What have feminist philosophers made of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir? Let's find out together.
Hi Frens, I thought I could share with you the ground we covered during the Feminist Romp Through the History of Philosophy, in preparation for the next Fall cohort:
We began with Plato, whose inclusion of women among the ruling class turns out to be less proto-feminist (as some philosophers wanted to see it) than a case built to strengthen his dualistic metaphysics. It doesn't matter what kind of body you have, he tells us. The body is part of the immanent, material, visible realm, and inconsequential. What matters is the quality of your soul — the part of us that comes from the transcendent, invisible realm of the Forms — for determining what class you belong to. As Spelman argues, we should reject this view because it violates a basic feminist principle of egalitarianism. In Plato's ideal polis, some are meant to rule but many others are meant to be ruled, by nature of their souls. It is a society in which most are subjugated to the ruling class, even if that ruling class includes women. This was Plato's real investment — justifying the rule of some over others — and his somewhat positive views on women have little to do with women themselves, or any appreciation thereof.
We saw how Aristotle naturalized a hierarchy of beings that raises men above women, anchored in his single-sex theory of reproduction. Aristotle believed that man provides the seed and woman the nutrients and support for reproduction, but the offspring is man's province, just as a fruit comes from the seed, not the land in which that seed is grown and harvested. Aristotle's theory of reproduction has a female resulting from a womb that is too wet and cold, so girls are uncooked fetuses with diminished capacities. This theory was influential up until the Enlightenment, and has left a long shadow.
We then turned to Descartes, whose split between mind and body was tested, and found wanting, by his favorite interlocutor, Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. He is very complimentary of her, saying that while with others he finds himself repeating his positions, she makes him rethink and revise them. It is Princess Elisabeth who shows Descartes that his mind/body dualism is untenable because (1) mind/reason is dependent on the body, taking her own experience of illness as her evidence, and (2) the division fails to explain how two radically distinct "substances" could communicate at all, or how mind can affect body as it obviously does — when I think to move my arm, I am able to will my arm to move. What is more, he accepts this critique even though he isn't ever able to solve for it.
Descartes himself believed that "even women" could achieve rationality, in theory; but as the feminist philosophers have shown, Cartesian reason is masculinist and excludes women in practice. This is what Princess Elisabeth tried to teach him, saying that her duties did not allow her to practice as he prescribed. As Nancy Tuana points out, in order to practice philosophy as a thinking "I," women would have to renounce everything that makes them women, and become men.
Hegel's master-slave dialectic gives us a model for understanding asymmetrical relations that embody social and political differences, and is highly influential for Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis. But his views on women are quite negative. At best it is a vision of women as the "ironic" heart of the community in his reading of Sophocles' Antigone — women are necessary to the modern state but also a threat to its very foundation. Some feminists like Simone de Beauvoir embrace Hegel's account of difference, but more recent critique of both Hegel and Beauvoir attempts to loose feminism from its agonistic portrayal of human relationships.
Merleau-Ponty reclaims the body from Cartesianism and elaborates Husserl's brief account of the lived-body, turning embodiment into a resource feminist philosophy could build on. His attempt to anonymize and de-gender the body fails, according to his feminist readers, and begs the question of what a theory of embodiment that does take sex and gender into account could look like. In the next Romp, we'll look to Iris Marion Young's phenomenology as one model.
Beauvoir, whose own difficult legacy paints a picture of woman as something one becomes, not something one is born. She brings existential phenomenology and historical materialism into a grand account that is meant to situate women's lives in historical and socio-political context. We take a look at why Beauvoir was late to come out as a feminist, and how early readings of The Second Sex created much confusion and controversy both within and outside of feminist circles.
Rather than positioning her vis-à-vis Sartre, we read her as an original thinker whose thinking had more in common with Merleau-Ponty's problematic of the lived-body. In the next Romp, we will also see how her thinking, in the hands of a young Judith Butler, is radicalized and becomes a theory of sex/gender construction.
Throughout, we followed several themes: how the ancient soul-body dualism and its modern heir, mind-body, both structure our relationship to reality and knowledge; the different answers each thinker gave to the question of what is philosophy/philosophical thinking/philosophical method; how reason, knowledge, and power are bound together in all philosophical work; the importance of reading these thinkers within their own historical and political contexts; and, last but not least, the invention of new forms of subjectivity (i.e., masculinity, the thinking "I," the unexpected feminine, and finally the lived-body).
For those of you who didn't attend the Feminist Romp Through the History of Philosophy, good news: you'll get another chance at the end of September with the Fall season of the Romp. Here is what is included:
Is there a philosopher you'd like to see added to the line up? Other feedback or questions?