Know thyself and care for your integrity

Engaging in self-scrutiny and critical assessment of one’s perspectives within the social and cultural orders of my environment is a social choice. I do not remember my first social choice, yet I am convinced that engaging in one’s life is a very early activity of a human being. It is true that as a baby I expressed myself “through facial expressions, gestures, postures, and vocal utterances” (Aichhorn, Wolfgang, and Helmut Kronberger. 2012. “The Nature of Emotions. A Psychological Perspective.” In Yearbook 2011. Emotions from Ben Sira to Paul, edited by Renate Egger-Wenzel and Jeremy Corley, 515–25. 216. Berlin: De Gruyter). It is also true that I realized these expressions in an interaction with my mother, my father and some other persons who came to see me. Communicating my first emotions I already reacted to emotions of my mother - let me be honest, my mother cared for me and was intensively dedicated to watch over my wellbeing after she had lost her first son. From the beginning of my life as baby, I influenced others when I expressed my fear, anger, happiness, annoyance, disgust, contempt, sadness and surprise and at the same time I was reacting to fear, anger, happiness, disgust, contempt, sadness and surprise of others, mostly of my mother. At the time, when I was a baby, there was no animal around me, but it is important to insist that interaction with the environment includes not only humans, but also animals and the flora as other elements that sustain our life in a series of exchanges that only ends with death. In the first year of life, the face-to-face interactions of the baby with the mother and the mother with the baby are very important for the well-being and integrity of the baby and the mother (ibid. 517).

Mutual reading of the faces and eyes and showing interest and expressing emotional states by the baby and the mother, matches their emotional patterns by interacting. If these exchanges of communications are not mutual and interactive, if they do not respect the effective emotion of the baby and the mother does not express her effective emotion, then there are terrible consequences for both. These concern primarily the baby but also the mother. If the mother does not read correctly and does not reflect the infant’s internal state but sticks to some determinist interpretation of what is going on with the baby, we must speak of a discrimination of the baby’s effective emotional state and feelings. A baby that does not get the required reaction by the mother will eventually turn way from the mother and will withdraw; and the baby will eventually show no emotional expression anymore (ibid. 518). If a baby and a child does not have the possibility to relate emotionally to the mother, there is discrimination of the legitimate needs of the baby. If the mother fails to relate emotionally to the child, the child suffers, there is no acknowledgement, there is no regulation and enforcement for the child. Disgust on side of the baby signals to the caregiver that “his or her behavior has triggered negative feelings”, “sadness indicates that an interruption in the relationship ought to be undone as soon as possible”, distress is the reaction to a neglected or failed “desired response from the caregiver” (ibid. 519). Mutual and reciprocal reading and expressing of emotions are important for the well-being of both, the caregiver and the baby or child. This life-sustaining exchange and communication of feelings is not only important during infancy and childhood, a mutual and reciprocal communication with respect also ensures and realizes the dignity of adult communicating partners.

When we are speaking, when we are expressing significant sentences and propositions, we are using language according to rules that we learned as children. Usually adult women, men and queer are not conscious of the fact that they realize the expression of their thoughts by using language. Thinking is not possible without language. Adults are usually not conscious of the fact that they use language to picture their world and that we make ourselves these pictures of facts with language. With Wittgenstein, I assess the philosophical a priori of Tractatus 4.022: “A proposition shows its sense.” (Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. Side-by-side-by-side edition, version 0.42 (January 5, 2015), containing the original German, alongside both the Ogden/Ramsey, and Pears/McGuinness. London: Kegan Paul).  The a priori of this sense of the propositions refers to the individual speaker and his or her spoken sentence. The sense of the proposition is prior to any affirmation or negation of the proposition. In Tractatus 4.064 we read: “Every proposition must already have a sense: it cannot be given a sense by affirmation. Indeed, its sense is just what is affirmed. And the same applies to negation, etc.” The a priori of the sense of the proposition thus points to the personal value-system of the speaker who is the originator of this sense. All thinking is linked to language and Tractatus 4.0031 concludes this thought: “All philosophy is a critique of language.” It is the aim of philosophy to clarify this sense. The way to obtain this goal is the investigation of propositions enunciated by individuals and understanding them as human behavior. Speaking is a social choice, is a human behavior that expresses pictures of beliefs, reasons, feelings, desires, intentions and claims.

Language is a social institution, and we learn to speak according to the rules of the language games. As babies we learn the rules of language communicating with our parents or other related persons. The rules of language concern the use of language, the use of words and concepts, the making of pictures with language. It is true, my mother and my father, my relatives talk to me according to the rules of language. At the same time, it is true that my mother does not only teach me how to use words but uses sentences to speak to me expressing sense. Consciously or subconsciously, my mother teaches me how to speak that is also to express meaning and values, rules of behaviors that are practiced in society and that make a difference. One of the most important differences my mother learned as a child and after reflecting on it as an adult has passed on to me is the gender difference of the male-female bipolarity. My mother never used the expression male-female bipolarity. She knew she suffers discrimination as a woman in a patriarchy. Her father did not allow her to visit university as a young woman and she suffered from this repression. At the same time, she did not overrule her father’s decision. The social constraints of patriarchy in the 1950s in Central Europe were strong enough to replace the self-deciding will of the individual young woman and to organize behavior according to fixed and unquestioned gender roles that treated women, men and queer not only differently but organized society by discriminating women and queer and by privileging men. Ultimately this social determination alienated all, women, men and queer from mutual, respectful and reciprocal relating to each other.

