Feminism and Modern Philosophy

Andrea Nye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134500536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A feminist approach to the history of modern philosophy reveals new insights into the lives and works of major figures such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, and is crucial to an appreciation of the advent of feminist philosophy. Feminism and Modern Philosophy introduces students to the main thinkers and themes of modern philosophy from different feminist perspectives, and highlights the role of gender in studying classic philosophical texts.This book shows how the important figures in the history of modern philosophy have been reinterpreted by feminist theory, including:
* feminist critiques of Descartes' rationalism
* Locke's 'state of nature' as it relates to the family
* the charges of misogyny levelled against KantIn addition, the book introduces lesser-studied texts and interpretations, such as:
* the metaphysics of Leibniz's contemporary, Anne Conway
* Annette Baier's recent presentation and defence of Hume Feminism and Modern Philosophy: An Introduction is written in an accessible and lively style, and each chapter ends with a helpful annotated guide to further reading. It will be appropriate for philosophy as well as gender studies courses looking at the development of modern western thought.

1 The Virtues of Misogyny

DOI: 10.4324/9780203646427-2

As nature has given man the superiority over woman, by endowing him with greater strength, both of mind and body; it is his part to alleviate that superiority, as much as possible, by the generosity of his behavior, and by a studied deference and complaisance for all her inclinations and opinions.

David Hume, Essays, p. 133

The quest for abstract and speculative truths, principles, and axioms in the sciences, for everything that tends to generalize ideas, is not within the competence of women … Nor do women have sufficient precision and attention to succeed at the exact sciences. Woman, who is weak and who sees nothing outside the house, estimates and judges the forces she can put to work to make up for her weakness, and those forces are men's passions.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, pp. 386–7

Feminine traits are called weaknesses. People joke about them; fools ridicule them; but reasonable persons see very well that those traits are just the tools for the management of men, and for the use of men for female designs.

Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, p. 217

In post-World War II Britain and North America, with the analytic paradigm for philosophy in full sway, philosophers‧ views on women were seldom a subject of discussion. Kant's Anthropology was considered peripheral, unrelated to core issues in modern philosophy—the resolution of skeptical doubt, the discrediting of dogmatic theology, and reconciliation of naturalistic determinism and free will. Kant's views on sexuality and women, when they were mentioned at all, were dismissed as personal idiosyncrasy or due to prejudices of his times. Kant himself could be cited in support. In the introduction to the 1785 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, he announced his aim to construct a moral philosophy independent of anthropology. Women, contemplating Kantian ethics—an ethics that denies the importance of feeling or passion—could find Kant's resolve to steer clear of human nature puzzling. What is this “anthropology” that is to be left behind if a man is to be moral?

Man in his physical existence, Kant explained in his Anthropology, is a poor creature. Driven by lust, jealousy, and greed, he is worse than an animal whose behavior has regularity enforced by natural instinct. Man's freedom from the constraints of instinct means that passion can lay hold of him, impose on him a necessity before which all other demands must give way. At the same time freedom from instinct is man's escape from passion and his one redeeming feature. Man can, if he chooses, reason and freely will what reason commands. What distinguishes man as a species, Kant wrote, is that man is a “reasonable being endowed with freedom” (Anthropology, p.195). He has the capability to act by pure force of will, but according to the requirements of reason and not passion.

Kant's Anthropology was published at the end of his life, but his thoughts on the nature of man and woman had been a long time developing. Early on he had discovered and thrilled to Rousseau's discussion of natural man and woman in Emile. In passionate detail Rousseau described the education that would allow man's true nature to flower. He described the woman who would be the ideal mate for natural man. Kant read David Hume's Essays in which Hume commented on femininity and on relations between the sexes. Like many of the moderns, Kant was a reader of travel books, familiar with Captain Cook's adventures on South Sea islands with beautiful willing native women, Indian braves decorated for mating dances with beads and feathers, strange practices of polygamy and wife-trading. Never did he let go, said Kant, of the insight that struck him when first reading Rousseau. Understanding the human nature of man is the necessary foundation for ethics even if it is that very nature that moral man must transcend.

