Words of Power

A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic

Andrea Nye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000737172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Business General

Originally published in 1990. A common complaint of philosophers, and men in general, has been that women are illogical. On the other hand, rationality, defined as the ability to follow logical argument, is often claimed to be a defining characteristic of man. Andrea Nye undermines assumptions such as: logic is unitary, logic is independent of concrete human relations, logic transcends historical circumstances as well as gender. In a series of studies of the logics of historical figures Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Abelard, Ockham, and Frege she traces the changing interrelationships between logical innovation and oppressive speech strategies, showing that logic is not transcendent truth but abstract forms of language spoken by men, whether Greek ruling citizens, imperial administrators, church officials, or scientists. She relates logical techniques, such as logical division, syllogisms, and truth functions, to ways in which those with power speak to and about those subject to them. She shows, in the specific historical settings of Ancient and Hellenistic Greece, medieval Europe, and Germany between the World Wars, how logicians reworked language so that dialogue and reciprocity are impossible and one speaker is forced to accept the words of another.

In the personal, as well as confrontative style of her readings, Nye points the way to another power in the words of women that might break into and challenge rational discourses that have structured Western thought and practice.

Part I
Classical Logic

1

The Desire of Logic:
Parmenides’s Passion

The mares which carry me
as far as my heart desires
Were escorting me, leading me
as they put me on the many-speaking road
Of the Spirit, that Spirit who carries
past the towns the knowing man (1.1–3).¹

Logic and poetry are traditionally put at opposite poles. Poetry expresses emotion; logic is passionless. Poetry invokes objects of desire that can be physically possessed; the objects of logic are abstract entities and relations accessible only to reason. Poetry is most often motivated by love; investigations that yield logical truth are disinterested. What then is the motivation for logic? Why does the logician so delight in his abstractions. Why does he² find logical truth so much more exciting than the concrete realities of lived experience? To protest that a logician’s interests are pure of any motivation is to avoid the question. Some desire, or despair, or need must have driven him to the intricate and demanding study of logic.

A question of motivation is also a question of origins, of beginnings. But where is the beginning of logic? With Aristotle who was the first to abstract the logical form of arguments? With his teacher Plato who first envisioned the reality of abstract entities? Or is it necessary to go back still further to another text, a poem, that in its rejection of the change and inconsistency of natural beings evokes for the first time that self-consistent “Being” that is the subject of logic? In his sixth-century BC heroic poem, Parmenides dramatically portrays the passion in this rejection of physical and natural existence. Here, in its infancy, logic has not yet separated from poetry. Parmenides frames his quest for logical truth in a romantic setting of maiden guides, eerie sounds, ethereal locked doors, and gaping chasms that open to engulf and delight.

The choice of poetry to describe a search for logical truth has often been seen by philosophers as unfortunate.

It is hard to excuse Parmenides’ choice of verse as a medium for his philosophy. The exigencies of meter and poetic style regularly produce an almost impenetrable obscurity and the difficulty of understanding his thought is not lightened by any literary joy.³

In this argument, the classicist Jonathan Barnes criticizes Parmenides’s poetry as a clumsy gloss on his logic. Others have discarded Parmenides’s prologue with its chariot ride and female divinities as religious,⁴ or argued that logical notions were so new that they had to be temporarily expressed in figurative language,⁵ or discounted Parmenides’s poetry as a metaphor whose function is only to represent the objective existence of logical truth.⁶

But what is striking in Parmenides’s prologue, whatever its literary merit, is neither spirituality nor rhetoric but poetically expressed desire, desire that is to be fulfilled in Parmenides’s final encounter with the patron goddess of truth. Desire (θυ

μός) initiates Parmenides’s journey and is the impulse that drives it forward. He will go as far as desire can reach. The mares he drives are the servants of his longing; they respond sensitively (πολύϕραστοι) to the urgings of his heart. Desire puts him on the road to logic, leads him through and past the ordinary concerns of human life in a quest or search for something loved and lost, dreamt of but never attained.⁷

Parmenides evokes the scene in concrete detail. Maidens urgently lead the way as in a marriage procession.

Maidens of the Sun,

forsaking the house of Night

For the light, throw back

with their hands their veils (1.9–10).

These are the first of a series of female attendants, gatekeepers, and instructresses who will direct Parmenides to his final destination. As the Sun maidens press the horses on, the sparking and glowing wheels give out a pipe-like accompaniment, and a strange music and unearthly glow come from the chariot as the wheels turn faster and faster. The throwing back of the maidens’ veils expresses the urgency of the logician’s passage from darkness to light, to a transparent truth laid naked without any obscuring covering. Their unveiling is only a foretaste of the more profound revelation that will constitute a final apotheosis in the presence of truth itself.