The gender difference of the male-female bipolarity during the so-called evolution of humanity had produced many social injustices and discriminations for women and queer. From the point of view of my personal assessment that I am ok, that I am feeling all right and may enjoy my physical, psychic, social, economic, cultural and spiritual integrity, I am asking myself to listen to the claims to equal dignity, freedom and rights of women and queer. My education systems and society structures still silently repress with evident perspicuity the integrity and dignity of girls, women and queer citizens.

The Global Gender Gap Report 2018 assesses that globally, the average population-weighted gender gap that remains to be closed is 32% (The Global Gender Gap Report 2018. 2018. vii. Cologny/Geneva: World Economic Forum. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf). This gender gap concerns political empowerment of women for political decision-making, and it concerns economic participation and opportunity for labor force participation. It concerns the estimated female-to-male earned income gap, wage equality for similar work, educational attainment and the gap between women’s and men’s current access to education, health and survival measures, the gap between women’s and men’s healthy life expectancy to consider the years lost to violence, disease, malnutrition and other relevant factors (ibid. 4–5).

Communication is an instrument to do away with this discriminating gender gap of injustices; communication is also an instrument of oppression. Therefore, I ask for a communication that contributes to empowering the integrity of the involved speakers. I am asking what is wrong with a communication that shakes and destructs the integrity of the participants. Empowering integrity is all right, weakening and destroying the individual’s integrity is wrong. There are many ways to empower the integrity of individuals in discourse and there are many ways of neglecting and destroying the integrity of individuals who communicate. There is a sense of sentences that follows the usual a priori of the sense of the sentence, that is the sentence can be perfectly understood but the sense destructively violates the integrity of the man or woman or queer that is addressed by the speaker of the sentence. A discriminating hierarchical power structure of society sets the rules for neglecting the dignity, liberty and equality of all interlocutors. An example of this sort of sentences that hurt the addressed individual is the sentence: I order you to obey to do what I am telling you without questioning and regardless of if you consent or dissent. The use of this sentence follows the rules of the grammar of language but violates the dignity, liberty and equality of the interlocutor. A rule that claims the dignity, liberty and equality of the participants of discourse, that is of all women and men and queer on this earth is the first paragraph of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and feelings and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood.[i]

Integrity is the result of personal integration of the many perspectives of the human existence in society. Fortunately, human behavior is not unilaterally determined by inner or outer factors of determination but can be understood as a mutual interaction of inner and outer factors that are integrated by the individual person. The person is both active and reactive. There is a permanent exchange between internal and external factors. Psychological or genetic determinations look at internal traits such as the self, identity, human competence, mental force, energy, my ego, effort, abilities, qualities, talents, qualities, will, and others. External factors are important, powerful and influential persons (for example wife, husband, partner, children, parents, boss, superiors, friends, etc.), the social or economic situation (for example poverty, unemployment, workplace, etc.), and general circumstances in society (political system, health system, educational system, etc.) (Hoff, Ernst-Hartmut, and Hans-Uwe Hohner. 1992. Methoden zur Erfassung von Kontrollbewusstsein. Materialien aus der Bildungsforschung 43. Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung).

The person-environment and the environment-person relationship can work as mutually interaction, committed to each other and in a reciprocal flow. The individual person is capable of consciously reflecting, judging and behaving on her or his interactions. I can see myself as a subject and an object of my environment at the same time. I can understand the link between my control conscience and my environment as interaction. I understand a certain behavior in a certain situation as the expression of a reciprocal exchange and not as simple result of an inner or outer determination. I do not negate that I see many of my actions rather as determinations of my environment and in other cases as caused by my will. I cannot separate the parts of myself in my behavior and the parts of the outer world in my behavior in a mechanical, segmental way. I try to understand my communication as a reciprocal relationship, and I try to integrate the permanent mutual and dynamic influence of endogenous and exogenous factors in my behavior.

Integration always operates as interaction of social factors and individual choices, and integration implies itself a social choice. Since the interactionist form of behavior sustains the integrity of the involved persons, I claim with Hoff the interactionist form as the preferred form of behavior in a certain situation. The interactionist concept of Hoff serves best at identifying individual differences and personality features. Identifying the socially constructed gender difference of the male-female bipolarity in a discourse is not an easy task. Interactionist, mutual and reciprocal communicating allows addressing alienating determinations (ibid.).

I understand the relationship between social structure and social action as a mutual relationship. Communication is an important social action and language is an important social structure. Language behavior is an important element in the construction of social structures, starting with our everyday practices of communication until the various levels of social behavior on the regional or international levels. The social organization of the international order is produced in much the same ways as the domestic order. There is an important question for the individual: How do I want to organize the social?

This question is not an expression of individual hubris. In the age of the world wide web, culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual. Speaking of my inner world enlarges the world, for the better or worse. Information and communication technologies are tools that enable desired changes, changes of the digital divide itself, of the gender-gap and many other discriminations.

