1
Introduction
Morwenna Griffiths and Margaret Whitford
Philosophy is in urgent need of a feminist perspective.
For centuries the practice of philosophy has been overwhelmingly the prerogative of men but it is only recently that feminist analysis has made it possible to see the distorting effect of this historical fact.
The articles in this book demonstrate in a variety of ways where the bias occurs and how it might be redressed.
They also show that redressing it is a matter of importance to feminists as well as to philosophers.
Feminist ideas are interrelated with philosophical ideas, but most feminist writing would not be recognised as' philosophy '.
Unlike most academic philosophy much of it is personal, polemical, poetical or allusive.
Yet part of the practice of feminism is concerned with the essentially philosophical activities of redrawing concepts, reclaiming language, redefining what counts as significant or important, and, as Daly (1984) calls it, ' naming '.
The reconceptualisation which feminism is attempting has a direct and vital bearing on central philosophical issues, not only in political philosophy where it might have been expected, but also in epistemology, ontology, philosophy of mind, and ethics.
At the same time, in their attempts to rearticulate these basic issues, feminists necessarily take over and use philosophical concepts already available  and in so doing they may import, entailed or entangled in apparently neutral concepts, implications which reiterate and reinforce the assumptions that are being challenged.
This point is made explicitly by several of the contributors to this volume (see Mary Midgley, Jean Grimshaw, Joanna Hodge and Anne Seller).
Philosophy from a feminist perspective has practical implications for both philosophers and feminists.
The practice and content of Western philosophy are male-dominated and male-biased.
This statement is not directed at any one set of philosophers.
It is true in general, in spite of the fact that philosophers by no means speak with a single voice, and do not even agree among themselves about what they understand philosophy to be, since the nature of the subject, its preoccupations and methods, is itself a matter of philosophical disagreement.
How then could philosophy in general be said to have a male bias?
To see this one needs to take a closer look at some of the ways in which philosophy has been conceptualised.
Western philosophy has a long tradition so it is not surprising that it has changed over the centuries both in content and in method.
Schools and traditions, with their prescriptions about content, method or both, have risen and fallen, sometimes to rise up again in a new guise.
Philosophers of all kinds continually look to thinkers from previous times for inspiration and argument, and schools can often be distinguished by which predecessors they read and discuss.
Conversely, bitterly opposed schools can sometimes look to a common ancestor.
The result of all this is a web of overlapping  but different  ways of conceiving of the nature of philosophy.
The tradition that is presently characteristic of the Englishspeaking world, including the United Kingdom, is often called ' analytic '.
From about 1955 to 1975 it had a particularly strong hold here in the form of ' conceptual analysis' or ' linguistic philosophy ', in which it was axiomatic that any ' empirical ' question was not philosophical.
Philosophy was held to be a ' second-order subject ' concerned only with reason, logic and the clarification of thought.
It could be of use to ' first-order ', empirically based subjects, but it could learn nothing from them.
Plainly, any questions about sex or gender are necessarily non-philosophical, if philosophy is taken to be conceptual analysis in this narrow sense.
Any attempt to introduce them into the discourse is immediately blocked by the slogan posing as question  ' but is it philosophy? '
Philosophy that limits itself to conceptual analysis can discuss the discourses of those who talk about sex and gender, looking for conceptual coherence and the presence or absence of rational argument.
But it can not treat gender as a theoretical or methodological category, that might structure its own tools and methods of inquiry, and so it can not examine its own discourse for masculine bias.
Unless the category of gender is explicitly seen as of methodological importance, the question can not even be raised.
Alternative traditions to the analytic one are mostly to be found in Continental Europe (and in some North American universities).
Montefiore and Ishiguro (1979) point out:
The universities of Europe which have not been influenced by the analytical tradition... have by no means represented any unitary tradition.
The disagreements, or even lack of communication, between, for instance, Hegelians, Marxists, phenomenologists and Thomists have often been deep.
But these disagreements are ' small ' in comparison with the barriers of mutual ignorance and distrust between the main representatives of the analytical tradition on the one hand and the main philosophical schools of the European continent on the other.
(pp. viiiCix)
These barriers have reached towering heights in the twentieth century, although information does slowly trickle through them.
It is still true to say that many Continental philosophers would hardly be recognised as such by their English-speaking contemporaries.
Montefiore and Ishiguro again:
How unfortunate... that they have refused to read or respect one another, the one convinced that the other survives on undisciplined rhetoric and an irresponsible lack of rigour, the other suspecting the former of aridity, superficiality and over-subtle trivialization (Ibid., p. ix)
Partly as a result of a slow trickle through the barriers, and partly as a result of internal inconsistencies, the analytic tradition has recently shown signs of moving from the strictly aloof position it adopted in the heyday of conceptual analysis.
It is now possible, even in respectable academic circles in this country, to recognise that the concepts people use are related to the (changing) circumstances in which they live.
The question ' but is it philosophy? ' is losing its power to block further discussion.
It remains true, however, that it is still deeply contentious to suggest the possibility of points of view in philosophy, let alone that substantial conclusions might be drawn from them.
In this volume, the possibility of a women's point of view in philosophy is discussed directly by Paula Boddington from within the analytic tradition.
Other contributors who are working within this tradition (Brenda Almond, Morwenna Griffiths, Mary Midgley and Anne Seller) also consider in what ways central philosophical issues might look different from a women's (or feminist) points of view.
Other contributors, like Alison Assiter, Joanna Hodge and Margaret Whitford, have been influenced by the non-analytic traditions of Continental Europe.
In some ways these traditions are of especial interest to feminists since part of their history is an opposition to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century versions of the Enlightenment and the mechanistic, scientific, atomistic picture of the universe.
These are concerns shared by substantial numbers of feminists.
However, it is clear from these three papers that the Continental traditions themselves need to be subjected to feminist scrutiny.
These traditions are, in theory, more hospitable than the analytic one to the idea of different points of view, but in practice their point of view has been overwhelmingly male.
The feminist criticism of this volume is the more powerful because its contributors come from a variety of philosophical traditions.
No doubt it will very quickly become apparent to the reader that there are differences in their philosophical assumptions that may not be reconcilable.
Nor do they share any body of feminist dogma.
It would be odd if they did, since feminists, like philosophers, do not speak with a single voice.
We think it would be a mistake to try and establish any ' consensual ' version of feminism or of feminist philosophy because we are committed to exploration of the beliefs and views we hold, even the ones which at present seem indisputable.
At this point the question may well arise: since there are such profound differences among the contributors, how could these different views be said to constitute a perspective?
And given the diversity both of contemporary philosophy and of contemporary feminism (Delmar, 1986), how could a feminist perspective in philosophy be recognised?
One suggestion is that feminist philosophy could be identified by its content.
This is not a suggestion we agree with, but it is a popular one, especially in North America where a number of closely related discussions have emerged recently about the content of feminist philosophy, or the form a feminist critique of philosophy should take (Flax, 1983; Hartsock, 1983; Jaggar, 1983; and see also Ruth, 1981).
They include substantive conclusions about what would be different in philosophy if it were influenced by feminine rather than by masculine assumptions.
For instance, Flax argues that certain preoccupations are typical of masculine philosophy, and arise out of dilemmas deeply rooted in the masculine unconscious, resulting from childrearing practices:
Apparently insoluble dilemmas within philosophy are not the product of the immanent structure of the human mind and/or nature but rather reflect distorted or frozen social relations.
(p. 248)
Philosophy reflects the fundamental division of the world according to gender and a fear and devaluation of women characteristic of patriarchal attitudes.
(p. 268)
The apparently irresolvable dualisms of subject-object, mind-body, inner-outer, reason-sense, reflect this dilemma.
(pp. 269C70)
Hartsock (1983) argues that for men but not for women:
The core experience to be understood is that of discontinuity and its consequences.
As a consequence of this experience of discontinuity and aloneness, penetration of ego-boundaries, or fusion with another is experienced as violent.
Thus, the desire for fusion with another can take the form of domination of the other.
(pp. 299C300)
She argues that this perception of discontinuity and dominance has consequences for the way experience finds expression in the work of male philosophers.
For women, in contrast, discontinuity is not the core experience, and relationships are not perceived as violent.
Jaggar (1983) sums up the position as follows: ' The standpoint of women generates an ontology of relations and of continual process' (p. 376).
There are serious problems with this kind of content-based assertion, as Grimshaw (1986) points out in her discussion of ' the maleness of philosophy '.
Firstly, it ignores those male, often misogynist, philosophers who have emphasised relations and continual processes.
She cites Hegel and Bradley as examples.
We would also point out that prior to the seventeenth-century scientific revolution the universe was seen, by European men, as a great chain of being, connected rather than atomistic, necessarily related to humanity, rather than being a ' neutral domain of facts, of contingently correlated elements, the tracing of whose correlations will enable greater and greater manipulation and control of the world ' (Taylor, 1985, p. 134).
Secondly, it distorts the history of philosophy by assuming that it has been unchanging in its preoccupations and conceptualisations, which it clearly has not.
However, as Lloyd (1984) shows in her tracing of changing ideas of reason, while ideas may change, their gender inflection may remain.
Throughout the history of Western philosophy women have been thought inferior or less than fully human, though some philosophers, like Kant and Rousseau, have found them charming and necessary to men's well-being, as long as they keep in their place.
Thirdly, it has a tendency to a rather static and essentialist picture of both ' men ' and ' women ', in this way ignoring the important and real differences between women themselves.
We do not think that any particular content in philosophy can be identified as female.
Where we agree with the suggestions of the feminist philosophers we have just quoted is in their insistence that philosophical theory comes out of experience, so that philosophy formulated exclusively by men will reflect the experience of men.
But we also want to emphasise that neither the experiences men have nor their ideas about masculinity have remained constant.
They have varied over history and they still vary today with race, culture and class.
But however much they vary, the symbolic division of the world by gender appears to be a constant and fundamental way of articulating experience.
Therefore, the experience of women will vary systematically over time, place and circumstance, in step with, but different from, the experience of men.
As several of the contributors point out, one should be wary of reducing women's experiences (plural) to women's experience (singular).
But the division of the world by gender continues to underlie these changes.
Gender is defined by opposition.
To be masculine is not to be feminine.
Feminine is what is not masculine.
What appears on either side of the male-female divide is extremely variable.
For instance, whether males tend to be warlike, bookish, competitive, cooperative, individualist or role-oriented is specific to time and place.
But where masculinity is associated with any one of these, femininity will be associated with the opposite, and, where women are oppressed, taken to be inferior.
Philosophy, in so far as it is the articulation of the concepts, dilemmas, explanations and abstractions of a culture, will only be half the story unless both genders contribute equally.
As far as our own history is concerned, feminist criticism shows that Western philosophy has been consistently masculine in orientation even while it has changed its preoccupations and methods.
But the other half of the story can not be simply added on.
Grimshaw (1986) suggests:
The trouble with [ a view that what is needed is a re-evaluation of the feminine ] is that it still leaves uncriticised the whole association of particular qualities with the masculine and others with the feminine...
A response to the gender inflection or masculinism of philosophical theories should involve, I think, neither merely the assertion that women too should be seen as included under or capable of whatever norms are suggested by the theory, nor merely the assertion that what is seen as feminine should be valued too, or given equal status with what is male.
Rather, what is needed is a critique of the polarisation of masculine and feminine qualities, and in particular a critique of the way in which such qualities may be interpreted or clustered. (pp. 47C8)
Grimshaw emphasises that femininity or masculinity are not fixed, nor are they independent of each other.
We would add that to suggest giving equal status to what is currently thought to be feminine or masculine is to ignore the way in which one is defined by the other.
In our culture to give equal status is a contradiction in terms, so long as gender is an expression of power relations and the male continues to be the superior term.
We are saying, in short, that a feminist perspective in philosophy is necessarily critical.
Like any other philosophy it is specific to its circumstances.
It will depend on the characteristic experiences of women and men at the time of its formulation, and on the way they have entered into philosophical discourse.
Feminist criticisms and contributions need to expose and redress distortions where they are found.
Thus, if maleness is especially associated with individualism, feminists may need to point to connectedness, but if connectedness is part of the male view, emphasising it won't be feminist.
Intuition is now said to be ' feminine ', and is opposed to logic (which is thereby ' masculine ').
But intuition used to be the favoured type of knowledge, and St Thomas Aquinas, for example, would never have allowed intuition to constitute a specifically feminine attribute, because it would have meant admitting that women were nearer God.
Since the feminist perspective is necessarily critical, feminist philosophy is not a way of articulating women's experience in parallel with men 's: it is not a form of relativism.
This is a particularly important point.
That which a feminist perspective enables us to perceive is valid for everyone.
However, since we have argued that content is not the defining criterion of feminist perspectives, we are not claiming a new objectivity or neutrality.
We are not claiming that women on their own (or feminists on their own) have the truth, but rather that men on their own do not.
Therefore, here again we have reservations about the position articulated by Alison Jaggar (1983) at the end of an excellent discussion of political philosophy from a feminist perspective:
Women's subordinate status means that, unlike men, women do not have an interest in mystifying reality and so are likely to develop a clearer and more trustworthy understanding of the world.
A representation of reality from the standpoint of women is more objective and unbiased than the prevailing representations that reflect the standpoint of men.
The concept of women's standpoint also provides an interpretation of what it is for a theory to be comprehensive.
It asserts that women's social position offers them access to aspects or areas of reality that are not easily accessible to men...
The standpoint of women reveals more of the universe, human or non-human, than the standpoint of men.
(pp. 384C5)
Though appealing and heroic, such a vision seems to claim too much.
But although we are not arguing that women or feminists have privileged access to the truth about reality, we agree with Jaggar that the standpoint of women offers an opportunity to see what is wrong with current male-defined theories and to correct them.
It could be objected at this point that all philosophy is critical, that all philosophical theory attempts to question, correct or overturn current orthodoxy and so that feminist philosophy is just philosophy, and there is nothing specifically feminist about it.
The difference is, of course, that feminist criticism arises from the experience of feminism and from taking feminist theories seriously.
This would be true whatever the particular circumstances which produced the feminist response.
The experience of becoming feminist inevitably leads to changes in one's view of oneself, and in one's view of the rest of the world.
It is never an intellectual exercise which leaves everything the same.
It is a discovery that changing concepts is a political activity: that it is not value-free, but is tied to the adoption of a particular interpretation of the world.
The result is a re-evaluation of one's personal life, a re-evaluation which is often surprising and usually difficult.
Things which were previously seen as obviously true come to be seen as obviously false.
The tensions generated by this process (and by the kinds of activity, personal and political, which accompany it) have philosophical consequences, both concerning which concepts seem problematic, and also what is problematic about them.
The articles in this book explore some of these consequences.
A preoccupation common to all the papers in the book springs directly from the difficulties involved in reassessing how the ' facts' of one's experience correspond to the descriptions of them offered by others.
It could be summarised by the feminist slogans, ' the personal is political ' or ' the politics of experience '.
Whatever the problems with these rather global and unanalytic formulations, none the less they do encapsulate one indispensable and basic argument of feminism, the argument that women's experience has been left out: one of the central themes of feminism has been the importance of women's experience, and one of its central enterprises has been to show how a great deal of male theorising about women has tended to deny, invalidate, or be unable to account for this experience.
This is not to say that women's experience, perceptions, feelings and emotions are self-validating and constitute in themselves an epistemological standpoint, or even to say that they are always correctly identified and described, but it is to suggest that philosophy would look rather different if women's experience had the same rights of entry as that of men.
Most of the contributors draw attention to this point in one way or another.
For example, Morwenna Griffiths refers to the feminist emphasis on generating abstractions on the basis of concrete, personal experience (rather than assuming that inherited abstractions adequately explain experience).
One of the strengths of this approach is that it becomes much more immediately apparent why certain issues are felt to be important.
The experience of trying to force one's perceptions into preconceived categories, and the pain and distortion that this has often led to, is now used as a basis by feminist theorists for the argument that to see feeling as' contaminating ' objective, scientific knowledge points to a distortion of conceptualisation.
As Jaggar (1983) points out, this is not a simple process of incorporating the neglected experience: ' a theory may require that we revise even the description of the world on which the theory itself is based ' (p. 381).
The contributors are not making the easy assumption that to validate their experience women do not have to put themselves into question; on the contrary, it must be recognised that to be a feminist theorist may involve some painful and hard-won putting into question of the beliefs and commitments that are the point of departure.
But the contributors all agree on the importance of that experience.
In these papers, all kinds of non- and extra-philosophical activities become the basis for philosophical reflection, for instance menstruation and childbirth (Brenda Almond's paper); a gut reaction to pornography (Alison Assiter's paper); the fantasies that disturb because of their apparently unfeminist nature Jean Grimshaw's paper); and nonviolent demonstrations against missile bases (Anne Seller's paper); the point in each case being that these experiences are the starting point, because their importance did not seem to be recognised within the theoretical categories already provided, and so urgently impel the theorist to work out categories that are more adequate.
A second preoccupation evident in these papers is responsibility, and what could roughly be described as the ethical dimension of conceptualisation.
Several contributors explicitly criticise the social atomist conception of human beings, defined by Mary Midgley in this volume as follows:
This is the idea, implied by all Social Contract myths, that an individual is essentially a solitary unit, a free chooser, a being intrinsically without social ties.
As she goes on to argue, ' The pronoun ' he ' is an essential part of this description. '
Because the life-experience of women is normally so different from that of men, they are likely to conceptualise freedom, equality, rights, responsibility and autonomy, to give but a few examples, in a rather different way from men.
Thus Brenda Almond suggests that the ways in which women's lives differ from those of men are morally significant.
In our culture women typically conceptualise themselves in relation to others; discussion of the implications of this can be found in several of the papers (Alison Assiter, Lorraine Code, Jean Grimshaw and Judith Hughes).
The result of seeing the difference in women's experiences in positive rather than negative terms  seeing women as having something to offer philosophy rather than seeing them as inferior or aberrant versions of a male norm  is that the contours of familiar conceptual landscapes begin to change.
Judith Hughes, for example, puts forward a way of seeing autonomy (and adulthood) based primarily on the notion of responsibility rather than that of rationality, thus giving an ethical dimension to autonomy.
Lorraine Code argues that epistemology should not be divorced from ethics; one should be a responsible knower.
Alison Assiter extends the notion of autonomy into the private realm where the tradition cautiously refrains from setting foot, and suggests that how we treat and are treated by other people in private has a direct bearing on our autonomy in the public sphere.
The ideal of an unrelated self is shown to be an ideal developed by people who have never been in the position of having primary responsibility for the care of children or the old.
This position, actual or potential for all women, leads to a version of the self which is more likely to be defined in relationship and which therefore implies certain commitments or responsibilities which can hardly be denied.
Where standard discussions of autonomy place it in the context of rights, freedom and equality, paternalism and rationality, here it is discussed in conjunction with questions of fantasy, how we treat others, social and personal relations, and responsibilities.
Where standard discussions of the self talk about memory and unity, brain transplants, the rational agent acting on his beliefs and desires, or the self in its public aspect as citizen, here the self is looked at in the context of the past history of a person, unconscious or fantasy relationships with others, the importance of feelings, or the body.
This is not simply an alternative or complementary perspective, since it raises directly the issue that what counts as a philosophical problem is itself an issue for critical inquiry.
We have been arguing that changing concepts is a political activity; that it is not value-free, but arises out of a particular ethical or political interpretation of the word, and that one of the aims of the dialogue between feminism and philosophy should precisely be to reconceptualise the world that is offered by philosophy as it is at present.
Some feminists would expand this argument to suggest that the political and/or ethical discussion should be made an explicit part of the methodology of philosophy.
Harding (1986) argues that since scientific knowledge (the epistemological paradigm) is in any case used for social ends, social aims should determine the formulation of scientific or epistemological problems.
Along the same lines, Anne Seller in this volume argues for a more democratic epistemology.
From this perspective, ethics in the broad sense (the question of relations with and responsibilities towards other people or a community) is not just a branch of philosophy but informs the conception of what philosophy is or might be.
Contributors to this volume were given no more precise brief than the provisional subtitle ' explorations in philosophy from a feminist perspective ', and they are working within quite different philosophical traditions and on different sorts of issues.
However, the papers are unified by a common factor: they all draw on a body of writing and thinking  with admittedly elastic boundaries  which is not taken seriously by the mainstream as having anything to offer philosophy.
Providing an outline of each paper in the second part of the introduction, below, we draw attention to the feminist debates which are the source for each contributor's point of departure.
In the third and final section we give a brief survey of the most well-known publications in the area of philosophy from a feminist perspective.
We hope this will be of value to both feminists and philosophers approaching these questions for the first time.
The opening paper, by Mary Midgley, discusses the central issue of the possibility and necessity of a women's point of view.
She addresses the tensions generated by two related dilemmas in feminist thinking, and points out why they have a wider relevance in philosophical and political thought.
The first of these tensions is about the degree of attention that needs to be paid to natural (i.e. genetically given) sex differences and similarities.
The second, related one is about the reasons for treating all people as if they were the same, regardless of their individual peculiarities of sex and gender.
She relates these concerns to the philosophical projects of finding universals of human nature, of morality and of political being, and in particular, to the project of achieving equality between individuals of varying class, race, age and cultural background.
The questions are both political and controversial.
As Midgley makes clear, discussions of natural sex differences can never be simply a neutral issue, even if it is an empirical one, since one still has to consider what consequences should follow from the differences one has discovered.
