Digressions&Impressions

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.

Racialized Democracy and Fairness

In their important piece "Is the United States a ‘Racial Democracy’?" (New York Times, Opinionator),  JASON STANLEY and VESLA WEAVER note that "Starting in the 1970s, the United States has witnessed a drastic increase in the rate of black imprisonment, both absolutely and relative to whites." Thus, in the decade after "the civil rights movement in the 1960s," in which blacks gained equal formal rights under the law Stateside, the law  increasingly  removed blacks from the streets and (because of voting rules governing felons and ex-felons) the body politic. Stanley and Weaver name this  "a racial democracy," that is, a state that "unfairly applies the laws governing the removal of liberty primarily to citizens of one race, thereby singling out its members as especially unworthy of liberty, the coin of human dignity."

Even if the laws were not officially designed or enacted with this purpose, the pattern of consequences has long been visible in the statistics. Given human nature, it is likely that some (the insiders such as law-enforcement, corrections' staff/contractors, certain politicians, media, etc. ) that benefit from this consequence probably noticed it before the people who do not obviously benefit from the new regime. Human nature being what it is, often the disadvantaged outsiders are the first to speak up about the unintended side-consequence. The outsiders are at a disadvantage when they do so because if the side-consequence is really harmful they fight it with relatively slender resources while trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Meanwhile, the insiders can believe they have clean hands. While they actively benefit from an outcome pattern, they can always claim that none of them intended it or actively promoted it.* Moreover, if the outcome pattern is endorsed by justice, why would one even imagine that something is amiss?