The Man of Reason

"Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy

Genevieve Lloyd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134862641
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This new edition of Genevieve Lloyd's classic study of the maleness of reason in philosophy contains a new introduction and bibliographical essay assessing the book's place in the explosion of writing and gender since 1984.

1
Reason, science and the
domination of matter

Introduction

In a striking passage in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir suggested that ‘male activity’, in prevailing over the ‘confused forces of life’, has subdued both Nature and woman.¹ The association between Nature and woman to which de Beauvoir here alludes has a long history in the self-definitions of western culture. Nietzsche, with characteristic overstatement, suggested in a fragment on ‘The Greek woman’ that woman’s closeness to Nature makes her play to the State the role that sleep plays for man.

In her nature lies the healing power which replaces that which has been used up, the beneficial rest in which everything immoderate confines itself, the eternal Same, by which the excessive and the surplus regulate themselves. In her the future generation dreams. Woman is more closely related to Nature than man and in all her essentials she remains ever herself. Culture is with her always something external, a something which does not touch the kernel that is eternally faithful to Nature.²

But in associating woman with sleep Nietzsche only pushed to its limits a long-standing antipathy between femaleness and active, ‘male’ Culture. The pursuit of rational knowledge has been a major strand in western culture’s definitions of itself as opposed to Nature. It is for us in many. ways equatable with Culture’s transforming or transcending of Nature. Rational knowledge has been construed as a transcending, transformation or control of natural forces; and the feminine has been associated with what rational knowledge transcends, dominates or simply leaves behind.

Femininity and Greek theories of knowledge

From the beginnings of philosophical thought, femaleness was symbolically associated with what Reason supposedly left behind—the dark powers of the earth goddesses, immersion in unknown forces associated with mysterious female powers. The early Greeks saw women’s capacity to conceive as connecting them with the fertility of Nature. As Plato later expressed the thought, women ‘imitate the earth’.³ The transition from the fertility consciousness associated with cults of the earth goddesses to the rites of rational gods and goddesses was legendary in early Greek literature. It was dramatized, for example, in legends of the succession of cults at the site of the oracle at Delphi, incorporated into the prologue of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, and elaborated as a story of conquest in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. Euripides’ version presented the transition as a triumph of the forces of Reason over the darkness of the earlier earth mysteries. The infant Apollo slays the Python which guards the old Earth oracle, thereby breaking the power of the Earth Goddess. She takes revenge by sending up dream oracles to cloud the minds of men with a ‘dark dream truth’. But these voices of the night are stilled through the intervention of Zeus, leaving the forces of Reason installed at Delphi. Reason leaves behind the forces associated with female power.⁴ What had to be shed in developing culturally prized rational- ity was, from the start, symbolically associated with femaleness.

These symbolic associations lingered in later refinements of the idea and the ideals of Reason; maleness remained associated with a clear, determinate mode of thought, femaleness with the vague and indeterminate. In the Pythagorean table of opposites, formulated in the sixth century BC, femaleness was explicitly linked with the unbounded—the vague, the indeterminate—as against the bounded—the precise and clearly determined. The Pythagoreans saw the world as a mixture of principles associated with determinate form, seen as good, and others associated with formlessness—the unlimited, irregular or disorderly—which were seen as bad or inferior. There were ten such contrasts in the table: limit/unlimited, odd/even, one/ many, right/left, male/female, rest/motion, straight/curved, light/dark, good/bad, square/oblong. Thus ‘male’ and ‘female’, like the other contrasted terms, did not here function as straightforwardly descriptive classifications. ‘Male’, like the other terms on its side of the table, was construed as superior to its opposite; and the basis for this superiority was its association with the primary Pythagorean contrast between form and formlessness.

Associations between maleness and clear determination or definition persisted in articulations of the form-matter distinction in later Greek philosophical thought. Maleness was aligned with active, determinate form, femaleness with passive, indeterminate matter. The scene for these alignments was set by the traditional Greek understanding of sexual reproduction, which saw the father as providing the formative principle, the real causal force of generation, whilst the mother provided only the matter which received form or determination, and nourished what had been produced by the father. In the Eumenides, Aeschylus has Apollo exploit this contrast in the affirmation of father-right against motherright in the moral assessment of Orestes’ murder of his mother Clytemnestra, in vengeance of the murder of his father Agamemnon:

The mother to the child that men call hers
Is no true life-begetter, but a nurse
Of live seed. ’Tis the sower of the seed
Alone begetteth. Woman comes at need,
A stranger, to hold safe in trust and love
That bud of her life—save when God above
Wills that it die.⁵

Plato, in the Timaeus,⁶ compared the role of limiting form to that of the father, and the role of indefinite matter to the mother; and Aristotle also compared the form-matter relation to that of male and female.⁷ This comparison is not of any great significance for either of them in their explicit articulations of the nature of knowledge. But it meant that the very nature of knowledge was implicitly associated with the extrusion of what was symbolically associated with the feminine. To see the implications of this we must look in some detail at the way the form-matter distinction operated in Plato’s theory of knowledge.

