true, but the application of this conclusion is actually much broader; it applies not only to the organic world, including man, but also to the inorganic world, which encompasses the entire Universe. On the philosophical level, this conclusion follows from Hegel’s famous law of unity and struggle between opposites, which reflect the dichotomy of everything in existence in the moving Universe. If there were no struggle between opposites, there would be no motion, so there would be no Universe; it would have remained to this day in its singular state. Therefore, in order for the human being to emerge as a unity, this being must of necessity have two sexes.
Thus, man changes, while woman preserves. This is why man has more developed scientific, experimental abilities; he ‘reaches for the sky.’ Woman preserves all his achievements and adopts them to everyday life; she is earthbound, she is ‘Mother Earth.’ Man organizes progress, seeks to wreck stereotypes, digs into science, formulates fundamental laws, and carries out revolutions. Woman seeks to preserve stereotypes; she favors stability and peace; she is opposed to wars and revolutions; she needs peaceful conditions to raise her children. In the parlance of political economy, woman is the foundation, man is the superstructure. One does not exist without the other, but there is between them constant contradiction, the struggle which alone pushes humanity forward. This same idea can be expressed through the categories of intelligence and beauty.
Since the human being, as a special species of the organic world, appears in the forms of man and woman, each of these varieties has its own dominant, expressed in its dominating force. For man, this force is intelligence; for woman, beauty. Naturally, both intelligence and beauty are inherent at the same time to both man and woman. The problem lies in the proportions. However, it is necessary first to provide a general definition of intelligence and beauty.
Everyone knows the expression: beauty is a clot of truth. Not everyone knows, perhaps, that this assertion, that has a long historical past, was only proven in the tongue of philosophy by Hegel - in his Esthetics, where it says: “beauty and the truth are in one way the same.” (111) Prior to justifying this assertion, I want to reproduce here the reasoning on this topic of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, in the context of the great Russian poet Pushkin and his wife Natalia Goncharova. In her essay “Natalia Goncharova (Life and Works)”[1] Tsvetayeva claims that Pushkin married Natalia because she was a “zero,” “for he was himself – all.” However, this “zero” embodied genius of beauty. Tsvetayeva writes: “There was thing in her: beauty. Merely beauty, simply beauty, without the correctives of intelligence, soul, heart, talent. Naked beauty, smiting like a sword. And smite she did. Simply – beauty. Simply – genius.”[2] Tsvetayeva adds that their union was “a pure phenomenon of genius, like a pure phenomenon of beauty. Beauty, i.e. emptiness.” (132) Characterizing the union of Pushkin and Goncharova, she notes: “A pair in force moving in opposite directions; I would like to say: a pair one away from the other. A pair apart.” (ibid.)
The hopeless stupidity of Natalia Goncharova is mentioned in many of her contemporaries’ memoirs, including the letters of Pushkin himself - which are quoted by Tsvetayeva, by the way. However, something else is of interest to me here: Tsvetayeva’s reasoning contains the idea that is shared by very many people, namely: intelligence, even genius-sized, can create a “pair” with empty beauty. This approach refutes Hegel’s postulate about beauty and truth being one and the same. So who is correct?
Even though Tsvetayeva was not lacking for male hormones, as evidenced by her non-feminine poems, she was still essentially a woman. She failed to understand that “emptiness”-beauty (as follows from the context of her reasoning) cannot in principle possess force, since force is substance, not reflection. A “pair” headed in different directions is not a pair, since a couple is a unity of two elements. Should we recognize Pushkin as a genius - as all Russians do - then his death soon after marriage clearly conforms to regularity. Genius and empty beauty cannot be united in principle. If such a coupling does take place in life, it is a fateful mistake that ends in tragedy. It wasn’t d'Anthes who killed Pushkin; it was precisely the emptiness – Goncharova – that did it. This applies to every family where intelligence and empty beauty are joined by accident. So anyway, what are intelligence and beauty?
