As discussed in
Part One, Esther Vilar has the markings by which we recognize feminists. Her “misogyny” can be more easily explained as envy of more romantically successful, less intelligent women. Her theory looks like a plan to turn the world upside down in the service of a single Argentinian-German writer.
And what she wants appears so minuscule compared to what she damns as the problem. While “Slut Power!” feminists want society to change so they can gain access to many men, Vilar wants a revolution so she can have a monogamous, jealous and faithful relationship with just one man.
Though I believe her arguments are weak, though I believe the whole of her vitriol is not in defense of men but in service to herself, I still recommend
The Manipulated Man to nearly every man under forty.
The reason is this: nearly every man would benefit from its perspective.
TMM paints the relationship between a man and a woman as the cold exploitation of a pathetic fool. We should all spend a little time asking the question, “Am I a pathetic fool?” Especially so when it comes to women--nowhere does the male tendency towards idealization do as much personal damage.
A few might agree but I’m getting the impression that more would be puzzled at my recommendation. “Why would you tell someone to read a book based on flawed thinking?”
E-PRIME, abolishing all forms of the verb "to be," has its roots in the field of general semantics, as presented by Alfred Korzybski in his 1933 book, Science and Sanity. Korzybski pointed out the pitfalls associated with, and produced by, two usages of "to be": identity and predication. His student D. David Bourland, Jr., observed that even linguistically sensitive people do not seem able to avoid identity and predication uses of "to be" if they continue to use the verb at all. Bourland pioneered in demonstrating that one can indeed write and speak without using any form of "to be," calling this subset of the English language "E-Prime."
When Robert Anton Wilson first introduced me to E-Prime, I didn’t see its value. Everyone knows that language is a metaphor, right? I didn’t see a need to remind people that to say, “The apple is red,” is to say, “The apple absorbs the full spectrum of light and reflects only that wavelength that we agree to call ‘red.’”
But Wilson was right and I was wrong. We do need to be reminded that “the map is not the territory,” and often.
I recommend Vilar’s theory not because it is the capital-T Truth but because it is an enlightening perspective. Vilar, on the other hand, is quite sure that she has found the Philosopher’s Stone that makes all of the male/female problem comprehensible.
The philosopher's stone is a legendary substance, allegedly capable of turning inexpensive metals into gold. It was sometimes believed to be an elixir of life, useful for rejuvenation and possibly for achieving immortality. For a long time, it was the most sought-after goal in Western alchemy. In the view of spiritual alchemy, making the philosopher's stone would bring enlightenment upon the maker and conclude the Great Work.
My statement is this:
There is no Philosopher’s Stone, in any arena of human knowledge.
E-Priming that statement, we should
assume that there is no Philosopher’s Stone and that every theory that comes along should be thought of as a
description and not a
definition.
We see the folly of believing that we have created a definition--that we’ve pinned reality to a display board--in Vilar’s
The Polygamous Sex.
Two of her assertions reveal that she hasn’t discovered the Philosopher’s Stone. The first is her analysis of biological imperatives. The second is her definition of love.
Vilar told us in
TPS that humans have three drives: to preserve one’s own life, to reproduce and to raise the offspring until they are independent.
The whole of her theory, from the first book to the last, rests on her assertion that the last two drives are entirely distinct from one another. But are they really?
Speaking biologically, one doesn’t rear offspring unless one has had sex. The mentor-protege relationship, as Vilar characterizes parenthood, is inextricably connected to sex.
I’m sure that Vilar has thousands of words available explaining why this connection is illusory, but that connection explains the development of the traditional monogamous family. It explains it more simply, too, than asserting that the family is only a female trick upon men.
Since Vilar is telling us--in so many words--that she has the Philosopher’s Stone of romantic relationships, just arguing the distinction makes her whole argument false. Truth is the absence of the false; she tells us that she has the truth.
If she had stopped writing at
The Manipulated Man, that work may have become more than what it is now, which is a footnote to a footnote. If she had said, “Look at your love life from this perspective,” its value would be more obvious.
Instead, she tells the married man that he is being deceived by the one he loves, that he is a slave and, worst, that he is committing “pseudo-incest” each time he enjoys the marital bed. Not only that, she says she can prove it, as she pulls out a list of definitions.