Archeologists learn to understand the organization of the social and the cultural of prehistoric social groups of homo sapiens. Only since the middle of the 20th century CE, women archeologists publish in Austria. Looking with astonishment and some excitement at prehistoric industrial landscapes as sites of salt mines in the Alps, at musical instruments and at little sculptures of stone, at burial sites reflecting empathic piety with the dead and artefacts of cave paintings and stone graffities, they all trigger in me a deep feeling of  amazing emotion that enhances an optimistic outlook to the future and nurture my confidence that humanity is a true family, good and beautiful from the beginning.  Artefacts of slain cranes are proof that humanity from the beginning was good and bad, true and false, ugly and beautiful.  In the summer of 2007, I visited the northern hills of the Wachau with Sabine Moser, these friendly and fertile soils along the Danube where wine and a mild climate and the generously nurturing vegetation attracted women, men and queer since the Old Stone Age. The excavation hearths, that is of campfire charcoal rests, animal bones and stone tools brought to the light of our times the traces of ancestor hunters and gatherers who settled for some weeks or longer to take temporary shelter from the rain under simple wood huts in the steppe. Their choice of animal bones allows comments concerning seasonality and hunting strategies (Neugebauer-Maresch, Christine. 2008. “Galgenberg-Stratzing/Krems-Rehberg and its 32,000 years old female statuette.” Wissenschaftliche Mitteilungen Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum 19: 119–128. 119. Sankt Pölten: Amt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung. https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/WM_19_0119-0128.pdf).

The hunters removed flakes from a core of a rock and used hammer and percussion techniques to produce axes blades and scrapers. These were further trimmed and sharpened under pressure using a piece of an antler tine as a flexible tool to peel thin flakes off the core material. The production debris left behind testifies of the immensely industrious activities of the men and women who struggled to stay alive. “People from the Galgenberg” - in English gallows mountain – “collected nodules for the tool production in the gravels of the Galgenberg itself as well as in the riverbeds of the Danube and the Krems. Raw materials of low quality are abundant in large quantity. An essential part of the finer tools, however, is made of white patinated flint presumably imported from the area of the Czech Republic (ibid. 126). The hearth was the center of life of the clan of about twenty-five women and men. The campfire site provided warmth and light. The spectrum of stone tools found in layer two at the Galgenberg consisted primarily of burins and burin spalls (ibid. 126).

Since 1986, Christine Neugebauer-Maresch has carried out excavations at the Galgenberg site. In 1988, during one of the excavation campaigns she found the now famous statuette of seventy-two millimeters’ height and the weight of ten grams (ibid.). She writes on the topography of the site that “Galgenberg is characterized by its position at the border between the Tullnerfeld in the East and the Wachau in the Southwest. Geologically, it is located at the transition of the Bohemian Massif in the West to the Molasse Zone in the East. Tertiary gravels occur at the base of this elevation which is partly covered by thirteen-meter-high loess deposits” (ibid. 120). The Galgenberg lies 374 meters above sea level, towards the East a view far into the Danube valley is given and in the West a cut leads to the Krems valley (ibid.). Pollen analysis from three cultural layers dating from 46,000 to 29,000 years BC “provided evidence for the occurrence of coniferous trees like pine and larch, different sorts of grass and herbs which are typical for the Loess steppe. The palaeosoil of the lowest layer also contained pollen of ferns and spores of moss as well as evidence of deciduous trees like birch and alder” (ibid. 121). The eight fragments of the statuette were found in layer two near hearth B, which dates in between 32,000- and 20,000-years BC (ibid. 122). With a diameter of one meter, this hearth exceeded the others in size by far, and the repeated dispersion of charcoal on various places in the surrounding shows that the long-time use of this hearth is certain (ibid. 125). At hearth B, the fauna is only poorly preserved; but there are numbers of horse teeth and burned bones which are more robust. “Remains of wild horse, reindeer, mammoth, deer and woolly rhino could be determined. … Among the most remarkable finds is a pelvis (both parts of the pelvis combined with the sacrum) of a woolly rhino deposited in anatomic association and found in the north-western part of the excavation area in 1987. In connection with a small fragment of a blade lying close to the bones we suppose that these are remains of the prey” (ibid. 127).

Neugebauer-Maresch assesses that “it is highly probable that the statuette was manufactured at the Galgenberg. The occurrence of amphibolite schist in several hundred meters from the site, as well as many small fragments of this raw material in the area of the fragments of statuette, which may be waste from carving support the above-mentioned assumption. The statuette itself is an upright standing figurine without feet, one leg in close touch to the other. The legs are separated by a pointed oval perforation. The left leg seems stretched while the right one is flexed. The transition from the hips to the upper part of the body is rounded which can especially be seen from the back side. The right arm is also separated from the body by a pointed oval perforation and touches the thigh. A rod like object along the leg appears in outlines. Two projections on the left-hand side can be interpreted as raised arm and the left breast in profile. The head is slightly inclined to the right. Four notches visible at an oblique view on the same side as the raised arm may indicate the main view of the head – the face which is not further modelled. The clearly pronounced right shoulder makes the lack of the left shoulder especially clear. The anatomic explanation is clear: When the arm is raised the shoulder disappears building a “v” with the line of the body from the neck and the head. This posture is strengthened by the head turned in this direction with a view slightly turned upwards” (ibid. 126). So far, the description of the statuette by Christine Neugebauer-Maresch in 2008.

In September 2007, I wrote a description of the statuette that I called with the name Neugebauer-Maresch gave her in the 1988: Fanny[ii]. Twenty years later, Neugebauer-Maresch speaks of a statuette, and not any more of a woman dancer. At the communal center of the community of Stratzing, I bought a reproduction of the statuette to inspire me at my working desk. Reading the accompanying information brochure, I wrote the following on Fanny.