Feminists began by arguing that sex differences are artificial and insignificant, for the very good reason that the idea of natural differences had so often been used to justify discriminatory treatment against women.
Midgley argues that it is time to move on from this position.
She sees natural sex differences as providing the basis for a critique of certain philosophical conceptions which exclude women, and in that way is enlisting them on the side of feminism.
The view that philosophical conceptions may be not so much ' universal ' as' male ' is discussed further in the next paper.
Brenda Almond draws on recent feminist arguments that women's distinctive perspective and experience lead them to view morality in a different light from men.
This distinctive perspective is derived from a focus on the concrete, as opposed to the abstract, and is characterised by an emphasis on responsibility rather than on rights.
Almond suggests a number of ways in which the ancient idea that the two sexes have  or should have  different moral outlooks can be given new life in the context of modern feminism.
She considers whether it is true to claim that there is a sex-related divergence of views, and the possible reasons for any such divergence, and goes on to suggest that there are areas in which women's views may typically differ from those of men.
In particular, Almond questions the notion of autonomy as it has been developed since Kant, arguing that this notion is of limited value to women, since ' the ' masculine ' goal of moral autonomy has in practice almost always been outside a woman's grasp'.
She suggests that women's distinctive experience leads them to form a moral sensibility that is closer to aesthetic response than to the legalism implicit in much principle-based morality.
Almond argues, like Midgley, that women's experience adds a positive and complementary contribution to our ethical conceptions.
An ethical perspective is also present in Alison Assiter's paper, in which she argues that the Kantian or Hegelian notion of autonomy should apply to sexual relations as much as to the public world of social contract.
She suggests that persons and their autonomy should be respected in all private and personal activities, including erotic fantasy.
The argument should be seen in the context of feminist debates about pornography and its significance.
One of the clearest discussions of these debates can be found in Elizabeth Wilson's book What Is to Be Done about Violence against Women? (1983).
She points out that what feminist thought has done is to take pornography out of its usual position in the argument between conservatives and liberals over censorship, and to put it into a completely different framework (p. 137).
For feminists, there is another context which gives the phenomenon of pornography a different meaning: the social context of violence against women.
Pornography is seen as one manifestation among others of the way in which women are controlled by male power or violence (other manifestations are rape, or the fear of rape, wife-battering, prostitution, child-abuse, etc.
). (For further discussion see Brownmiller, 1975; Lederer, 1980; Dworkin, 1981; Griffin, 1981; and Kappeler, 1986 which are directly concerned with pornography, and Snitow et al.,
1984; and Vance, 1984 on sexuality.)
Like these writers, Assiter makes a consideration of pornography central to a consideration of women's social situation.
She enters the feminist debate here, arguing that some feminists have misunderstood the significance of pornography, taking it to be a major cause of the oppression of women, rather than a symptom of it, albeit a symptom which itself then contributes to that oppression.
It is now beginning to be argued by feminists that in order to deal with pornography and what the phenomenon reveals, we have first to understand it, understand, that is, the meaning and function of fantasy for both men and women, and what effects it has on the rest of one's life (see Wilson, 1983 for a summary of this discussion, and also Carter, 1979; Linden et al., 1982; Midgley and Hughes, 1983).
For Assiter, fantasy is not just a harmless and essentially solitary activity in which everyone engages to a greater or lesser extent, but is something which also has an effect on the way people behave towards others, and on the way they may feel they can justifiably treat each other, particularly women.
There is thus a connection between people's private fantasies and their status as autonomous individuals.
Drawing on a notion of autonomy which originates with Kant, and which is developed in the writings of Hegel and Marx, Assiter extends this notion and criticises the way in which it has been confined to the public sphere.
In arguing for the relevance of the notion of autonomy in private life, she brings into question the demarcation point between private and public life which is assumed by most of the philosophical tradition she is working in.
It has been pointed out by feminists that the tradition which depends upon this demarcation line fails to give a satisfactory account of conflicts that arise in the private sphere.
Thus two apparently unrelated discussions: the notion of autonomy in relation to the public-private distinction, and pornography, are shown here to be intimately related.4
The notion of autonomy is discussed in a different context by Judith Hughes in the next paper which, like Assiter 's, illuminates the concept from a new angle and, like Almond 's, emphasises the importance of responsibility.
Underlying Hughes's paper are questions about how children figure in political debate, what problems the considerations about children bring to light, whether these problems have any special significance for women, and whether women's new awareness of their own political situation can be used effectively in thinking about children.
Thinking about these questions produces the conclusions that are the starting point for Hughes's paper: that the philosopher's child invariably turns out to be male and that autonomy seems to be for men only.
These conclusions lead her to argue that rationality has been falsely assumed to be the criterion of political adulthood, and that rationality does not entail autonomy.
Thus, analysing the attempt by political philosophers to justify the exclusion of women from public life on the grounds of their defective capacities (either rational, moral or cognitive), she suggests that there is a hidden argument which takes the exclusion of women to be unquestionable and attempts to justify the status quo by seeking an explanation in the defective capacities that women must then be assumed to have.
She argues that autonomy should not be seen as a psychological capacity, but as a social one, depending on public acknowledgement, and that this acknowledgement arises from the recognition of responsibility rather than of rationality.
A fourth paper discussing the notion of autonomy indicates the importance of the concept for women, for whom the experience of dependence and powerlessness is often a central feature of their lives.
Jean Grimshaw looks at some of the ways in which feminists have tried to conceptualise what it is for a woman to be autonomous, and the relationship between these conceptions and philosophical ways of thinking about the human self.
She locates her argument within both feminism and philosophical thought.
She considers the idea, implicit in much feminist theory, of an authentic self which is said to be socially conditioned by patriarchal power, and argues that this idea owes much to a tradition in Western philosophy which dates back to the Aristotelian distinction between actions that are voluntary and actions which are coerced, a tradition that can be traced through Descartes to the present time.
Grimshaw argues that feminists' appeal to this humanistic conception of the self as a unitary, atomistic, conscious and rational core is quite inadequate to conceptualise experiences such as self-deception or obsessional delusions, or the contradictions which feminists have described between their rationally held views and political convictions on the one hand, and their emotions and desires on the other.
In order to account for women's lack of autonomy it is not sufficient to think merely in terms of removing a veil, or stripping away the outer layers.
The concrete experiences of women (and men) are here used as the basis for a critique of a particular conception of the
Grimshaw suggests that Freud and psychoanalysis might offer an explanatory account of the self of considerable value.
Both feminists and contemporary philosophers in England and America have had an uneasy relationship with psychoanalytic theory.
Philosophers have been primarily preoccupied with the scientific status of psychoanalysis and whether its therapeutic claims can be substantiated.
They have, on the whole, ignored it as a theory of mind, though a few (such as Richard Wollheim) have been deeply influenced.
Feminists have been antagonistic to psychoanalysis, seeing it as a means for the social control of women, although over the last few years, the mood has shifted, and psychoanalysis is being re-examined for its possible value to feminists (see Sayers (1986) for an overview).
In France, psychoanalysis has been taken more seriously by both feminists and philosophers, and the psychoanalytic model used as a basis for the reconceptualisation of a number of philosophical issues.
The paper by Margaret Whitford shows how the feminist philosopher and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray, uses psychoanalytic theory to provide a critique of Western rationality and the traditional symbolism, which symbolises rationality as' male ' (see Lloyd, 1984).
Foregrounding the theme of sexual difference, Irigaray locates male-female symbolism as one of the fundamental underlying polarities of Western thought.
Placing Irigaray's work in the context of Freudian and post-Freudian theory, Whitford suggests that Irigaray's apparently very traditional and essentialist use of symbolism has a strategic function, like that of Derrida's analyses, designed to draw attention to the underpinnings of Western metaphysics, in order to undermine them.
Feminists have approached the work of Irigaray eagerly, looking for a theory which would help to understand and change the situation of women, but have been divided in their interpretations of her writing.
Some see a romantic celebration of difference, a static, essentialising, ahistorical view of women, others find her work politically equivocal.
Whitford's view is that Irigaray's work has been read out of context, and that we need to give much more careful attention to the psychoanalytic dimension of her thought.
Her argument is that Irigaray, as a psychoanalyst, sees psychoanalysis as a process of change rather than as a scientific theory: Irigaray's work suggests ways in which psychoanalysis could be seen as a model for feminists seeking fundamental social change, in particular by proposing an alternative model for the relation between the rational and the non-rational which would be more satisfactory than the dominant paradigm.
In the next paper Morwenna Griffiths also addresses the question of the relation between the rational and the non-rational.
Drawing on the re-evaluation of emotion characteristic of contemporary feminist theory and practice, she argues that feminist conceptions of emotion constitute a critique of dualist conceptions of mind found in much Western philosophy in the English-speaking world and elsewhere.
She refers, in particular, to radical feminists who turn on its head the criticism that women are more emotional than men, and claim that not only are women more emotional, but that this is their strength, and that in comparison, men are enfeebled, deadened and impoverished creatures.
As Griffiths points out, there are problems with this position, but she argues that, despite its flaws, its passionate impetus to reconceptualisation is invaluable.
Griffiths suggests that the legacy of Descartes to the philosophical understanding of emotions has been to subsume them into one of two categories, mind or body, and to make them rational or non-rational.
She proposes an alternative model of mind in which feelings are paid sufficient attention, and in which, through language, they are seen to be intelligent rather than rational, non-rational or irrational.
She argues that one's feelings are a source of knowledge as well as being a result of understanding, and that for both social and biological reasons they are gender-related.
Thus she concludes that being male or female gives one a distinctive viewpoint which should be included in any theory of human beings.
She also endorses the radical feminist view that the well-being of private and public life depends on a better understanding of feeling.
The legacy of Descartes comes in for further scrutiny in Joanna Hodge's paper, which examines the concept of ' the subject ' which philosophy has inherited from Descartes.
This concept, she suggests, has been both valuable and limiting for women.
Valuable, in that, by providing a conception of an autonomous, rational and apparently neutral subject, it made it possible for Enlightenment liberalism (in particular Mary Wollstonecraft) to question the exclusion of women from public life.
Limiting, in that it conceals a covert gender specificity which operates to justify women's continued exclusion  whether from public life or philosophy.
Now, however, contemporary critiques of the notion of the subject (see, for example, Heideggerian phenomenology, structuralism, psychoanalysis or Derrida's deconstruction) have begun to dismantle the assumptions concealed in the notion of subjectivity.
In her densely argued and complex paper, Hodge points out that one can distinguish between the subject, a notion with ontological and metaphysical commitments, and subjectivity, an empiricist notion (developed, for example, by Hume) which retains its epistemological function while abandoning its ontological links.
Descartes, effecting a split between rational consciousness and sensual embodiment, offered an account of the mind-body relationship which accepted the traditional hierarchy according to which reason governs the body or the senses.
He saw the body in functionalist terms, but failed to make a distinction between the different functions of the male and female bodies.
Subsequent empiricist versions avoid the Cartesian problem of the relation between mind and body by focusing instead on the epistemological processes of subjectivity, but in this way obscure even further the nature of the body attached to these processes.
However, feminism brings back to the centre of the debate the ontological issue of the different kinds of body to which the rational processes may be ' attached '.
Feminist analysis has shown in detail that women's bodies bear cultural meanings that are quite different from those ascribed to men's bodies.
This difference is particularly visible in the phenomenon of pornography which serves to foreground the issue of the nature of the body, an issue not discussed by Descartes and completely absent from subsequent post-Cartesian philosophy.
Hodge argues therefore that women's epistemological position can not be exactly the same as men 's.
Like Assiter, then, Hodge suggests a link between the issue of pornography and the notion of an autonomous and rational subject.
Her paper argues for the importance of standpoint to be taken into account in discussion of fundamentals such as epistemology and ontology, but also suggests that feminist political theories which assume that a conception of the subject is already available need to be complemented by more radical feminist theories (such as those of Daly or Irigaray) which criticise and take apart the metaphysical implications inherent in philosophical conceptions of the subject.
The epistemological issue is discussed in more detail in the following two papers.
Firstly, Anne Seller's paper argues that the view of knowledge as a correct description of the world has only limited application.
The epistemological model of truth and falsity which applies to formal statements of propositions turns out to be difficult to apply in the context of social and political life.
Like Hodge, Seller takes the view that women who uncritically adopt philosophical conceptions of knowledge may find themselves saddled with consequences that are at odds with their perceptions of the world and their politics.
She discusses this in relation to epistemological stances of realism and relativism.
' Realism ' and ' relativism ' are not exact terms.
They are each used here to gesture at a range of philosophical positions.
Realists are impressed by the constraints imposed by the ' external world ' on what we know and can know.
Seller takes realism as the view that ' there is an objective order of reality which can be known by the human observer '.
She discusses this in relation to the view held by some feminists that ' every woman's experience of the world is valid, not false, illusory or mistaken, and that all views of the world are equally valid '.
She considers the strengths and weaknesses of both positions and shows how the epistemological and political questions are intertwined with each other.
She argues that the main task is that of deciding what to do, and that the best way of deciding is through a genuinely democratic epistemology.
Once this is achieved, she suggests, the dichotomy between realism and relativism becomes irrelevant; both will proceed in the same way in trying to sort out what is going on and what to do.
Lorraine Code's paper arises out of a concern on the one hand with the epistemological status of experiences, and on the other, with the importance of recognising the ethical dimensions of knowing: what she terms' knowing well ' or ' taking epistemic responsibility '.
She elucidates her concept of epistemic responsibility by focusing on the practice of stereotyping, and in particular, the stereotyping of women by men.
The philosophical tradition she is working within is Kantian: she emphasises that human cognition is an ' active process of taking and structuring experience ', and therefore, she argues, a process that entails freedom and responsibility and the associated ethical virtues of honesty, humility and courage.
This active process is hindered for everyone if they use stereotypes.
It is rendered particularly difficult for women who have been stereotyped, because the stereotype of women is one which precludes the exercise of active responsibility.
The other central theme of Code's paper is the relation between experience and knowledge.
She argues against the Kantian tradition of seeking a pure, clear objectivity in knowledge which will leave personal experience behind.
A concept of knowing well which rejects stereotyping can not move very far from the experience which generates the knowledge.
She defines the area of feminist epistemology as that of developing theoretical accounts of knowledge which retain continuity with women's experiences.
In a critical discussion of Carol Gilligan's work in moral development (Gilligan, 1982), she notes that Gilligan's methodological principles, in particular the aim of listening responsively with receptiveness and humility, supply an example of the kind of approach that might fulfil this aim.
The concluding paper, by Paula Boddington, returns to the issue of a women's point of view and what difference this might make to philosophy, leaving the reader with a kind of map of the basic issues to be explored: ' an opening up of complexities'.
Situating herself within the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition, she looks at different conceptions of philosophy, its content and methods.
Readers unfamiliar with philosophy will find her discussion of the nature of philosophy illuminating; they should be warned, though, that philosophers are likely to find it contentious.
Including a review of material already published about women and philosophy, she distinguishes between female, feminine and feminist points of view, and then, focusing on the first of these, she considers how philosophy could or would be affected by the inclusion of more women in its institutional structures.
She looks first at how the present conceptions and practices of philosophy might admit of different points of view at all.
She then goes on to consider what might be changed by the inclusion of more women.
Finally she returns to her original distinction between female, feminine and feminist, and suggests how the relation between them might have implications for possible developments in the practice of philosophy.
She concludes that women's views need to be considered and then synthesised with men's to ' find a human whole '.
What is now known as' second-wave ' feminism emerged in the late sixties and seventies.
By the early seventies, articles that saw themselves as explicitly feminist were beginning to appear in philosophy journals (e.g. The Monist, special issue, 1973).
As women began to cast a critical eye over the discipline of philosophy, a number of different types of work appeared.
These can be divided, very broadly, into the following categories (although the categories clearly overlap both chronologically and conceptually).
Firstly, there were discussions of issues thought to be of particular interest or relevance to women, such as abortion or equality.
Many of these discussions are to be found in the early collections (see, for example, Gould and Wartofsky, 1976; English, 1977; Vetterling-Braggin, Elliston and English, 1977).
An extended discussion of this kind can be found in The Sceptical Feminist by Janet Radcliffe Richards (1980).
These discussions are characterised by an increasing scope and depth as the issues are accorded greater philosophical seriousness.
Thematic collections on issues of particular concern to women continue to appear, for example The Family in Political Thought (Elshtain, ed., 1982) or Mothering (Trebilcot, ed., 1984).
A couple of recent collections which bring together a range of articles on a variety of topics are 'Femininity', ' Masculinity ' and ' Androgyny ': A Modern Philosophical Analysis, edited by Mary Vetterling-Braggin (1982b) and the special issue of Radical Philosophy (1983) on ' Women, Gender and Philosophy '.
Secondly there was the re-examination and reinterpretation of the history of philosophy, looking at philosophers through ' the prism of sex ' to see what they had to say about women.
In practice, since philosophy often proceeds by paying attention to past philosophers and their ideas, the two categories overlapped to some extent with each other, and with a third category, political philosophy, which looks at the political philosophers in the light of the practice and experiences of feminist politics (see Okin, 1980; Elshtain, 1981; O'Brien, 1981).
As the often misogynistic views of philosophers were exposed, two lines of approach were adopted.
Either one could discard what the philosopher had said about women and keep the rest  which in fact often meant accepting conceptions of human nature that took the male as paradigm, and trying to demonstrate that women were as fully human as men, or one could argue that the philosopher's thought formed a system within which the attitude towards women formed an inseparable part (see Elshtain's (1981) discussion of the private-public distinction or Grimshaw (1986) for the examples of Aristotle and Kant), so that it was impossible just to take certain parts and leave the rest.
The second of these choices was the one that most feminists adopted, and as a result the next decade was marked by an increasing self-confidence on the part of feminists about their place in philosophy.
This led to a fourth type of work which discussed the nature and limits of philosophy itself and whether there was any place for women in it, and considered whether the basic assumptions of philosophy included or excluded women.
Here we would just like to mention briefly some of the studies that came out between 1980 and 1986, which attempt to develop accounts that would be either specifically feminist or draw upon a women's point of view.
Under the heading of political philosophy, feminist philosophers begin by arguing with the tradition, trying to reconcile feminist insights with already existing systems of thought such as liberalism or Marxism, and go on to attempt to define a new perspective in philosophy.
In The Politics of Reproduction (1981), Mary O'Brien rereads traditional political theory's preoccupation with the family and reproduction, and uses a revised version of dialectical materialism with a view to developing a feminist theory.
She argues for the view that there is such a thing as a ' feminist perspective ' and criticises feminist theorists (de Beauvoir, Millett, Firestone and Reed) who depend too heavily on existing (male) theories.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, in Public Man, Private Woman.
Women in Social and Political Thought (1981), looks at the way political thought has conceptualised the public-private distinction and its bearing on attitudes towards women, and critically examines contemporary feminist versions of that same distinction.
Alison Jaggar, in Feminist Politics and Human Nature (1983), looks at the relation between feminist theory and political philosophy, arguing that different feminist theories  liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism and socialist feminism  imply different conceptions of human nature and have different implications for practice.
A collection of essays edited by Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus, Women in Western Political Philosophy (1987), presents a feminist perspective on questions that have been central to political philosophy and raises questions about the philosophical underpinning of political theory.
In ethics, there have been attempts to incorporate or develop a women's point of view, perceived as missing from mainstream theory.
Carol Gilligan, in In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982), examines psychological theories concerning human moral development, and suggests that a male model has been developed which does not fit the experiences of most women's lives.
Criticising a rights-based ethics, she suggests that an alternative view of morality is needed which would include a typically feminine way of conceptualising the relationship between self and other.
Nel Noddings describes her book, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984), as' an essay in practical ethics from the feminine view ' and attempts to evolve a specifically feminine form of ethics.
A recent collection, Women and Morality, edited by Eva Kittay and Diana Meyers (1986) widens the discussion by bringing together different viewpoints on the issues raised by Gilligan.
A variety of work has appeared addressing issues relating to reason, rationality and emotion.
Carol McMillan, in Women, Reason and Nature (1982), argues that feminism makes the same mistake as anti-feminism in its excessive belief in rationality and empiricism, and consequently undervalues emotion, intuition and the private sphere.
Genevieve Lloyd, in The Man of Reason: ' Male ' and ' Female ' in Western Philosophy (1984), looks at the way in which Western philosophy has conceptualised reason, and shows that throughout its history ideals of reason have incorporated an exclusion of the feminine, which creates both practical and conceptual problems for women who may experience conflicts between reason and femininity.
(This study contains a useful bibliographical essay on women and philosophy, going up to 1983.)
Mary Daly, in Pure Lust (1984), a polemical book subtitled ' Elemental Feminist Philosophy ' which explicitly and insistently refuses to fit the usual categories of what philosophy is supposed to consist of, argues that the passions and their relation to reason must be renamed, and thus reunderstood by women if they wish to free themselves from the constrictions inherent in the male naming of them.
In the areas of language and epistemology, there is a collection of essays edited by Mary Vetterling-Braggin, Sexist Language: A Modern Philosophical Analysis (1982a), which usefully brings together a wide range of articles by a variety of contributors.
Another collection, edited by Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka, Discovering Reality (1983), a wide-ranging and challenging selection of essays in epistemology, metaphysics, methodology and philosophy of science, argues that it is not just content but also methodological assumptions and epistemology which show male bias.
