@ The Metaphilosophy Foundation and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 lJF, UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 27, Nos. 1&2, January/April 1Y96 0026-1068

PANEL ON FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY IN THE 90s

NAOMI SCHEMAN

In a time of widespread and increasing threats to women, universities, the humanities, affirmative action, social justice, and other elements of a minimally decent society, it might seem frivolous to focus on threats specifically to feminist philosophy. But those of us who do feminist philosophy do it in part because we think our teaching and writing are contributions, however limited, to the struggle for a world that is more just, more intelligently compassionate. The threats I want to focus on come from two perspectives: one (represented by Christina Hoff Sommers in various articles and in her book, Who Stole Feminism?‘) questions our political judgment about what is wrong with the world and what might make it better; it would choose to see feminist philosophy annihilated. The other (represented by Martha Nussbaum’s review of A Mind of One’s Own in the New York Review of Books,’ though not by the book itself or by its editors, Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt) shares (at least much of) our political vision but questions our diagnosis of philosophy’s role as part of the problem and our vision of philosophical transformation; it would choose to see feminist philo- sophy domesticated. (I do not mean to be including as part of this threat philosophers, such as Antony and Witt and many of the contributors to the volume they edited, who share the scepticism of the “domesticators” about the projects of feminist philosophy but who are concerned to address such projects directly and to nurture the dialogue between feminist philosophers and their critics. What I mean by domestication is the attempt to dismiss or render invisible what I will refer to as the central and most radical of feminist philosophy and to replace it, without serious argument, by work that is much less critical of prefeminist philosophical views.)

I want, briefly and schematically, to suggest that these two perspect- ives - the annihilating and the domesticating - share a deep misconcep- tion of the challenge feminist philosophy poses to the field and consequently misread both its philosophical and its political implications.

‘ Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

* Martha Nussbaum, New York Review of Books, 20 October 1994, review of A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, ed. Louise Antony and Charlotte Witt (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).

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Thus, the annihilators see feminist philosophy as an arrogant imposition of unfounded views on people - in particular, women - to whom such views are bizarrely unrelated to their senses of their own lives; while the domesticators see (central, radical) feminist philosophy as undermining politically efficacious, as well as philosophically tenable, notions of reason, rationality, and objectivity in favor of a politically disastrous and philosophically incoherent relativism. In both cases, I want to suggest, there is a failure to grapple with the specifics of the feminist philosophical critique of the relationship of the knowing subject to others and to the world, a critique that challenges the entrenched idea that we are forced to choose, in David Pears’ words, between “super- idealized guidance or ~ a p r i c e ” ~ - that is, between transcendent guarantors of truth and practice-transcendent norms on the one hand and laissez-faire relativism or the uncriticizable workings of power on the other.

Feminist philosophy, though relatively new (the work I have in mind began in the mid-seven tie^)^ is richly diverse, but what I am calling the central and radical core of its shares, though it does not always explicitly articulate, a commitment to a robust realism, both about the world and, most crucially, about knowing subjects. It is at the heart of such a doubly realist commitment to regard knowledge as essentially perspect- ival - to be concerned with the actual conditions under which subjects encounter the world and with the ways in which relationships of authority and trust are established, in complex interaction with the construction and maintenance of diverse, intersecting forms of privilege and power. While remaining deeply concerned with questions about the justifiability of judgments and about truth, this work radically questions the need for - or the intelligibility of - transcendent standards for the correctness either of our judgments or of our norms (moral or epistemic).

We see the need for such transcendent standards throughout the history of philosophy, perhaps most starkly at times at which they are being challenged. Thus, late nineteenth and early twentieth century concerns with the “death of God” - summarized by Dostoevsky’s phrase, “God is dead; everything is permitted” - capture the deep anxiety (or exhileration, or both) at the presumed inadequacy of any norms not held in place by a transcendent deity. I am reminded of my experience of learning to walk: I could walk fine as long as I held onto

’ David Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Developmeni of Wiitgensiein’s Philosophy, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 488.

The philosophers I have in mind include, among many others (this list is highly idiosyncratic: it’s who I cite most often): Claudia Card, Lorraine Code, Patricia Hill Collins, Marilyn Frye, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Evelyn Fox Keller, Helen Longino, Maria Lugones, Adrienne Rich, and Patricia Williams.

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something - it didn’t matter that the something might be a stick. I needed the illusion that something other than my own efforts was holding me up. It is developmentally appropriate for toddlers to need to believe in the reliability of empowering authority, far exceeding their own nascent abilities; as it is developmentally appropriate for adoles- cents to question the grounds of such authority and for their doubt to issue in generalized nihilism. Such nihilism is an inevitable response to disillusionment with forms of authority that are believed to be the necessary grounds for judgment: if they don’t know - if they’re revealed to be lying or mistaken - then no-one really knows anything.