In the simplest definition that can be found in any philosophical dictionary, intelligence is a characteristic of thinking and understanding. This quality is possessed by all people regardless of gender, race or religion. However, the development of thinking and the depth of understanding - which, by the way, are one and the same - are dependent on gender, and on race, and on religion. (I’m not even touching here on the historical cross-section.) Setting race and religion aside till another time, let us concentrate here on gender differences.
The depth of understanding of the surrounding world depends on the width and depth of knowledge, through which the ontological force (ontóbia) manifests itself. The discovered laws of nature and society are a concentrated expression of this knowledge. The history of mankind’s development shows that the vast majority of these laws were discovered by men. As for the fundamental laws in natural sciences and in philosophy, there are no exceptions here at all: men dominate these fields utterly. Since the Nobel Prize was inaugurated in 1901, among the laureates in natural sciences (over 100 years, through 2002) there were only ten women, one of whom, Maria Sklodovska-Curie, won twice (in physics and in chemistry). I want to note that six of them were recognized jointly with men[3]. This despite the fact that there are currently tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of women active in science. I want to remind you here the words of Otto Weininger, who wrote that all people who possess any gifts of notice are “in part bisexual, in part exclusively homosexual” (93), i.e. their gifted structures are due to their “masculinity.” As for women as women, they “can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts. These demand a universal faculty. Women may have happy inspirations, taste, elegance, but they have not the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the same as that between animal and plant. The animal corresponds more closely to the character of the man, the plant to that of the woman. In woman there is a more peaceful unfolding of nature, a process, whose principle is the less clearly determined unity of feeling.”[4]
Thus, the gender differences between man and women, noted by Hegel and by Weininger, including differences in the functioning of the brain - these differences, which are constantly confirmed by modern science, determine the difference in the depth of their understanding of the surrounding world. This must be recognized as a fact, if only because if it weren’t for such differences, there would have been no mankind.
This is why the preceding definition of intelligence more exactly means consciousness as simple understanding, and still more exactly: realization of self and of the world around. It coincides with the concept of common sense which enables the greater part of mankind to survive by way of adapting to the environment, including the society. Common sense is simple reproduction; it does not work to increase the life delta.
When we call someone a fool, we mean primarily a man with deviations precisely from common sense, i.e. a man who does not evaluate reality adequately, due to psychic illness or to the absence of elementary knowledge necessary for survival. Because of this, his existence is directed against the increase of the life delta, against progress.
Intelligence, on the other hand, is man’s ability to cognize and change the objective world for the purpose of increasing the life delta. Only a minuscule part of the human community possesses this quality. However, mankind owes it to precisely this tiny fraction that instead of still sitting in treetops alongside distant relatives, it now travels into outer space. There exist three degrees of intelligence: genius, talent, ability. They depend on the depth of cognition of nature and society, and in philosophical concepts they are distributed in the terms universal, special and particular. Naturally, genius uncovers the universal, talent uncovers the special, and ability uncovers the particular. I propose to analyze these matters in the science section of my promised book on society. Let us now return to beauty.
When people say that beauty is truth, they mean that beauty is embedded in truth itself. And truth is those very objective laws of nature and society. They can only be understood by intelligence and by nothing else. It is precisely intelligence that cognizes truth, and through it cognizes beauty. Beauty is a phenomenon, i.e. the form of truth. They are interrelated as form and content. Intelligence gives birth to beauty, yet cognizes it through contemplation, which produces in it the feeling of the beautiful.
It surprised me how precisely the Russian language reflects the interconnection of intelligence, beauty and life. The Russian translation of the Bible renders the famous verse as follows: “Adam had cognized Eve his wife and she became pregnant, and gave birth to Cain, and she said: I have acquired a man with the aid of Jehovah.” (Bibliya, Bytiye. 4:1)[5] It is not quite clear how Eve “acquired” a man with the aid of Yahweh, but the important thing here is this: intelligence (Adam), cognizing beauty (Eve), leads to birth of man (life). Hence, outside of life-man there exists neither intelligence nor beauty.
