But, perhaps, someone will ask, whether women are under men’s control [potestate] by nature or institution [natura an ex instituto]? For if it has been by mere institution, then we had no reason [ratio] compelling us to exclude women from government. But if we consult experience itself, we shall find that the origin of it is in their weakness. For there has never been a case of men and women reigning together, but wherever on the earth men are found, there we see that men rule, and women are ruled, and that on this plan, both sexes live in harmony. But on the other hand, the Amazons, who are reported to have held rule of old, did not suffer men to stop in their country, but reared only their female children, killing the males to whom they gave birth. But if by nature women were equal to men, and were equally distinguished by fortitudinous spirit [animi fortitudine] and ability/talent [ingenium], in which human power [potentia] and therefore human right chiefly consist; surely among nations so many and different some would be found, where both sexes rule alike, and others, where men are ruled by women, and so brought up, that they can make less use of their abilities. And since this is nowhere the case, one may assert with perfect propriety, that women have not by nature equal right with men: but that they necessarily give way [necessario cedere,] to men, and that thus it cannot happen [fieri non posse], that both sexes should rule alike, much less that men should be ruled by women. But if we further reflect upon human passions, how men, in fact, generally love women merely from the passion of lust, and esteem their cleverness and wisdom in proportion to the excellence of their beauty, and also how very ill-disposed men are to suffer the women they love to show any sort of favour to others, and other facts of this kind, we shall easily see that men and women cannot rule alike without great hurt to peace [magno pacis detrimento fieri]. But of this enough.--Spinoza, Political Treatise, 11.4, translated by Elwes
In a recent paper, Susan James (70) has rightly called attention to Spinoza's rejection, earlier in the Political Treatise, of Aristotle's stance that there are natural masters and slaves, and his embrace of the reality of a common nature. (7.27) Even so, an attentive reader of the Political Treatise will, perhaps, be dismayed by the final paragraph (quoted above), but not wholly surprised. For, in his treatment of Aristocratic government, Spinoza had quite clearly asserted that out of any given population of hundred patrician men, "hardly three are found that excel in skill and counsel." [ vix tres reperiuntur, qui arte et consilio pollent vigentque, ] (8.2) This does not seem intended, in the first instance, as criticism of aristocratic education (although he may well (recall) be critical of it), but rather as a kind of statistical regularity of the distribution of cognitive abilities in populations of males.
What is more surprising is given his explicit elitist embrace of the reality of cognitive hierarchy that, unlike so-called Platonic feminists (male and female), Spinoza denies that there are similar number of women with such cognitive excellence. For, in the Ethics Spinoza had appeared to claim, in the context of his retelling of Adam & Eve story (E4P68S), that men and women agree in nature, or, in James' terms "thin" conception of human nature. But unlike the platonic feminists, Spinoza does not avail himself of pointing to the reality of known excellent women. Spinoza is not just an elitist, but a male chauvenist.
Now, there has been enormous number of excellent and insightful work on the quoted passage above. Some, like Beth Lord, claim that while in this passage the "disempowerment of women is ‘part of nature’. Spinoza does not seek to justify or condemn that fact, but he does seek to explain it." And according to her, he explains it through socio-economic structures. The real question then is if we can imagine a democracy together that is more equal. (1105) Others, like Moira Gatens, who finds Spinoza's philosophy useful in imagining a feminist future, nevertheless read the passage as suggesting that according to Spinoza woman are "rightly excluded from the body politic because men are by nature superior to them," (47) I am inclined to agree with Gatens' (and James') interpretation.
As an aside, it is worth noting that the quoted passage above is one of four paragraphs on the nature of democracy. Even if one grants the universal consensus that the chapter (and so the book) is unfinished, it is notable that Spinoza thought it important to write/draft this paragraph at the start of the chapter on democracy. And while I grant James, in commenting on he passage, that something "psychologically complicated" is going, it is fair to say that for Spinoza entertaining the very idea of mass democracy seems to demand a stance of excluding women from the franchise. This reaction is clearly not Spinoza's alone; as Eileen O'Neill notes, Gouges, when confronted with the possible revival of mass democracy during the French revolution, recognizes that this exclusion is a temptation for newly enfranchised men (and, against her warnings, she was right and guillotined for it).