This book draws extensively on the work of Nancy Chodorow (1978) and object-relations theory in psychoanalysis concerning the construction of male and female personality.
A recent book by Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (1986), develops the work in epistemology and philosophy of science, and examines the work of feminist theorists in this area.
Harding shows the obstacles to, and the far-reaching consequences of, trying to construct a theory of gender as an analytic category that is relevant to the natural sciences.
Most recent work is often concerned with philosophical issues within feminism itself.
Mary Midgely and Judith Hughes, in Women's Choices (1983), discuss the philosophical issues facing feminism.
They locate the various strands in feminist thinking, and show the conceptual problems involved in combining them.
The collection edited by Carol Gould, Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy (1983), discusses some of the philosophical problems raised by feminism.
Jean Grimshaw, in Feminist Philosophers: New Perspectives on Philosophical Traditions (1986), explores tensions in feminist thought and examines some of the philosophical problems underlying them.
The work of French women theorists is also beginning to be translated and discussed in this country, although for French theorists, the boundaries between philosophy, literary theory and psychoanalytic theory are often fluid, so that their work does not always fall clearly into the familiar categories of philosophy.
However, the work of Christine Delphy, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Michele Le Doeuff (to name the most well known) is currently being discussed by feminists working in the area of philosophy or feminist theory.
An impressive overview of the context in which contemporary French theory is being thought is offered by Alice Jardine in Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (1985).
Jane Gallop's book, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1982), is an excellent introduction to the range and implications of French feminist theory.
A more accessible introduction can be found in Claire Duchen, whose book Feminism in France: From May ' 68 to Mitterrand (1986) contains a couple of chapters discussing the central theoretical issues.
2
On Not Being Afraid of Natural Sex Differences
Mary Midgley
THE LURE OF THE UNIVERSAL
The long-standing philosophical controversy into which this topic most obviously fits is the political one about equality.
It concerns the degree to which human beings are standardised items.
How far are we all essentially the same?
My main point will be that this is not a simple, package-deal question.
There are angles from which it is important to emphasise similarities, and others from which  for equally strong moral reasons  it is important to emphasise differences.
In the last century or two, the similarities have had more emphasis from philosophers.
This has happened partly for good political reasons because there was need to demand a more equal society.
But it has also happened for formal reasons which are not good ones at all.
There is a notion that philosophy ought only to deal with matters which are absolutely universal.
Now it is true that all very wide questions have a philosophical aspect.
Philosophy, therefore, often does deal with these questions.
But this does not mean that it is fitted only to be used on matters at the extreme end of the spectrum of abstraction  that it can, for instance, discuss people only in so far as they are rational beings, or sets of behaviour-patterns, or immortal souls.
Philosophy deals with conceptual difficulties, and these arise in the working out of quite detailed and specific ideas, as well as of wider ones.
Indeed, since we actually live in particular contexts and often have difficulty in understanding them, many of our mistakes arise at that level, before more abstract speculation begins at all.
The hasty flight to apparently universal rules often gives philosophical notions only a specious air of universality.
It is notorious that ambitious ideas claiming to mirror the whole human condition have often turned out to describe chiefly the condition of the group doing the theorising.
When a different set of people takes up the questions, this becomes obvious.
Of course, errors of this kind will always be made.
We can not jump off our own shadows.
But after so many of these experiences, we ought to be becoming increasingly aware of the danger.
Though we can not look at things from all points of view at once, we can at least learn not to pretend that we are doing so.
We speak with relative confidence about our own group.
But to see what limitations this brings, we absolutely need to have a more lively sense of its differences from at least the groups which neighbour it.
A gradient of dissimilarity leads away from each of us.
Yet in spite of this, we all need to communicate and to get some general understanding of each other and of the world we live in.
Total scepticism about this project is not an option for us.
We therefore continually try to correct one philosophical perspective about it against another.
Among these corrections, feminist ones have by now resoundingly made good their place.
Earlier generations had already noticed the odd consequences which followed from Aristotle's having seen the human condition as unquestionably that of an Athenian gentleman, and Kant's having seen it as that of a Prussian bourgeois.
But until lately very few people had managed to make themselves heard when they pointed out the dramatic effect of all previous philosophers having seen it as that of a man  that is, of course, not an exact reflection of what men are like, but an image of how they tend to see themselves when they contrast themselves with women.
How much does this particular limitation matter?
Till lately, respectable intellectual opinion has held that it hardly mattered at all.
From the ancient hierarchical point of view (unchanged from Aristotle to Kant and beyond) it could not matter because women themselves did not really matter.
They were in effect an inferior kind of man, with no distinctive character of their own.
They thus shared in the human condition to the extent that inferior men did, and needed no special comment.
On the other hand, those who abandoned the hierarchical position and held, not only that all men were equal but that all people were so, lost interest in sex differences for the opposite reason.
For them, women were as good as men because they were no different from men.
They were effectively men but no longer inferior ones.
The move is that which Aristotle or Kant would have made if they had promoted all outsiders (such as women and non-European peoples) to the status of honorary Athenian or Prussian men.
Now from certain points of view  mainly political ones  this is an admirable move.
For the purpose of asking whether a given set of people may be enslaved, or deprived of their property, or denied access to the law courts, or the like, decency is best served by remembering that these are beings as conscious and valuable as ourselves, sharing our vulnerabilities and sensibilities.
So we call them equal.
But there is a whole range of other situations where the opposite move is needed, where we need to stress that people can differ from us, for instance over proposals to give all children the same kind of education or to make everybody live in the same kind of house.
Notoriously, long and gruelling work is needed to make the notion of political equality fit both these kinds of demand.
To date, feminism has contributed a good deal of fuel to both sides of this dialectic, because the case of women is a peculiar one, and introduces even more complications into an already troublesome argument.
The main need, however, is to bring the two sides somehow together, since all of us at one time or another need help from both of them.
I think feminists have not seen this need clearly enough.
They have been too ready to use one or other of the clashing theses as occasion served, without troubling to bring them into intelligible relation.
This has happened naturally enough, because it reflects the habits of those with whom they were disputing.
Reformers attacking the subordinate status of women have naturally appealed to the idea of equality, because it was already recognised as a proper and powerful tool of reform.
But in other situations  for instance in asserting a mother's special right not to be deprived of her children, or in offering characteristically female insights to correct a narrowly male view of life  they have equally naturally appealed to the idea of a distinct female nature.
Quite sharp conflicts continually develop between these two approaches, and will continue to do so until their relation is thought out properly.
Is all difference eventually to be abolished?
Should the dialectic process ideally lead to a simple merging, so that the views of men and women on any matter will normally be indistinguishable?
Or is the position more like that of the interaction between two separate cultures  or indeed two individuals  where each can indeed gain a great deal from the other, but will always retain its own distinct identity?
AUTONOMY, SOLITUDE AND EGOISM
An interesting and crucial example of this difficulty concerns the ' social atomism ' typical of Enlightenment thinking.
This is the idea, implied by all Social Contract myths, than an individual is essentially a solitary unit, a free chooser, a being intrinsically without social ties.
This unit can become bound to others only by his own free choice, and his choice is rational only in so far as he can safely expect it to serve his own interests.
The pronoun ' he ' is an essential part of this description.
If ' she ' is substituted, the ludicrous unreality of the picture at once becomes plain.
The great Social-Contract theorists of the Enlightenment therefore explicitly excluded women from their systems.
Each woman remained attached to some male contractor, according to the older organic and hierarchical pattern. '
The resulting brand of individualism thus contains a radical anomaly, affecting half of those present  an anomaly which, however, does not seem to have been visible until light was specially directed on to it by feminists.
(This little bit of extra enlightenment is a key move in the creation of modern feminism.)
There are two possible ways of curing the anomaly.
One is to go the whole atomist hog and turn women too into full-time contracting egoists, no less exploitative and solitary than the males.
Rousseau (1755), in his early accounts of the state of nature, attempted this heroic move, and he has recently been echoed from the feminist side by Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex (1971).
As a response to the brutal competitive individualism which is fashionable today, this proposal is understandable.
If the rest of us can not beat the gangsters, we may well be tempted to join them.
But efforts to work out this atomistic society in detail are not very plausible.
In particular, the situation of children both in Rousseau's world and in Shulamith Firestone's is a more or less impossible one.
This is not just a matter of children's physical dependence; it concerns the emotional constitution of human beings generally.
The asocial attitude which these pictures call for is not one normal to human beings of either sex.
The only situation in which it tends to look so is the transient one of adolescents leaving home and protesting against their parents.
Even Nietzsche expected his future Supermen to form a community.
Why then has the atomistic image been so powerful?
Why has it been extended so far beyond the large-scale political contexts where it was needed, to permeate modern ideas about choice and freedom?
Why, when we all know that loneliness is a paralysing form of human misery, do we go on as if we thought that the deepest need of rational individuals was to be independent of one another?
Traditional thinking answered these questions by saying simply that such was the true nature of man.
And it often explicitly contrasted that nature with that of woman.
It is no accident that both the Greek and Latin words for ' virtue ' originally meant ' maleness'.
Much morality, and thereby much metaphysics, has been distorted by serving a polemical purpose in a clash of ideals seen as dividing the two sexes.
Theorists have constantly and explicitly used antitheses such as active/passive, reason/emotion, form/matter, mind body, autonomy/dependence as weapons in this supposed war, recommending their own ideals by directly claiming that the contrary ones were typical of women.
The call to ' be a man ' has regularly been seen as a self-explanatory moral exhortation.
In this way, grossly oversimple notions about sex differences have affected philosophy far beyond the obvious context of egalitarian theory from which we started.
False claims to universality have been used to cover a persistent warping in our notions of what it is to be an individual.
Once we have seen it, can we get rid of this distortion quite easily?
We can certainly make some progress towards doing so by peeling away the gender-drama from the conflicts of ideals in which it has often figured, and trying to see those conflicts in sex-neutral terms.
Freedom, we now notice, is not always a higher ideal than those with which it competes, nor is rationality necessarily just a matter of self-interest.
Certain social bonds are essential for the highest activities that we are capable of, so that the antithesis' bond or free ' was always a tendentious one.
And so on.
Can we then go on from there to a new unbiased universality?
Have we reached down to the true bedrock of human life, at which sex differences are revealed as artificial and insignificant, so that we no longer need a tribal division?
On this point, feminist thinking is  as I have mentioned  highly ambivalent.
The egalitarian strand of it says yes, and dismisses all suggestions of genuine, irreducible sex differences as' sexist '.
Another and at least equally powerful strand says no, because it wants to emphasise the distinctive value of women's insights, and also the special bond of sisterhood which is seen as binding women together, rather than letting them be absorbed and assimilated into he wider human group.
For both these purposes, it is inconvenient to regard the existing distinctive qualities of women  whatever these may be  as simply deformations produced by oppression, which could be expected to evaporate when that artificial pressure is removed.
Those who stress sisterhood rather than equality value a great deal in women's distinctive approach as it now is (and has been in societies much less egalitarian than ours) and do not want it lost in the melting-pot of assimilation.
Deeper thinking can no doubt resolve this clash.
But until it does, constant confusion arises from trying to combine the two approaches.
This (again) is not just a problem for feminism.
It indicates much wider unfinished business in our long task of digesting Enlightenment ideas  of working out the proper relations between such large concepts as nature, freedom, equality, justice, individuality and the human affections.
By ceasing to ignore the awkward case of women  as most of the traditional theorists did we can often see what has gone wrong with our thinking in other, apparently more straightforward cases.
THE USELESSNESS OF STANDARDISING
One point which should help us to start here is already familiar from existing discussions of equality.
Political equality does not call for standardisation.
Political equals do not have to be indistinguishable in any respect.
They do not even have to be alike at all beyond some minimum range of conditions which puts them into the same political category.
This range varies for different purposes, but the aim is always to make it as wide as possible.
Thus, for basic civic rights like not being enslaved or imprisoned without trial, people should need only to be people.
For slightly more demanding purposes like voting or serving on juries, they need also some minimum level of maturity and sanity, because here their actions affect the interests of others, so they need to understand what they are doing.
For more demanding purposes still more is required, and it is often hard to decide just where to fix the borderline.
But what the ideal of equality never demands is likeness in any respect above this minimum.
In spite of its quantitative sound, political equality never means having an equal amount of any chosen characteristic.
It does indeed enshrine a quantitative metaphor, because it exists to counter an older picture which used one.
This was the archaic picture of a king ten times as large as a noble, a noble ten times as large as a merchant  and so on down to the almost imperceptible peasant woman.
Against this notion, the reformers contended that, in Bentham's words, ' each should count for one and nobody for more than one '.
But there does not seem to be any useful way of developing this idea by seeing people as containing equal quantities of any special substance, or equal degrees of any property.
Imaginatively, however, negative moves of this kind have to be completed by devising new pictures to replace the old ones.
To replace hierarchal pictures, the Enlightenment used many such images, and they often did tend to suggest some deeper kind of standardisation as the basis of equality.
Thus when Burns wrote:
The rank is but the guinea stamp, The man's the gold for a' that
he vigorously used an ancient notion of personal worth as resting in an original standard substance, and variation as introduced by society.
How ancient this thought is we can see by noticing that it is just the figure Plato used in The Republic to supply his political myth justifying political inequality (Bk.
III, 414C15).
The hereditary caste of Guardians must (Plato says) be believed to be originally golden while the other castes are of various baser metals, and the various metals ought not to be mixed together.
Therefore  except for an occasional mutated child which turns out to be plainly of the wrong metal for its caste  ranks must remain separate.
Burns triumphantly hijacks this image by extending the golden substance to the borders of manhood  ' a man's a man for a ' that', so that one could properly ask for ' one man, one vote '.
Women, however, were still perceived as being made of a different metal and, in spite of Mill, their voting remained an absurd and scandalous project for many decades after ' manhood suffrage ' became a reality.
And indeed the otherwise democratic Swiss are still of Burns's mind in this matter; their women do not vote.
People who are denied political privileges like this on the ground that they are not standard items naturally tend to reply that the charge is false  to claim that they are actually just as standard as everybody else.
When political conflicts rage, it is far harder to take on the awkward task of asking why this particular standard was set up in the first place.
In class warfare, for instance, oppressed people easily find themselves claiming to be just as noble or gentlemanly as their supposed betters, without properly criticising existing ideas of nobility or gentility.
(Burns avoided this move, which is what gives his protest its particular dignity.
) Aspiring castes can easily be led in this way to inherit actual faults from their predecessors.
More subtly and widely, they can be led to waste effort in imitating traits which had a point in the situations which gave rise to them, but become empty and even harmful when transplanted.
The Victorian middle class seems to have become entangled in a good deal of bad faith of this kind by its attempts to imitate an aristocratic life which it did not fully understand.
The pursuit of standardisation  the failure to value a difference  here goes beyond a mere passing mistake and becomes actively pernicious.
There will be similar trouble over the gender difference if indeed as I am suggesting  it is true that ideas about the meaning of maleness have distorted moral thinking in our culture quite deeply, so as to affect the whole concept of individuality, and thereby condition the way in which some central metaphysical issues are seen.
(If this is right at all, it is, of course, right to some extent for other cultures too, but that must be left aside for now.)
If, therefore, women want to storm the citadel and share its existing treasures, they have to decide what to do about these autonomy-centred ways of thinking.
Are they satisfactory, genuinely universal conceptual systems, which everybody in the new, gender-free intellectual cosmos can use with perfect comfort?
Or are they biased, faulty and badly in need of revision?
The first option is Shulamith Firestone 's.
It is, I think, the logical conclusion of the line in Enlightenment thought which has run from Rousseau through Nietzsche and Sartre  the strand of truly anarchic individualist thinking which avoids the vulgar Nozickian ' libertarian ' path of concentrating on the freedom of certain selected institutions such as commercial companies, and genuinely exalts only the freedom of the individual.
Anyone who finds that this entire detachment from personal ties really is their highest ideal will be happy with this kind of utopia.
Shulamith Firestone undoubtedly did everyone a great service by vigorously extending this notion to women, and pointing out the absurdity of men's viewing themselves as totally detached individuals in relation to the rest of society, while still expecting to go home to a wife who would always have their dinner hot for them in the evening.
But once this absurdity is made clear, many of us today will probably find that extreme individualism, when thus exposed in its full aridity, is not a heritage that we want to claim.
And that leaves us with the second alternative.
We have to do the more general piece of work involved in clearing one more bias from our morality.
We have to look at the range of ideals which are somehow clustered together to guide us, arrayed as they are in some sort of a rough priority system, and take out of its slot the unquestioned ideal ' be a man '.
We must examine it to see what sense it can yield us in the case of those who, as it happens, are not men in the first place, and in what way, once this is done, it will have changed its meaning for those who, by no special fault or merit of their own, actually are so.
DIFFERENCE IS NOT INFERIORITY
As the title of this paper shows, I am sure that we can not hope to do this rethinking while still clinging to the currently orthodox view that there are no natural, genetically determined sex differences.
This orthodox view does not really rest on factual evidence, though such evidence is sometimes brought in to back it.
(There is no hypothesis which can not find some facts to support it.)
It is held because people believe the acceptance of natural sex differences to be dangerous.
The danger has been a real one, but it has flowed entirely from distorted views about what the differences are, not from acceptance of difference as such.
Different does not mean worse or better, it means different.
And in fact the greater the difference is, the less easy does it become to dismiss one of the differing parties as a mere inadequate version of the other.
This is clearly enough seen in the case of differing individuals, and also in that of differing cultures.
And the case of the sexes is on the same footing.
The main reason why difference is harmless has already been mentioned.
Equality does not mean standardisation.
One can be ' as good as' somebody else in all kinds of ways while still being very different from them.
This may sound obvious, but it is extremely hard to remember.
Life is constantly astonishing us by confronting us with new kinds of character, and thereby with different kinds of goodness.
Thus Anne Elliott in Persuasion, astonished at her friend Mrs Smith's cheerful acceptance of misfortune and hardship,
watched  observed  reflected and finally determined that this was not a case of fortitude and resignation only.
 A submissive spirit might be patient, a strong understanding would supply resolution, but here was something more; here was that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from Nature alone.
It was the choicest gift of Heaven.
(Persuasion vol. 2, ch. 5)
Failure to be ready for this kind of thing is the main cause of our dismissing whole squadrons of our fellow-creatures as uninteresting or inferior.
This was Aristotle's mistake over women.
Judging them by the standard which he used for men, in a society where their roles were totally different, he naturally did not think much of them.
So far, what I say may not sound too shocking.
Moral pluralism, the notion that there are different kinds of goodness, is quite acceptable to modern thought.
What worries people is the idea that these differences, however valuable, are in any way naturally determined and therefore out of the control of the individual.
In the case of personal differences, how much does that matter?
It is true that I can not become you, you can not become me and Blake could not be Beethoven.
But this is not an infringement of our freedom.
As theologians have noticed, it is not clear that even God could become somebody other than himself.
The power to become absolutely anybody goes beyond any normal notion of omnipotence; why should it be a necessary part of freedom?
The idea of freedom which lies behind this kind of demand is confused in the same way as the idea of equality which calls for standardisation.
Both universalise prematurely, hardening and expanding one aspect of the moral situation to cover ground that goes far beyond its relevance.
Does this point lose its edge if we think of the differences as socially rather than naturally produced?
This too is a strange idea.
Of course, it is true that much of the individuality which people show has been the result of their upbringing.
Nobody who brings forward biological causes supposes that they replace social causes.
They merely supplement them, as the original qualities of food supplement the effects of cooking in accounting for the properties of the finished dish.
But this fact can not save the inflated concept of freedom just mentioned, because people's upbringing is normally just as far out of their control as their genetic constitution is.
What is called ' biological determinism ' is not more of an attack on freedom than the social determinism (or economic determinism) which is accepted without moral qualms throughout the social sciences.
What is injurious is not determinism but fatalism  that is, the pretence that bad things which are in fact within our control lie outside it and are incurable.
On any view of causes, a great deal in the life of each of us is completely out of our power, and our freedom must consist in the way we handle that small but crucial area which does actually come before us for choice.
This situation is far more benign than people obsessed with freedom make it sound, because what comes to us by no choice of our own is a gift  a whole world which we could not possibly have made and at which, in spite of all its horrors, we can on the whole only bow our heads in wonder.
Moralists able only to think of autonomy, of the active imposition of the will on what is round us, miss the essential values of receptivity, of contemplation, of openness to the splendours of what is not oneself.
Our inheritance, both social and natural, is not a shocking intrusion on our privacy and freedom, but a realm for us to live in.
Morally speaking, one of the worst aspects of the autonomy-centred Enlightenment attitude has been to denigrate the receptive virtues, to make us so obsessed with giving that we do not know how to receive.
As usual, one of these aspects of life does not make much sense without the other.
About individual differences, much of what I am saying here may not sound too bad, but many people will want to treat sex differences quite otherwise.
Here, the history of the various disputes has been important.
Modern educational theory has strongly promoted the idea that individual differences are intrinsic and must not be ironed out.
We have been told for several centuries now that every child is naturally different and it is therefore wrong to impose on one the mould which has been prepared for others unlike it.
This important thought has been constantly at odds with the equally influential notion that we are all blank paper at birth, ready to be entirely formed by our society.
This last wild exaggeration has also been popular with educators at times when they wanted to stress the importance of their task and the need to get it right.
But the quite opposed notion of innate individuality has also maintained its strength, no doubt because there is so much in the experience of anybody who actually works with children to support it.