Kant described such moral transcendence in the Anthropology. The ability to deny passion and to act from rationally determined dispassionate will is not given by nature. A man is not born with it. It must be acquired in a kind of “rebirth.” In midlife, around the age of forty, a man—a man like himself— may undergo a crisis. At this point, there can be “an explosion which suddenly occurs as a consequence of our disgust at the unsteady condition of instinct” (Anthropology, p.206). The result can be utter cynicism, debauchery, or despair, but the crisis can also lead to a dramatic conversion. A resolve or decision can be made in which a man becomes a man of “character,” capable of resisting passion and objects that arouse passion. Although this change in a man has minimal requirements of rationality and can be achieved by the “ordinary human mind,” there are many for whom it is difficult or impossible. Poets, clergymen, and courtiers have too much invested in pleasing their masters to achieve moral character. Women are completely disqualified.

Women, said Kant, have principles, but these principles are “hard to relate with character in the narrow sense of the word” (Anthropology, p.222). They have character, but in the sense that a natural kind has character. They have principles, but these are the result not of autonomous reasoning but of maxims like “what is generally believed is true” or “what people generally do is good.” Misogynous anecdotes were readily available. Did not the poet Milton's wife urge him out of social ambition to join Cromwell's government, a government he had previously called illegal? Did not the proverbially shrewish wife of Socrates mar the high tone of the great philosopher's deathbed by breaking in to complain of the destitute state in which he left her and their children? Of course, Milton and Socrates, being men of character, were not deterred from acting on “principle.” He can say this, quipped Kant, without diminishing the credit due to the feminine “character.” Women have a character, a character given by nature, a character ordained by biology.

If the reason why clergymen and courtiers cannot achieve full humanity and moral maturity is social, owing to the deference these functionaries must pay to church officials, ruling monarchs, and mistresses, the reason why women cannot achieve moral maturity is “nature's design.” Nature requires, Kant explained, that the species propagate. For that purpose union between men and women is necessary, a union in which difference is needed to ensure a cohesive fit. For such a union to be stable “one person must subject himself to the other, and, alternately one must be superior to the other in something so he can dominate or rule” (Anthropology, p.216). If man and woman are identical there will be conflict. Nature's solution is to make men superior in reason, strength, and courage, and to give women a compensatory power to say no to men's sexual desires. If women were totally lacking in power, men would rule like brutes, which they in fact do in “uncivilized countries” where the woman's power of denial is not fully developed and the man's strength is unchallenged. In “savage” lands, confidently reports Kant, men rule with clubs and women do all the work. In civilized countries a man's superior power is kept in check by a woman's ability to deny him sex until he accedes to what she wants. What she wants is the protection of marriage. Nature makes women alluring and gives them power over men, “so that [men] would find themselves imperceptibly fettered by a child due to their own magnanimity” (p.219).

People make fun of a woman's loquacity, timidity, quarrelsomeness, and childishness, but, said Kant, these traits are no joke. They are the key to a woman's power. They allow her to attract and entice men and then hold out for marriage. In that way a woman ensures not only procreation but support for herself and her children. At the height of “civilization” in European society, even married women, Kant reported disapprovingly, are allowed to flirt so as to have a ready stock of husbands in reserve in case they lose or desert their present mates. After marriage woman's primary drive is to dominate men and eliminate other women as rivals; this is all part of “nature's design” so that the species is propagated. A woman's virtues are consistent with her natural design. A man's virtue is to be tolerant, perceptive, and jealous of his wife; a woman's virtue is to be patient, sensitive, and jealous of every other woman (Anthropology, pp.221–2). A woman reigns in “civilized” marriages as a frivolous spendthrift monarch; a proper husband rules as a sober prime minister.

Women are not suited to be intellectual companions. Here Kant echoed the educational policies of his hero Rousseau. “As for scholarly women,” said Kant, “they use their books somewhat like a watch, that is, they wear the watch so it can be noticed that they have it on, although it is usually broken or does not show the time” (Anthropology, p.221). Certainly Kant did not contemplate that women would participate in the modern enlightenment that he considered to be the great achievement of his age. If Kant noted the reluctance of many men to be released from self-incurred tutelage and think for themselves, he reported the total refusal of women. “The step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind (and by the entire fair sex)” (“What Is Enlightenment?” in On History, p.3).