The statuette’s left arm flies self-assured and with fiery and yet concentrated gesture joyful and triumphant up in the air, not to warn and not in despair because her right arm which, with determined dignity is lowered as if to rest in her pants pocket, signals to be at ease and on firm ground. With naturalness, the statuette insists to stand upright and straight. Her left breast attracts attention and makes clear that the case is to take part in the constant struggle for sense within the narrow conditions of life. The resemblance with the erotic naturalness of the dancing Fanny Elßler (1810-1884), the famous star of free individualistic expression is evident. Fanny’s freedom to dance stands in contrast with the liberty chaining powers of European male monarchs at the dancing congress of Vienna in the 19th century. It is a noble and gender empowering gesture of the archeologist Christine Neugebauer-Maresch to name the found Venus “Fanny”. Gender equality in the age of democracy still is a goal in contemporary European societies. Fanny was fabricated about 32,000 years ago. This sculpture was produced by an artist of the Old Stone Age, and still touches my heart, and respectfully reminds me of the longing of man and women to produce human pictures and to forget about the rest of this world because picturing is the best way to live and master life. For the artist of Fanny, it was apparently one of the most important things of her or his life to produce the sculpture. This is to be understood in the sense that she or he preferred sculpturing to the production of tools, which were helping her or him to sustain life. Apparently, she or he had gathered or hunted enough and was permitted by the clan to pass her or his time near the campfire sculpturing little figures. Apparently sculpturing made sense to his or her life. Picturing certainly gives sense to my life and the bronze reproduction of the little Fanny in my hand reminds me of both, the assurance that picturing is a self-satisfying business and that to be empowered to exercise this creativity is still a rare privilege in our modern societies.

The Paleolithic sculptor uses techniques to work the stone. He or she was careful not to fragment the seven-millimeter thin foil of the slate and destroy her or his picture and she or he was to be prudent not to disturb the social integrity of the clan, which takes care of her or his economic necessities. Was the artist of Fanny admired or feared, integrated or isolated because of his or her preoccupation with sculpturing a woman? Why did she or he produce the picture of a woman? Did she or he represent what he or she desires and longs for in his or her dreams? Was the statuette a model figure that balances reality with imagination or did the sculptor assess how she or he wants to be seen by the other men and women? Was the motive to sculpt to provide courage to stand up to the hardness of nature, to the violence of men and women or to overcome the sufferings of sickness and slow death? Did the sculptor simply enjoy her or his satisfaction from realizing the know-how of integrating art technique and creativity? Was sculpturing the only accessible way of expressing what language did not yet allow to say?

From Fanny to our days, to satisfy the sense searching need by living with picturing preoccupies women, men and queer. Picturing is a good way to live and master life. Many women, men and queer today hope and long to create art themselves. Making pictures of all kinds, and certainly making pictures of language, imagining and thinking how to realize the imagined, the production technique and the art to express forms that reach the heart of the others and maintain the dignity of all by appealing to respect man and women since Fanny can be observed. Women and men live as creative creatures because they experience sense in their lives and conscientiously express their sensitivity. Women, men and queer produced works of art and pictures in the millenniums and centuries after Fanny.

Concerning the social structures of the artists’ environment we must assess those women, men and queer are not treating each other as partners on this earth. Women are still caught in oppressing dependence and often enslaved conditions of patriarchic social structures of cultures. Wisdom, science, art and reason are creative forces and powers of women, men and queer alike. When will a civilization of love take profit of the cultural universe that joins female, male and queer creative forces of production to live together in peace and justice? What changed since the days of Fanny?

One day, Christine, a young student of theology looked at the little sculpture on my office desk and she did not see a woman but a man. In her eyes Fanny was an Old Stone Age man that swings an ax over his left shoulder and balances his body’s weight by leaning on a spear in his right hand. What I took to be the left breast of Fanny for Christine was the elbow with which men recklessly elbow their way forward to power, success and control.

A few weeks later, I took a second look at Fanny on my desk. I saw on television the picture of a young gang-raped African woman whose children and husband were slaughtered by the mad violence of some marauding mercenary soldiers. The picture was terribly sad to watch. The forceless rage of the woman was reduced to the silent crouching on a clay step. This woman has lost everything and has no disposal over anything. She was not any more able to even protest. No hope was in sight, no hope for justice or protection. The way she slowly lowered her eyelid showed that it was enough what life expected her to bear. The way she closed her eyelid before the camera and the later viewers like me was the strongest expression of dignity. She expresses what had happened to her and was about to destroy her soul, she mourns her loved ones and touches the viewers with deep sorrow. In this moment watching the film, Fanny became a picture of that young woman, a picture of a suffering woman in our age. A soldier had cut off her right arm. I realized that the left forearm of Fanny is missing too. Immediately, I interpreted the sculpture showing a woman with her raised stump of the left arm as the warning picture of the cruelties men and women inflict on one another. Fanny from now on is not only the sculptured picture of the expression of a modern woman finding dignity and liberty, but also the accusing sculpture of the brutal mutilation of the basic dignity of women, men and queer by brutal men, women and queer.