If the little creatures were really blank paper at birth, nobody would ever have the slightest difficulty in writing on them whatever their particular culture required, and it would be impossible for them ever to surprise their elders by unexpected conduct.
This is so far from the truth that on the whole, for those really attending to education, the notion of innate given individuality has remained the stronger.
Sex differences, however, have been put into a different box.
By bad luck, the question of women's emancipation has been most often seen as parallel to that of non-European races.
And race difference is, among all the differences which have been used to justify oppression, probably the most trivial.
Where it does not coincide with cultural frontiers, it is insignificant.
In this case, therefore, Burns's idea of treating differences of status built on it as idle and artificial is just as appropriate as it is in the case of class.
It can not follow, however, that this is true of all other differences.
Burns's image of the gold is, we should notice, bound to the Blank Paper theory of human difference.
Gold can be made into all sorts of other things besides guineas.
Is the gingerbread which is currently stamped into men equally capable of being stamped into standard unisex persons?
If we are tempted to assume so, it may be worth while looking at yet another parallel to balance the highly peculiar one of race.
How about age?
This certainly has a biological basis as well as a social one.
The physiological states of growing organisms including human beings  vary greatly from one stage to another.
Typical behaviour patterns also change.
Play, sleep, sexual behaviour and other proceedings are differently distributed typically  at different ages, in a way that broadly holds across cultural barriers.
What reason would there be to deny the obvious causal connections with changing physique?
' Ageism ' is objectionable, not because it means admitting these connections, but because it means treating old people  or children  badly.
There is nothing fishy about simply admitting the reality of the difference, or that of the physical causes which  alongside cultural ones  help to produce it.
To insist on denying the reality of such causes is to draw a bizarrely hard line between the physical and the mental aspects of a human being  a line which does seem sometimes to be drawn in the social sciences, and may prove handy in academic feuds between them and biology, but which seems very badly suited to the realistic description of our lives.
I have carefully said nothing here about the details of particular natural sex differences.
The general point about the innocuousness of natural difference as such needs to be grasped on its own.
Once seen, it gives us back a legitimate access to a great wealth of traditional human experience on the matter, which must of course be critically used, but which certainly does not leave us utterly puzzled, as we might be in starting to observe a strange species.
Feminists have already made good use of this tradition.
I think, however, that their use of it is still often confused and inhibited by mistaken ideas about what equality demands, and that the senseless ideal of standardisation still produces a waste of effort on this topic, as on many others.
This is the sort of muddle which often causes good ideas to run out into the sand.
I particularly do not want this to happen to feminism; hence my choice of subject for this essay.
3
Women's Right: Reflections on Ethics and Gender
Brenda Almond
There is a view that is as old, probably, as the human race, and certainly as old as Homer and the ancient Greeks, that there is one ethical structure that represents right for men: a composite of manly virtues, such as courage, endurance, physical stamina, wiliness and political judgement, and a corresponding but complementary conception of what is right for women, womanly virtue being seen as a mixture of timidity, tenderness, compliance, docility, softness, innocence and domestic competence.
Views about the exact composition of virtue, male and female, have changed over time, and they may vary, too, with differing social and geographical contexts, but the underlying theme is constant: the theme, that is, of difference.
It is recognisable even when it appears in feminist dress, as it does, for example, in these remarks of Hester Eisenstein (1984): ' I argue that feminist theory has moved from an emphasis on the elimination of gender difference to a celebration of that difference as a source of moral values.
A woman-centered analysis presupposes the centrality, normality, and value of women's experience and women's culture ' (p. xviii).
Clearly, a distinctively feminist conception of women's moral values will differ significantly from traditional stereotypes.
But it is worth asking, nevertheless, whether the old and the new might not be rooted in the same set of facts.
Any discussion of ethics and gender, then, must involve some reference to facts.
But the primary question is not one about facts at all.
It is about moral ideals.
Should we  women and men  be aiming at a common ethical conception, a shared moral perspective?
Or should we  women alone  be working to rewrite the map of morality to promote a separate moral perspective?
Must we, in other words, accept an ultimate sexual apartheid as far as ethical values are concerned?
The larger question, then, is not about what is, but about what ought to be.
But since answering this question involves reference to some matters of fact, it is necessary to say something about those facts.
Essentially, they are of two kinds.
First, there are facts about what different people's moral ideals actually are.
Here it is important to know (a) whether male and female ideals diverge: whether, that is, the moral outlook people have depends in some causally related way on whether they are male or female, and (b) whether the ideals themselves are gender-relative: that is to say, whether what is good in a woman or right for a woman might not be bad in a man, or wrong for a man, and vice versa.
Secondly, there are facts about the lives of men and women and the systematic ways in which their lives differ, which it would be unwise to overlook.
A systematic difference in the life-experience of women and men can have ethical implications both in generating a different moral ideal making women think differently about morality from the way men think about it  and also in justifying a different moral ideal justifying, that is, a genuinely alternative moral perspective.
These last points may seem to imply a flagrant disregard of the well-known difficulty, first pointed out by the philosopher David Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739), of reasoning from ' is' to ' ought ' (Selby-Bigge ed., 1952, pp. 469C70).
But no transgression against Hume's stricture is involved in pointing out that people's views about what ought to be  their moral stance and outlook  may be directly related to certain distinctive features of their lives.
And no transgression, either, is involved in accepting that moral views and ideals must take account of, and be responsive to, facts.
Ideals are not formed in an aseptic vacuum, but in the chemical brew of interacting personal lives and events.
So let me begin by making some impressionistic guesses about the views women do in fact currently hold on morality.
I can do this best by way of a personal anecdote, which might be called the Incident of the Taxman and the Philosopher.
Discussing the case of a headmaster who had reported his pupils to the police for criminal behaviour, the Philosopher, who was female, expressed the opinion that, since the headmaster is in loco parentis, he should have tried to avoid resort to law; he should have dealt with his pupils himself, privately and without publicity  as would, she suggested, a loving parent.
The Taxman expressed moral outrage at such a suggestion, declared that this was not his conception of the implications of being in loco parentis, and said that he, as a parent and husband, would have no hesitation in reporting the criminal actions of his child or indeed his wife, particularly if he saw no sign of either remorse or an intention to reform.
He added that apprentice-Taxmen are coached in the matter of the known duplicity of women and their willingness to lie to protect members of their family.
At this point, the Taxman's wife expressed moral outrage at the discovery that her husband would, without compunction, report her misdeeds, or those of her daughter, to the authorities, and the Philosopher was left with a sense of having stumbled upon a set of basic moral presumptions which are held in common by one sex, and entirely inverted in the case of the other  a looking-glass reversal of priorities and values.
As it happens, of course, this conclusion conforms to the observations of Freud, who believed that women had less sense of justice than men and are more often influenced in their judgements by feelings of affection or hostility.
It conforms, too, to some more recent observations of Piaget, Kohlberg and Gilligan.
Lawrence Kohlberg's empirical work on moral development follows, as far as its basic stance is concerned, the structure and assumptions of Jean Piaget, who has demonstrated apparently invariant sequences of change, not only in relation to moral development, but in other areas, too.
The underlying assumption is that there is a necessary maturation of cognitive processes, just as there is of physical and motor processes.
Just as every normal human child first learns to crawl, then to stand and then to walk and the motivation and capacity to do these things comes from within the child, and is not artificially imposed from outside  so, the moral development theorists hold, there is a necessary sequence of stages of emerging moral judgement.
Their empirical research is directed to establishing what these stages are, and to describing the circumstances surrounding the transitions.
Kohlberg's stages of moral development are usually described as a progression from lower to higher  itself an inbuilt and at first unrecognised value-judgement.
The early or lower stages that he has identified are first, a stage in which children's thinking is rooted in obedience to adults, fear of punishment and acceptance of authority; then a stage of an essentially self-interested acceptance, for the sake of reciprocity, of a principle of fairness between peers; and then a further stage of seeking approval and desiring to be well thought of by one's community or group.
Later comes a stage of respect for justice: recognition of the importance of rules for community living, followed by an awareness of the universality of some of these rules and their embodiment in principles of individual human rights applying across varying cultures and societies.
Kohlberg has speculated on the existence of a seventh stage in which the universal human perspective is replaced by a holistic cosmic perspective which might have a religious or even a pantheistic orientation.
All this is framed in gender-neutral terms, but researchers have become aware of difficulties in finding women who can be placed by this classification in the ' higher stages' of moral development.
Women's answers to the questionnaires by which assignments to ' stages' are made show them to be more heavily represented in the early stages of development rather than the later.
Women desire to please.
Women rebel against impersonal principles of morality which, when rigorously applied, ignore individual pleas for sympathetic concessions, for mercy rather than justice.
Carol Gilligan's research, which focused on the distinctively female moral dilemma of an abortion-decision, suggested that what was emerging here was not a moral deficiency of women but a ' different voice ' on morality.
The findings of the male researchers, she claims, are dogged by what she calls the problem of women ' whose sexuality remains more diffuse, whose perception of self is so much more tenaciously embedded in relationships with others and whose moral dilemmas hold them in a mode of judgment that is insistently contextual '.
While she concedes the broad outline of the developmental model  a model which proceeds from an egocentric through a societal to a universal perspective  she sees this development as taking place, in the case of women, within a special moral conception.
The nature of this moral conception is recognised by a distinctive use of a particular vocabulary: a vocabulary of selfishness and responsibility; or morality as an obligation to exercise care and avoid hurt.
The particular sequence of moral development revealed by Gilligan's research is described by her in this way: first, as in Kohlberg's findings, a stage of focus on the self; then, a second level of development in which the notion of responsibility is used to balance the claims of self against the claims of other people; this stage brings a notion of the good as caring for others; it involves a protective care for the dependent and unequal.
It is succeeded by a third stage at which the tension between conformity and care, selfishness and responsibility, is dissipated by a self which, in Gilligan's words' becomes the arbiter of an independent judgment that now subsumes both conventions and individual needs under the moral principle of non-violence ' (Gilligan, 1977, p. 492).
Gilligan sees this as a morality of responsibility that stands apart from the morality of rights underlying Kohlberg's conception.
In it, a positive conception of caring contrasts with the purely negative policy of non-interference suggested by an emphasis on rights.
What is missing from the latter, and its omission is deliberate rather than accidental, is the detail and texture that comes with knowledge of particular people and particular circumstances.
Kohlberg's research is based on questionnaires which demand a response to hypothetical and imaginary situations in which concrete detail is necessarily omitted.
Gilligan points out that Kohlberg thus divests his moral actors of the history and psychology of their individual lives.
Many women, confronted by Kohlbergian questionnaires, ask for, or contribute out of their own imagination, concrete detail which might help them resolve the moral dilemma with which they are presented.
They are told that this sort of question or embellishment is inappropriate.
Kohlberg's dilemmas are not about real people  they can't be if the aim of the research is to discover objective principles of justice.
Gilligan mentions here the anonymous woman whose nonlegalistic thinking enabled Solomon to display his legendary wisdom.
She contrasts that woman's sacrifice of self and principle for the life of her child with the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for principle and personal integrity.
What both of these examples demonstrate is the concreteness and particularity of real life situations.
It is interesting to compare Gilligan's criticisms of Kohlberg on this point with Robert Nozick's parallel and equally cogent criticisms of Rawls.
John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, seeks to arrive at abstract principles of justice by means of a device which strips the procedure of arriving at principles bare of all reference to the particular and concrete.
His principles are chosen by people behind a hypothetical ' veil of ignorance ', where they know nothing of their social position in society, their sex, race, abilities or conceptions of the good (Rawls, 1972, in particular pt.
I, ch. 3).
Nozick points out that the very nature of Rawls's thought-experiments guarantees the type of principles that will be chosen: that they will be impersonal and grounded in future-oriented principles of distribution, rather than being personal and grounded in current or past circumstances (Nozick, 1974, in particular pt.
II, ch. 7).
To accept Nozick's criticism is not to judge in favour of Nozick's conception of justice against Rawls, any more than acceptance of Gilligan's argument involves rejection of Kohlberg's abstract principles of justice.
It is simply to recognise that the structure of the ' proof ' in both cases, in Rawls's case an a priori proof, in Kohlberg's case an experimental one, actually presupposes what it sets out to establish.
The outcome is guaranteed before the procedure, whether logical or empirical, is embarked upon.
But Gilligan does not, in fact, reject the notion of a rights-based morality.
Instead, she argues that the feminine strand should contribute to an enlarged and revised universal conception of morality, in which the ideals of compassion and care are added to the more impersonal ideals of autonomous judgement and action.
She believes, then, that a morality of rights can be integrated with a morality of responsibilities  that the two conceptions are essentially complementary.
This coincides with the views of some other feminist writers who have been impressed by this distinctively ' female ' contribution to morality.
Hester Eisenstein, for example, looks forward to women transforming the world in the image of what she calls' the woman-centered values at the core of feminism '.
This means, she believes,
associating feminism with the liberating traditions of Western thought, from Locke and Rousseau to Marx and Engels, tending in the direction of greater equality, shared decision-making and justice.
But it means, too, transforming these traditions, by imbuing them with the woman-centered values of nurturance and intimacy, as necessary and legitimate goals of political life.
(Eisenstein, 1984, pp. 144 5)
Reflecting on the same contrast, Carol McMillan refers to Hegel's view of the family as an inferior organisation to the state because it is based on love.
She points out that much of a woman's life is based on a spontaneity of moral response that many philosophers, in particular Hegel and Kant, would say had no moral worth (McMillan, 1982).
The idea that acts of love are inferior to principled acts is a deep-rooted philosophical tradition.
This area of love, care and spontaneous response which ignores, or deliberately flouts, principle and convention is one, then, where an initial impressionistic guess about male and female differences can be given an impressive weight of support.
There is a second impressionist guess, however, which it is harder to document.
This is the extent to which women's moral perceptions are tied to the aesthetic.
The link between awareness of beauty and recognition of the moral good was a fundamental aspect of Plato's ethical theory, but few writers since Plato have tied awareness of beauty in nature so closely to a deeper notion of the good.
However, it is a striking observation that women's moral sensibilities are, more often than men 's, triggered by an awareness which is essentially aesthetic.
The following account is given by Helen Weinreich-Haste of a response to a question designed, not to explore this point, but simply to discover more about significant changing points in people's lives:
I was driving on my way through beautiful scenery in Wales where I live and it suddenly occurred to me how this would all be altered in a nuclear war.
And it just stopped me dead in my tracks.
I couldn't keep driving.
I had to stop and I felt really physically very unwell.
And I was crying.
I sat for about three quarters of an hour before I could continue the journey.
(quoted in Weinreich-Haste, 1987)
The woman who gave this account thereafter changed her established way of life to become an activist in the Greenham Common protest against the siting there of cruise missiles.
To cite a personal response of a comparable nature, I find in myself an apparently irrational extra revulsion at the occurrence of bombings or murders that take place in beautiful places on beautiful days.
It would be absurd to approve of such events taking place on grey, sunless days in dark, depressing places.
Nevertheless, there is a sense of incongruity and inappropriateness about an ugly act which involves the destruction of what was, in some wider and more general sense, previously beautiful.
But this, even more than the previous example, is not, of course, an attitude confined to women.
It must be something of the sentiment that inspired the war poets, enduring indescribable ugliness  the mutilation and destruction of people and places amongst the fragile flowers that nature silently but abundantly proffered in the stench, decay and squalor of the trenches.
The sentiment was expressed many times over, but it is succinctly put in the following lines by R. E. Vernede, who was killed in action in 1917:
The sun's a red ball in the oak And all the grass is grey with dew, A while ago a blackbird spoke He didn't know the world's askew...
Strange that this bird sits there and sings While we must only sit and plan Who are so much the higher things  The murder of our fellow man...
Or, as Edmund Blunden put it:
Bold great daisies' golden lights, Bubbling roses' pinks and whites  Such a gay carpet! poppies by the million; Such damask! such vermilion!
But if you ask me, mate, the choice of colour Is scarcely right; this red should have been duller.
The early war poems had promoted patriotism, justice and principle.
It is striking that there was this shift from principle to aesthetic response as the war progressed.
It might be that it was the incessant closeness to blood, death and suffering that brought out these sentiments in men who had, on the whole, been raised in an education system that rejected such responses as feminine and unmasculine, and that promoted an abstract conception of justice and a stern morality of obedience to rules.
If so, it could be that the impact of that experience parallels in a sharpened and intensified form the impact on women of the experience of child-bearing  a potent, personal experience that, however sanitised, brings a woman face-to-face with these three realities.
Again, as in the previous case, if this aesthetic response is accepted as especially characteristic of women's moral awareness, it can be argued that it is an important element to incorporate in any full account of the moral.
It should be encompassed within, rather than competing against, any universal conception of morality.
These are, then, two ways in which women may, and probably do, see morality in a different light from the way men typically see it.
This means that the first set of questions about facts mentioned at the outset can now be answered.
Male and female do appear to diverge in certain identifiable and significant ways.
The moral outlook a person has may  though this is, of course, only a statistical or average truth  depend on whether that person is male or female.
But these ideals are not necessarily gender-relative.
And indeed, it is the potential complementarity of the views that is their most striking feature.
But before turning to the central question of what ideals men and women should adopt, it is worth speculating a little about what it is that causes these observable differences of moral outlook.
Answering this question involves reference to the second group of facts which were mentioned at the beginning of this discussion facts about the systematic differences in the life-experience of women and men.
Two main types of explanation are offered as accounting in these terms for the distinctive ways in which women and men approach moral questions: these are, first, predominantly biological explanations, and, second, predominantly social or cultural explanations.
Differences, it is assumed, must either be biologically based, or they must be culturally induced, the result of education, upbringing and social pressure.
One important aspect of attributing differences to biology as opposed to attributing them to culture is that the second type of explanation leaves room for views to change, while the former appears to rule this out.
This contrast may be more apparent than real, however, for new technologies of birth and reproduction may alter the biologically given so as to make possible a changed perspective that would have been inconceivable in the past.
Anti-patriarchal utopias in which male power, if not man himself, has been eliminated, and in which women have created a new social structure, are convincingly depicted in feminist science-fiction, and advocated as social policy by some radical feminist writers (see, for example Firestone, 1971).
Both biological and cultural explanations, however, have sceptical implications as far as morality is concerned.
If moral scepticism is to be avoided, then, it is important to appreciate both the scope and the limits of these sorts of explanation.
The Biological Thesis
This, which may also be called the socio-biological or ' geneticist ' thesis, asserts that innate biological factors determine a person's morality.
Thus, in the case of the sexes, it sees different moral qualities as part of male or female ' nature '  qualities and contrasts such as aggressiveness or docility; kindness or cruelty; selfishness or unselfishness; conscientiousness or carelessness.
The thesis is essentially deterministic: we can not escape from what our genes make of us.
And so it considerably curtails the scope for morality, for it leads to such questions as: Why, if it is genetic factors that make people what they are, praise or blame them for what they do?
Why not simply accept the way they  men and women  behave?
The Sociological Thesis
This is the thesis that it is social or cultural factors that determine a person's moral view-factors such as environment, upbringing and social context.
Coupled with this factual thesis is the full-blooded relativist view that there are only these different views; that to talk about morality is to make reference to them; and that there is no fact-of-the-matter; no independent concept of right and wrong; of good and bad; of duty or responsibility.
Within this second type of explanation, two very different theses may be distinguished:
(i) the view that dominating differences are related to non-gender-related contrasts: for example, social class, economic structure, and a broad range of cultural factors.
(ii) the view that the salient and overriding cultural phenomenon is gender.
This view, then, may be distinguished from the ' orthodox ' sociological view for separate consideration: it is the patriarchy thesis.
The Patriarchy Thesis
This is the thesis that women's morality, which in certain vital respects, particularly in relation to sexual behaviour, often differs from men 's, has been imposed on them by centuries of conditioning by men.
It differs from the standard sociological thesis in that it regards the gender difference as the most fundamental and most fully explanatory division in human society.
It holds that across all cultures and forms of social arrangement women have been kept in subservience to men.
In so far as there is this domination, it must be acknowledged that men have been aided in their domination of women by women themselves  sometimes older women, whose own conditioning has matured in conformity with that of men.
In other words, men's moral requirements may not be imposed directly on women, but indirectly through the filter of female complicity.
Recognising this paradox lends weight to the patriarchy thesis, explaining away many apparent counter-examples.
For instance, if clitorectomy often known as female circumcision  is a ' moral ' requirement to serve male interests, it is nevertheless women who carry out, maintain and insist upon the practice, and it is women who express their moral offence if it is not carried out.
This may lead those who would otherwise oppose the practice to defend it on cultural grounds.
Because of its far-reaching effects on individual women's lives, however, it is difficult not to see it as, on the contrary, a potent example of the weakness of an orthodox relativist view  a view, that is, which attempts, incoherently, to maintain the equal validity of all moral perspectives.
For many feminists resist the relativist conclusion in this case to demand that both women and men shake themselves free of their conditioning.
This reveals a fundamental contrast between either biological or sociological determinism and the patriarchy thesis.
Characteristically, the patriarchy thesis generates a revolutionary ideology rather than a fatalistic acceptance of determinism and relativism.
It rejects the tyranny of local culture and regards even biological ' necessity ' as manipulable.
It results in an appeal, a call, to women to throw off the bonds of conditioning, to take freedom to control their own lives.
But it must be asked how far such autonomy is a realistic possibility.