But we have thousands of years of personal and theoretical descriptions of marriage. Our civilization (at least until the last few decades) has concluded that a monogamous marriage between a man and a woman is a net positive for everyone.
In response, Vilar waves her Philosopher’s Stone and cries that she has seen the Truth.
Vilar tells us that the reason that men commit infidelities is because their primary relationships are incestuous. Deep in their hearts, men are disgusted by this and turn to other women, seeking the pure sexual love Vilar describes.
That’s certainly one way to look at it. Our current accepted wisdom is that men are biologically driven to spread their seed far and wide because that is the best evolutionary reproductive strategy. Infidelity is natural and monogamy is unnatural.
Anonymous Conservative tweaks this theory. The urge to have sex with as many women as possible stems from an r-selected reproductive strategy. With abundant resources, the organism’s best path is to create many offspring and invest little energy raising them. The alternative is K-selection, in which organisms mate with fewer partners and devote more energy to raising offspring. This brings us back to the concept that the sex instinct and the nurturing instinct are linked.
At the very least, we can return to our original quibble with Vilar and say that, while raising offspring is completely linked to sex, the reverse is only occasionally true. The loose correlation of sex to children allows room for interpretation, but the two drives are definitely linked. Vilar looks at it and decides that they aren’t linked at all.
If our concern is to pinpoint Truth, we cannot accept Vilar's argument. Her distinction between the sexual and the nurturing drive is false. Since the rest of her argument hinges on this distinction, we must pronounce that it isn't True.
One antidote to Philosopher’s Stone thinking is the phrase, “For the sake of argument.” We accept that Vilar has severed the sex instinct with the nurturing instinct not because it is true. We accept it to see what doing so can tell us.
Vilar, however, believes that she’s found Truth, so she aims for a definition of love based on her assumptions. Love--sexual or romantic love--has been perverted into pseudo-incest by stupid and lazy women. What, then, is love when it is uncorrupted?
To explain, she relies on her ex-husband’s ontological theories. Note that she feels no need to
prove his theory. We are to accept it as valid.
What I’ve gleaned is that it begins with a basic thought experiment.
Imagine a black box.
You may have imagined the box resting on a surface. If not, you may be assuming the box surrounded by air. If not air, then surrounded by
nothing.
The one thing you can’t picture is the black box as its own “system,” as Vilar phrases it. If the universe stops where the box stops, it’s not a box. A box has sides; if there is no “outside the box,” there is no “inside the box.” The edges are where the box stops
being and starts
not-being.
The conclusion is that objects are defined by other objects. A box is not air. A box is not nothing. A box is not the surface it rests on.
Okay. We don’t know how useful that line of thinking is, but we’ll accept it. Vilar then says that the individual is no different, that a person is defined by other people.
Putting it mildly, this skips over a lot of philosophy. Vilar says, in effect, that that entity that we have called the psyche, the soul, the self, or consciousness--that entity which we have discussed for millennia--is simply an object like a black box. We can know the self only by defining it through others.
Here, even the most indulgent of readers has to take pause. Q: If a person lives alone in a forest, does he exist? A: Why would you think he doesn’t?
The arguments against this idea are more complex than a simple, “I think, therefore I am,” but it does not matter. Vilar simply asserts that we somehow don’t exist until we are defined by others.
What I mean to say is that it’s a little hard to swallow.
Her next leap is to assert that the
best definition of the self comes from having only a single definition. Her argument is that multiple definitions create the possibility of contradiction.
This is a remarkable statement. She has been playing the ruthless logician throughout the book, but yet she places the highest value on a perspective that does not eliminate inaccuracy, but eliminates the evidence of inaccuracy. She will not allow a second definition because it may not agree with the first definition. This is like covering one’s ears to avoid hearing what someone is saying.
The PDF that Crowley linked contains commentary by an unspecified “KJ” at this point. This KJ has very little respect for Vilar’s arguments--at least in this portion of the book, because he doesn’t show up elsewhere. He pokes enough holes that I won’t waste any more words on it.