In secular settings, such as modern universities, God, who stepped in to replace parents as the transcendent guarantor, has himself been replaced by a real world that transcends any of our best theories and by norms (ethical or epistemic) that transcend our practices. Both transcendent realism and a commitment to practice-transcendent norms reflect a belief in the inadequacy of human, historical and social, practice to adequately ground truth, rationality, reason, goodness, rightness, and all the other notions that serve to distinguish the “real thing” from various imposters. Unlike the stick that I believed held me up, which would have continued to do so if it worked not by magical thinking but by being held by a grown-up, such transcendent guarantors are disqualified if they actually make contact with the practices they ground. Thus, it is the intractable problem at the heart of epistemology, including moral epistemology, to explain how it is that a world that is necessarily independent of our thought about it, or a realm of values or norms that is necessarily independent of any particular practices, can be epistemically accessible.

Its independence, however much it may pose an epistemic problem, is nonetheless taken to be the sine qua non of its doing the work it is called upon to do, of distinguishing between what merely seems to be and what really is. The requirement is precisely for “something that turns though nothing turns with it.”’ Transcendent reality is supposed, in some never successfully explicated (and, I would argue, inexplicable) way to guide our practice; but any mechanism of guidance that might actually be revealed - especially in a way that enables us to criticize its terms - cannot, for that reason, be the real thing; it must, because we can see how it works, and think of its working differently, be merely a model or a representation.

Such mystification of ultimate authority, including the faith that, in some yet-to-be-determined fashion, one’s actions are underwritten by it, is more likely to have a grip on those who feel their own authority thereby apparently supported. It is likely to be far less appealing to those who

See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1271: “Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.”

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labor behind the scenes, as, in Marilyn Frye’s terms, the stagehands whose work allows the play of patriarchy to proceed and to pass as reality.6 When we turn to those whose labor makes the mechanisms of discovery and justification work, we can get a far less mystified account of what makes some judgments true and others false, some actions right and others wrong, some ways of life good and others bad.

Feminist philosophers have turned our attention to the resources in our practices for resolving disagreements, for achieving objectivity. Whether it’s a matter of the truth of some claim about the world or about the morality of some action or of the validity of some rule of reasoning, we see something quite different if we ask not: what must be the case for our judgments to be true or false; but: what do we actually do when we resolve disputes, come to agreement, raise objections, reach or unsettle consensus? The shift is from the assumption that I could walk only if some higher power were supporting me (so inferring from the stick’s support that it must be connected invisibly to such a power), to the recognition that there is nothing but my own efforts and abilities (so seeing the stick as a vestige of an earlier appeal to authority). The shift is from the demand for the transcendent guarantor to the transcendental argument: given that we do agree and argue and sometimes argue to the point of agreement, what must be the case - where the answer to that question has to be something that can actually do some work. My suggestion is that feminist philosophers (and others philosophizing from perspectives other than privilege) have a better grasp of the mechanisms that make our language games work than do those whose privilege largely consists in their isolation from the nitty gritty details of how anything works. (At a recent talk at the University of Minnesota, Joanna Kadi referred to the difference in what working class and middle class people mean when they say “we built our house.”)

Transcendent guarantors look both necessary and useful insofar as one has a fundamentally mystified take on how things happen, which leads to its seeming intelligible that a form of authority can actually work in the absence of our having any concrete engagement with it (as a reality that by definition must be able to elude our epistemic grasp and whose regulative effect on our knowledge is speculative can nonetheless be what makes some of our judgments true and others false). Feminist philosophy is guided by a robust sense of engagement: what resources are actually available to us when it actually matters that we be able to argue that our view of the world is true, or at least more nearly true than, for example, that of male supremacists? Appeal to the way the world really is - when that means how it may be different from even our

Marilyn Frye, “To Be and Be Seen: The Politics of Reality,” in The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg. N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1983).

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best-ever theory of it - simply doesn’t help: it does no work, however reassuring it may be to those for whom the mechanisms of meaning are beneath their notice. (It is a puzzling fact about philosophical discussions of realism that if what one is concerned with is how it is that real people really resolve real disputes with other real people about things that really matter to their real lives, one is classified as an anti- realist, e.g., a verificationist: metaphysical realism is marked precisely by its appeal to what real people can never get their real hands on.)

The labor of maintaining embodied human life and social structures is the mechanism that makes possible both agreement and dissent, as well as the processes for working through dissent. It may well be true (to take the example Nussbaum discusses in her New York Review of Books review, that modus ponens cannot seriously be rejected as a valid argument form: the question is what it means to assert this. As she argues, we do all agree to its validity, or can - nontendentiously - be brought to agree: but what if we didn’t? Feminist philosophers take this to be a real question, to be faced in the real world by real interlocutors, placed in real social relationships, including relationships of differential power and privilege, with different stakes in the status quo, including how good reasoning is defined, taught, and acknowledged. (Ruth Ginzberg’s point in the Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy piece Nussbaum cites’ is that those who do not initially agree to the validity of modus ponens, or to its applicability to their own reasoning, are better brought to agreement by having their initial scepticism treated respect- fully than by having it dismissed.) When we focus on how we actually deal with disagreement, we face up to the politics of silencing or discrediting or marginalizing dissenting voices - and we are moved to work at crafting less oppressive ways of finding or creating common ground. Despite the claims of the annihilators and the domesticators, it is such feminist philosophy, in concert with allied forms of liberatory theory and practice, that would make truth and objectivity more than empty gestures, and reason and rationality more than tools of power.

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’ Ruth Ginzberg, American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy 88:2 (Winter 1989).

@ The Metaphilosophy Foundation and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996.