If there are some brute facts, perhaps social, but founded in biological difference, which separate the lives and experience of women from those of men, may these not continue ineluctably to affect the moral ideals they may hold?
Is there something about woman's experience as a biological and social being that gives her a common identity and differentiates her forever from the male?
Or are differences only superficially cultural?
Was Margaret Mead (1935) right to see woman as' an infinitely malleable clay figure upon which mankind has draped ever varying period-costumes'?
And was Simone de Beauvoir (1972) justified in believing that, because women ' live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men  fathers or husbands  more firmly than they are to other women ', they can have no common identity or history?
I want to suggest that whatever anthropological and economic truths are embodied in these and similar statements, the fact is that there are indeed certain systematic differences in the lives of women and of men, and that this fundamental contrast in life-experience does indeed account for and to some extent also justify a difference in their moral outlook and assumptions.
This is not simply a matter of those aspects of women's sexual lives that are so often cited in evidence as disqualifying women from running the affairs of nations, or even from running a small business: menstruation and premenstrual tension; conception, pregnancy and childbirth; lactation and child-care.
These are important, but they are surface phenomena, overtly physical.
What they connect with is a much deeper and more significant fact.
This central fact is the fact of change, together with the problems of identity and self-concept that this generates.
For women characteristically experience change in their lives in a way which is only experienced by a man if he is unfortunate enough to be the victim of some mutilating accident or illness.
The horror depicted in Kafka's Metamorphosis, in which a man awakens to discover that he has become a large insect, invites comparison with the norms of women's existence  her passages from childhood to puberty, from mature womanhood to menopause and old age; her experience of pregnancy.
Kafka's Metamorphosis begins with the following passage:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
He was lying on his hard, as it were armour-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely.
His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.
What has happened to me? he thought.
It was no dream.
His room, a regular human bedroom, only rather too small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls.
It is interesting to compare this with Sylvia Plath's poem about her own experience of pregnancy and child-bearing:
I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.
The doctors move among us as if our bigness Frightened the mind.
They smile like fools.
They are to blame for what I am, and they know it  They hug their flatness like a kind of health.
And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?
They would go mad with it.
Pregnancy, however, is a relatively brief and dramatic bodily change, succeeded by reversion to something like the former state.
As Plath later continues:
I am not ugly.
I am even beautiful.
The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.
The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.
This contrasts with the two major irreversible shifts of a woman's life, first to puberty, then to menopause.
These not only cause a change in self-concept  the way a woman sees herself  but, more important, a change in the way she is perceived by other people.
In vain she may cry, as Gregor Samsa does to his parents, sister and employer, that the same person is there inside, looking out in the same way at the world.
The world sees a woman, in a way it does not see a man, as old or young, sexual or non-sexual, defining her frequently by nothing other than her biological role: mother, spouse, grandmother, widow.
It is not surprising, then, that both the phases of major transition, as well as the experience of pregnancy and childbirth can bring mental disturbance and breakdown in their wake.
These are rightly described as pressure-points in the lives of women.
It would not be surprising, either, if this flux and change in the self were to generate a more flexible response to morality, and one that is peculiarly sensitive to the aesthetic dimension.
Women's experience continually forces them to react to situations in which all the parameters have shifted.
If one adds to this one other incontrovertible fact  that the overwhelming majority of women have lived their lives without economic freedom or autonomy, but as dependants or chattels lacking control over the crucial fixed aspects of their own lives  then it becomes clear that the chameleon nature of women is their necessary self-protection.
As in the case of that animal, their clothes must fit their habitat, changing in response to external change.
In this respect, a famously offensive passage by Rousseau on the education of girls may be seen as, after all, no more than realistic for period and place: recommending that girls be taught to break off games they are enjoying to return to work without complaint, he writes:
This habitual restraint produces a docility which woman requires all her life long, for she will always be in subjection to a man, or to man's judgment, and she will never be free to set her own opinion above his.
What is most wanted in a woman is gentleness; formed to obey a creature so imperfect as man, a creature often vicious and always faulty, she should early learn to submit to injustice and to suffer the wrongs inflicted on her by her husband without complaint.
(Rousseau, 1762, trans., p. 333)
The ' masculine ' goal of moral autonomy, then, has been no more in woman's grasp than it was within the grasp of the Stoic slave of ancient times.
And just as the ethical perspective of Stoicism was shaped by the slave-status of some of its principal proponents, so the ethical perspective of women has evolved within a framework of powerlessness to affect external events  even the lives of her own children within the family structure  and powerlessness to resist the inexorable internal cycle of obtrusive biological change, with the social and economic concomitants of that change that are absent in the case of the more modulated maturing and ageing processes of men.
The conclusion to be drawn from these reflections is, I believe, that the ways in which women's lives differ from those of men are indeed morally significant.
It may be that the effects of those significant differences can be mitigated by social change, and by education for mutual understanding.
But because the weight of explanation is preponderantly biological rather than cultural or social, it may be that women's moral perspective will continue to be one which reflects a distinctive range of values.
The feminist goal must be the interweaving of those values, which have a richness, complexity and spontaneity lacking in more abstract conceptions, with the universalistic goals of traditional moral theory.
In practice, this may mean as little as insisting on modest changes in decision-making procedures and modes of academic debate; or it may mean as much as the sacrifice of a whole way of life for activism in some major political cause.
But if there is to be a new morality  new values for the new situation resulting from technological and political change in the closing years of the twentieth century  then the creation of that new morality must in the end be a joint enterprise of both women and men.
4
Autonomy and Pornography
Alison Assiter
There is a notion of autonomy implicit in some philosophical writing and including the work of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx.
According to this conception, a person is autonomous if he or she subscribes to principles that have been formed by his or her own moral scrutiny.
Integral to at least some of the philosophers' thinking is the idea that the individual is part of a collective; a member of society.
For me to be autonomous, it is not sufficient that you leave me alone; rather the way I am treated by you has a bearing on my autonomy, and reciprocally for you.
In this paper, I shall defend a qualified version of autonomy along Kantian lines.
I shall then show, by reference to the work of Kant and Hegel, how autonomy has been excluded from the private realm.
Even Hegel, who apparently extends the notion of autonomy to the private domain does not really do so.
Indeed, ironically, the relation between lovers turns out, for him, to involve the most extreme possible violation of autonomy; in fact, the relation between lovers turns out to fit a relation Hegel argues must be transcended  that between Master and Slave.
Against the thinking of these philosophers, I propose to defend the view that the individual should be treated as a rational, autonomous being in perhaps the most private of all domains  that of love-making.
I shall support the view by means of a criticism of pornographic eroticism.
Pornographic eroticism, I will argue, is, therefore, to be condemned, but it does not function in quite the way some feminists have argued that it does.
Andrea Dworkin, in her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981), argues that porn lies at the heart of male supremacy, of the oppression of women.
I believe that this view is too strong, that, although porn does reinforce certain attitudes towards women, in the main, it is rather a symptom, and not a major part of the cause, of power relations that exist outside the pages of Penthouse, Playboy, etc., and outside the cinemas in Soho or Amsterdam (see Moye, 1985).
A DEFENCE OF AUTONOMY
An autonomous person is one who is self-legislating and self-determining.
The most common sort of violation of autonomy is paternalism  where the person is coerced into giving up some or all of it.
At its most extreme, someone's capacity to choose which course of action to perform is removed from them.
Thus, if a person is given a drug which gets rid of any resistance he/she might have had to being taken into captivity, then, in a very strong sense, his/her autonomy has been violated.
But, in a slightly weaker sense, someone may lose their autonomy if the opportunity for them to exercise their capacity to choose is removed.
Thus, a person who becomes a slave loses this opportunity.
A particular sort of slavery, what we might call moral slavery, occurs if a person is forced to act according to someone else's moral values.
All the above types of violation of a person's autonomy involve what Kant described as treating the person as a means to someone else's end, and not as an end in themselves.
We ought, he said, to ' treat humanity whether in your own person, or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end ' (Kant, 1948, para. 429).
Intuitively, we would judge these violations of a person's autonomy as wrong.
Why?
Kant argued that no one could voluntarily relinquish their autonomy without giving up their personhood.
It is logically impossible, he argued, to contract to give up all one's rights, since such a contract would deprive the person of the ability to make any agreements at all.
This argument has been questioned.
One person who has done so recently is Arthur Kulfik (1984).
He says:
the argument falters on a temporal equivocation.
Up to the moment that the contract is made, or more accurately is to take effect, the agent retains both his status as a person and whatever rights this entails, including the right to make a contract.
Only after the contract takes effect does the agent (putatively) ' cease to be a person '.
(p. 283)
I agree with Kuflik that it is not actually impossible to contract to give up one's autonomy, but I do not think, however, that Kant's argument can be so easily disposed of.
Who, in their right mind, would voluntarily relinquish something that has as a consequence the loss of their personhood?
Who, if they recognised and understood the consequences of their actions, would choose such a course?
Perhaps only those for whom life itself had ceased to be worth living.
Of course, if they didn't recognise the consequences, they might choose to do it, but this illustrates Kant's point.
Even if a person did not know the consequences of giving up their autonomy, it is in fact these consequences which make the relinquishing of autonomy wrong.
It has been argued recently, however, (see Graham, 1982) that it must be rational for a person to give up their autonomy sometimes.
One case often cited is that, for instance, it is rational to take orders from a competent doctor in a course of treatment.
Another is that two people may have conflicting beliefs about which course of action to perform.
Since it may not be possible for both sets of belief to be realised in action, if the courses of action are incompatible, it may be rational for one person to give up his/her autonomy.
As far as the first case is concerned, I take it that part of the process of rational reflection on a set of moral principles and courses of action for myself would involve consulting others (the experts, if you like).
Deferring to a doctor is not in itself being coerced into accepting a view against one's will, thus this need not involve the loss of autonomy.
As for the second type of case, something that Kant had to say may again be relevant.
He argued that I should treat other people's wants and needs as constraints upon the satisfaction of my own.
In other words, the rational being who is autonomously evaluating the most appropriate courses of action for him/herself must consider the wants, needs and interests of others.
The non-satisfaction of my wants, needs etc., therefore, is not always a violation of my autonomy.
Autonomy involves the right and the capacity to exercise choice and to make reasoned judgements, and not the capacity to have those judgements invariably realised in action.
The dictator (to look at one of Keith Graham's examples) who allowed everyone to decide for themselves what they wanted and then told them what they must do, is violating their autonomy not because their wants and needs are not realised in action, but because they have been coerced into doing something they do not want.
Thus autonomy is lost or renounced either if someone is coerced into thinking/acting against their will, or if a person is treated perhaps willingly  as a means to the satisfaction of someone else's desires or ends.
There may conceivably be cases where it is all right for someone willingly to allow themselves to be treated as a means.
If, for instance, I volunteered to give up some of my bone marrow to save a person suffering from leukaemia, then, so long as my own health was not in danger, there would seem to be nothing wrong with my momentarily relinquishing my autonomy.
Perhaps, therefore, a distinction should be drawn between allowing oneself voluntarily, and where there is no danger to oneself, to be treated as a means to the satisfaction of someone else's needs, and being treated as a means to the satisfaction of someone else's desires.
Only in the former case could a violation of autonomy conceivably be justified.
Again, it might be argued that there can be nothing wrong for a person voluntarily to allow themselves to be treated as a means to the satisfaction of someone else's desires.
If Justine, in the work of the eighteenth-century ' pornographer ', the Marquis de Sade, willingly submitted, what is wrong with her allowing herself to be treated in whatever fashion her persecutors wanted?
I shall argue, later, that such treatment is wrong, not necessarily per se, but for other reasons.
HEGEL AND LOVE-MAKING
Most philosophers who have defended autonomy have exempted the private realm from the domain of its operation.
Kant, for instance, quite explicitly did this.
He reduced wives, children and servants to the status of ' things' so far as their relation to husband/father in the family is concerned.
He argued that the husband/father has the right to the possession of wife/children as' things'.
In other words, wives, in their marital relation to their husbands, were quite specifically treated by Kant as not autonomous.
In their role as wives and lovers, then, women, for Kant, were viewed as means to the satisfaction of the man's needs and wants.
Ostensibly Hegel's view is different.
In The Philosophy of Right he argues, against Kant, and others, that the sphere of operation of contractual relations is limited.
Family life lies quite outside its domain.
Hegel is adamant than human beings can not be reduced to the status of ' things'.
He argues, against Kant, that no one has the right to alienate their entire ' person ' through a contract.
He claims that rights arising from contract are never rights over a person, but only rights over something external to the person  for instance, that person's body.
Kant, according to Hegel, forgets that there are some aspects of personality that can not be alienated: for instance, ' my universal freedom of will, my ethical life, my religion ' (para. 66).
In marriage, Hegel argues, neither husband nor wife treats the other as his/her property.
Family members are linked through love.
Morality, at this level, appears as something natural.
Through love, the individual renounces his/her egoistic standpoint, and becomes united with the loved one.
Individuals, through love, become real social beings, each identifying with and loving through the other.
The love between man and wife, therefore, apparently presupposes man and wife treating one another as equal, autonomous beings.
Each has to find him/herself partly through the other.
In love, men and women are ' living subjects who are alike in power and thus in one another's eyes' (para. 62).
Apparently, then, Hegel is extending a notion of full autonomy to the sphere of love-making.
Yet, on the other hand, and in tension with the foregoing, Hegel argues that, although the male does not ' own ' wife or children, he is in control of family property.
For legal purposes, the family is represented by its head: the father/husband.
Moreover, it is also the father/husband's role in modern industrial society to go ' out ' to work in the world outside.
It is only the man who enters civil society (the ' public ' sphere) and, in that world, he represents the other family members.
Daughters and wives, by contrast, are expected to remain, throughout their lives, in the family network.
Their activities have no direct economic significance.
Thus, although ostensibly the relation between husband and wife in love-making is a relation between equals, in fact it is not.
The power of the father is not quite like that of the ' patriarch ' in Filmer's Patriarcha (1680), yet his activities outside the home invest him with an importance which the wife does not have.
These powers will limit the extent to which men and women can be autonomous and equal in love-making.
Moreover, Hegel explicitly distinguishes the ' natures' of the two sexes.
Man is a creature of ' reason ', woman is intuitive; man is' powerful and active ', woman passive and subjective (para. 166).
In other words, Hegel elevates some of the traits which characterise men as powerful masculine beings, women as feminine, to the status of differences in their natures.
Therefore, the appearance that the relation between husband and wife in love-making is one between equal autonomous partners, is an appearance only.
In losing themselves in their partners, men and women are renouncing unequal qualities.
The man has to give up some of his power; the woman must gain some.
But this suggests that it is actually impossible for Hegel to realise what appears to be an ideal notion of the relationship between lovers.
Losing oneself in the other when one party is more powerful than the other can only mean the one submitting to the other.
Two wills becoming one, when the two wills were initially unequal can surely only mean the one will subordinating itself to the other.
Thus, in the end, it looks as though Hegel's view of the relation between husband and wife in marriage is not very different from Kant 's.
Indeed, although Hegel does not admit quite what I am now suggesting, he effectively concedes that, given the difference between the sexes, unity between them is impossible.
' Man has his' substantive life ' in the State, in learning and so forth, whereas the ' substantive destiny ' of woman lies in the family ' (para. 166 again).
In addition, Hegel restricts his discussion of love to that between husband and wife in marriage.
It is only inside what is, in the end, a contractual relation, that ' love ' can prevail.
' Love ' therefore between a non-married man and woman, or between two men or two women would be impossible.
Rather than describing a relation between equals, Hegel's picture of love-making is very like his account of the relation between Master and Slave, in the Master-Slave dialectic, described in his Phenomenology of Spirit.
This relation in fact, for Hegel, represents a stage to be overcome, in the evolution of spirit towards rational self-awareness.
Indeed, Kant and Hegel's accounts of the relation between man and wife in love-making are actually not far removed from a description of pornographic eroticism.
The Master-Slave dialectic is an apt metaphor for the latter.
Let us have a look at the passage to see how this might be.
THE MASTER-SLAVE RELATION
In this passage Hegel is asking the question: How do I become aware of myself as a self?
He believes that ' desires' are important to the consciousness of our own existence.
As people act on things because they want them  the child wants a teddy bear, or wants something to eat  they begin to gain a sense of themselves as distinct from those objects.
Hegel, however, argues that we can not be fully aware of ourselves, as selves, unless we are conscious of other people.
Here he is on the importance of the view of ' the other ' to one's sense of self: ' Self consciousness exists in and for itself, when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged ' (Hegel, 1979, p. 111).
Hegel suggests that we all aim to be recognised by others wanting to be noticed by others, to be deemed worthy by others are traits we all have.
Sometimes, indeed, we identify with another instead of seeing ourselves as independent autonomous subjects, we identify with Lady Diana, our headmistress or somebody at work.
But, says Hegel, if my identity lies outside myself  in my head of department, in my father  it is outside my control.
Therefore, Hegel suggests, I  the jealous one  may set out to destroy the person in whom my ' self-hood ' resides.
Of course, few of us really set out to destroy someone of whom we are jealous; none the less Hegel is describing an extreme form of such a feeling.
Taking it as far as it can be taken, Hegel suggests that the conflict between myself and the person in whom my identity resides will become a struggle between life and death, because, he says, it is only by risking one's life that one becomes fully aware of oneself as a free, autonomous individual.
It is only when I realise how fragile my life as a human being is, by becoming aware of its limits, that I can become a fully free person.
However, we must remember what we earlier quoted Hegel as saying: that the other person's attitude towards me is important for my sense of self-identity.
So I must neither die myself, nor must I destroy the individual in whom my identity resides.
Since we can not go on struggling with one another indefinitely, Hegel says that one must submit to the other.
The one who submits he calls the ' slave ' and the one to whom that person submits him/herself becomes the ' master '.
Thus we get Dependence and Independence of Self Consciousness: Master and Slave.
Hegel believes that the ' Master-Slave dialectic ' is a phase in the development of world history  in the progression towards freedom of the ' Spirit ' that controls historical change.
In fact, the relation is disadvantageous both for the slave and for the master.
Indeed, he thinks that whereas the master fails to gain a proper sense of himself from the slave, because the slave merely carries out his (the master's) will, the slave does gain a certain degree of self-consciousness by means of the work he performs for the master.
It seems to me that this passage describes the way loving relationships turn out to be for Hegel.
Ostensibly, the relation between man and wife, where they are linked by love, and that between Master and Slave, are very different.
Yet, as I argued earlier, giving up one's identity to another who is more powerful can only mean submitting oneself to the other.
In the end, the role of the wife in marriage is very like that of the Slave.
But the Master-Slave dialectic seems to capture the relation between people in pornographic eroticism.
In much pornography, people, usually women, become objects for another.
The philosopher Sartre believed that, in the act of love-making, the lover becomes at once subject and object  for she sees herself partly as the body desired by the lover.
But then her identity is partly outside her control, so she tries to turn her lover into an object as well (Sartre, 1957, pt.
III, ch. 3).
In the case of pornography, what happens is that the one person becomes a body desired by the other, but this is not reciprocated.
In much porn, the woman becomes the ' object ' of male desire.
She either involuntarily submits in this role (as does the woman on the pages of Penthouse) or she does it voluntarily, like de Sade's Justine or ' O ' in the pornographic novel by Pauline Reage, The Story of O.
In that story women are taken to a castle, where they are abused and tormented by men.
' O ' is enslaved by her lover Rene, yet she voluntarily submits; she is represented as desiring subordination.
Since the identity of the lover  the woman  becomes submerged in the other lover's desire for her/his body, one of the two may become afraid and want to kill the other.
In a recent hard-core pornographic film from Denmark, the woman ends up killing the man.
Throughout the film, it has been the man, the dominant male, who got the woman to act out his wishes and fantasies.
The woman's killing the man seems metaphorical only, but it fits the present idea  that the one whose identity becomes submerged may want to kill the other.
But sometimes, in porn, it is the dominant man who takes his domination to the extreme and kills the woman: in Norman Mailer's The American Dream, the woman  the slave  dies.
De Sade said that if one wants to know about death one should look at sexual excitement.
And Sigmund Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, described the ' drive to inorganicism ' as' the most radical form of the pleasure principle '.
Sexuality affords us the opportunity of transgressing the barrier separating life from death.
But mostly, even in porn, the taboo against killing is upheld.
Instead we have the Master-Slave relation: one person partly being seen as the body desired by the other, but where this is not reciprocated.
Unlike Hegel's slave, however, who loses his subjectivity to the Master, the ' slave ' in porn must retain some subjectivity or she will cease being desirable to the master.
The subjectivity she has is as a subject who desires to be object-a subject who wants only to satisfy the wants of the Master.
Things ought not to be this way, in love-making, however.
People ought to treat one another as people, as autonomous beings, in love-making, as elsewhere.
One of the things wrong with porn, therefore, is that someone's  usually the woman's  autonomy is violated.
PORN AND FANTASY
Porn, however, involves fantasy.
Often, in pornographic eroticism, there is no real love-making between people.
One writer claims that the use to which the most heavily read porn  Penthouse, Playboy, Men Only and Mayfair  is likely to be put, is as material for masturbatory fantasies (Moye, 1985, p. 53).
What can be wrong with this?
Let us imagine ourselves as a reader of Penthouse in order to answer this question.
In one picture in the centre pages of a copy of the magazine, a woman is smiling, relaxed; she stares erotically at her viewer.