Eleven years after having written the above notes on Fanny, I learn from Christine Neugebauer-Maresch that the Paleolithic scientist does not speak any more of a woman statuette. The intuition of Christine, the female student of theology, was right. Apparently, there are Paleolithic researchers who interpret the little statuette from the Galgenberg as a male hunter carrying a club. Others interpret the statuette as a religious symbol of some rites resembling the pose of a shaman woman going into trance to receive visions. The researchers will continue working on their hypothesis about the precious green amphibolite piece of art that Neugebauer-Maresch found at the Galgenberg. Paleolithic research started in Austria in the 19th century that is while Fanny Elßler danced in Vienna (Neugebauer-Maresch, Christine. 2008. “Paleolithic Research in Austria.” Wissenschaftliche Mitteilungen Niederösterreichisches Landesmuseum 19: 1–18. 2. Sankt Pölten: Amt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung. https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/WM_19_0007-0018.pdf). Only in the 1950s, women started publishing paleontological and archeological studies in Austria, Maria Mottl was one of the first (ibid. 7). In the 19th century, individual women and a few men claimed liberation from patriarchy and the end of oppression by social structures that were ruling society, the women and wives. In the 19th century, universities were still banning women from education, research and teaching, a most basic of women’s human rights, depriving them of economic, physical, and intellectual independence (Fraser, Arvonne S. 1999. “Becoming Human: The Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 21 (4): 853–906. 853).

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ernestine Rose, born in Poland, barely escaped an arranged marriage (ibid. 871). She emigrated to Germany, moved on to Paris during the 1830 revolution and by 1840 moved from England with her husband Robert Owen, a reformer too, to the United States (ibid.). She and her husband lobbied for the passing of a married women’s property act in New York, “the legislative act allowed women to hold property in their own names and be legal guardians of their children” (ibid.). Claimed by women since the 1840s, public discussion of the husband’s right to chastise or beat his wife was not discussed widely until the late twentieth century when domestic violence against women finally became a crime (ibid. 875). It was in 1845 that Caroline Norton protested the cruelties of child labor in England (ibid. 866). Only in 1923, English women gained equal rights in divorce, “and it took fifty more years, until 1973, before Parliament allowed English mothers to have legal custody of children equally with fathers” (ibid. 868). American women only achieved the right to vote in 1920 (ibid. 875). It took until 1973, when the US Congress adopted Title IX of the Education Amendments, to eliminate among other things discrimination against women in education, to open US law schools to more than a small quota of women, and to encourage schoolgirls to participate in sports (ibid. 876).

I do not know about the intentions or motif of Christine Neugebauer-Maresch to name the Palaeolithic statuette that she had found Fanny. The statuette reminded her of a dancing pose of Fanny Elßler. I do not know about gender equality or discrimination against women and queer in the Stone Ages. The women discriminating social practices of gender differences and the invention of male-female bipolarity for reasons of suppressing women undoubtedly developed during history. Investigating historic texts of ancient cultures as sources that document possible gender-based discrimination is possible. Investigating spoken language for discriminating expressions is possible too. Most lexical items have short linguistic half-lives of just a few thousand years (Pagel, Mark, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude and Andrew Meade. 2013. “Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110 (21): 8471–8476. 8471. doi:10.1073/pnas.1218726110). A high frequency of use guarantees sustainability of the words and concepts (ibid.). Male and female scientists consider the words “Thou, I, Not, That, We, To give, Who, This, What, Man or Male, Ye, Old, Mother, To hear, Hand, Fire, To pull, Black, To flow, Bark, Ashes, To spit, Worm” (ibid. 8474) as “ultraconserved” words that evolved from a common ancestor, an ancient Eurasiatic “linguistic superfamily 15,000 years ago” (ibid. 8471). The ultraconserved words do not include the word Father but simply the word Man or Male. The list includes the word Mother, but not the word Woman or female. From this observation, it is not possible to claim that women were only spoken of as mothers and were not regarded as women; men instead were considered male as being male and not because they take the role of caregivers to their children. The words listed would permit many language games, including games speaking of giving each other, listening to each other, saying yes or no to the other, speaking for a group and many games more. Albeit these games are purely imagined, and we do not possess any language artefact from the Neolithic Age.

What is the use of preparing the conditions for life on earth for millions of years, if this life is as burdensome and fragile as ours is? The universe presents conditions that make life on earth possible. Yet, two hundred thousand years after women, men and queer started to inhabit planet earth, this most dangerous and gentile creature of all, and the species that is most capable of both love and hate, must face the fact that it is about to threaten planetary stability of mother earth. We are all made up of the elements that the stars and stellar bodies of the cosmos set free for an enterprise that led to life. The energetic mass of the universe with exploding and shrinking stars started some eighteen billion years ago, the palpitating rhythms of asthmatic spasms of space tunnels, turning matter from the cold to hot explosions of density at the heat of fifteen million degrees centigrade. After fifteen billions of years, the alteration of shrinking and expanding produced life conditions for bacteria and with admirable patience they birthed in the monotonous flow of time three billion years later vegetation and one hundred million years ago from the cyclostomes’ jawless fish rapidly ran evolution to amphibians, reptiles and birds to mammalian and wild animal life. In 2019, we do not need any interstellar comets to extinguish the life of the dinosaurs from the face of the earth, we do not need cosmic catastrophes to hit the earth every 120 million years to cause chaos and destruction. In 2019, women, men and queer of the Neolithic nuclear age can destroy their life sustaining conditions by themselves. On the other hand, we observe enormous capacities for cooperation and constructing sustainable lives. Women, men and queer are capable of cooperation and their organisms are the result of the cooperation of trillions of cells.

