Engenderings

Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege

Naomi Scheman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415907408
• eBook ISBN: 9781317857112
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Naomi Scheman argues that the concerns of philosophy emerge not from the universal human condition but from conditions of privilege. Her books represents a powerful challenge to the notion that gender makes no difference in the construction of philosophical reasoning. At the same time, it criticizes the narrow focus of most feminist theorizing and calls for a more inclusive form of inquiry.

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Introduction: The Unavoidability of Gender

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Philosophers are distinguished from other people in part by the problems they have: how do we know whether the external world exists, or whether we have bodies or others have minds: and if we do have both minds and bodies, how are they connected? It isn’t, of course, supposed to be only philosophers who have these problems. Rather, just as the problems of how to make sure bridges stay up are problems not solely for structural engineers, but for all of us who drive or walk across bridges, so we are all supposed to have philosophical problems, and philosophers are those who are equipped, by interest and training, to best answer them for the rest of us.

Feminist philosophers have queried the questions of philosophy, asking who is this “we” whose problems these are, out of whose experiences do they arise, and from whose perspective are they salient? The usual answer has, of course, been men (or some men: those who are white and otherwise privileged), that is, people like the people who have been philosophers.

I don’t think this answer is quite right. As the feminist critics have argued,¹ the maleness of (most) philosophers, insofar as it has been reflected in their philosophy, has been a matter not of biology but of culture, not the possession of certain chromosomes, hormones, and bodily characteristics, but the learning of certain norms of thought, feeling, and behavior. But according to the usual way of understanding the feminist argument, call it the Standard Account, philosophers, having become men according to these norms, just do find some things rather than others interestingly problematic, and some methods rather than others useful for addressing those problems: philosophy is male in that its problems are born out of and its methods are recommended by distinctively masculine ways of being in the world.

Arguments about the maleness of philosophy, so understood, have been challenged, interestingly, by feminists, most notably by Jean Grimshaw,² who argues that being a man has historically been neither necessary nor sufficient for thinking like one. A recent project of recovery of women philosophers from antiquity onward would bear out the nonnecessity of maleness: many of the rediscovered women philosophized indistinguishably from their male contemporaries,³ as certainly many women philosophers do today. And, conversely, Grimshaw gives examples of male philosophers whose views seem to diverge from masculinist orthodoxy, without there being any reason to believe that their sex role socialization did so. Such criticisms are, I believe, effective against the Standard Account, and to some extent against the actual arguments that get so construed. I want here to give a slightly different argument, leaving it open how closely this alternative account of the maleness of philosophy reflects the views of the various feminist critics: it is, at least, significantly different from the Standard Account, and it is, I think, true.

We can start by asking again who the philosophical “we” is. For those who use it unreflectively (and it is instructive—and dismaying—to note how readily and often even those of us who have learned to be suspicious of it do use it unreflectively)⁴ it is assumed to be everyone. It is, we (philosophers) are taught, to mistake the philosophical tone of voice for the sociological or social psychological to reply to a question about the relation of the mind to the body by asking “whose mind to whose body?” But subtly or overtly many philosophers indicate that they don’t entirely mean to include everyone in the “we,” and it’s frequently unclear where they mean to and where they don’t. (One of the strongest arguments against the use of the supposedly generic ‘he’, ‘man’, etc., is that such terms are ambiguous, and the reader often can’t tell which is meant.) Part of what is distressing to many women in reading philosophical texts is the experience of taking oneself to be included in the “we” and coming up short against the realization that one really wasn’t.

One way to approach the question of the identity of the philosophical “we” is by looking at the problems that, as participants in philosophical conversation, we are supposed to have. One striking thing about the core epistemological problems defining modern philosophy is that the philosophers who discuss them acknowledge that by and large people are not concerned with such questions, that even the philosophers themselves go about their daily lives untroubled by not being able to answer the questions they pose in their writing. Descartes, who, more than anyone else, got us started on these questions, explicitly regarded his insouciance in the face of unresolved doubt as merely provisional: he thought it was imperative for the development of a reliable science or ethics that fundamental metaphysical and epistemological questions be resolved and knowledge put on an unassailable footing. But, notoriously, his resolution, particularly as it relies on a Scholastic proof of the existence of God, has convinced far fewer readers than have his arguments for the doubt it was meant to lay to rest. Cartesian scepticism, for its inventor a powerful tool for the acquisition of certainty, has been, for those who have followed him, a slippery-sided abyss we cannot climb out of.

Humeans would have us simply steer clear of that abyss, noting that that way madness lies, and that without venturing to its edge we can give accounts of what the world is like and how we know about it that are good enough. Many contemporary philosophers would agree, eschewing the demands of foundational-ism and absolute certainty in favor of one or another sort of naturalized epistemology.⁵ That is, many philosophers have simply joined the rest of the world, which conducts its business on the other side of the abyss from where the philosophical subject as constructed by Descartes found himself. But there are unanswered questions about what that character (the one Hume failed to find on his introspective search) was doing over there, why he had the problems he had, and whether we can simply turn our backs on him.

The problems at the heart of modern epistemology concern the possibility of securely bridging one or another gulf: between the mind and the body, the self and others, the inner and the external world. The form of all those problems is the same: the philosophical subject finds himself on one side of the gulf and attempts to assess the possibilities of establishing reliable cognitive contact with what lies on the other side of it. What is striking is that the gulfs are not simply given: rather, the authoritative subject puts them in place with the very gestures by which he secures his authority. Again, the Meditations is the clearest expression of this activity of self-constitution, as the self of the cogito is discovered/created by successive gestures of estrangement from everything taken previously to constitute the self and to anchor it in the world.