The viewer can lay aside, in his fantasy relation to this woman, the difficult, complex emotions he will experience in any actual relationship with a real woman, and concentrate upon his own desire.
He can picture the woman to whom he is relating, as uncomplicatedly wanting him, her desire being to satisfy his.
Thus to use the contemporary philosopher Richard Wollheim's (1985) analogy of the mind as a theatre, he is, in his fantasy, an actor in a play that he has written, and she  the woman on the page  is in it too, as his adoring lover, his woman who is totally fixated upon him.
The woman represented on the pages of Penthouse is depicted, as I have said, as a subject who desires to be object: she appears to want just to satisfy the desire of the man who gazes at her as he masturbates.
What can be wrong, however, with fantasising, treating a woman as an object, if there is no connection between the fantasy and real life and if she is depicted as wanting to be treated this way?
Wollheim, as I have mentioned, depicts the mind as a theatre.
In the theatre, he argues, there is (a) an internal dramatist  who makes up the characters and their actions; (b) an internal actor  who represents to the reader for his benefit the actions he has made up as dramatist; and, finally, (c) an internal audience.
After the fantasy performance, we, the individuals doing the fantasising, are left with some reactions to our fantasy.
The first type of link between the fantasy representation and the world outside is that the fantasy materials  the characters in the play and their actions  are drawn from real life.
Even novels which appear to be furthest removed from the lives of those who wrote them  the work of Kafka, of Lewis Carroll, of the contemporary feminist writer Marge Piercy  have drawn on the real life surroundings of their authors.
And there is a particularly close connection in the case we are considering.
The fantasy relation between reader and text, in the case of a man reading Playboy, is more like the relation between consumer and a realist novel than it is like that between reader and the text of Kafka.
But this is obviously not sufficient reason for us to condemn the porn.
The fantasy had by the reader of Penthouse may not involve any beliefs that real women behave as he imagines the woman on the page does.
So what grounds are there for condemning the porn?
Part of the grounds are the following.
The evidence for a causal connection between reading pornographic material and committing violent acts against women is inconclusive (Williams, 1979).
But even if there is not this causal connection, the fantasy does have a causal effect.
Returning to Wollheim's analogy: when the reader of the porn performs, as internal actor, his fantasy, he is left, as internal audience, in a state that simulates the state he would be in if he had actually had a relationship with a woman like the imagined one.
The reader of Penthouse is left feeling pleasure.
And this, as once again Wollheim argues, though it may not lead to action like that in the representation, acts as a lure to the formation of fresh dispositions to act  of fresh desires.
In other words, the representation of the desire as pleasurably satisfied, reinforces the desire.
Thus pornographic representations are to be condemned because they reinforce the desires to treat people, and it is usually women, i n the way I have been arguing they are treated.
The fantasy desire on the part of a man, to have a woman adoring him, and to have her interested only in satisfying his desires, reinforces such desires in him.
And such desires, as I have argued, involve treating women as means, and not as ends in themselves.
Such desires may involve coercing the woman into behaving in the way the man wants her to.
Even if the desire is never satisfied in any but the fantasy way, the man who constantly has such desires is to be condemned, for he is gaining satisfaction from a person whom he has divested of personhood and turned into a slave.
Because he is constantly having desires for these partial relationships satisfied, he is less likely to seek out non-distorting, non-partial relationships in the rest of his life.
Thus a full description of what is wrong with pornography is that it reinforces desires on the part of men to treat women as objects, as means, and thus, indirectly, it reinforces male power.
Though the woman depicted on the pages of the magazines may be represented as wanting to be treated as a means, this type of depiction of women is commonplace, and is one of the major expressions of women's oppression.
Thus, no one should be treated purely as a means anyway.
But, additionally in the case of porn, treating women this way has the consequence of reinforcing male power.
Not treating women as autonomous, in pornographic love-making, has the consequence of reinforcing women's subordination.
Pornography is not, as Dworkin (1981) suggests it is, the main causal agent of women's subordination, because it is merely one case of a phenomenon that is commonplace: women have been treated as objects throughout history.
In much Greek thought, women were represented as being closer to nature than men; their role in reproduction connected them to nature's fertility.
Being closer to nature, they are more like objects than human beings.
In the courtly love tradition, the woman was put on a pedestal  objectified.
Such a conception of women has continued down the centuries.
If fantasy depictions of others are likely to have consequences for one's behaviour outside the fantasy, then so are real ways of treating the other in love-making.
Thus, a man's not treating a woman as autonomous in love-making is likely to have consequences for the way he treats her elsewhere.
Before concluding, I would like to raise a couple of objections to the view I am advocating.
SOME OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED
First of all, it might be argued that there is no reason why the man should treat the woman, in fantasy, in the way that I've described.
Why should he not view her as a fully rounded subject, with wants and desires of her own?
Part of the answer is surely just the way in which the woman on the page is presented.
She appears, somehow, just as a woman whose main desire is to satisfy the wants of the one who gazes at her.
But, additionally, pornographic magazines are bought and sold.
In other words, once the magazine has come into his possession, the man as it were acquires the right to treat the images on its pages in whichever way he chooses.
Thus he is able to treat the woman as infinitely desirous of sex, as wanting nothing so much as to satisfy his desires.
A second objection that will be brought is that it is odd to treat another as a rational being, in the Kantian sense, in erotic relations, of all places.
It will be objected that love-making necessarily includes an irrational, a Dionysian, element that is obscured by what I am saying at the moment.
I would argue, however, that love-making ought not to be treated as drawing only on the irrational side of a person's nature.
Part of the process of treating another well, in love-making, is attempting to satisfy her/his desires, and this, of necessity, involves the ability to recognise them.
In turn, this presupposes treating the other as a person, as, at least partly, a rational being.
So, although there is an irrational element to eroticism, it ought, I am arguing, not to be so irrational a process as to violate the other's autonomy.
Thirdly, the criticism might be made that the distinction I earlier drew (in the section on ' Autonomy ')  between someone voluntarily being treated as a means to the satisfaction of another's needs, and their being treated as a means to the satisfaction of another's desires  is not adequate here.
The man reading Playboy will argue that he has a need for it.
This suggests, I think, that I must refine my earlier criterion in the following way: it is wrong for a person to be treated as a means to the satisfaction of another's desire, and only allowable for them to be treated, with their consent, as a means to the satisfaction of another's needs, if no other means for their satisfaction can be made available.
The need to read Playboy is of a different order from the need for my bone marrow  in the latter case, it is assumed, at the present level of development of medicine, that no alternative is possible while, in the former, it is much easier to produce alternative means (including other sorts of magazines).
Indeed the former is a matter of life and death, while the latter is not.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, I have argued that, contrary to the thinking of some of the major representatives of the tradition which distinguishes the public world from the private one, the notion of autonomy ought to be extended to the private sphere.
Part of what is wrong with pornographic eroticism, where people are not treated as autonomous, is that it reinforces men's desires to treat women as means, as objects, in areas of their lives other than the erotic.
By excluding love-making from the sphere of operation of the notion of autonomy, Kant and Hegel were limiting its scope in the ' public ' realm.
What goes on inside the family, even in the most private of all relations between human beings, has effects outside the family.
5
The Philosopher's Child
Judith Hughes
SOME OF OUR CHILDREN ARE MISSING
Children have served philosophy very well.
That is the first thing which anyone surveying the literature would notice.
Along with a selection from a list including women, animals, madmen, foreigners, slaves, patients and imbeciles, children have served in that great class of beings, the ' not-men ', in contrast with which male philosophers have defined and valued themselves.
Unlike the others who appear and disappear as fashion and progress dictate, children occupy a permanent place in the list partly because of their continuing presence as a potential sub-class, partly because they have never protested and mainly because it is assumed that in favourable circumstances they will become men and therefore require attention.
They have received it in the shape of detailed educational theory carefully worked out to see them through the maturation process from infancy to adulthood.
Generations of philosophers have documented this process.
Perhaps the best known version is Shakespeare's seven ages of man which is a poetic statement of what had already been received wisdom for centuries and was to remain so for centuries to come.
Education was to guide the infant through the transition to manhood including such stages as childhood, boyhood and youth.
That is the second thing to notice; the philosopher's children are boys.
The fact that at least half of the world's children would not actually go through this process beyond the first two stages is conveniently forgotten or ignored and, no doubt, the reasons for this were largely social.
But the neglect of girl children through the centuries of theorising is more than a social injustice, though many might think this real and bad enough.
Education has an end.
Although it is fashionable to talk about its value ' for its own sake ', what prompts the theorising is the strong and well-founded belief that the experiences of childhood affect the kind of adult which the child turns out to be.
Where the end is person- rather than role-oriented  that is, where the end is the development of the human mind and spirit rather than the production of, say, information technologists  then education is valued in relation to some conception of worthwhile human existence which it is meant to serve.
Such an ideal does not stand isolated from the practices which strive towards it but interacts with those practices, helps to construct them, and is in turn constructed by them.
The great philosophers have always produced such a person-oriented account at least for those whose education was thought to matter.
Education has been directed at the production of the rational, the free, the independent of mind, the dignified, in short, the autonomous human being.
Yet because the philosopher's adult has traditionally been male, his children boy children, and his educational programmes designed to facilitate the transition between them, the ideal of the fully human person has been masculinised to the point where otherwise thoughtful and sometimes good and wise men have unashamedly admitted that this defining ideal is not applicable to half the species.
Rationality turns into narrow intellectualism, freedom into licence, independence into isolationism, dignity into selfish pride; the autonomous human being turns out to be no more than a social atom after all.
The degeneration occurs, not because men are congenitally or even incorrigibly narrow, libertine, isolated or selfish, but because in defining themselves as autonomous beings in opposition to other human beings they have had to seek what separates them as a group from others.
It is a curiously paradoxical foundation upon which to build a theory of autonomy.
Moral autonomy is concerned with individuals not with groups; a conception of autonomy which depends upon group membership displays its own contradiction.
This paper is partly about the rejection of certain accounts of autonomy though not with the rejection of the ideal of autonomy itself.
It is also about children.
WOMEN PHILOSOPHERS AND GIRL CHILDREN
Why should women in general and women philosophers in particular be specially interested in the nature and status of children?
There are, of course, the familiar and obvious reasons connected with women's traditional role in child-rearing but there are less obvious reasons too.
When philosophers dismiss women as' not-men ' they frequently do more than simply lump them together with children or lunatics.
Explicitly or implicitly the suggestion is that women are children or lunatics or whichever other company they keep.
It would be well to know just what this entails.
Schopenhauer said that women remain big children all their lives; it would be interesting to know what he thought children were like.
A common result of this is that when the philosophers deny autonomy to women, they do so for the same sorts of reason that they deny it to children and cite lack of rationality, capriciousness and vulnerability among their characteristics.
We can do more than to reject such descriptions of ourselves; we can ask further questions: are children like this? is this why children are not autonomous?
Again, women well know what it is like to be treated as children and they find it offensive.
It would therefore be reasonable to consider whether children find it offensive to be treated like children.
Is being treated as a child an intrinsically humiliating and self-denying experience?
What is it to be treated as a child?
Women philosophers are in a special position to consider such questions for in the image of the philosopher's child they see themselves.
It is no accident that the liberation of women, such as it is, should form part of a wider movement of liberation in general; liberation for one part of the ' not-men ' is bound to have a knock-on effect when your fellow groups are sometimes quite literally identified with you.
The assumption that all groups in the ' not-men ' class are identical with each other is so firmly rooted that, as we shall see in the fourth section, it is readily assumed even by modern libertarian thinkers that showing that, for example, some ground for distinguishing between men and women is false or irrelevant, immediately commits us to the view that the same ground is irrelevant in distinguishing men from children.
' That's what they used to say about women ' is not a proof that saying it about a child is false.
But it should make us very suspicious.
That when women are given the vote it follows that children should be given it too is no argument at all, but a version of it occurs in modern debates over the justice or injustice of Mill's famous disclaimer in his essay On Liberty.
Having denied that we may ever legitimately interfere with the liberty of another except on the grounds of self-protection, Mill (1910) asserts:
this principle is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties.
We are not speaking of children or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood.
Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury.
(p.73)
This view, as we shall see, has been attacked on the grounds that it rests on the false assumption that the distinction between adults and children is identical with the distinction between rational and non-rational beings.
The attacks are based on empirical observation; most women and older children are actually quite as rational as most men while some men are actually less rational.
If we agree that in that case women should be embraced by the liberty principle then so should children.
I shall suggest that this does not follow because rationality is not in fact the grounds for the distinction in the first place.
Partly to redress the balance and partly because talking about ' children ' covers such a wide range of potential images, I shall try to keep before my mind an ordinary 10-year-old of our society.
She is the child of this paper unless I indicate otherwise.
Throughout we should ask ourselves, does this (whatever is being said) apply to her?
First of all, let us remind ourselves of the traditional picture of children drawn for us by some great philosophers of the past.
One thing they are all quite sure about is that children are not like adults; in particular they agree that children lack some capacity for rational thought which adults have.
NOW WE ARE 6  OR 10  OR 18....
the slave has absolutely no deliberative faculty; the woman has but its authority is imperfect; so has the child, but in this case it is immature.
(Aristotle, 1959,1260A)
Children... are not endued with Reason at all, till they have attained the use of speech but are called Reasonable Creatures for the possibility apparent of having the use of Reason in time to come.
(Hobbes, 1914, p. 21)
[ Children ]... love to be treated as Rational Creatures sooner than is imagined... [ by which ]...
I mean, that you should make them sensible by the Mildness of your carriage, and the composure even in your correction of them, that what you do is reasonable in you and useful and necessary for them.
(Locke, 1968, p. 181)
In training for youth, the child must be given reasons; in the training of the infant for childhood this can not be done.
Young children ought merely to have things shown to them as they are, or they get puzzled and ask question after question.
But as we approach the age of youth reason appears.
At what age ought the education for youth to begin?
Roughly at the age of ten years, when by nature the child enters the stage of youth and begins to reflect...
The youth... is capable of having principles; his religious and moral ideas can be cultivated, and he is able to attend to his own refinement.
(Kant, 1930, pp. 250C1)
If a society lets any considerable number of its members grow up mere children, incapable of being acted on by rational consideration of distant motives, society has itself to blame for the consequences.
(Mill, 1910, p. 139)
What are the philosophers' children like?
They have an ' immature ' deliberative faculty (Aristotle), are not ' endued with Reason ' (Hobbes), until roughly the age of 10 (Kant) and are ' incapable of being acted upon by rational consideration of distant motives' (Mill).
But they are not completely lost causes.
The immature deliberative faculty will mature; children have the ' possibility apparent ' of turning into rational beings (Hobbes); they love to be treated as though they were rational though they are not so yet (Locke); you can give the prerational child reasons for acting in certain ways and he will turn into the youth who is capable of having principles (Kant).
Until the time when these things happen then Mill's disclaimer comes into operation.
Children must be taken care of by others and protected from external injury and against their own actions.
The traditional view is encapsulated in the claim that children are not autonomous; that is, on a standard interpretation, they lack the capacity to act rationally in pursuit of their own self-chosen goals.
It is then a matter of preference whether you say that they can not choose the goals or that they can not form strategies to achieve them or both.
In either case, the political implication is that denying rights to children is entirely justified, and there the matter rests.
In all this, there are perhaps a couple of things which look plausible when we compare the philosopher's child with our mental picture; Aristotle's observation that children are immature and Mill's suggestion that they might need protection.
Beyond that, the similarities seem remote.
There is obviously something wrong with a portrayal of children as totally lacking in reason until they leap out of bed on their tenth birthday announcing that they are now able to act on principle.
Apart from being false, such an account leaves no room in our thinking about children for things like teaching and learning, or development in understanding and character and all those other concepts which refer to processes and not to states.
The tension between these theoretical views of children as non-rational, non-autonomous beings and the practical knowledge of real children is evident in those quotations from Hobbes and Locke and Kant and Mill.
Children, according to Hobbes, have the ' possibility apparent ' of becoming reasonable.
In what does the possibility consist?
Hobbes is not using an inductive argument here; the ' possibility apparent ' is not an inductive argument from observations about past children but is meant to refer to some discernible feature of present ones.
But what?
Hobbes does not tell us, but whatever it is it had better be something which a monkey does not have.
It is not language since Hobbes is here talking about the prelinguistic child.
Perhaps it consists in the ability to respond intelligently to the language of others.
But then, either Hobbes has failed to distinguish the child from at least the higher and domesticated animals or the force of ' intelligently ' must be explained in such a way as to exclude animals.
In any case, if such a qualification is called for it is hard to see how a creature with no rationality at all could possess it.
Locke's remarks are just as puzzling.
Children are definitely not rational but love to be treated as if they were.
How is this possible?
Apparently they like having things explained to them without understanding either the explanation or even what an explanation is.
Perhaps he just means that they like the sound of my voice?
Well, maybe they do, but making any old noises is clearly not sufficient to enter the rationality stakes; I must at least say something.
Is it just that I talk to them that they love?
Maybe, but I can also, if I like, talk to my car, but yelling at it in the approved Basil Fawlty manner is hardly treating it as rational.
Lockean children have the added amazing ability to recognise reason in you without possessing any themselves, while Kantian kids, two stages back from rationality, have the disconcerting habit of getting puzzled and asking questions.
Mill's minors are a little more complicated.
Part of the time he sees them in the familiar way as creatures who lack rationality to at least some degree.
But in the disclaimer his children need above all to be protected from the ghastly consequences of their own actions.
Their problem seems to be not one of the inability to choose goals or to form strategies for achieving them, but an incorrigible propensity to choose the wrong ones and an awesome efficiency in achieving them unless adults intervene.
All in all, it is a pretty unconvincing picture.
If you say that children are completely non-rational then you have to account for the fact that they become rational, and to do that it appears from these examples that you have to assume that they already are.
If, on the other hand, you allow rationality to children, then you can not use their lack of it as a criterion to distinguish them from adults.
Hobbes et al.
are not aware of the unreality of their original pictures which is why, often in the same sentence, they produce these contradictions.
The one thing they do not do is to re-examine the original for the tell-tale signs of forgery.
ILLEGITIMATE INFERENCES
The recognition that children can not simply be written off in the rationality stakes and can not therefore be denied autonomy on this account has led some writers to conclude that they can not, therefore, be denied it on any account.
We should notice that this view is not just a flight of fancy from the loony left, the pederast lobby or children themselves.
It is also to be found in stronger or weaker versions of more cautious academic thought.
In Escape from Childhood (1974), John Holt notes that children are, in fact, capable of a great deal more than modern society allows them to be.
He sees childhood as a fairly modern invention designed to fit adult rather than children's needs, and an oppressive invention at that.
He suggests that children should be given a comprehensive range of civil and legal rights including the right to vote, to manage their own financial affairs, to direct and manage their own education and to control their own sex lives and
to make and enter into, on a basis of mutual consent, quasifamilial relationships outside one's immediate family  i.e. the right to seek and choose guardians other than one's own parents and to be legally dependent on them.
(Holt, 1974, p. 16)
This is also the view put forward by John Harris, though in less specific terms.
Like Holt, Harris believes that the so-called incompetence of children is an adult invention imposed on children for adults' convenience.
He makes a firm proposal that the age of majority should be gradually reduced to 10 years, and remarks:
We must remember that to deny someone control of their own lives is to offer them a most profound insult, not to mention the injury which the frustration of their wishes and the setting at naught of their own plans for themselves will add.
Perhaps we should conduct annual examinations from an early age to be sure that we do as little of this sort of damage as possible?
(Harris, 1982, p. 49)
Now Holt and Harris both have many wise, enlightened and humane observations to make about some of the injustices which we inflict upon children, but as these remarks show, putting them right without inflicting equally grave injustice is no easy matter.
Both of them appear to suffer from a form of mental myopia in imagining the consequences of such proposals, and I am not here referring only to Mill-type consequences of harm brought about by unwise decisions.
What, we may ask Holt, happens to the child who, dissatisfied at home, seeks in vain for guardians who would suit him?
What if no one wants him?
Our papers are currently full of ' hard-to-place ' children in local authority care advertising for foster or adoptive parents.
In such a situation the skilled care of social workers is crucial to ensuring that an unwanted by-product of success for some children is not the total destruction of self-esteem for others.
What, we may ask Harris, happens to the child who repeatedly fails his annual examination?
To impose such a test on children would be a particularly invidious way of discriminating against them, unless Harris has in mind that we should all undergo such examination.
He might then be open to bitter objections from many adults.
These two suggestions, far from being enlightened liberation of all children, are actually oppression of a deeply damaging kind to at least some, and Harris's suggestion contains a capacity criterion in disguise.
In any case, it would be dishonest to pretend that Mill-type consequences are not relevant here.
Suppose Holt's 6-year-old does opt out of school?
What happens to her then?
What happens if her father is unwilling or unable to stay at home with her?
Is it any better to oblige her to go abseiling or butterfly-catching instead?
However much she may enjoy such pursuits, there will be times when she would actually rather wander the streets unaccompanied.
Given that Holt is presumably not volunteering himself to take care of her, who will?
His view that letting children run in and out of busy airports smartly avoiding the traffic is perfectly reasonable depends upon a conception of a child which is far narrower than even the sex divide.
Holt's child is actually the Artful Dodger; mercifully, not all children are.
There are other difficulties too.