At the same time, women, men and queer are also lacking the kind of cooperation that would empower every woman, man and queer on this earth to take part in society in a free and dignified way. The diameter of a human red blood cell is about eight micrometers. The erythrocytes are very large cells. My body is the product of the organization and cooperation of about one hundred trillion of cells. It is quite a task to get near an understanding of how this cooperation functions. System biology that studies the cell processes, and their information chains is an exciting science. Many scientists concerned with women, men and queer find the evidence of human cooperation astonishing. This kind of cooperation of women, men and queer on a global level seems to be unseen on earth. Women, men and queer can put themselves in somebody else’s place and position. They seem to be able to look at and care for the other’s emotional and cognitive state and condition. Men and women do not necessarily have their eyes on their own interests and do not necessarily search their advantage over the others. Women, men and queer have started discussing the protection of Earth’s life-support system as a reaction to the destructive ways humans are transforming the planet. There is no thriving global society without the stable functioning of Earth systems such as the “atmosphere, oceans, forests, waterways, biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles” (Griggs, David. 2013. “Sustainable development goals for people and planet.” Nature 495: 305–307. 305).

Sustainable development, the equal dignity, freedom and rights of nine billion women, men and queer by 2050, must include the security of people and the planet (ibid.). Human development is threatened by “water shortages, extreme weather, deteriorating conditions for food production and sea-level rise”, by climate change, terrestrial and marine biodiversity loss, “interference with the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, global fresh-water use, change in land use, chemical pollution and atmospheric aerosol loading” (ibid. 306). The current and future generations depend on safeguarding Earth’s life-support system. We need to change our economies and pursue policies that are “reducing poverty and hunger, improving health and well-being and creating sustainable production and consumption patterns”. Lives and livelihoods can be improved by promoting “sustainable access to food, water and energy while protecting biodiversity and ecosystem services” (ibid. 307).

The scientists who research the history of humankind and the scientists of physics and astrophysics and of the sciences of life are still using the gender differences and the concept of a male-female bipolarity without reflecting the fact that they carry discrimination talk into their hypothesis and experiments. We are invited to acknowledge that the expression “biological” already belongs to the social sphere. Women, men and queer speakers use the predicate “biological” as a term and we use this predicate in language without much thinking about the descriptions that helped to define the term. Since the foundation of feminist theory in the late 19th century, the question of gender was a question of “the social norms and expectations associated with masculinity and femininity” (Richardson, Sarah S. 2017. “Plasticity and Programming: Feminism and the Epigenetic Imaginary.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43 (1): 29–52. 42). Feminists criticized the term biological dimorphism that is corporealized in the sexed body, as the discriminating result of the social conditions of subjugation of women by men (ibid.). Social factors insisted on the inequality of the female and male bodies and men finally scientifically defined, that is legitimized as a norm of nature this inequality of biology, starting with theories of molecular epigenetic processes that prove the bipolarity of sex differences, negating diversity and variation in sex and gender (ibid. 45).

Feminism has not yet accomplished its goals and the expectations and norms of a neoliberal, postfeminist economy exploit individual women’s empowerment and choice for enhancing capital profit making (Rottenberg, Catherine. 2017. “Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of Human Capital.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (2): 329–348. 329). Enabling women to establish a successful high-power career and a family while enjoying both at the same time, is perhaps attainable for the top 1% (ibid. 333). If reproduction and care work are already being outsourced to other women, “new forms of racialized and class-stratified gender exploitation” is emerging with the neoliberal order (ibid. 332). To make the idea of finding the right work-family balance attractive for millions of middle-class women, balance has to be sold as a promise for the future and women have to desire this reward and pursue the aspirations of pursuing happiness through finding the right work-family balance (ibid. 333). Middle-class stay-at-home mothers are out, while professional women who are having children are in. The responsibility for planning career and family belongs to the women, she has to craft her equilibrium and even calls herself a feminist (ibid. 335). To solve the conflict between well-educated women, work, and family by pointing at future rewards and promises produces multiple alienations (ibid. 336). It is a perversity to persuade women in the name of feminist empowerment “to postpone motherhood to some ill-defined future moment” and “pay female employees to freeze their eggs” in order to concentrate on their career (ibid. 341). It is a lack of solidarity that the individual woman is held responsible for solving this conflict on her own. We need to change our economies and pursue policies creating sustainable production and consumption patterns that improve the well-being of all, the happiness of all, the health of all and reduce poverty. All women, men and queer are invited to develop forms of lives and participate in promoting livelihoods on a working work-life balance. It is possible to organize family life and the care for children with the participation of both parents, women, men and queer.

If there is political energy and will, sustainable production conditions and life adapted career patterns are possible. If there are flexible work arrangements for women, men and queer, and if men take equal responsibility for childcare and the housework, if society enables family careers with the same energy and perseverance as it rewards the commitment to professional careers, if work and family are organized together, women, men and queer get a chance to become happy together. To me it is a question of organizing society in a completely new way. The expression work-life conflicts is not any more reserved for men and when women are concerned, the expression does not slip any more to work-family balance. A work-life balance includes job-work and family-work and creative leisure as well as many other social realizations and concerns of women, men and queer (ibid. 339). We have to create workplaces that balance commitment to family and job-work and are ideal for women, men and queer. As a man, I think about the possible experience of caring for my children knowing that I will still be able to pursue a career that makes me happy. I will not earn as much money, but the loss of capital value is more than compensated by the gain in human value. Why do we not start realizing this kind of organizing in our societies? Feminism includes organizing the private and the public domain according to the equal dignity, liberty and rights of women, men and queer. I argue that women, men and queer participate in the negotiation of work and home life and that women and men take responsibility for organizing their common lives. The discourse of liberal democracies “has always been gendered and has served to naturalize the sexual division of labor” by making normative the distinction between the private and public spheres (ibid. 344). Therefore, I claim to replace this discourse by a new discourse of balanced solidarity of women, men and queer where men take responsibility for the family as do women and queer. We make ourselves pictures of policies and pictures of values, desires and aspirations. Why not develop a society where women, men and queer work together in the family, care together, plan their careers together with women, men and queer managers and professionals who join in realizing the business of solidarity and capital value that sustains life.

