We all know ...

... that old Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle ... but did you know, had you any idea, that Schopenhauer was such a misogynist arsehole?

Click to get a bigger image, and start reading halfway down the left page ...

In case you can't see a bigger image when you click:

Schopenhauer's disparaging view of women [writes author Christopher Janaway], concentrated to most corrosive effect in his short essay, On Women, has earned him some notoriety. To what extent it should single him out from any of his contemporaries and predecessors is debatable ... What is not in question is the vehemence of his rhetoric on the topic:

Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex; for in this impulse is to be found its whole beauty.

Throughout their lives women remain children, always see only what is nearest them, cling to the present, take the appearance of things for reality, and prefer trivialities to the most important affairs. This it is the faculty of reason by virtue whereof man does not, like the animals, live merely in the present ... In consequence of her weaker faculty of reason, woman shares less in the advantages and disadvantages that this entails.

There are few compensating virtues. Schopenhauer ... is convinced that they [women] cannot reason very well, and have shallow characters. Their interests are 'love, conquests, ... dress, cosmetics, dancing'; they regard everything as a means to winning a man; dissimulation is inborn to them 'just as nature has armed the lion with claws and teeth, the elephant and boar with tusks, the bull with horns, and the cuttlefish with ink that blackens water'.

And: 'Generally, speaking, women are and remain the most downright and incurable Philistines.'

(From Schopenhauer, by Christopher Janaway, published by Oxford University Press)

Just thought I'd share that with the sisterhood.

Incidentally, those are not my scrawlings and scratchings. This entire book, from the library, is full of it, with notes in margins and all this stupid underlining. A lot of it is in what seems to me to be a mature hand. The work of one of those respectable older persons, I imagine, who deface public property and then spend the rest of their time whingeing about skateboarders or indolent youth.

There is so much to dislike in and about these two pages, isn't there?

I'm off now to bake a cake.