It is not clear whether or not Harris thinks that children of 10 should be obliged to take on full political status whether or not they want to, but Holt clearly does not.
He proposes that ' the rights, privileges, duties, responsibilities of adult citizens be made available to any young person, of whatever age, who wants to make use of them ' (Holt, 1974, p. 15).
If Holt thinks that this proposal would remove an arbitrary boundary line between adults and children, then he is mistaken.
The point about an adult citizen is that he has these rights, privileges, duties and responsibilities whether or not he wants them.
He may not exercise his rights or he may shirk his duties, but he can not forgo them.
They are not just available to him, they are his.
That is what being a citizen involves.
Rights and privileges do not pose any particular problems in the case of children.
Holt can and does believe that children should have them as adults do, and then leaves it up to the child to decide whether or not to exercise them.
But the same can not be said for duties and responsibilities.
Failure to exercise one's rights may be morally neutral; failure to carry out one's duties is not.
It would be perfectly possible to give the rights to children without imposing the duties on them, the one does not entail the other, but we would then still be distinguishing between adults and children as citizens.
Children still would not have full political status.
Duties and responsibilities are not merely available to a citizen; they are an integral part of being a citizen.
Holt does not want children to be obliged to take on any of these responsibilities and he manages to make his point by concentrating solely on the rights so that he can remark:
I do not say, either, that these rights and duties should be tied into one package, that if a young person wants to assume any of them, he must assume them all.
He should be able to pick and choose.
(Holt, 1974, p. 16)
If he can ' pick and choose ', I suggest, he is not a citizen, he does not have full political status and he is quite distinguishable on these grounds alone from the adults around him who do not have this option.
Holt and Harris both, in the end, face the same problem.
They attack the status quo by pointing out that the reasons given for denying rights to children are bad reasons, and then explicitly or implicitly deny them duties for no reason at all.
Whatever else such a strategy may achieve, it certainly does not manage to produce a situation in which children are politically indistinguishable from adults and it rests on premises which, unless they can be defended, gain nothing for any defence to the charge of arbitrariness.
WHEN IN DOUBT, GO BACK TO ARISTOTLE
The trouble with all the views which we have looked at is that they tie the notion of autonomy firmly and solely to that of knowledge interpreted in either a broad or narrow sense.
That it is firmly tied must be correct; the inhabitants of Brave New World are not autonomous precisely because they are denied access to relevant information.
Relevant knowledge is a precondition of autonomy but it is not synonymous with it.
Aristotle said something very interesting in that extract from the Politics which I quoted earlier; he said that women have a deliberative faculty but that it lacks full authority.
What did he mean?
What he did not mean is that women lack rationality; they can and do deliberate.
At first sight what he seems to be saying is simply that no one is going to take any notice of the conclusions which a rational woman reaches after deliberation.
On further reflection, I think this is exactly what he is saying, and its significance is immense.
His view is that the judgements which women make have no standing.
Keeping to the domestic front for the moment, what this means is that the conclusions which women reach, no matter how carefully and intelligently they are worked out, can never have the status of decisions.
You can not decide, though you may desire, to divorce your husband if the law does not allow; you can not order the wine if only his signature makes the order legitimate.
And your inability to decide or to order has nothing to do with your mental powers.
But Aristotle is not just making a sociological point about what is and is not permitted to women in his society.
His remark goes deeper than that.
It refers not to power but to authority, and what I think he means is that although a woman can make good and wise judgements, she can not be the arbiter of that goodness or wisdom.
For that she needs the ratification of men, and that is enough to conclude that her judgements lack authority.
Now that is quite different from saying that women always make bad judgements, that is to say, that they suffer from some deficiency of rationality.
Aristotle only produces spurious suggestions about a woman's incapacity to think or to stick to principles when he is obliged to say something about why their judgements lack authority.
It then looks as though the argument runs:
(1) Women lack some moral or cognitive capacity therefore (2) Women (must) lack authority.
In truth this version is the argument on its head; its real form is:
(1) Women lack authority therefore (2) Women (must) lack some moral or cognitive capacity.
The important point here is that Aristotle's women are not autonomous, not because they lack abilities or capacities but because they lack authority; that is, their right to make decisions, to speak for themselves is not acknowledged.
This acknowledgement is absolutely essential, for without it no mental act which they perform, however well, will count as a decision at all.
The point I am making here is based on an observation by Stanley Cavell (1979, p. 460) and repeated by him in many contexts: ' a human being could not fail to know, confronting me, that I am a human being '.
Why not?
Because to see someone is to see them as a human being and to see them as a human being is to acknowledge them as such.
This acknowledgement is not derived from a prior knowledge of facts, rather it is a precondition of there being any facts.
We do not, on the Cavell model, first discover certain truths about an object and then conclude that it is a person; we first acknowledge the person and only inquire into facts later if necessary.
The point was put graphically by my colleague, Ian Ground.
Faced with a row of objects we do not, he said, lampooning Wittgenstein, perform appropriately by pointing to one after the other saying that's a tree, that's a tree, that's a man, that's a tree.
Rather we will say (pointing) that's a tree, (pointing) that's a tree, (waving) hello! (pointing) that's a tree.
What makes us greet the man is not an albeit swift chain of inference, it is his presence which commands the acknowledgement while the presence of the tree does no such thing.
Of course, if the man is clearly carved from stone then pointing is in order, and if we subsequently discover that ' he ' is an inflatable rubber doll we are suitably embarrassed.
But we are embarrassed because we got it wrong when usually we do not.
In our viewing of the other we see ourselves being viewed; the recognition is mutual.
How then is it possible to withhold acknowledgement?
Cavell's answer is that it is not.
There is no way of seeing another human being except as another human being.
In a poignant discussion of the hypothesis that Southern slave owners did not see their slaves as human beings he disagrees:
When he wants to be served at table by a black hand, he would not be satisfied to be served by a black paw...
Everything in his relation to his slaves shows that he treats them as more or less human  his humiliations of them, his disappointments, his jealousies, his fears, his punishments, his attachments.
(Cavell, 1979, p. 376)
Treating people as if they were not people is not a possibility; to try to do so requires all the resources of evil which the human mind can muster, but it always breaks down.
What is possible is to treat people as more or less human.
We can withhold acknowledgement from them on limited or selective fronts.
This may not be downright evil, but in the absence of potential disbarments (like possibly being a rubber doll) it requires a considerable amount of bad faith.
It is very hard to do.
This is what Aristotle appears to do to his women.
They are human, and are acknowledged to be, they can think but they are not to be acknowledged as authoritative, and if their presence demands such acknowledgement, they are bad women who should have been taught to hide or repress such demands.
Rousseau's blueprint for the education of Sophie is directed at this end, and if it is truly successful, she will internalise the lesson until neither her behaviour nor her demeanour will demand the acknowledgement.
Then she has been infantilised and she is no longer autonomous.
But Rousseau's blueprint contains its own contradiction.
If you need to teach people or compel them in some other way to repress their natural demand for acknowledgement as rational, competent, authoritative human beings then you have no answer to the charge of some malefaction between bad faith and dreadful wickedness.
Is this unfair to children?
When we deny autonomy to our 10-year-old, are we too guilty of bad faith?
What reason could we produce to allow that she may have the capacity to act autonomously while denying her the capacity-to-act-autonomously?
Whatever it is we should first notice that while the capacity to act autonomously is construed as a psychological capacity, the capacity-to-act-autonomously is not.
It is a social capacity which depends upon the acknowledgement of others.
What we need to do is to show that withholding this acknowledgement is neither arbitrary nor unjust; we have to ask, does her being demand it.
CARRYING THE CAN
To do this we need to consider another element in the picture of autonomy which was so meticulously side-stepped by Holt.
That is, the matter of responsibility.
In Freedom and Resentment (1974, p. 19) Strawson talks not of a child's emerging autonomy but of ' the progressive emergence of the child as a responsible being '.
Responsibility is an aspect of autonomy to which lip-service is commonly paid but which takes a back seat in most discussions about children.
I believe it to be central.
In his essay, ' In Defense of Anarchism ' (1970), R. P. Wolff does give responsibility a central place in his brief analysis of autonomy.
He argues that freedom of choice makes a man responsible for his actions while the capacity to reason about those choices places him under a continuing obligation to take responsibility for those actions.
To take responsibility is to accept the duty of deciding for oneself what is right.
A man, Wolff argues, can forfeit his autonomy by not taking the responsibility on himself; by, for example, obeying commands blindly; but he can not abnegate the responsibility which the possibility of choice confers upon him.
Since being autonomous includes both freedom of choice and the capacity to reason about those choices, the impairment of either is a bar to autonomy.
Against this background he makes two remarks about children:
It is quite appropriate that moral philosophers should group together children and madmen as beings not fully responsible for their actions, for as madmen are thought to lack freedom of choice, so children do not yet possess the power of reason in a developed form.
It is even just that we should assign a greater degree of responsibility to children, for madmen, by virtue of their lack of free will, are completely without responsibility, while children, insofar as they possess reason in a partially developed form, can be held responsible (i.e. can be required to take responsibility) to a corresponding degree.
(Wolff, 1970, pp. 12C13)
All men refuse to take responsibility for their actions at some time or other during their lives, and some men so consistently shirk their duty that they present more the appearance of overgrown children than of adults.
(Ibid., p. 14)
There is a striking similarity between Wolff's way of talking about children and the views we saw put forward by Hobbes, Locke and Kant.
Wolff begins with the assurance that children are not rational and then immediately back-pedals to say that actually they are, partially at least.
Four paragraphs later where the second quotation appears, the child is not unable to take responsibility but is refusing to take it.
She is not an incompetent but a degenerate.
Having denied that she is incompetent, I am certainly not going to concede that the only alternative is to make her a degenerate; there must be another choice available.
What is missing from Wolff's analysis, though it is present in his terminology, is the recognition of the public face, the mutuality of responsibility.
He talks of assigning responsibility to children, holding them responsible, requiring them to take responsibility and these are natural ways of speaking.
What they do is to introduce a new element into the concept of responsibility which involves more than free will and reason; now a third party is present and is an active participant in the language game in which responsibility has a role.
People are not only responsible for something, they are responsible to God, other individuals, society or themselves, and this latter Kantian notion is derived from the primary social context in which it makes sense for the concept of responsibility to be invoked.
This is just what I was claiming for authority.
To say either that someone acts authoritatively or that someone is responsible for his actions may depend upon the possibility of ascribing mental states or capacities but neither is merely a shorthand way of ascribing them.
In the case of the fully autonomous person, authority and responsibility go hand in hand.
The capacity-to-act-autonomously is the coming together of the two.
If both or either is impaired then so is this capacity, and both depend upon the psychological capacities of the agent plus the recognition of other members of the moral and political community.
This raises a difficulty.
PASSING THE BUCK
The problem here seems to be this: am I saying that a child is responsible if and only if we declare her to be so, given that she knows what she is doing?
This view has some historical clout.
Given the knowledge it is always possible to hold someone responsible for their actions.
Children were still being imprisoned and deported when Mill wrote that disclaimer.
Is it then just a matter of fashion, of the times in which we live?
Not entirely; to begin with we might take a pragmatic line in the light of new knowledge about the long-term effects of such treatment on a child's subsequent development.
We might argue that while we can hold her responsible, the consequences of so doing turn out to be unacceptable.
But the horror which writers such as Dickens expressed at the cruelty of his times was prompted by no such knowledge.
Dickensian child victims grow into upright citizens if they grow up at all.
What Dickens saw was what most of us see, the inhumanity of treating a child in certain ways.
In what does the inhumanity consist?
Not just in harsh action; increased concern about children is almost always part of a larger concern about people in general, but when horrible things are happening to people it is not unusual to focus on children and try special pleading on their behalf.
This special pleading is, no doubt, partly emotional but it might very well include reference to children's lack of knowledge and understanding.
Yet the inhumanity does not consist in the ascription of certain cognitive states either.
We may be quite right to ascribe agency to a child for his acts.
The inhumanity seems to lie in allowing the full weight of responsibility to fall on the child.
Responsibility is not only about agency.
' When we say a person is responsible for what he does we mean not just that he was the agent... we also say that the act reflects (back) on the agent, ' writes David Wood (1973, p. 191).
How much reflecting goes on depends upon the reflective capabilities of the child and also on the strength and direction of the beam which we, the adults, determine.
Perhaps now we can take Mill's insight on board without opening ourselves to the charge of arbitrariness.
Mill wanted to protect children against the harm which they might do themselves.
The problem which was supposed to bring liberal theory crashing to the ground was that we do not wish to justify interfering with adult liberties on these grounds.
It may be that what we are protecting children from is not so much the awful consequences of their ignorant decisions but of the burden of responsibility for those decisions which children are not yet ready to bear and which, for entirely non-political reasons, we can not choose to impose upon them.
If giving or withholding this responsibility were possible options in a one-person game, then this criterion would do nothing to counter the charge of arbitrariness but I have already argued that they are not and could not be.
We can only play at ascribing responsibility outside this mutual interaction; making the horse a senator, blaming the toy which the child trips over are games which do not fool the horse or the toy.
Growing up, maturing, emerging into autonomy is the process of the child taking from the adult more and more of the responsibility for those actions which she does knowingly.
Respect for the dignity and freedom of the child consists in the recognition that the burden of responsibility shifts from the adult to the child as she herself demands it.
We leave unhappy teenagers who ' don't want to talk about it ' alone; the tearful 5-year-old comes and dumps the problem in your lap.
In between, we say, we ' play it by ear ' and what we listen for is the child's own claim to have its decisions treated as authoritative and to be ready to bear the responsibility.
This claim is not a conscious, spoken claim; if it gets to that stage, we have already left it too late.
The claim is implicit in the child's own social interactions and unless we are blind or acting in chronic bad faith we can do no other than acknowledge it.
But neither can we impose it.
Holding a child responsible is not the same as making her responsible; we may succeed in the former, without her cooperation we can never succeed in the latter.
Now it can still be objected that this is also true of adults and that I have still, therefore, failed to distinguish them from children.
However, there is a difference.
With children, the presupposition is that we take the responsibility until they show us that they want it; with adults we assume that they take the responsibility unless they show us that they don't.
(We are surprised when the ' man ' turns out to be a robot.)
That is what membership of the moral and political community is, and it is a serious business which deserves more attention than I can give here.
It is quite correct that children's application for membership should be taken seriously; once accepted there is no turning back, resignation is not an option.
To end, a word about voting.
Voting is not just a matter of knowing how to put a cross on a piece of paper, nor of having a rough or even quite refined view of the policies of the major political parties.
It also, in a democracy, involves being responsible to some degree for the society which we have.
Maybe ' I didn't vote Tory ', but even that does not enable me to opt out of that responsibility entirely.
Why else would I buy the sticker?
Let us ask our 10-year-old's mother if her daughter is ready to take that responsibility.
What would she say?
Perhaps that, yes, her child is intelligent and thoughtful and even knowledgeable; yes, she would be as competent as many adults in coming to sensible conclusions.
Also, perhaps, that sometimes at night, she finds her crying for the starving of Africa or unable to sleep with the terror of the possibility of nuclear war or desperately seeking a denial of the reality of the horror of the Holocaust.
Perhaps she would be angry if, by trying to impose responsibility on her daughter by giving her the vote, we were also taking from her the only comfort which she has, namely that when she is older she will change all that.
Or perhaps she would just tell us that her child is not yet ready; she would be right.
Denying the vote to children is not based on some false assumption about 10-year-olds' political knowledge, nor to deny that they have interests, nor to protect them from the harm their votes might do.
It is to take responsibility to ourselves for the way the world is.
And that really does belong to us.
6
Autonomy and Identity in Feminist Thinking
Jean Grimshaw
Issues about women's autonomy have been central to feminist thinking and action.
Women have so often been in situations of powerlessness and dependence that any system of belief or programme of action that could count as' feminist ' must in some way see this as a central concern.
But what is meant by ' autonomy ' and under what conditions is it possible?
This has been an important and contentious question in philosophy.
But questions about autonomy, and related questions about self and identity have also been important to feminism, and within feminist thinking it is possible to find radically different ways of thinking about these things.
In this paper, I want to look at one kind of way in which some feminists have tried to conceptualise what it is for a woman to be ' autonomous', and at the implications this has for ways of thinking about the human self.
I shall argue that this conception is not only philosophically problematic, but also has an implicit politics which is potentially damaging.
And I shall try to suggest some ways of beginning to think about ' autonomy ' which seem to me to be more fruitful and adequate, and to draw on different traditions of thinking about the self which have become influential in some recent feminist thinking.
Feminist thinking does not, of course, exist in a vacuum, and in thinking about women's autonomy, feminists have drawn on different (and conflicting) approaches to questions about the human self, some of which have a long history.
I want to begin by going back to an argument that Aristotle put forward in the Ethics, since I think that the point at which his argument breaks down can illuminate the nature of the problem some feminist thinking has faced.
Aristotle's argument concerns the question of what it is that makes an action ' voluntary ', done of a person's own free will, and in order to answer this question, he distinguished between actions whose origin was' inside ' a person, and those whose origin was' outside ', which resulted from external influences or pressure or compulsion.
He discussed at some length the problems that arise over trying to define ideas such as' compulsion ', and in estimating the degree of severity of pressure that could make an action not voluntary.
But in this sort of model of autonomy, what defines an action as autonomous is seen as its point of origin; it must have an ' immaculate conception ', as it were, from within the self.
Now ultimately I think that it is this definition of ' autonomy ' in terms of origin, and the associated distinction between an ' inner ' self which can in some way spontaneously generate its' own ' actions, and ' external ' influences which are not ' part ' of the self, that will need challenging.
But I think it is possible to defend the Aristotelian version of autonomy up to a point, provided notions of ' inside ' and ' outside ' the self are defined in a certain way.
If a person is prevented from doing what they would otherwise intend or desire to do, or if they are coerced into doing what they would not otherwise want or desire to do, they are not acting autonomously.
Under this interpretation, actions which originate from ' inside ' the self are those which are seen as in accordance with conscious desires or intentions, and those which originate from ' outside ' the self are those which one would not do if one were not coerced.
The pressure here is to consider the sorts of circumstances which do, in fact, coerce people in these sorts of ways.
And, of course, a central concern of feminism has been to identify and fight against the kinds of coercion to which women have been subjected, including things like physical violence and economic dependence.
But it is at this point that an Aristotelian-type argument fails to be able to deal with the most difficult questions about autonomy.
The Aristotelian view, as I have interpreted it, ' works' only to the extent that it is assumed that there is no problem about what I shall call ' the autonomy of desires'.
Autonomy is defined as acting in accordance with desire (or intention).
But what of the desires themselves?
Are there desires (or intentions) which are not ' autonomous', which do not originate from ' within ' the self, which are not authentic, not really ' one's own '?
Feminist writers have wanted, of course, to indict the various forms of brutality and coercion from which women have suffered.
But this brutality and coercion has been seen not merely as a question of physical or ' external ' coercion or constraint; the force of subjection has also been seen as a psychic one, invading women's very selves.
The language of ' conditioning ', ' brainwashing ', ' indoctrination ', and so forth, has been used to describe this force.
The female self, under male domination, is riddled through and through with false or conditioned desires.
But set against this conditioned, non-autonomous female self are various images of a female self that would be authentic, that would transcend or shatter this conditioning.
I want now to look at some of these images of the female self in feminist discourse: my particular examples are from the work of Mary Daly, Marilyn Frye and Kate Millett.
Daly, Frye and Millett all stress the way in which women have been subject to the power of men.
Much of Daly's book, Gyn/Ecology (1979), is an account of the barbarities inflicted on women such as suttee, clitorectomy, foot-binding and other forms of mutilation.
Millett, in Sexual Politics (1977), sees patriarchal power as something so historically all-embracing that it has totally dominated women's lives.
Frye, in The Politics of Reality (1983), uses the situation of a young girl sold into sexual slavery and then systematically brutalised and brainwashed into a life of service to her captors as an analogy for the situation of all women.
And all three writers stress the way in which they see the female self as' invaded ' by patriarchal conditioning.
Millett writes:
When, in any group of persons, the ego is subjected to such invidious versions of itself through social beliefs, ideology and tradition, the effect is bound to be pernicious.
This should make it no very special cause for surprise that women develop group characteristics common to those who suffer minority status and a marginal existence.
(Millett, 1977, p. 55)
Women, she argues, are deprived of all but the most trivial sources of dignity or self-respect.
In her discussion of Lawrence's depiction of Connie in Lady Chatterley's Lover, what she sees Connie as relinquishing is' self, ego, will, individuality ' (p. 243); all those things which, Millett argues, women had but recently achieved, (and for which Lawrence had a profound distaste).
Mary Daly's picture of the way in which women's selves are invaded by patriarchal conditioning is even more striking.
She describes women, for example, as' moronised ', ' robotised ', ' lobotomised ', as' the puppets of Papa '.
At times she seems to see women as so ' brainwashed ' that they are scarcely human; thus she describes them as' fembots', even as' mutants'.
In Millett, Daly and Frye, women are seen primarily as victims: the monolithic brutality and psychological pressures of male power have reduced women almost to the state of being ' non-persons'.
And indeed, as Daly sees women as having become ' mutants' or ' fembots', so Millett sees them as not having been allowed to participate in fully ' human ' activities (which she characterises as those that are most remote from the biological contingencies of life), and Frye sees them as simply ' broken ' and then ' remade ' in the way that suits their masters.