After extended remarks on women's nature in the Anthropology, Kant has a moment of self-consciousness. Has he “dwelt longer on the subject of characterization [of the sexes] than seems proportionate to other divisions of anthropology?” But, he explains, there is an important “pragmatic” point to be made. One must appreciate the “wisdom of nature's gradually unfolding designs” (Anthropology, p.225). Consorting with women is a necessary evil, at least for some men, so that the species continue. If possible, however, it is better to avoid close contact with women. And Kant followed his own advice. After an early tentative interest, he disavowed marriage and, it would seem, carnal attachment of any kind. By the final statement of his ethics in the Metaphysics of Morals, sex has become a source of degradation. Even under the best of circumstances in marriage, where the sexual use of another is exclusive and mutual by contract, sex without the practical aim of procreation is morally compromising.

These and other misogynous remarks make Kant an obvious target for feminist critics. Feminist philosophers cited Kant's prudish disgust at a woman's body, his contempt for women's intelligence and ethical capability, his defense of a “patriarchal” law of marriage in which a woman has no legal rights. They pointed out the obvious contradiction between Kant's views on women and the moral principle that human beings are to be treated as ends not means. They condemned his relegation of women to a biological function.

But why not lay aside Kant's misogyny as an aberration unworthy of serious notice? This was the view of many readers of Kant, including the editor of the 1978 edition of the Anthropology, Frederick Van de Pitte. Van de Pitte was no conservative in questions of philosophical content. He noted with approval that by the late 1970s what was considered proper philosophical subject matter had expanded. Ideas from the continent, from thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, were back in fashion. There was movement away from an overemphasis in English-speaking philosophy on logical analysis and epistemology. If Kant's Anthropology seems peculiar to English-speaking readers, commented Van de Pitte, it is because “the English-speaking world has too long restricted its consideration to a purely empirical anthro-pology.” European thinkers on the other hand kept alive the “notion of a genuinely philosophical anthropology” (Anthropology, p.xxi). In that spirit Kant's work on the nature of man is essential, claimed Van de Pitte, if commentators are to understand the purpose of Kant's philosophy and the degree to which it is prescriptive rather than narrowly descriptive.

But even the liberal Van de Pitte denied the philosophical importance of Kant's comments on women. The Anthropology gives us insight into Kant the man, he said. It shows us Kant's wide reading, his interest in travel literature, his use of explorers’ tales to prove generalizations about human nature. The Anthropology is proof of Kant's taste and his concern for the social graces. If it also exhibits some lapses from good will, these should be set aside. Important though personal qualities may be from a biographical point of view, “from the philosophical standpoint, information about Kant as an individ-ual is the least interesting aspect of the Anthropology” (p.xx). On that ground, Van de Pitte had no trouble dismissing what he called Kant's rather “amazing” views on women and non-white races: “Kant was a man of goodwill,” he stated categorically, “and any failure on his part to live up to the moral ideal must be ascribed to a lack of experience which permitted his prejudices to remain undetected” (p.xx).

In fact, Kant did have experience with women. Throughout his life, he was a frequent guest at aristocratic households where he learned to ingratiate himself with fashionable hostesses. He moved in freewheeling literary circles where boisterous partying and sexual intrigue were common. As a young man he had several romantic adventures. Long sections on women in his early Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime show him preoccupied with women and not always in a derogatory sense. The young Kant, not yet a man of character, may have been bashful and uncomfortable in the presence of women, but judging from his “observations” on feminine beauty, he was also romantically taken by them.

Kant's subject in the Observations is aesthetics in the wider sense popularized in England by Shaftesbury and in Germany by Baumgarten. Aesthetics in this sense is not the study of classical rules of genre, but the exploration of pleasurable response to all sorts of phenomena, in nature, decorative arts, architecture, persons. In this early work, unlike the later Critique of Pure Reason in which reason is the same for all men, Kant embraces diversity as a positive factor and a rich source for discoveries about beauty (Observations, p.45). Continually he notes the personal nature of his “observations” as he explores varied and complex reactions to objects, including passionate and romantic responses to feminine beauty. Women for this younger Kant are the beautiful sex and his description of their distinctive character and worth is in many places a poetic hymn of praise to the charming “difference” of feminine grace and amiability.