Tractatus 2.1 reads “We make to ourselves pictures of facts”. The picture is itself a fact and Tractatus 3 says “The logical picture of the facts is the thought”. Tractatus 4 continues “The thought is the significant proposition”. In 2019, I want to revise my proposition of 2007 concerning Fanny. Yes, this sculpture still touches my heart. I am still excited that an artist of the Old Stone Age engaged in creative art. But Fanny does not remind me any more of the longing of man and women to produce human pictures to forget about the rest of this world. Producing pictures of art, sentences or sculptures, music or paintings is a very good and legitimate way to live and master one’s life. Forgetting about the rest of this world means first forgetting about oneself. Producing pictures helps to get along with oneself, but forgetting about oneself is not good. No picture could make up for oneself. Neglecting self-awareness, painful or full of happiness, is repression that is violence. A violent person is not capable of relating to other persons peacefully and with love. Having found the love of oneself and of another person allows turning to produce creative pictures and sentences. Do not substitute your love with a statuette like Fanny, a picture of a dead mother or an imagined lover.

In September of 2008, I wrote the following self-assessment that is inspired by my reading of Adolf Grünbaum’s 1998 article on a century of psychoanalysis (Grünbaum, Adolf. 2012. “A century of psychoanalysis: critical retrospect and prospect.” Psychiatry online Italia. October 12. http://www.psychiatryonline.it/node/2198). He takes a look at psychoanalysis as a theory of human nature and therapy. What use do I make of the expression “unconscious”? Grünbaum helps me to answer this question in relation to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Repressed forbidden wishes of a sexual or aggressive nature, which recklessly seek immediate gratification, independently of the constraints of external reality make up what Freud called the “dynamic unconscious” (ibid.). Defensive operations of the ego apparently prevent the entry of these unconscious wishes into consciousness. I do not want to present the elements of Freud’s picture of the unconscious nor reconstruct the relation of memory, perception, judgment and attention to the wish-content. The technique of free association could lift the repression of instinctual wishes. I agree, using the flow of free conscious association alone and in group experiences enables me to observe wishes, desires, anxieties and many other sentiments and emotions that I apparently had repressed to the unconscious world and never made it to be formed in a picture of language. I agree that I show resistance to the exercise to calm down and sit on my Caucasian meditation rug in the prophet’s colors of green, black and deep purple, red and white. I agree that I show resistance to the exercise to remember my dreams where restlessly I travel in the company of proletarian hobos and depressingly unsuccessful drivers of trucks and automobiles. I show resistance to any effort to get calm and peaceful. I show resistance to the simple admission that I do not feel good. What about the censoring forces of the ego? I acknowledge not liking bad experiences and news. Grünbaum writes on Freud: “Freud assumed axiomatically that distressing mental states, such as forbidden wishes, trauma, guilt, and sadness — all of which are unpleasurable — typically actuate, and then fuel forgetting to the point of repression. Thus, repression presumably regulates pleasure and unpleasures by defending our consciousness against various sorts of negative affect” (ibid.). I agree on the examples for distressing mental states. I agree that unconsciously and consciously I repress unpleasurable emotions, events and memories. For the practical experience of my life, I profited from the technique of free association in groups, of allowing me to associate freely in meditation and of overcoming the unpleasurable fatigue of dreaming by trying to memorize what I dreamt.

In 1981, I was 25 years old, the psychologist in a workshop on self-experience encouraged me to remember my dreams. A few months later I remember having dreamt that my father made me responsible for the death of a pale linnen bandage bundle lying on the ground behind his car. The bundle represented my dead brother, who had died three years old, three days after a car accident of my parents. At the time I was an embryo of five months and not the boy I was in the dream. My father never accused me of that death in real life. Did my dream reveal my father’s repressed anger at me? Or did the dream simply reveal my repressed bad conscience? I do not know. The dream certainly revealed to me my repressed guilt feeling because I was alive and taking over the role of the first-born from my dead brother. Up to that dream, I said when I had been asked to say something about the feelings for my father, that I do not miss him. He never embraced me; he repressed his incapacity to stand up for his will. He evaded conflicts and did not fight for his interests. He was weak and without force and tactics, so that I stayed without a model to learn to stand up with courage and say what I think. All that may be true, but the dream showed me a deeper and more convincing history that I discovered decades later. The remembered dream of my father’s accusation is a screen memory. Today I understand the dream as a screen memory of my prenate trauma from that accident and the following painful months of my prenate life and the depressing suffering of my mother. After that dream, I wrote for two decades about my angst and my desire to experience the caring and protecting embrace of my mother. It took me another decade to accept my angst, and to stand up to my angst for the few minutes till I experience that the angst fades and unimagined strength brings back my integrity to talk strongly and with sensible force. What do I want to say? Facing my life and letting memory, emotions and feelings, desires and wishes, pleasurable and torturing, surge from the unconscious, is an exercise that helps me to confront the fact that there is a lot of energy with me. I am happy to hear that there are scientists that “do valuable work on the conditions under which painful experiences are remembered and on those other conditions under which they are forgotten”. Yet, I do not talk of a method of free association. I called it a technique of free association. In a group, the technique would consist in the rule that anything that comes into one’s mind, emotions, feelings, thoughts or other, can be communicated and is worth being told and listened to with respect. There is a lot of grieving, mourning and sorrow coming up in groups where men and women follow this rule, there are a lot of tears and hurting pain and wounds to be lamented and exchanged. There is no finding of causes, there is no therapy to get happy, and there is no interpretation of a dream that must not be validated by the dreamer herself. Nevertheless, I owe much of my integrity, dignity and freedom to the insistence of Freud on a successful sexual life of partnership; I owe much to him because he insisted on the importance of feelings, emotions and distress for the history of a life.

