Red-Pillers before Red Pills: Misogyny, Metaphysics, and the Crisis of Western Philosophy
There is a kind of philosophical violence that runs silently through the core of modern Western thought. It is a violence not of mere logic or abstraction, but of rejection — of the feminine, the world, the Other, and ultimately, of God. To read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Jung or Spengler is to sometimes enter a dark chamber of the modern soul, one where misogyny is not simply a prejudice but a metaphysical condition. In some of their texts, the feminine is not simply denigrated; it is demonized, pathologized, projected upon — made into the mirror of their own disfigured selves.
And yet, these men — these emotionally fragile, often embittered, self-alienated intellectuals — are lionized as the “greats” of Western philosophy. Their bile against women is either ignored, explained away, or dressed in the elegant robes of genius. But when Global South thinkers, or traditional metaphysicians, critique the West’s internal rot — we are told we are “generalizing.” When we point to the deeply gendered, racialized pathology underlying modernity’s canon, we are accused of being “unfair.” But fairness, I submit, has become the liberal alibi for moral evasion.
Let me be precise. I am not speaking in sweeping terms of all Western philosophy. My critique names names: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Jung and Spengler — each a pillar of the modern Western philosophical canon, each leaving behind a documented legacy of contempt for women, and not merely as a social class, but as ontological defect. Schopenhauer’s notorious essay On Women explicitly proclaims the intellectual inferiority of women and reduces them to reproductive vessels. Nietzsche’s quip in Thus Spake Zarathustra — “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!” — is not only a literary flourish, but a symptom of personal neurosis projected onto gender itself. That Nietzsche descended into madness after being rejected by Lou Andreas-Salomé is less a biographical footnote than a psychological indictment. These were not strong men. These were philosophized wounds.
And we must ask: What does it mean when such men are upheld as the philosophical conscience of a civilization? What kind of “Reason” lionizes thinkers who associate femininity with deception, passivity, hysteria, or lack? These were the original “red-pillers,” long before the manosphere was named. Theirs was a hatred not only of women, but of embodiment, of the sensual world, of the very conditions of creation. They hated the world because they could not love. And their misogyny is not incidental — it is metaphysical.
To my critics: yes, I have read these thinkers — not once, but repeatedly, and with rigor. And I can say, as someone who has also deeply studied Mullā Ṣadrā, Ibn ʿArabī, Suhrawardī, Ḥāfiẓ, the Qurʾān and Bayānic cosmology — that these Western figures are spiritual infants in comparison. One page of al-asfār al-arbaʿa is worth more than the entire corpus of Heidegger’s writings cubed. And I say that not as a slogan, but as someone who knows both traditions and knows the difference between a jewel and dung.
Some responded by asking: What about Simone de Beauvoir? What about Hannah Arendt? Fair enough. But this response proves my point. The two examples offered were two white European women — and even then, marginal figures in the history of a male-dominated tradition. I ask: Why is it so difficult to name subaltern women philosophers from the Global South with the same ease? Not because they don’t exist — but because the very canon that celebrates Nietzsche buries them. This is not a problem of the East’s intellectual production. It is a problem of the West’s epistemic gatekeeping.
I was accused of collapsing East and West into crude binaries — of not acknowledging continuity across traditions. But this too is mistaken. The very structure of post-Cartesian Western philosophy is a rupture from the metaphysical traditions of both East and West. Beginning with Descartes’ cogito (which is itself a mutilated version of Ibn Sīnā’s floating man argument), and culminating in Kant’s barring of noumena from the realm of philosophical knowledge, modern Western thought severs itself from metaphysics. It chooses the phenomena and forsakes the Real. In contrast, thinkers like Ibn ʿArabī and Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī uphold a tradition where metaphysics is not only possible — it is lived, embodied, cosmic. Their philosophy does not reduce the world to human cognition. It reveals the world as a theophanic unfolding of Divine Names.
Now, let us be honest: What motivates the angry misogyny of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer? It is not philosophical clarity — it is emotional resentment. Nietzsche did not descend into madness because of nihilism — he collapsed because he was never initiated into love. Freud projected his unresolved sexual neuroses onto humanity. Kierkegaard’s tormented theology of womanhood comes not from spiritual depth, but from spiritual cowardice. Jung, for all his talk of anima and shadow, exoticized the feminine into an archetype to be analyzed but never truly met.
And so I argue: This is not philosophy — it is pathologized projection masquerading as philosophy.
Those who say “but these thinkers criticized the West itself!” forget a crucial truth: they did not critique the West for its imperialism or domination — they lamented the loss of white male supremacy within it. This is why their thought so easily fertilized the ideological soil of Eurofascism. Read Spengler. Read Heidegger’s Black Notebooks. The line is clear.
I am not calling for cultural essentialism. I am calling for epistemic honesty. And I am calling on those from formerly colonized and spiritually ravaged societies to stop genuflecting before thinkers whose very worldview abhorred them. There is no shame in saying that your own tradition contains deeper wisdom — especially when it does. This is not chauvinism. This is justice.
Let the Nietzschean white male of the West keep his whip – and shove it! I will take my ʿishq and my fanāʾ any day.