Women are kind-hearted and responsive. Male passions at best spur a man on to his moral duty and at worst make him a monster. Women's feelings are sensitive and accurate so women can act benevolently without the compulsion of duty. In moral matters, women do not need to act on principle; they can “broaden” and enlarge their feelings, cultivating a form of direct moral response. Even vanity, a vice in a man, can make a woman more beautiful if she uses her beauty to soften and attract. A woman's nobility is of a different kind from a man's, said Kant. She is noble in her modesty, simplicity, benevolence, her respect for others, and her trust in herself. Her noble qualities survive aging when moral beauty rather than purely physical beauty shines through. Even passages where Kant deprecates women's intellectual ability can be read as a kind of praise. A woman, says Kant, has no need of academic erudition, which requires painful effort and can mar her beauty. She need know only enough about Leibniz's monads or Descartes's vortices to see the joke when such abstruse constructions are satirized at dinner parties.

In this early work, far from being the moral downfall of man, feeling, especially feminine feeling, is a possible source of moral insight. Already Kant has doubts about personal sentiment as a basis for morality, but instead of denying sentiment a role in morality as he does later, here he elaborates on what can give sentiment moral force. Women provide his examples. Sympathy and sociability, he argues, can be broadened, can be made a kind of principle so that morality is stabilized. Principle here is not the categorical imperative of the later Critiques, nor is it Hume's calculation of utility. A broadening of sentiment, Kant says, is due not to “speculative rules” but to a “feeling” for “the beauty and dignity of human nature” that expands and extends impulses of sympathy and sociability (Observations, p.60). Feeling in a woman is not ancillary or “adoptive”; her kindheartedness is broad enough so that she does not need to think in terms of duty, does not need to be subjected to laws that govern her behavior. Not only are women able to broaden their feeling in this way, they can awaken such enlarged feelings in men. If impulse and inclination were all, a man would lose interest in his wife when she ages. A broadened appreciation for her keeps love alive. A desire for honor, for the favorable judgment of others, provides an impulse to “take a standpoint outside himself in thought, in order to judge the outward propriety of his behavior as it seems in the eyes of the onlooker” (p.75).

If the Kant of the Observations has doubts about women they are liberally spiced with romance. Kant, whose health, at least in his own mind, was fragile, expressed worries about the sex act, but never the disgust and loathing of his later Metaphysics of Morals. On to sexual desire “the finest and liveliest inclinations of human nature are grafted” (Observations, p.84).

The European alone has found the secret of decorating with so many flowers the sensual charm of a mighty inclination and of interlacing it with so much morality that he has not only completely elevated its agreeableness but also has made it very decorous.

(p.112)

To preserve these finer feelings and to guard against disgust, a certain reticence and shame are necessary, but a purely physical appreciation of a woman's looks is not to be disdained, especially if added to it is a taste for moral beauty, for a face that indicates a benevolent heart and inner feeling that will last past youth.

Even here there is a note of disillusion. The common man with simple straightforward, if crude desires may be better off than a romantic, wrote Kant. A common man's simple physical feelings are easily satisfied. He can go on to devote his attention to practical matters such as creating a household and handling money matters. For the man of finer feeling, the man of refined aesthetic taste, a man like himself, romance is more difficult. Reticence can cool his “impetuous ardor”; he is often disappointed when a woman fails to live up to his expectations, or worse, when she passes him over and chooses a seducer or a fop. Such a man may hesitate when contemplating marriage as a young man. He may postpone or even abandon marriage. If he rushes into commitment he may be racked with peevish regret that he made the wrong choice. Romance for this man of finer taste is often tragic romance, romance seldom consummated except in his imagination, because he holds on to the idea that marriage is a sacred union, creating a “single moral person” (Observations, p.95). Marriage for this man must be a perfect match between a man's understanding and a woman's sensitivity, in which both husband and wife are inclined only to please the other so there is never any conflict, never any question of man's right to rule or woman's duty to obey. Even under these ideal circumstances, there is work involved: a man...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface: living in time
• Introduction: shaping a past
• 1 The virtues of misogyny
• 2 Descartes: man of reason
• 3 John Locke and the state of nature
• 4 Reworking the canon: Anne Conway
• 5 Jean Jacques Rousseau and the noble savage
• 6 David Hume: a friend from the past
• 7 Feminist antinomies: Immanuel Kant
• 8 Feminist critical theory after Kant
• Afterword: the weight of the past
• Bibliography of works cited
• Index