I owe much to Freud, because in his account of the story of Oedipus, I got a story that helped me for some time to cope with my mother and father, my dead brother and my brother alive. Do not substitute your love for a picture or an object, is a wisdom that I owe to the savage sage Freud who did not cultivate his psalms with the help of David and Babylon. Do not substitute your love for a picture, even if she is dead and cannot love you anymore. Terrible and full of suffering is the story of expulsion of Freud from Vienna by his fellow Austrians in 1938. Terrible is the untold story of sufferings and destructions of individuals by the German army, Hitler’s organizations of dehumanizing people. Unsaved are the tears of the men and women who were subjected to this unbearable terror of evil men and women. Freud’s insistence on the emotional integrity of the individual can be understood as a social realization of dignity. His insistence on listening to the individual that is too week for the moment to work out her or his integrity, his insistence not to talk and interpret and thereby overhear the suffering that needs to be told and listened to is an important contribution to the dignity and freedom and liberty and integrity of the individual. Integrity, health and Human Rights are now seen as inseparable and take together many aspects of human life and experience, biological, psychological, social, economic, cultural and spiritual aspects must be taken seriously by all professions. Do not substitute your angst for aggression, your impotence for omnipotence, your creativity for normality, would be a formulation of what is good for me.

My personal ethical work consisted in finding, accepting and working out in daily life the following rules: Do not substitute your dead mother for some figure of importance as reincarnation of the lost. Do not substitute the men or women in front of you for the multiple transfers that tempt your soul and mind and feelings. It takes a lot of love to overcome one’s transference resistances. To experience good emotional experiences after having mourned the sufferings of the emotional past is the way to integrity. Yet I suppose that the world of the unconscious in me and the unknown influences of my social environment are pictured by the sentences of my speech. Working through my associations and getting to the feelings that disturb, prepares the meditation of calm and peaceful consolation. Sometimes meditation serves very little. Do not substitute a dead love for some picture of little life. If you have to say goodbye to a loved one in your life do not substitute but reach out and go for the love of another man or woman that you can love tenderly with your life. So far in September 2008.

I know that Freudian theory was used to reinforce the social imaginary of patriarchy that determines the social norms and expectations associated with masculinity and femininity according to male superiority and female inferiority (Mambrol, Nasrullah. 2016. “Feminist Critique of Freud.” Literariness.org. April 18. https://literariness.org/2016/04/18/feminist-critique-of-freud/). I cannot judge whether Freud claimed that inferiority was an inherent quality of the female. Describing women as having penis envy that is by lacking a penis and therefore desiring men, indeed is discriminating. I do not want to defend any theory of Freud; I give testimony to what was of help to me. There are women like Arlene Kramer Richards and Hilda Doolittle who found in their analysis encouragement, a sense of purpose, and belief in her own creative powers (Kramer Richards, Arlene. 1999. “Freud and Feminism: A Critical Appraisal.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 47 (4): 1213–1237. 1213. doi: 10.1177/000306519904700411). Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis as the art of listening and his therapeutic work was instrumental in freeing women from both domestic bondage and fantasies of inferiority. Sabina Spielrein and Lou Andreas-Salomé contributed with their writings to early psychoanalysis. Spielrein worked as a clinician, theorist and researcher on child psychology and language, on sexuality’s aspects of satisfaction and destruction, and it is our social choice to recognize Andreas-Salomé as a psychoanalytic thinker defending the ego calming resources of stormy creativity. Why should Freud have believed that women are not equal to men (ibid.)?

Analyzing my psyche is a capability I must learn. Learning to analyze myself is the task of the psychoanalyst. Falsely people claim that the psychoanalyst does the psychoanalysis. No, the psychoanalyst helps and empowers a person to whom she or he is listening to a lot, to analyze herself or himself. If a psychoanalyst thinks he is called to explain something to somebody, we have the case Wittgenstein describes, “Freud’s fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in ‘explaining’ symptoms of illness)” (Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1980. Culture and Value. 55e. Edited by G. H. von Wright, translated by Peter Winch. Oxford: Blackwell). Kramer Richards and Doolittle found in their analysis encouragement, they empowered themselves to a sense of purpose and discovered their creativity. Adreas-Salomé speaks of her stormy creativity and her fight to be free to create.

[i] “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” United Nations, http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ (accessed April 23, 2019).

[ii] “Eiszeitwanderweg & Fanny,” Stratzing, http://www.stratzing.at/freizeit/eiszeitwanderweg-fanny/ (accessed April 23, 2019).