Knowledge, for Plato, involved a relation within human beings that replicates the relation in the rest of the world between knowable form and unknowable matter. Matching that separation on the side of the knower was a sharp distinction between mind—the principle which understands the rational—and matter, which has no part in knowledge. The knowing mind, like the forms which are its objects, transcends matter. Knowledge involved a correspondence between rational mind and equally rational forms. The idea that the world is itself suffused with Reason was present in much earlier Greek thought, but Plato greatly sophisticated it. In earlier thought, the intelligible object of knowledge was not sharply distinguished from the intelligence which knew it; the notion of Logos applied equally to both. Plato recast the idea of the world as mind-imbued in terms of the form-matter distinction; it was only in respect of form that the world was rational. The identification of rational thought and rational universe was not for him an unreflective assumption. It was achieved by deliberately downgrading matter to the realm of the non-rational, fortuitous and disorderly, while preserving for form the correspondence with rational, knowing mind.

In the Timaeus, Plato pictured this correspondence as an internalization in human beings of the rational principle in accordance with which the world was fashioned. The relationship of the world-soul to the world is mirrored in that of the rational soul to the body which is subject to it. In the mythology of the Timaeus, a cosmic Reason hovers round the sensible world, influencing human minds. Necessity has been subjected to Reason in the creation of the world, and human minds can participate in this Reason. When they do so, they apprehend self-existent ideas, unperceived by sense. Mind, in this special sense, is ‘the attribute of the gods and of very few men’.⁸

In the mythology Plato incorporated into the Timaeus, there are intimations of a gender differentiation with respect to the exalted conception of cosmic Reason. The reflection of the order and Reason of the universe is supposed to be less clear in the souls of women than in those of men. Their souls originate from the fallen souls of men who were lacking in Reason; hence they are closer to the turbulence of non-rational accretions to the soul. But what is most important for our purposes about Plato’s treatment of knowledge is not this, but rather something less explicitly associated with sexual difference. It emerges in his version of mind-matter dualism. Matter, with its overtones of femaleness, is seen as something to be transcended in the search for rational knowledge. It was the relation of master to slave, rather than that of man to woman, that provided the metaphors of dominance in terms of which the Greeks articulated their understanding of knowledge. But this Platonic theme recurs throughout the subsequent history of western thought in ways that both exploit and reinforce the long-standing associations between maleness and form, femaleness and matter.

In his early works, still strongly influenced by Socrates, Plato construed the dualism between intellect and matter as a simple dichotomy between a unitary soul and the body. Here his thought again reflected earlier Greek attitudes to matter. The polarization between body and a supposedly immortal soul figured in the religious rites associated with Orphism and the Pythagorean cults. They conceived the soul as a fallen ‘daimon’ trapped in a disdained body. This soul was the bearer of humankind’s potential divinity. It was reincarnated in a succession of lives until it managed to escape into a godlike immortality; and the process, they thought, could be assisted by the performance of ritual ascetic purifications to purge the soul of gross intrusions of body. Plato transformed these ascetic doctrines, retelling them in terms of the cultivation of Reason; the bearer of immortality became in his version the rational soul, and its freedom from the body was to be gained through the cultivation of rational thought.

In the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates, in his speech on his approaching death, present the intellectual life as a purging of the rational soul from the follies of the body.⁹ The philosopher’s life prepares his soul for release from its prison-house at death. His soul despises the body and flees from it to pursue pure and absolute being with pure intellect alone. Reason enables the soul to go away to the ‘pure, and eternal, and immortal, and unchangeable, to which she is akin’. The senses, in contrast, drag the soul back to the realm of the changeable, where she ‘wanders about blindly, and becomes confused and dizzy, like a drunken man, from dealing with the things that are ever changing’. The soul which cultivates Reason during life can expect at death to be released from error, folly, fear and fierce passions, living with the ‘divine, and the immortal, and the wise’. The soul which does not pursue this ‘deliverance and purification’ during life is, in contrast, defiled by contact with the body and is at death ‘weighed down and dragged back to the visible world’, taking root in another body ‘like a seed which is sown’. During life, Plato concluded, the god-like rational soul should rule over the slave-like mortal body.

