Philobiblon

What’s the origin of the fundamental misogyny in Western thought? If we’re ever going to get rid of it – to, in the large-scale terms I’ve started to think recently – get rid of the gender binary, the insistence that everything be split in two opposing categories to which the negative is assigned the female – one of the things we certainly need to do is work out where it came from.

That’s the subject of Vigdis Songe-Moller’s Philosophy Without Women: The Birth of Sexism in Western Thought, translated from the Norwegian by Peter Cripps. That a publisher should have chosen to translate such a text suggests something pretty special, and while it ventures into aspects of philosophy to which I have limited exposure, I rather think that it is.

Songe-Moller is conerned primarily with how Greek citizens (which means of course men), and particularly classical Athenian citizens, thought about women, and about reproduction, and relations between the sexes. Her basic conclusion is that they “seem invariably to have drawn sustenance from the dream of women’s superfluity”. (p.4)

In Greek and particularly Athenian myths, she finds again and again asexual, vegetative reproduction preferred to sexual – and suggests that this is related to the fact that only this way can a “perfect” reproduction of the male – a copy – be related. Despite Greeks liking to think of women as simply a vessel for the male seed (she quotes from Aeschylus’s tragedy, Eumenides: “The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth/Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male.”), the fact that a child was not a copy of its father was undeniable.

So Athenians (men) thought of themselves as the descendants of Erichthonius, who is born when the Olympian blacksmith, Hephaestus, fails in a bid to rape Athena, but instead spills his seed on the earth, the soil of Athens, from which the child springs. He has a father, but no mother.

There’s also sociology: “Since it is the woman who gives birth to the child, it seems reasonable to regard her as the physical link between one generation and the next. For the Athenian oikos, however, she was an unstable link, insofar as a new woman had to be fetched into a man’s family for each new generation. ..Thus the secure link in the family was the man, the master of the house, the paterfamilias. It was he who symbolized the family’s unit and continuity, that is who enabled the family to remain the same through time.” (P. 16)

But it is Greek philosophy that is at the heart of the author’s argument, and particularly the pre-Socratic Parmenides, who establishes an ideal: “The ideal is eternity and immutability… a form of divine reality in which mortal phenomena such as life and death play no part. Parmenides can be characterized as Plato’s spiritual father; and the extent of his influence on European philosophy right up to the present day can hardly be overestimated. Philosophers of the Platonic tradition – from Parmenides and Plato through to Kant and Hegel – have for example found it natural to think in terms of heirarchies. Immutability is suprerior to change; eternity is set above time; immortality above decay and death.” (p.21)

More, Parmenides tries to define what is existence, or Being – something that exists. And central to his definition is certainly, lack of plurality or mutability. Not-Being, the alternative, is an essential part of change – e.g. a shoot becoming a leaf, but No-Being can’t be allowed anywhere near the pure Being. In her introduction, Songe-Moller explains how as a pregnant post-doc, she realised that “the Parmenidian idea of all things existing ultimately as one and self-identical is… far from self-evident.”

Songe-Moller goes then back to the 1960s and 70s Paris School around Jean-Pierre Vernant, which she says argued that there was a close link between the geometrical way of thinking of the ancient Greeks, with the circle as the central motif, and the archaic and classical city state. Each citizen was theoretically equidistant from the centre of power. Extending on from this, she says that Parmenides establishes this balance and equality through exclusion – the exclusion of women and slaves. “The unity and balance of Parmenides sphere of Being depend on the exclusion of Not-Being, and … this strategy can be regarded as analogous to democracy’s dependence on those groups that were excluded from it.” (p. 51)

From this point, Songe-Moller moves on to the rather better-known misogyny of Socrates and Plato. Even where there’s apparent equal opportunities in Republic: “Socrates demonstrates the basic insignificance of sexual difference by means of a simple illustration. He maintains that the difference between the one who gives birth and the one who ‘begets’ us as trivial as the difference between long and short hair…but the way in which he presents his arguments is likely to lieave us in doubt as to whether his subject really is equality of opportunity, or whether here as well the real concern is the negation of the feminine… the male guardians are characterized as the best citizens (politai), the female guardians are described as quite simply the best women (gynaikes)… the ‘best women’ means – paradoxically – the women that have most successfully overcome the fact that they belong to their sex. Thus what we find in Book V of the Republic is not a proposal for equal empowerment of the sexes, as is often claimed, but rather an attempt to cultivate masculine qualities within the ruling class.” (p. 91)

More, of course, there’s the homoeroticism. On this, Songe-Moller goes to Phaedrus, saying: “The text clearly suggests that the desire for sensual beauty is a necessary precusor to the desire for the true Beaty, that is, for the form of Beauty itself, which lies beyond all form of sensuality… the love between a man and a woman has its ‘natural’ conclusion in coitus and does not in itself point to anything beyond the purely physical … this purpose can only be served by unconsummated physical love, which Plato’s text represents as an ideal of homosexual relationships.”(pp.93-4)

Songe-Moller moves on then to consider two “modern” views of Plato, that of Irigaray and Foucault, in which the book to some degree betrays its origins as individual essays, although the overall flow of the arguments remains clear.

She goes to Irigaray’s interpretation of the cave myth, from Book VII of Republic. It has men living in a cavern open to the light along its width, but fettered so they can only see the back wall, and so placed that they see manipulated puppets appearing as shadows against the wall. “The sole purpose of the wall in Plato’s myth is – as with the female – reproduction, although the way it performs this job leaves much to be desired…due to its material properties, the wall is an unsuitable medium for the reproduction of pictures… insufficiently virginal, or alternatively: it is not sufficiently frigid. It does not repulse and transit the masculine rays of light that are thrown at it, but rather receives and absorbs them, so that no more than shadows remain.” (p. 124)

“…I shall only mention the reference Julia Kristeva makes in her Histoires d’amour to Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates describes how the soul in love – that is the philosopher’s soul – grows warm, swells up, and sprouts great wings, in due course it raises itself in its desire to fly towards its beautiful lover, and together with him towards Beauty itself. The phallic connotation is clear, and Kristeva laconically remarks that, when we consider Plato’s description of the soul’s erection, it is not so difficult to understand why the Church Fathers hesitated in attributing souls to women.” (p. 127)

Perhaps the most exciting, and frustrating passage in the book refers to the possibility that there was an alternative thought system available, if probably now unrecoverable:
“In his exposition of what he refers to in the poem as the ‘opinions of mortals’, opinions that apparently contain ‘no true belief’, Parmenides seems to describe a world in which the two sexes are equal in status. Unfortunately most of that part of the poem that deals with this theme has been lost, but the surviving verses still convey a sense that in Parmenides’ day, that is in the 5th century BCE, there were the rudiments of an attitude that presupposed no hierarchical order among the sexes.” (p. 51)

But “the Greek political theory of the classical period – with Plato and Aristotle as its foremost representatives – built on the legacy of identity theory….the concept of the equality of opposites was unable to gain any significant influence is subsequent philosophy….much philosophy has been permeated by what we can call a one-sex model: in reality there exists only one sex, the man, who constitutes the norm of all human life. Within this model, the specifically female could only be defined negatively.”

It all makes me want to add another book to those I’d like to write – call it about No 12 – an alternative history that sees the alternative, non-hierarchical, view win out among the Greeks, and the whole course of human thought thus changed. (Or perhaps a time-travel history, in which we go back and wipe out the odd key philosopher on the “wrong” side, just to help the cause…)