Man and his love of Sophia

Once men finally learn what woman is, then philosophy (the activity by which thought attempts to grasp being, its constitutive other) will cease.

The paradoxical thing is that the only way man can come to know her is by realizing that she is an illusory figment of his own imagination, circularly produced by his desire. Yet this unreality of woman cannot be asserted by thought without turning it into yet another philosophical decision about her nature, rendering her (yet again) as an alien object over and against which he stands as the epistemic subject.

In order to truly know her unreality he must embody rather than merely think her, which would amount to an annihilation of his own self-identity as a man and as a philosopher. The realization of the absence of her inherent existence is tantamount to the realization of the absence of his own inherent existence.

Since many a man and philosopher are totally averse to this necessary self-annihilation of their own being, woman remains an eternal mystery and his desire for her functions as cause for his perpetual transmigration from one state of ignorance to the next. Thus, the more he reproduces the conditions for the continuation of his self-identity over time, the wider he configures the difference between himself and his knowledge of her (in fact, we can consider these two as mutually entailing aspects of the same exact process).

Like the capitalist who will never let go of wage-labor even while asymptotically reducing it to absolute zero, the becoming of man and the enterprise of philosophy (they are really one and the same thing) is a contradictory form of life: he wants her and doesn’t want her at the same time, never being able to completely make up his mind as to the nature of her existence, whether she is real or ideal, or both, or neither. He would rather destroy the whole world than admit that, as he stands, she remains entirely out of his grasp.

openlyemptywoman