Another aspect of the same topic is this: beauty is already hidden within truth (in the Bible it is Adam’s rib, from which came beauty-Eve). In philosophical parlance, using Hegel’s terminology, I would put it this way: truth is beauty-in-the-outside, while beauty is truth-in-self. When someone refers to something as beautiful, it means that in the speaker’s head the idea of beauty is constructed already on the basis of his knowledge of the world around. In other words, in order to think beauty, one to needs to have already a notion of beauty. Whenever some deformity that clearly doesn’t conform to the laws of mankind’s survival is regarded as beautiful by someone, it means that this man’s intelligence is formed based on distorted knowledge of the world; therefore he can be considered not intelligent, but rather insane, i.e. one who took leave of his reason. Azerbaijan poet Mirza-Shafi put it very laconically:
Beauty cannot be appraised
With an unskilled eye.
Diamonds can only be
Cut with other diamonds.
I think it is no accident that throughout the history of painting only artists of genius managed to create women whose beauty is genius.
This reasoning of mine was once countered by a “killer” question: the genius Leonardo da Vinci painted a masterpiece depicting one Mona Lisa, yet it is allegedly known from history that the woman was utterly stupid. This appears to resemble Tsvetayeva’s reasoning.
The matter, you see, is this: Leonardo was not reflecting the beauty of the woman as a personality; he depicted in this portrait his own conception of beauty, thus conforming that ideal beauty is the universal, i.e. the objective. Anyone can identify a beautiful woman, whether she is Chinese or German, Russian or American. I came across a short article titled In Search of the FACE, reporting the results of research undertaken by David Perrett and Keith May of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and Sakiko Yoshikawa, of Otemon Gakuin University in Japan, about notions of beauty in Britain and in Japan. The traits of the most preferred faces in both races proved to be surprisingly similar. The most preferred faces in both racial groups bore some similarities: they had higher cheekbones, more delicate lower jaws, larger eyes relative to the rest of the face, and shorter distances between nose and mouth, and mouth and chin. These are precisely the proportions embodied in Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, although these proportions were derived from the average parameters of face parts of 60 white women.[6]
Returning now to Leonardo’s painting: it isn’t just about the proportions of Mona Lisa’s face. It isn’t the optimal facial proportions that make this painting a work of genius; it is the smile that instills life into beauty. It is the smile of Leonardo himself who sees this smile inside himself. There is no such thing as empty beauty, yet dead beauty happens. A curious fact: one contemporary artist (actually, more than one made the attempt) reproduced da Vinci’s painting, substituting for Mona Lisa’s face a very like face of a pretty model. Apparently he did everything just like Leonardo did with Lisa, yet the smile turned out trite. Instead of an ideal of beauty, the result was an “ideal” of a loose bimbo.[7]
As for Goncharova’s beauty, we perceive it in interaction with genius intelligence. If indeed there was not an ounce of intelligence in this beauty, then in actual fact she was not beautiful, or else those who considered her beautiful were out of their minds. There is a third version: she was so beautiful that she turned into form without content – a shell, a wrapper, a bubble. The regular geometric proportions of the human body without the soul (Tsvetayeva, by the way, writes of this herself) are measurements that have nothing to do with beauty as a phenomenon. It is a dead or deadening beauty that destroys mankind. In its extreme manifestation such emptiness is assembly-line-produced in the modeling business. The creatures on the catwalk are concerned-looking wrappers of human beings with measurements posted on them. This, sure enough, has more to do with the animal world and with business, the buying-selling of biological creatures.
The feeling of beautiful emerges precisely because it is tied inseparably to content, and the unity of these enables man to exist and develop.