The chariot draws near to the threshold which Parmenides must cross, the barrier he must penetrate, a forbidding set of double doors.

There are the gates

of the ways of Night and Day,

And they are framed by a lintel

and a threshold of stone,

Ethereal, they close the great doors,

And for these much punishing Dike

holds the alternate keys (1.11–14).

For such an awesome gatekeeper gentle words and cunning are necessary. Using both, Parmenides’s maiden guides persuade Dike to push back the bar from the great gates. With loud clankings and scraping of metal bolts, the doors swing open to reveal a gaping chasm (χάσμα)into which Parmenides’s chariot is immediately guided by the Sun maidens. With this mimicking of the physical consumation of desire, Parmenides nears the final object of his quest.

Now he is face to face with his goddess; the attendant maidens and chariot fade away, and the sacred conversation begins. She welcomes him in flattering terms, and takes him by the right hand.

Welcome. It is not an evil fate

that prompted you to travel

This road—for it is

far from the paths of men—

But law and justice.

It is necessary that all be learned

Including the unshaken heart

of well-rounded truth (1.26–29).

The lesson proceeds. There are in fact two things that Parmenides must learn.

On the one hand:

it is and to not be is not;

On the other: it is not

and it is necessary not to be (2.3–4).

In this hermetic teaching is the self-identical kernel of logical truth. The choice that Parmenides has made, and must go on making, is not between “is” and “is not,” for, the goddess points out, the way of “is not” is impossible. Nonbeing is nothing and cannot constitute a choice. The choice instead is between the correct way of “what is” and its identity with itself against the wandering of ignorant masses who think they can go back and forth from what is to what is not.⁸ These masses, or tribes (ϕν

λα)as the goddess calls them contemptuously, are helpless and confused,

… mortals who seeing nothing

Wander, of two minds,

for confusion

In their hearts guides their wandering thought,

And they are carried

Deaf as well as blind,

astonished undecided masses… (6.4–9).⁹

The “many-speaking” high road through the towns of women and men must become the broad avenue of truth from which there can be no deviation. The twisting and branching of ordinary existence must be rejected for the straight way of what is. The blindness of sight and the deafness of hearing will be replaced by the vision of logic. Thought will no longer backtrack or veer or contradict itself with the changing evidence of the physical senses and the conflicting opinions of ordinary mortals.

It only remains for the goddess to instruct Parmenides in some of the distinguishing marks of the way of logic, and to compare them to the “wandering” ways of popular teachings on cosmology, theology, and psychology, which involve a forbidden vacillation between the ways of what is and what is not. The goddess first describes the faithfulness of logical truth which Dike, stern gatekeeper with her double keys, ensures by rigidly separating “is” and “is not.”

Nor will the force of fidelity (πίστις)¹⁰

accept that anything be

Born beyond itself,

when neither for birth

Nor dying does

unhearing Dike loosen her bonds,

But holds fast… (8.12–14).

Now inside the doors, with “is not” exposed as an impossible way, Dike’s task is not to separate or balance being and nonbeing, but to hold (ἒχει)what is tightly, to bind it in the shackles that will keep it uncontaminated from what is not. Ananke, or Necessity, plays a similar role.

For obdurate Ananke

The boundaries in fetters holds,

presses in from all sides

Because it is the law that what is

is not unfinished (8.30–32).

And also Moira or Fate.

… since of course Moira holds fast

The whole unmoving (8.37–38).

The goddess explains the characteristics of this imprisoned being. It is, she says, a well-rounded sphere, uniform and not admitting of degrees, homogenous and not subject to any death or destruction.

This is the proper object of Parmenides’s search, the destination he longed for in the prologue, the fulfillment of the promise made in the first line of his poem that he would go as far as his heart could reach. This is the ultimate satisfaction not possible in human affairs where the reach of the heart is always beyond its grasp. “What is” is the perfected object of desire, a being that can be approached without any of the confusion, fear, indecision, or ambivalence with which we approach the physical objects of desire. Parmenides has found an object of love eternally faithful, beyond birth or death, held tightly in the embrace of logical necessity.

If the prologue describes the foreplay for this perfect marriage, the remaining fragments of the poem, in which the goddess explains in more detail the fallacious theories of humans, is an account of forbidden and inevitably disappointing extralogical adventures. The masses, she explains, are satisfied with inferior gratifications, with fulfillment that is both uncertain and unclear. The problem is with the incoherence of their view of the natural world. In contrast to the logical contemplation of the oneness of “what is,” the description of the “opinions” of mortals shifts to the natural beauties of the night and day skies. If he follows her instruction, the goddess promises Parmenides, he will come to know the fallaciousness of these opinions.

