The canonical texts in Western philosophy have been written by men and have inscribed male experiences and perspectives into that philosophy.
Clack’s Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition offers selections from the writings of major philosophers which provide the evidence for what its title describes, including founding figures Plato and Aristotle and the two nineteenth-century philosophers often considered to be the field’s most notorious misogynists, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Such evidence has been a foundation on which analysts have been able to piece together what philosophers thought about masculinity because, as is true of most traditional intellectual life, assumptions about masculinity have been so deeply embedded and unconsciously taken for granted in the Western philosophical tradition that most philosophers have said very little explicitly about it, despite philosophy’s claims to be able to probe to the deepest foundations of knowledge and reality. In fact, most of what philosophers have had to say about the gendered aspects of men’s lives emerges only in contrast to what they have had to say about women.
While feminist criticism has focused primarily on philosophy’s images and exclusion of women, it has also critically questioned the nature of philosophy’s masculinity. Two books that exemplify an early wave of such scholarship looking specifically at political philosophy, where the male bias was conspicuously pronounced, were Wendy Brown’s Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory and Di Stefano’s Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist Perspective on Modern Political Theory.
At the time of their publication in the late 1980s and early 1990s attention to masculinity was still so suspect in academia that both authors seem to have felt compelled to specifically name their books as ‘feminist’ in their subtitles, and both begin with a defence of the project, almost an apologia. Brown’s primary subjects are Aristotle, Machiavelli and Weber, while Di Stefano’s are Hobbes, Marx and Mill. In a recapitulation of the trajectory of early feminist theorising about women, the earlier book, Brown’s, tends to discuss masculinity in a more monolithic manner, while Di Stefano begins to move the question from masculinity to masculinities.
Di Stefano explicitly situates her treatment in the tradition of psychoanalytic feminism, synthesising Anglo-American ‘object relations’ and Continental Lacanian schools. What these perspectives share is a move away from the Freudian paradigm wherein gender identity formation takes place in the patricentric Oedipal phase to place it in the earlier matricentric phase, designated as ‘pre-Oedipal’ by the Freudian euphemism invented precisely to avoid naming the mother’s importance. A decisive result of this shift is that masculinity appears as a defensive reaction formation against earlier maternal identification, rather than as a primary ground of identity. Emphasis is placed on the difficulty and pain of the male’s rejection of and by the mother, so that female rather than male development emerges as a more continuous and secure process, with the result that masculinity is always fragile, requiring strong defensive mechanisms against re-engulfment within the feminine. The violence that accompanies male domination is therefore in this new conceptualisation not evidence of some deep aggressive instinct constituting some essence of masculinity, but rather evidence of the fragility of masculine identity, of precisely the lack of depth to which it can be internalised. Masculine identity is at best a temporary achievement, standing always under the threat of regressive dissolution. Hence the need to marshal and deploy massive resources of aggression in its defence.
Brown argues that our concept of the political is determined by the need to satisfy male developmental needs. Freedom becomes defined as autonomy from and domination over anything associated with the early experience of the feminine in the body of the mother: the body itself, nature, birth, dependence, necessity, desire and, ultimately, life itself. For Brown discerns ‘a traceable genealogy’ whereby masculinity, as well as humanity, ultimately finds itself entrapped in an ‘iron cage’ forged by its very successes:
Freedom cast as freedom from the body, need and necessity is therefore inherently oppressive as well as ultimately impossible living things cannot transcend or overcome themselves, the fact of their lives. This construction of freedom breeds a politics against life, dooms the activities and persons involved with necessity [i.e. women] to organization under domination, and renders life an instrument rather than a cause of freedom. The utter bankruptcy of this approach to freedom was revealed by Weber: under modern systems of power, the quest for freedom as control of necessity has utterly subverted itself and man appears dominated by and trapped within the cogs of his own machinery of freedom.
(Brown 1988:194)
Rather than seeing the figures she analyses as part of a single trajectory as does Brown, Di Stefano sees Hobbes, Marx and Mill as embodying three types: ‘heroic, productive, and disciplinary metaphors of modern masculine selfliood’ (Di Stefano 1991:201). Di Stefano sees the theme of men’s denial of women’s birthing powers and childrearing work as central to a myth of ‘autogeneration’ essential to all the ideals of modern manhood provided by these philosophers, whether it be in Hobbes’ injunction in his classic work of political philosophy De Cive (‘The citizen’) to ‘consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement with each other’, Mill’s embrace of an individualist code of self-discipline, or Marx’s dictum that ‘man makes himself. Contingencies of nature and fate—or, in Machiavellian terms, the feminine fortuna—must be conquered by masculine control and virtue (virtu). The masculinist taboo against theorising reproduction as central to political theory is one of the foundations of the public/private split and all of its gendered connotations which have so thoroughly redounded to the detriment of women.
Consider further how many of the founding myths of our culture contain crucial instances of the founding fathers committing or permitting violence against their sons, whether it be Laius against Oedipus, Abraham against Isaac, or the Christian God the Father against Jesus. (Many feminist theorists have argued that Freud’s seduction theory covers up the violence of the fathers against the daughters as well.) What emerges here is that the Freudian tale placing the origins of civilisation in the revolt of the sons against the father in the primal horde similarly covers up the prior violence of the fathers against the sons, motivated by the Laius rather than the Oedipal complex, i.e. by the father’s fear of the son’s impending ascension to power.
Some theorists have argued that modern patriarchy is more correctly conceptualised as the rule of the brothers rather than the fathers. This theme emerges, for example, in Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988) and Kann’s On the Man Question (1991). It is implicit in Carol Brown’s (1981) oft-cited distinction between private and public patriarchy, and led me to suggest that ‘fratriarchy’ might be a more descriptive term for the more advanced patriarchy that developed after this shift from private patriarchy, in which men hold power as individual heads of families, to public patriarchy, in which men collectively hold power through the state, and whose philosophical expression lies in all that followed in the wake of the death of God the Father in the nineteenth century.
