THE FLIGHT FROM WOMAN

by ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 1965

Karl Stern's Flight From Woman is an erudite plea for a balance of complementary values, for a shift away from arid scientism toward those qualities which have conventionally been associated with woman: intuition, tenderness, faith, innocence, and unabashed dependence. He examines the question of the polarity of the sexes (fundamental duality or cultural variability), the validity of the science-wisdom antithesis, the relationship between psychoanalysis and metaphysics, the male-female conflict as it occurred in the lives of men who have shaped our modern attitudes: Descartes, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Goethe, Tolstoy. He concludes with the Cartesian world as ""wise mother on a grand scale,"" sexual polarity as ""urprinzip which pervades all levels of being,"" and an admonition to cosset the differences. One must forgive Dr. Stern an occasional piece of nonsense, e.g., ""The well-known enigmatic sense which people get by looking at the Giocoda is unthinkable in the case of a male portrait."" Every lucky college student has had a professor like Karl Stern at one time or another. He rambles a bit. He doesn't always prove the thesis he set out to validate. But he throws out bits of wisdom four or five times during the semester that more than compensate for his other faults.

Pub Date: July 12, 1965

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1965

Categories: NONFICTION