We know from philosophy that form is more changeable than content. This is true of the initial stage of the development of the essence. Subsequently the cause and the effect change constantly. Although Hegel wrote in his Aesthetics that intelligence (reason) is finite, while the beautiful (beauty) is infinite, in fact they are both finite and infinite at the same time because they mutually condition each other. However, in the unity intelligence-beauty intelligence is more mobile; it seeks constantly not only to cognize the endless world, but also to change it, whereas the beauty-form of this world resists change, fearful of being destroyed. It is for a reason that Hegel himself called man an animal, and woman a plant. Based on this, I define beauty as man’s property of being preserved in this world, i.e. preserving the optimal parameters of human adaptation to the environment. [8]
Intelligence belongs to the realm of the ideal; it is reflected in the totality of knowledge about the world. Beauty is embodied in the forms of the objective world – in particular, in the forms of the human body. Intelligence often does not know what it creates. When it becomes too detached from form/body, for example when it invents something alien to human nature, it is capable of destroying all humankind. Beauty/body constantly contains the anti-natural thrusts of intelligence. It is no accident that crazy ideas usually come to men, not women. It is likewise not by chance that among men there are much greater numbers of geniuses and madmen; woman chooses the optimal middle version; beauty-body is closer to nature, it functionally works toward stability.
One more time: intelligence and beauty are inherent to both man and woman, same as the hormones testosterone and estrogen. However, I speak here of dominants which stem from the above-mentioned differences in workings of the brain. Simplifying crudely, I assert that intelligence is man, beauty is woman. Besides, to women beauty serves a biological purpose. Note that from this perspective, the facial forms matter less than the bodily proportions, as Schopenhauer pointed out with justification. The optimally built woman whose natural duty is to continue the human species must possess certain necessary morphological proportions for carrying the fetus to term, giving birth and breastfeeding. Therein lays the essence of true female beauty, i.e. its conformity to life.
There exist certain optimality parameters for the human organism. Let me remind you that Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, created in the 1880s the science of Eugenics, within which framework he obtained the quantitative parameters of an optimal human being. I don’t have them at hand, but they are clearly visible in Greek statues, in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. Women who are too thin or too fat, flat-chested or otherwise man-like are unlikely to be able to fulfill their natural tasks.[9] A pretty face is an additional factor for attracting men. A homely face is at risk of being left without male attention, and that means without offspring.
In this connection, I further assert: an intelligent woman is an oxymoron. As the English playwright Joseph Addison put it aphoristically: "The woman that deliberates is lost." It means that her brain works like that of a man, therefore she is no longer a woman, or hardly a woman. She is an ‘it’ creature that I described in the very beginning. A reasonable woman – now that is a different matter. She is a woman who understands her natural purpose. Equally nonsensical is a pretty (womanlike) man. If he thinks that his looks matter, he ceases to be a man, for his natural function is different. A strong man – now that is a different matter. Note: while in the early stages of humankind’s development precisely physical strength was required for survival and continuation of the species, today the emphasis has to be on the power of intelligence, while preserving an optimal degree of physical power of the body as the necessary material substance of that same intelligence.
I repeat: intelligence and beauty are unity and struggle between opposites; without it, no development of humankind is possible.
[1] Note for the non-Russian reader: the essay is dedicated to the artist Natalia Goncharova, a distant descendant of the Pushkin family. The name of Pushkin’s wife was Natalia Goncharova, too.
[2] Tsvetayeva. My Pushkin, 131.
[3] See: Istvan. The Road to Stockholm. Nobel Prizes, Science, and Scientists.
[4] Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 144. Subsequent references to Hegel in the text are from this work.
[5] In the English translation, instead of the word “cognized” the word “intercourse” is used (quite a difference!): “Now Adam had intercourse with Eve his wife and she became pregnant. In time she gave birth to Cain and said: «I have produced a man with the aid of Jehovah.»’ (Genesis, 4:1)
[6] The Vancouver Sun, March 28, 1994, 4.
[7] This painting is reproduced in: The Independent (13 February 2005, 18).
[8] Having formulated this definition, I found something similar in Aristotle: “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.” – Aristotle. Metaphysics. Book XIII.
[9] At this point, some may object, arguing that it isn’t only the “optimal” ones who give birth. That’s true, unfortunately. However, it should be obvious without any statistical data that it is precisely the offspring of the “non-optimal” ones who constitute the majority of the ill – the people who drag down the life delta of the concrete society and, accordingly, of mankind as a whole.
On Love, Family, and the State
(Philosophical-sociological Essay)