You will know the ethereal nature

and of the ether all

The signs, and of the pure torch

of the shining sun

Its dark works,

and from what they were born.

And the wandering works

of the circling moon you will know

And its nature. And you will see

the heavens holding on all sides

Since its beginning.

And how guiding Ananke bound it

To hold the limits of the stars (10.1–7).

In this description of the panorama of the heavens is all the grandeur and the puzzling ambiguity of nature. The sun is pure, chaste, shining (εὐαγέος), its torch is innocent and clean (καθαρ

ς), but nevertheless it does dark works, causing drought and burning crops. The moon circles but also “wanders.” Natural cycles alternate between destruction and regeneration. Here again is Ananke in her old role, not binding the logical necessity of what is, but as the necessity that rules the cycles of the natural universe, contains the starry limits of the cosmos, and presides over alternations of light and dark, pure and impure, good and evil.

Parmenides’s guide describes a complex system of interlocking heavenly rings (12.1–2):

In the middle of these is

the spirit who governs all

For everywhere she initiates

shameful birth and mixings

Causing the female to mix with the male

and the male with the female (12.3–6).

This divinity, who created Eros before all the gods (13), initiates and maintains a mixing of opposites and therefore a conflation of “is” and “is not” that must be denied by logic. If a female mixes with a male, the result is both female and not female, impossible by the rule of noncontradiction. In another fragment, the goddess describes for Parmenides the unfortunate biological effects of such mixings. In fertilization, if the male principle or the female principle prevails, then there will be well-formed bodies, but if there is no unitary sexual identity, the sex of the offspring will be tormented by “double seed,” that is it will have both male and female characteristics (18). But to mix masculinity and femininity is unthinkable. The cryptic fragment 17 illustrates concretely the requisite division between “is” and “is not”: “On the right boys, on the left girls,” a segregation which popular theories of generation and cosmic origin did not respect.

Even more illogical, mortal opinion posited mixtures to explain the nature of thought itself.

For always there is a mixture

in the much wandering¹¹ limbs

So thought comes to men, for this

is what¹² the stuff¹³ of the body thinks in men

Each and every of them, for satisfaction

is thought¹⁴ (16.1–4).

In this difficult passage, the goddess describes a sophisticated psychology of mixing and motion in the body. Changes in the physical body are what causes thought. Here, there is no separation of soul and body; instead the very stuff of the body thinks. Thinking is not done by disembodied minds; instead the thought process is initiated as people’s physical situations change. Thought reaches towards satiety or satisfaction, the resolution of conflict and the fulfillment of desire. In this nondualist psychology are again the mixings and ambiguity forbidden by logic. From the point of view of logic, such a thought could never be complete or final; always the body continues to be affected by internal and external processes, and thinking begins again, only to reach another provisional resolution.

This mingling of what is and what is not characterizes all the “deceptive” opinions of natural processes taught to Parmenides by his goddess. In birth a new life comes into being from what is not; in sexual intercourse the male mingles with the female; in cases of ambiguous sexual identity the masculine is conflated with the feminine. Even thought itself is a mixing in the body and so must lack the unity, coherence, and consistency demanded by logic. Seen from the standpoint of the prologue’s desire—the desire to go as far as the heart can reach—these opinions are obviously defective. Fulfillment is never complete; life is always subject to disease and death; heterosexual pleasure requires mixing with women; knowledge is never without ambiguity; birth is painful and “shameful.” Parmenides’s use of στυγεροîο implies not only the physical pain of childbirth but also shame, shame that a man comes to be from what he is not, from the inferior body of a woman.

When, from the standpoint of logic, Parmenides indicts the mingling of the sexes, he expresses attitudes toward women characteristic of Greek thought. There is something shameful in men’s sexual contact with women. Heterosexual intercourse may be a necessary evil for reproductive purposes but it should be gotten over with as soon as possible so a man may return to the masculine world of the agora, assembly, and law courts. A Greek man avoids mixing with women, protects his masculinity from the feminization that will result from too much contact with women.¹⁵ Men and women are segregated, boys on the right, girls on the left. Love between men is preferable to love between men and women because it does not involve any mixing; the union is of like to like and there need be no confrontation with an other who is not like oneself.¹⁶ Similarly impermissible is an individual with mixed s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Reading Logic
• Part I: Classical Logic
• Part II: Medieval Logic
• Part III: Reading Frege
• Conclusion: Words of Power and the Power of Words
• Index