Now, I do not have anything to add to Spinoza's one-sided, unimaginatively sexist interpretation of the historical evidence about the relationship between the political possibilities of men and women. But the passage also gives us a glimpse, in its strange treatment of the historical evidence, of a peculiarity in Spinoza's metaphysics of time. For, in the quoted passage, Spinoza fundamentally assumes that in human history, all possible permutations in the sex distribution of political rulerships that can occur have occurred.
To be sure, Spinoza cannot mean that all possible political organizations have occured because the Political Treatise itself proposes three or four institutional arrangements that have not been tried out in the configurations Spinoza proposes even by his own lights.* We know this because Spinoza thinks that some of these would be (uncurruptable and) enduring (10.1). But apparently, when it comes to figuring out whether females are capable of ruling history's verdict is final.
Spinoza's use of 'necessity' reminded me of a famous passage in the Ethics: "from the necessity of the Divine nature infinite things must follow in infinite ways (i.e. all things that can fall under an infinite intellect)" (E1p16) And, if we glance back to the quoted passage at the end of the Political Treatise, it is notable that Spinoza does not help himself to an idea he could have borrowed from Al-Farabi or Ibn Rushd, that the gender properties of political rulership need not fall under the infinite intellect.
Now, it is a feature and not a bug in Spinoza's necessitarianism that eternity is in a sense all alike. This is why the very idea of creation, which singles out one moment as special, as the start of a series, is a superstitious fantasy. (Spinoza's deist and theist critics make a point of suggesting that this leave Spinoza without a viable cosmogony for the visible universe.) Let's call this the homogeneity of time thesis. Of course, there is such a thing as duration but it is not an attribute of substance (as one might have expected), but a mere consequence of the existence of causal interactions (E2p30S & E2p28], that is, the human mind's finitude or (sorry this is puzzling) negation.
In addition, E1P16 seems to suggest that all possibilities occur. Let's call this modal density. Of course, in some sense, and from the perspective of, say, Leibniz, Spinoza must mean something relative narrow with the 'possible.' But given that for Spinoza extension and mind are infinite, and that there are, perhaps, infinite further attributes, we should also not underestimate how much is genuinely possible for Spinoza.
Now given the homogeneity of time and modal density, and the reality of human history, it is not obvious that one has any right to assume that there are (knowable) possibilities that have not been tried out yet. For, that would suggests that there is temporal asymmetry between future and past. But that also means that at any given time one knows what one can know of the world (and the past). There is no reason to think one will be in a better position at a later date. And, in fact, this fits with a more general strain of skepticism about the limits of empirical knowledge that I have diagnosed in Spinoza.
In my view, what this suggests is that in some respects it is odd that Spinoza has become a mascot for progressives everywhere. Because there is a sense in which Spinoza's metaphysics is not, to put it mildly, especially hospitable toward any form of soft providence, including historical progress.+ If history has no fundamental direction things could get better and worse. Of course, just because there is no reason to think there is a temporal asymmetry between future and past, it does not follow there is a good reason to think the past has exhausted all the possible human permutations. For at no point could one be secure in that because that would privilege a moment of duration, and single out that moment. And, so while I have tried to point to the peculiarities of Spinoza's metaphysics that may partially account for his thinking in the final paragraph of the Political Treatise, I doubt these necessitate it; Spinoza seems to have underestimated women's capacity for rule and male capacity to adapt to it.
*I put it like this because I think it is possible Spinoza believes al the institutional arrangements he surveys and suggests have been tried out in various ways before (just not in their optimal configurations.)
+There is an interesting question when exactly the relatively modern idea of progress gets invented and displaces other conceptions of historial time.
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