Not all Philosophers Were Misogynists

Hegel aside, philosophy was never the easy path for Sedgwick. As a graduate student in UChicago’s Department of Philosophy, she was one of only two women in her cohort—the other dropped out after the first year—and there were no female faculty members. (Today, four of the deparment’s 20 tenure-track faculty members are women.)

Sedgwick credits her adviser, the late Manley Thompson, AB’38, AM’38, PhD’42, an authority on Kant, for taking her seriously in a way many other faculty didn’t. “It’s not as if they were bad guys,” she explains. “In their experience, women were daughters, mothers, lovers. They weren’t philosophers.”

...

Although feminist philosophy isn’t an area she works in directly (“Kant and Hegel were both big misogynists, just as all philosophers were,” she says), she welcomes its investigations. “One really great thing about philosophy,” Sedgwick says, “is that if it is working correctly, it should wean all of us of the idea that anything is simple.”[see here]

I have long admired Prof. Sedgwick from a distance; a former President of the Central APA, she is one of the leading scholars of Kant and his relationship to what is called German idealism. Her work exhibits the virtues of clarity, precision, and profundity. She is featured in the Alumni magazine of The University of Chicago, and I was moved by reading of her personal struggles in the department. Sadly, Manley Thompson had passed away by the time I became a graduate student at Chicago, but a (dwindling) number of the peers that could not really see women as philosophers were still around. Given their exacting standards, and adherence to truth and justice, this dissonance revealed itself only obliquely and unexpectedly to somebody (like me), who was not on the look out for it and not much affected personally by it.

Even so, I was dismayed by Sedgwick's claim that "all philosophers were" big "misogynists." Now, I recognize that this is an interview and that if we treat Sedgwick's remark as a statistical generalization it is probably broadly true. But it really needs emphasizing that in the centuries before Kant and Hegel, there were female and male philosophers who, in their declared philosophies, were anti-misogynists.* Problem is if I list their names -- Cavendish, De Gournay (recall here and here), Van Schuurman, Mandeville, Poulain de la Barre, De Grouchy, Condorcet, Millar, and Wollstonecraft (recall here and here), as well as, perhaps, Diderot and D'Holbach -- they are mostly unfamiliar or not read as philosophers because Kant and Hegel -- and the historiographers they inspired -- chose not to take them seriously qua philosophy. [For an excellent volume on the women, see here.]

This is not just a matter of historical justice.

The idea that everybody-was-a-misogynist is also a pernicious myth that can be the consequence of a kind of lazy historicism (e.g., it was common for men in that period to be sexists, antisemitic, etc.) that suits both apologists (if everybody did it then we can celebrate our moral progress and let the past off the hook) and critics (if everybody did it then let's just discard the past) alike. I treat it as an instance of the TEDI-syndrome (TEDI=the-everybody-did it; recall here and here).**

 

When we are in the presence of TEDI, we are either dealing with collective negligence, and this should make us question and reform the institutional structure that made such negligence possible; we must not let the privileged under the inherited structure off the hook by overlooking their (often tacit) complicity in it; and/or we are dealing with an often-not-so-subtle-rewriting of the past in  which the critics are simply effaced from historical memory (this is not meant to be exhaustive). Recalling those critics matters not only out of historical justice (and we should not overlook their bravery and magnanimity), but also because they may help us discern, if we allow ourselves to be receptive, how our inherited categories and taxonomies (and self-conceptions) may themselves be part of the problems that need urgent  tackling.

I say this not to disqualify Kantianism or Hegelianism, and the indirect historiographical and philosophical practices they spawned. (Reading Hume is no anti-dote here.) But we can't ignore the fact that a part of the institutional and political attraction of their philosophical practice was the ways in which they seemed to check a whole variety of radical or simply decent thought that challenged the institutional (religious/political) status quo. (This much is right about Jonathan Israel's approach.) The folk listed above were not all 'radicals', of course, and it is difficult to slot them into any existing shared category or even a taxonomy; in fact, some are very hard to read as philosophy if you are trained as a contemporary professional philosopher (see Dotson). That is to say, the thought of university professors can be made complicit in political authority. When we invoke TEDI, we prevent ourselves from learning to recognize that something is both philosophically rigorous, even profound, and simultaneously ideology. So, while I agree with Prof. Sedgwick that philosophy can cure us of the idea that anything is simple, we need to be willing to extend that thought to the nature of philosophy itself. 

 

*One could go further back, of course.

** Together with  my co-author, Merel Lefevere, I have published a more scholarly analysis of TEDI-Syndrome.

Comments

[Lisa Shapiro]

I basically agree with you, Eric, but I think you are far too generous. The late 17th and early 18th century are rich with egalitarian thinkers, both male and female. So for instance, you might also have mentioned Descartes, who, despite the opinion of many contemporary feminists, seems to have actively sought out female readers (by writing the Discourse in French) and served as an inspiration for not only French Cartesiennes but also English women philosophers like Astell. You also might have included Locke and Damaris Masham. And those are just the obvious ones.

[eric schliesser]

Yes, Lisa, you are right. (I almost added a few lines on Hobbes.)

[Marcy Lascano]

And Leibniz too!

[Jackie Taylor]

Emilie du Chatelet, Catharine Macaulay, even James Beattie -- all worth reading and worth our attention today. Sally was my graduate student host when I visited the U of C prior to attending. Between her time and the end of mine there, the dept. underwent a change when Ted Cohen and I formed an undergrad philosophy club with women undergrads at the helm.

[Arun Jetli]

Very odd that there is plenty of talk about misogyny but none on the very faulty epistemology that disregards due diligence and respects doxa based on the stature of the philosopher. There is no inductive severe logic in the West, therefore all opinions can be considered as co-equal. The biggest heist in philosophy is legitimized through doxa.