Vilar’s whole definition of love is a tangle of questionable assumptions and bizarre logic. It’s all in service of proving that love--sexual, romantic love--is monogamous, jealous and faithful. (Note--by “monogamous,” Vilar is saying that an individual has one partner over a lifetime, not that he sleeps with only one person at a time. Otherwise, it’s redundant to include “faithful.”)
Armed with the Philosopher’s Stone of reason, she believes that she has established that any relationship that doesn’t have these qualities is not love.
On the other hand, the Western tradition has concluded that monogamy is the best way to unite a man and a woman, because faithfulness manages the natural feeling of jealousy that sex partners have for one another.
In other words, that…
mess above was created to prove what we’ve already believed for centuries. Yet, Vilar tells us that marriage, the monogamous institution that manages jealousy by demanding faithfulness, is a ruse to trap men.
[In fairness, some clarification: Vilar is telling us that once we experience real love, we will automatically be monogamous because we are emotionally compelled. She is sex-positive and anti-virginity, so I assume that she believes that sexual restrictions get in the way of finding that love. That is, we won’t know that it’s love until we have sex, so take off your pants and go mix it up.
It’s actually a more restrictive concept than traditional marriage. Tradition tells us that we will be tempted to stray but we must resist. Vilar tells us the temptation is proof that the union is not real love and must be abandoned.]
How does this prove the folly of the Philosopher’s Stone? We don’t need Vilar to drag us through a brier patch of argument to get to her conclusions; we can just take the path that was created by the millions of husbands and wives before us. It’s no unique insight to conclude what most others have concluded.
When Vilar discusses our biological drives in respect to the power dynamics of romance, she is giving us the height, length and width of a cloud. But the cloud is not a rectangular box; it rises here and it stretches there. Her measurements may be true but they tell us very little that’s useful.
However, her description of a man enslaved by a woman who cares nothing for his interests, humors him enough to get what she wants, and allows him to work himself into an early grave for her benefit--that’s a useful description. She’s taken a snapshot of the cloud and drawn lines to show the dimensions. We can see more than just her assertions and we can see how her ideas fit into the whole.
Philosopher’s Stone proponents wish us to abandon everything we’ve understood and accept only their interpretation. They demand this because they believe that their stone has explained everything there is to explain.
Is it possible that someone will crack the code of romance and we will gain a complete understanding of it? Anything’s possible, I guess, but it is better to assume that the code will never be broken completely. Once a true Philosopher’s Stone comes along, we’ll deal with it then.
We should resist believing in a Philosopher’s Stone because that is the first step in believing that it has been found. In the field of relationships, we have seen one Philosopher’s Stone after another in the past couple of decades:
The Rules; Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus; He’s Just Not That Into You; Act Like a Woman,Think Like a Man. Each of these set a fire in the self-help world and each one died out because they weren’t the Final Answer.
Malcolm Gladwell has made a career out of uncovering Philosopher’s Stones. The most famous TED talks are almost always about a Philosopher’s Stone. Marxism, Objectivism, progressivism--they all say, “One formula to rule them all!”
To explain romance by way of biological imperatives, or to diagnose the poor as victims of either the wealthy or of vice--any argument like this is
reductive.
Reduction is necessary. Without it, we couldn’t say, “The apple is red.” We’d have to show the apple and figure out a way to indicate the color itself. But we have to remember that, like sex is to childbirth, our reductions should be attached to reality but reality is not attached to our reductions.
The lack of a Philosopher’s Stone does not mean that we can’t know
anything. What it means is that we have to accumulate
descriptions.
Vilar gave us one picture of romantic relationships. Plato gave us another. So did Shakespeare. So did
Love Story. So did your parents.
Vilar tells us that a single definition is best. I say that each new description brings us closer to accuracy, if even if by being completely wrong.
The Enlightenment put to rest the search the alchemical Philosopher’s Stone, only to replace it with the search for a rational new one. Our age is one that believes that all is knowable, that what is unknown now will be known soon, and that everything can be reduced to a formula.
In E-Prime: Attempting a complete understanding produces very little value. In English: Seeking a Philosopher's Stone is to view the world precisely as it
is not.