In Plato’s later thought, the simplicity of this subjection of body to mind gives way to a more complex location of the non-rational—not outside a soul which is of itself entirely rational, but within the soul as a source of inner conflict. On this later view, the struggle is between a rational part of the soul and other non-rational parts which should be subordinated to it. Later Judaic and Christian thinkers elaborated this Platonic theme in ways that connected it explicitly with the theme of man’s rightful domination of woman.

There is another respect in which Plato’s use of metaphors of dominance differed from later developments. In his theory, the dominance relation is seen as holding within the knower. The rightful dominance of mind over body, or of superior over inferior aspects of the soul, brings the knower into the required correspondence relations with the forms, which are in turn seen as superior to matter. On this model, knowledge is a contemplation of the eternal forms in abstraction from unknowable, non-rational matter. The symbolism of dominance and subordination occurs in the articulation of the process by which knowledge is gained. Knowledge itself is not seen as a domination of its objects, but as an enraptured contemplation of them.

Plato’s picture has been highly influential in the formation of our contemporary ways of thinking about knowledge. But overlaid on it is a very different way of construing knowledge in terms of dominance—the model which receives its most explicit formulation, and has its most explicit associations with the male-female distinction, in the seventeenth century in the thought of Francis Bacon. On this model, knowledge itself is construed as a domination of Nature. This brings with it a different understanding of knowledge and its objects. To see the significance of the change it will be helpful first to look briefly at the transformation of Plato’s version of the form-matter distinction in the thought of Aristotle.

Aristotle transformed Plato’s form-matter distinction and its role in theory of knowledge; and with this transformation, the mind-body relationship also underwent a crucial change. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle hailed Plato’s sophistication of the notion of form as a great advance over the primitive pre-Socratic cosmologies, which equated the basic principles of things with a single material element.¹⁰ Plato’s formal principles, Aristotle commented, were rightly set apart from the sensible. But he repudiated Plato’s development of this insight into a dualism between a realm of change, apprehended through the senses, and a different realm of eternal forms. Aristotle brought the forms down from their transcendent realm to become the intelligible principles of changing, sensible things. The formal remains, for him, the proper object of necessary knowledge, and it is attained by the exercise of a purely intellectual faculty. But it is now grasped in the particular and sensible; it does not—as it did for Plato—escape into a distinct, supersensible realm. In Aristotle’s own system, a dualism remained between what is sensed and what is grasped by Reason. But it no longer coincided with a distinction between changeable, created material things and uncreated, timeless, non-material forms. Aristotelian forms can function as intelligible principles of material things; and where they do, it is only in conjunction with matter that they can be regarded as existing at all. The mind-body relationship was accordingly transformed in the Aristotelian philosophy. The rational soul became the form of the body, and hence was no longer construed as the presence in human beings of a divine stuff which really belongs elsewhere. It was the intelligible principle of the body, not its prisoner; and rational knowledge was no longer construed as the soul’s escape from the body.

What is for our purposes significant in Aristotle’s transformation of Plato’s notion of form is highlighted in Aquinas’s treatment, in the Summa Theologica, of the Platonic version of scientific knowledge.¹¹ On his diagnosis, Plato overreached himself in his desire to save the certitude of intellect from the encroachment of the uncertainty of the senses. By introducing a special sphere of changeless forms as the proper object of scientific knowledge, he removed ‘whatever appertains to the act of intellect’ from the material world altogether—a self-defeating move, since it excludes knowledge of matter and movement from science. Moreover, Aquinas suggests, it seems ridiculous to explain knowledge of sensible substances by knowledge of things altogether different. Plato’s mistake, he thinks, was to take too far his idea of knowledge as a kind of similitude. It is not necessary that the form of the thing known be in the knower in the same manner as in the object. It occurs in the intellect under conditions of universality, immateriality and immobility. But from this it does not, as ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: REASON, SCIENCE AND THE DOMINATION OF MATTER
• 2: THE DIVIDED SOUL: MANLINESS AND EFFEMINACY
• 3: REASON AS ATTAINMENT
• 4: REASON AND PROGRESS
• 5: THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE
• 6: THE STRUGGLE FOR TRANSCENDENCE
• 7: CONCLUDING REMARKS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY TO THE SECOND EDITION