of self-compassion which is only a "weeping
with others when they weep."
How is it possible for a woman to look upon her unhappiness as personal
when she possesses no idea of a destiny? The most appallingly decisive
proof of the emptiness and nullity of women is that they never once
succeed in knowing the problem of their own lives, and death leaves them
ignorant of it, because they are unable to realize the higher life of
personality.
I am now ready to answer the question which I put forward as the chief
object of this portion of my book, the question as to the significance
of the male and female in the universe. Women have no existence and no
essence; they are not, they are nothing. Mankind occurs as male or
female, as something or nothing. Woman has no share in ontological
reality, no relation to the thing-in-itself, which, in the deepest
interpretation, is the absolute, is God. Man in his highest form, the
genius, has such a relation, and for him the absolute is either the
conception of the highest worth of existence, in which case he is a
philosopher; or it is the wonderful fairyland of dreams, the kingdom of
absolute beauty, and then he is an artist. But both views mean the same.
Woman has no relation to the idea, she neither affirms nor denies it;
she is neither moral nor antimoral; math
.
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