Without the rigor of Cartesian doubt, authoritative modern subjectivity has deployed essentially the same gestures, of self-constitution through the achievement of independence from others and disidentification with and control over the body, the senses, and the emotions. Those who are taken to be in the best position to know are those who are believed to be objective, distanced, dispassionate, independent, and nonemotionally rational. That is, those who define themselves through the norms of epistemic authoritativeness acquire, as a residue of that act of self-constitution, the problems of philosophy. They don’t, however, in New Age parlance, “own their problems.” Instead, philosophical problems are mocked: they are for wimps, irrelevant eggheads who can’t even match their own socks. The scorn masks the anxiety that is coded in those problems, anxiety about whether and how connections can actually be established and maintained with a potentially embarrassing body, with threateningly other people, and with an obdurately physical world. The anxiety is grounded in the norms that require that the body, other people, and the rest of the world be thought of in those ways, and consequently philosophical problems are originally problems for the fictive self that is constituted by those norms, and only derivatively for any real people, insofar as we identify ourselves with the project of living up to those norms.

It is evident in much, even contemporary, philosophical writing that the philosophical subject is not, in fact, any real person. Consider, for example, Kripke’s Pierre.⁶ Pierre, growing up in Paris, came to believe, from many descriptions and photographs, that, as he would have put it, “Londres est jolie.” After moving to London, he came to believe that the city where he was residing was anything but pretty, a belief he expressed in English as “Whatever else you can say about it, it’s certainly not true that London is pretty.” He learned the name of the city he now resides in not by having ‘Londres’ translated, but ostensively, and, in fact, he never has learned that ‘Londres’ and ‘London’ refer to the same city. Invoking some apparently uncontroversial principles concerning translation and belief attribution, Kripke generates a puzzle about what Pierre believes about the prettiness of London. That the puzzle has in turn generated a small philosophical industry is an indication of how entrenched is the (typically unarticulated) assumption that the philosophical subject is not you or me, whatever gender we might be.

The puzzle is generated by noting that there seem to be adequate grounds for attributing to Pierre the belief that London is pretty, and also adequate grounds for attributing to him the negation of that belief, and there seem to be no grounds for calling him irrational. Worse, there seem equally to be adequate grounds for our both asserting and denying the statement that Pierre believes that London is pretty, and there’s even less reason to think that we, as innocent observers of Pierre’s confusion, are irrational.

Now, if Pierre were one of us (real people), what we (other real people) would say, as Wittgenstein is good at reminding us, is that there simply isn’t any good answer to the question of what Pierre believes about the prettiness of London. It isn’t that ‘believes p’ is vague, like ‘is bald’: if all we knew were the evidence in one of Pierre’s linguistic homes, we would be justified in unequivocally affirming or denying of him that he believes that London is pretty. Rather, for us (real people) there are no necessary or sufficient conditions for belief attributions, nor any principles, about translation or anything else, that tell us what beliefs to attribute. We pay attention to what people say and do and, depending on an unspecifiable range of contextual circumstances, we interpret them (or, for that matter, ourselves) as having certain beliefs (or desires, attitudes, emotions, intentions …). And sometimes things aren’t straightforward in the ways they usually are, and we don’t know what to say, beyond telling the whole story: we can’t sum up that story as “he believes p” or “he believes not-p.”⁷

That’s how it is with real people. But Pierre isn’t a real person, nor are those who find his story genuinely puzzling. Pierre is a philosophical example, and those who puzzle over him are philosophers. Now, all the philosophers I know also happen to be real people, but it isn’t qua real people that Pierre worries them. One worries about Pierre because one wants, and thinks it reasonable to expect to have, a theory about such things as belief, and one has certain ideas about what theories have to look like in order to be worth having. In order for it to be even remotely plausible that one will ever get such a theory, the phenomena, or at least the descriptions of them, have to be sufficiently orderly; the data have to be regimented. It has, for example, to be either true or false that Pierre believes that London is pretty. It won’t do to say what real people say about other real people, that, if you look at it this way, he certainly seems to, and if you look at it that way, he certainly seems not to: why are you so intent on getting me to check one box or the other? (Think of how maddening survey research questions can be for us real people.)

One might reply that the philosophical subject—both the subject of the problems, like Pierre, and the subject who has the problems, the philosopher—are idealizations, like the gases that appear in the Ideal Gas Laws. But, I want to suggest, unlike airplane models in wind chambers or mathematical models of falling objects in perfect vacuums, philosophical subjects are normative. They aren’t just how people will be assumed to be for the purpose of figuring something out about them. Rather, the regimentation of the data of experience and the assumption that, for example, such things as beliefs are definite states of individuals, reflect a view of persons as atomistically self-contained, which is how they ought to be if they are to acquire and exercise socially recognized authority.⁸

The modern philosophical “we” is akin to the “we” in such documents as the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. The kinship is, of course, nonaccidental. The modern philosophical subject was conceived, most explicitly by Descartes, as constituting himself⁹ as epistemically authoritative, an authority that, as both its champions and its antagonists recognized, had far-reaching political, religious, and economic causes and effects. It is that subject—the bourgeois individual—who has held the center of the world-historical stage for the past two hundred years, and it is an open question whether or not he will—or should—continue to do so.

If one acknowledges the legitimacy of the claims of variously marginalized others to share center stage fully with the European and Euro-American men who have heretofore claimed it, that open question becomes one of the possibility of shedding the gender and race identifications that have characterized the fully authorized subject. Are those identifications...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Thinking Gender
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface: The Wizard of Oz, the Grand Canonical Synthesizer, and Me (1992)
• Note on the Text
• 1 Introduction: The Unavoidability of Gender (1990)
• Part I Gender and (Inter)Subjectivity
• Part II. Constructions of Gender and Authority
• Part III Conversations on the Margins
• Part IV. The Body of Privilege
• Part V. (In)Conclusion
• Index