Also in the nineteenth century, the paradigm shift documented by Foucault of the rise of the concept of homosexuality as a distinct identity transformed the public/private split so central to liberal political theory into not only a male/female divide but also a straight/ gay one. The assignment of sexuality to the private sphere became not merely a relegation of an aspect of everyone’s life to a place out of the public eye, but also a consignment to public and political invisibility of those whose sexuality now marked them as essentially ‘other’, i.e. both women and gay men.
The critique of philosophy’s masculinity extends well beyond the parameters of political philosophy. Lloyd’s The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (1984) argued that the supposedly neutral, objective standard of reason on which philosophy as a whole prides itself actually privileges those qualities of thought and habits of mind usually associated with men. This has led to the identification of the field’s perspective as ‘phallogocentric’ by contemporary French philosopher and psychoanalyst Irigaray, who analyses the philosopher’s ascent to knowledge in Plato’s famous ‘Allegory of the cave’ in the Republic as an allegory of men’s escape from the clutches of the womb of the feminine. The dualisms embedded in Western philosophical thought are profoundly gendered, which is why so many of the dominant and dominating hierarchical dichotomies which pervade our culture and establish the philosophical foundations of patriarchal thought map on to each other, privileging the ‘male’ side of the marked pair to the overall benefit of men: man:woman = culture:nature=mind:body=reason:emotion = subject:object=active:passive=spirit:matter = essence:appearance=ordenchaos=adult: child=discipline:wantonness=permanence: malleability=transcendence:immanence=universality:particularily=public: private=work: home=reality:illusion=light/white:dark/ black(bothmetaphoricallyandracially)=knowledge/enlightenment: ignorance/superstition = independence/separation: dependence/connection=freedom/liberty:necessity/enslavement.
Bordo’s The Flight to Objectivity finds tendencies towards historically masculine ways of defining the self as radically individualist and separated from its world to be embedded in the foundations of the deeply influential metaphysical dualism of Descartes, the ‘Father’ of modern philosophy, including the mind—body dichotomy that empowers men by associating them with the powers of the intellect while at the same time objectifying women. Many analyses, including those typically found in ecofeminist philosophy, argue that the opposition between a sky ‘father’ and ‘Mother’ Earth found in much religious imagery resurfaces in modern science, where the manly domination of nature mirrors men’s domination of women.
Nineteenth-century German philosopher G.W.F.Hegel infamously wrote that ‘The difference between man and woman is the difference between animal and plant’, men being animated by thought and fmding their natural spheres of activity in such areas as work, government and warfare, while women naturally found an outlet for their instinctual and sentimental nature in the domestic sphere of home, family and love. The Hegelian dialectic of lordship and bondage (or master and servant) has been deeply influential in philosophy, nowhere more so than in Beauvoir’s founding feminist paradigm in The Second Sex that woman has been ‘other’ to man’s ‘self, giving rise to her famous statement, which this encyclopedia and the entire field of masculinity studies are now happily contributing towards correcting, that ‘a man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male’. Italian feminist theorist Lonzi’s response to Hegel and the entire mainstream (what radical feminist theologian Daly called ‘malestream’) intellectual tradition of which she takes him as an exemplar is expressed in the title of her essay ‘Let’s spit on Hegel’.
Nye’s Words ofPower: A Feminist Critique of the History of Ideas extends the critique of philosophy’s masculine bias into the sacrosanct precincts of logic itself, from ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides to modern German philosopher, mathematician and logician Frege, often called the father of modern logic. Moulton’s ‘Duelism in philosophy’ sees the performance of masculinity in the adversarial, competitive way philosophy is practised, to the discipline’s detriment because it blocks other more cooperative and productive ways of philosophising, dubbing it not ‘dualism’ but ‘duelism’.
Kittay and Meyers’ Women and Moral Theory analyses the male standpoint of traditional moral theory, highlighting its impersonal and overly abstract nature, and May’s Masculinity and Morality provides ‘a progressive male standpoint’ from which men may counter it.
References and further reading
Beauvoir, S. [1949] (1991) The Second Sex, New York: Knopf.
Bordo, S. (1987) The Flight to Objectwity, Albany, NY: SUNY.
Brod, H. (1992) ‘Pornography and the alienation of male sexuality’, in L.May and R.A.Strikwerda (eds) Rethinking Masculinity, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 149–65. Originally in Social Theory and Practice (1988) 14 (3): 265–84.
Brown, C. (1981) ‘Mothers, fathers, and children’, in L.Sargent (ed.) Women and Revolution, Boston, MA: South End.
Brown, W. (1988) Manhood and Politics, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Clack, B. (1999) Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition, New York: Routledge,
Di Stefano, C. (1991) Configurations of Masculinity, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kann, M. (1991) On the Man Question, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Kittay, E.F. and Meyers, D.T. (eds) (1987) Women
and Moral Theory, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Lloyd, G. (1984) The Man of Reason, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Lonzi, C. [19701 (1991) ‘Let’s spit on Hegel’, in P. Bono and S.Kemp (eds) Italian Feminist Thought, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 40–59. The quote from Hegel is from the Addition to §166 of his Elements of the Philosophy of Right [1821] (1991) ed. Allen W.Wood. trans. H.B.Nisbet. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 207.
May, L. (1998) Masculinity and Morality, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Moulton, J. (1980) ‘Duelism in philosophy’, Teaching Philosophy: 419–33.
Nye, A. (1990) Words of Power, New York: Routledge.
Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity.