But behind this victimised female self, whose actions and desires are assumed to be not truly ' her own ', since they derive from processes of force, conditioning or psychological manipulation, there is seen to be an authentic female self, whose recovery or discovery it is one of the aims of feminism to achieve.
The spatial metaphor implicit in the word ' behind ' is not accidental, since this model of self is premised on the possibility of making a distinction between an ' inner ' and an ' outer ' self.
Ibsen's Peer Gynt compared his quest for identity to the process of peeling layers off an onion; but after shedding all the ' false selves', he found that there was nothing inside, no ' core '.
The sort of spatial metaphor implicit in Peer Gynt's account of himself is also apt in the accounts of self given by Daly, Millett and Frye, except that there is assumed to be a ' core '.
This is clearest in the work of Daly.
In GynlEcology, discovering or recovering one's own self is seen as akin to a process of salvation or religious rebirth, and Daly writes of what she calls the unveiling or unwinding of the ' shrouds' of patriarchy to reveal the authentic female Spirit-Self underneath.
And this Self is seen as a unitary and harmonious one.
Splits and barriers within the psyche, she argues, as well as those between Selves, are the result of patriarchal conditioning.
In the unitary and harmonious female Spirit-Self there will be no such splits.
Millett's picture of the authentic female self is rather different from that of Daly.
It does not draw, as Daly's does, on religious metaphors of salvation and rebirth.
It derives, rather, from a picture of the self as fundamentally a unitary, conscious and rational thing, a picture which, in Western philosophy, can be traced back to Descartes.
It emerges most clearly in her discussion of Freud.
She describes Freud's theory of the Unconscious as a major contribution to human understanding, but her account of the self owes, in fact, scarcely anything to Freud.
She is scathingly critical of Freud's theory of penis envy: Freud, she argued, ' did not accept his patient's symptoms as evidence of a justified dissatisfaction with the limiting circumstances imposed on them by society, but as symptomatic of an independent and universal feminine tendency ' (Millett, 1977, p. 179).
He made a major (and foolish) confusion between biology and culture.
Girls, Millett argues, are fully cognisant of male supremacy long before they see their brother's penis; and what they envy is not the penis, but the things to which having a penis gives the boy access  power, status and rewards.
Freud ignored the more likely ' social ' hypothesis for feminine dissatisfaction, preferring to ascribe it to a biologically based female nature.
What we should be studying, Millett argues, are the effects of male-supremacist culture on the female ego.
And what will undo these effects, she writes in the Postscript, is altered consciousness, and a process of ' human growth and tru
The ' social ' factors of which Millett writes are here seen as pressures which are ' external ' to the self, and which have the effect of thwarting the conscious and unitary rationality of female individuality, or the female ego.
And the task is that of removing their influence.
If, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, the scales were to fall from Connie's eyes and she were to see the worship of Mellor's phallus for what it is, a means of subordinating and oppressing women, she could free herself and develop her authentic will, ego and individuality.
The paradigm of coercion, writes Frye, is not the direct application of physical force.
Rather, it is a situation in which choice and action do take place, and in which the victim acts under her own perception and judgement.
Hence, what the exploiter needs is that
the will and intelligence of the victim be disengaged from the projects of resistance and escape but that they not be simply broken or destroyed.
Ideally, the disintegration and misintegration of the victim should accomplish the detachment of the victim's will and intelligence from the victim's own interests and their attachment to the interests of the exploiter.
This will effect a displacement or dissolution of self-respect and will undermine the victim's intolerance of coercion.
With that, the situation transcends the initial paradigmatic form or structure of coercion; for if people don't mind doing what you want them to do, you can't really be making them do it.
(Frye, 1983, p. 60)
And, she writes:
The health and integrity of an organism is a matter of its being organised largely towards its own interests and welfare.
She is healthy and ' working right ' when her substance is organised primarily on principles which align it to her interests and welfare.
Co-operation is essential of course, but it will not do that I arrange everything so that you get enough exercise: for me to be healthy, I must get enough exercise.
My being adequately exercised is logically independent of your being so.
(Ibid., p. 70)
Frye is writing here as if it were possible to distinguish the interests of one self sharply from those of another, and as if, were the effects of male domination to be undone, it would not be too much of a problem for the self to know what its interests were.
In various ways then, underlying much of the work of these three writers is a set of assumptions about the self.
First, that it is, at least potentially, a unitary, rational thing, aware of its interests.
Second, that ' splits' within the psyche should be seen as resulting from the interference of patriarchal or male-dominated socialisation or conditioning.
Third, that the task of undoing this conditioning is one that can be achieved solely by a rational process of learning to understand and fight against the social and institutional effects of male domination.
And implicit in these assumptions about the self, I think, is a conception of autonomy.
Frye writes that ' left to themselves' women would not want to serve men.
Daly writes of unveiling or unwinding the ' shrouds' of patriarchy.
Millett writes of the individuality and ego that women can discover in themselves once they recognise the effects of their patriarchal socialisation.
And in all three, what is autonomous (or authentic) is what is seen as originating in some way from within the self; what is in some way untainted by the conditioning or manipulation to which a woman has previously been subjected.
Before I come to discuss the philosophical problems that are raised by this sort of account of self and autonomy, I want to look at what I have called its implicit politics; and what I mean by this primarily is its possible consequences for the way in which women might think about their relationships to each other, and the way in which they might think about themselves.
The first consequence seems to me to be this.
Any view which sees self-affirmation in terms of an ' authentic ' inner self arising from the smashing of a socially conditioned ' false self ', or which sees autonomy as a question of the origin of actions from ' inside ' rather than ' outside ', is almost bound to adopt, however implicitly, a derogatory attitude towards those who are not yet ' authentic '.
The precise nature and tone of this attitude may vary.
But Mary Daly, for example, in GynlEcology, sometimes writes as if most women were really little more than the programmed, robotic puppets to which women were reduced in Ira Levin's novel The Stepford Wives; the language of ' fembots' and ' mutants' and ' puppets', whilst intended, I am sure, to enunciate a critique of women's oppressors, veers perilously near to sounding like contempt for those who are subject to that oppression.
And this is related, for example, to Daly's scorn for ' tokenism '  for those women who participate in what are seen as patriarchal institutions.
Kate Millett's language is less obviously extreme.
But the picture she paints of women is nevertheless often a derogatory one.
She describes them, for example, as' infantilised '; she accepts without question research which purported to show that most women despised each other (Millett, 1977, p. 55); she sees women as having little ' self-respect ', and as devoting almost all their time and attention to pleasing and flattering men.
This implicitly derogatory attitude to women is linked both to an overmonolithic account of male power, and to a failure to give much attention to the ways in which women have, in fact, often spent much of their lives, and to the activities which have been particularly theirs (such as the rearing of children, for example).
Sometimes women are depicted almost as a caricature of a male stereotype of themselves  they are servile, weak, powerless etc.
(Millett even suggests (p. 56) that the fact that women commit less' crime ' than men is due to their patriarchal conditioning in passivity.)
Millett basically dismisses the activities which have tended to dominate women's lives as' infantilising ', because they restrict women to the level, she argues, of the merely biological, and do not allow them to enter upon the ' fully human ' activities which have been the province of men.
And it is interesting, as Toril Moi (1985) points out, that in her discussion of literature, Millett concentrates almost wholly on male authors, with the exception of Charlotte Bronte, of whose work she tends to be very dismissive.
Furthermore, as Moi suggests, she seems to avoid much in the way of recognition or acknowledgement of feminist work prior to her own, or of the existence of female traditions and strengths which might have tended to challenge or subvert the supposedly monolithic nature of the male power which it is the main aim of her book to describe.
Mary Daly's indictment of male power and brutality similarly allows little space for a consideration of the patterns of women's lives, or the strengths and capacities that these might have enabled them to develop.
Her female Spirit-Self simply seems to rise mysteriously like a phoenix from the ashes of patriarchal conditioning.
And Frye is sceptical about the possibility of women looking to their foremothers as a source of inspiration; of seeing some women, at least, as having led lives that were not wholly male-mediated.
Feminist vision or imagination has no real resource to turn to.
Now these kinds of accounts (or perhaps one might say failures to give an adequate account?) of women's lives are implicitly divisive and threatening.
They are divisive because they have a tendency to divide women into two camps; those who have and those who have not shaken the dust of patriarchal conditioning from their feet.
And they are threatening, because it is offensive and undermining to be told that the life one has led has merely been one of servility, that it has not been of truly ' human ' value, that one has been a ' fembot ' or a ' puppet '.
I think that one important strand in the rejection of feminism by many women has been a feeling that feminists are saying that their lives have been of no value, and that their activities and concerns have been trivial.
But this image of autonomy and of the self can be threatening, too, to women who do have a strong allegiance to feminism; and the threat intersects with assumptions that have been made in some feminist discourse about who is or is not ' really ' a feminist.
The threat arises because this account of autonomy is in fact often a strongly normative one; it presents an image of what a ' feminist self ' should be like.
To be autonomous or authentic one should be strong, independent, rational, coherent or consistent, able to distinguish clearly those aspects of one's previous self which derive from male-dominated conditioning and reject them.
If one is ambivalent, conflicted, uncertain, confused, unwilling to make wholesale rejections, one stands to be accused, whether by oneself or by others, of bad faith, of lack of courage, of ' selling out ', of tokenism.
I am here giving an account of just one (influential) strand in feminist discourse.
There are other strands which have rejected this account of self and autonomy.
As I have said before, a picture of the self as conscious, unitary and rational can be traced back, in Western philosophy, to Descartes.
I do not have space here to discuss the various ways in which versions of this conception of self have been influential, in philosophy and psychology, for instance.
But the major tradition which has queried this view of self has been that which derives from psychoanalysis.
Feminism has had a complex relation to psychoanalysis.
Freud's theories have been the target of a great deal of feminist criticism.
In Sexual Politics, for example, Kate Millett sees Freud simply as the proponent of a biologistic theory of male supremacy, and as one of the arch-villains in the male plot of patriarchy.
Other feminist writers, however, have tried to reevaluate the significance of psychoanalytic theory for feminism.
And they have argued that, whilst feminism should indeed always have a critical relationship to psychoanalytic theory, the latter has within it the potential for allowing a better understanding of the complexities of human desires and of the psychological construction of ' masculinity ' and ' femininity '.
Now any adequate account of self needs to be able, I think, to encompass and try to make intelligible the ways in which women and men experience themselves.
And the central reasons for rejecting the ' humanist ' paradigm of the self  as I have outlined it above  are, firstly, that there may be aspects of the development of self which are not easily accessible to consciousness, and secondly, that there are conscious experiences which are not easy to make intelligible within the humanist paradigm.
I want now to look at some aspects of self-experience that I think should be central to any theory of self, and hence to any discussion of women's autonomy.
Fantasy
The dream (on which we may try hard to impose a narrative structure, to make sense of it) is unlike much fantasy in that it often doesn't, of itself, contain any such structure, and the ' story ', if it tells one, may be deeply unintelligible to us.
Much conscious fantasy is different; we may ' tell a story ' to ourselves (or listen to a story and fantasise it as about ourselves); and sometimes we may attempt an imagined resolution, through fantasy, of some aspect of our social situation.
One might, thus, fantasise the death of someone seen as a threat, or imagine oneself as possessing enormous fame or wealth.
But fantasies, not always in the form of a coherent narrative, may irrupt or intervene; one can be plagued, dominated or obsessed by them.
Freud wrote of the way in which fantasies or desires, often seen as evil or dangerous, could come to dominate a person's life.
Fantasy may be a threat; it may be inexplicable, bizarre and intrusive.
Discovering the fantasies of others, too, may be threatening; the discovery, for example, as Rosalind Coward (1984) suggests, that the ' mild ' man one lives with is a secret addict of sadomasochistic pornography.
Female sexual fantasies can be disturbing as well.
Why do many women find The Story of O erotic, and why is there a ' split ' between sexual fantasy and that which one might find pleasurable or erotic in real life?
Fantasy may be experienced both as pleasurable and as dangerous.
But sometimes it can just be pleasurable.
Coward discusses, for instance, the importance of the fact that one of the biggest growth areas in publishing in recent years has been women's romantic fiction.
Unlike the ' modern ' women's novel in which, usually after a series of disastrous sexual misadventures, the female heroine ends up (more or less) ' her own person ', romantic fiction is stylised, formulaic and unrealistic.
It offers women, Coward argues, the fantasised pleasure (and apotheosis of sexual desire) of finding security in the strong arms of the hard-bitten patriarchal hero, along with the pleasure of having ' tamed ' him and domesticated his wild ways by the power one enjoys over him in being a woman.
We have to understand the pleasure there is for women in such fantasies.
We have to understand what seems often to attract women more than men to soap operas, or to a passionate interest in the doings of the Royal Family.
We need to understand how and why male fantasies may commonly differ from female ones, and why the sorts of fantasies I have mentioned, which may in some ways seem antithetical to feminism, may still have a strong appeal to women who have a feminist allegiance.
The ' Split ' Between Reason and Desire
I will suggest, as a first example of this, a book by Suzanne Lowry, on Princess Diana, called The Princess in the Mirror (1985).
The appearance of the book is at first glance like that of any other glossy book about the Royals.
But it sets out, its author says, to deconstruct the image and appeal of the Princess.
At the end of the book, Lowry states that the image of the Princess is conformist and reactionary, that it acts as a powerful form of social control, and that Diana is an unwitting agent of that.
Yet the presentation of the book, and Lowry's text, often speak of a fascination with the Princess that is more than simply the fascination one can derive from the exercise of deconstructing an image.
And this fascination is often in tension with the attempt to articulate a critique.
Or think about the Fonda phenomenon.
The text of Fonda's book, Women Coming of Age (1984), exhorts women not to ' think thin', and its theme is mainly that of health.
Yet the illustrations are nearly all of women who are pencil-thin enough not to be out of place on the catwalk in a Paris fashion show.
The discourse of ' health ' is almost inextricably intertwined, in the case of women, with discourse about youth and beauty and sexual attractiveness.
The reasons women have for concern about fitness and health are often multiply overdetermined.
Notions, for example, of Ageless Ageing (Kenton, 1986) slide between discussions of how to preserve a youthful skin and a young-looking body and how to stave off the ravages of appearing older, with discussions of mental vitality and energy, and so forth.
A young-looking body is a sign of an alert mind.
There is a type of feminist criticism, both in literature and other media (and in fields such as education), which has been called ' Images of Women ' criticism.
This has supposed that feminist effort should be devoted, first, to showing how the ' images' in question oppress or denigrate women, and second, to offering positive images of women to replace these.
One problem with this kind of criticism is that the ' images' in question have often been misinterpreted, since they have been discussed without reference to the context or narrative structure in which they may appear.
But there are two other problems with this type of criticism which I want to focus on here.
First, what this approach often fails to recognise is the importance of understanding the appeal of the ' images' that are criticised; the relations they may have to women's pleasures, desires, fantasies, fears and conceptions of themselves.
Second, it fails to recognise what is signally obvious in the experience of many women, myself of course included, namely that it is perfectly possible to agree ' in one's head ' that certain images of women might be reactionary or damaging or oppressive, while remaining committed to them in emotion and desire.
I suspect that this' split ' happens at times in all women, and perhaps particularly in those who have some commitment to feminism.
And what it suggests is that structures of desire, emotion and fantasy have deep roots of some sort in the self which are not necessarily amenable in any simple way to processes of conscious rational argument.
An adequate theory of subjectivity has to recognise and try to understand these roots.
Contradictions
I have already identified more than one type of contradiction; those that can exist between one's fantasies and what one would actually do or enjoy in real life, and those that can exist between one's understanding of the oppressive nature of some discourse or practice and one's continuing investment of desire and finding of pleasure in it.
In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1973), Freud discussed the way in which symptoms are experienced in certain forms of obsessional neurosis.
He wrote:
Obsessional neurosis is shown in the patient's being occupied with thoughts in which he is in fact not interested, in his being aware of impulses which appear very strange to him and his being led to actions the performance of which give him no enjoyment but which it is quite impossible for him to omit.
The thoughts (obsessions) may be senseless in themselves, or merely a matter of indifference to the subject; often they are completely silly, and invariably they are the starting-point of a strenuous mental activity, which exhausts the patient and to which he only surrenders himself most unwillingly.
(p.297)
Obsessional neurosis is characterised, Freud argued, by the fact that the symptoms are not only debilitating, but are experienced by the person as alien; they do not seem ' part ' of him or her, and they seem discrepant with an everyday or normal sense of the self.
In the case of many of Freud's patients the disruption and debilitation caused by the symptoms was so extreme that they were scarcely able to carry on their lives adequately at all.
But Freud insisted that there was no sharp dividing line between ' normal ' and ' neurotic ' people, and would have argued that similar, though less extreme, obsessions and apparently inexplicable compulsions can be found in all of us.
In these cases, the self is, as it were, split against itself, subject to desires and impulses that seem ' out of character '.
But one can not assume that an everyday ' coherent ' sense of self is readily available.
One reason for this is that women (and men, of course) are often faced with the problem of negotiating contradictory or conflicting conceptions of themselves.
Women may, for example, be required to be both sexually exciting and available, and modest and chaste.
And gender relationships may be subject to the problems that can arise from conflicting discourses about femininity or masculinity.
Men may, for example, both see themselves as' stronger ' than women and tend to see women as more weak and passive, but also see women as having a power over them that can seem to engulf the man in forms of emotional dependence by which he may feel threatened.
Discourse about femininity and masculinity is by no means a homogeneous or stable thing.
In the twentieth century, the advent of a ' consumer culture ' and of mass communications has given questions about self and identity a peculiar intensity and difficulty in some respects.
They have led, for example, to a focus on appearance and ' style ', and the way in which these may ' express' one's individuality, that is historically novel.
The clothes one wears, the ' room of one's own ' in the Sunday Supplements: one may, apparently, now ' try on ' identities as if they really were clothes.
And women have often tended to be the main target of fashion and ' lifestyle ' talk.
For all the rejection of what was sometimes called ' woman garbage ' by American feminists, the issue of appearance is something that no woman can wholly avoid.
Feminists too, of course, have used style of dress and demeanour to express a sense of self and of political commitment.
(Elizabeth Wilson recorded once realising that she was more than usually anxious about the question of what to wear when she was going to talk to a feminist group.)
Self-knowledge and Self-deception
The concept of self-deception is one that has constantly puzzled philosophers.
How can one both know and yet not know something about oneself.
I do not have space here to discuss the question of self-deception in detail.
But an important thing to recognise at the outset is that knowing about oneself can never be a matter of ' mere information '.
One can not be distanced from or emotionally neutral about issues of self-knowledge.
(Freud stressed this in his account of the transference in the analytic situation.)
Herbert Fingarette (1959) uses the concept of ' avowal ' to give an account of the concept of self-deception.
We do not see everything that we think or do or fantasise or desire as equally ' central ' to ourselves.
It is quite common, in everyday discourse, to say things like ' I wasn't really myself ' or ' It wasn't like me to do that '.
Sometimes this process of rejection, of not avowing, is quite conscious.
At other times it may be barely admitted to consciousness, if whatever it was is seen as threatening to the self.
And sometimes it is, I think, not conscious at all.
Psychoanalysts have talked, for example, about the process of ' projection ', in which aspects of oneself of which one is fearful may be projected on to other people.
(A number of writers have seen ' projection ' as involved in the problem of masculinity, and have suggested that men may sometimes project their own fears of such things as emotional intimacy on to women, who are then seen as' bad ' because they cause these problems.)
Self-knowledge can never be a matter of easy or immediate introspection.
This is partly because aspects of oneself may be disavowed, sometimes unconsciously, and partly because the ' meaning ' of the deliverances of introspection is always dependent on an interpretation.
One may be aware of feelings, sexual ones for example, that one is not able to conceptualise as sexual at the time.
Freud believed that at the root of all neuroses lay repressed sexual desires, but even if one does not follow him in this, it would be hard to resist the conclusion that this was true of some of his patients.
Sometimes his patients lacked the kind of knowledge that would have enabled them to interpret the experience as' sexual ' at all.
Sometimes they possessed knowledge about sex, but could not admit that this was sexual, or that they had those sorts of desires.
I have outlined above some of the experiences and the problems about subjectivity that any adequate theory of self must be able to encompass, in a way that the ' humanist ' paradigm is, I think, unable to do.
There are approaches to understanding and theorising self which depart radically from the humanist paradigm.
I shall not attempt to enumerate them all here, nor do I think that feminism should accept any of them uncritically.
What they share, despite their differences, is an insistence that there is no ' original ' wholeness or unity in the self, nor a ' real self ' which can be thought of as in some way underlying the self of everyday life.
The self is always a more or less precarious and conflictual construction out of, and compromise between, conflicting and not always conscious desires and experiences, which are born out of the ambivalences and contradictions in human experience and relationships with others.
Accounts of the construction of the self vary, in the degree of stress, for example, that they lay on the period of infancy and early childhood, and on the importance given to sexuality.
But it seems to me that the theories of Freud must be seen as centrally important.
It is sometimes argued that Freud's theories must be accepted or rejected all of a piece, and that one can not simply accept or reject ' bits' of them as one fancies.
It is true, I think, that there is a certain sort of eclecticism, practised for example by some neo-Freudian writers such as Erich Fromm or by the American ' ego psychologists', which may undermine anything useful that Freudian theory really has to offer.
But whatever we may take or reject from Freud, what I think we should not lose is the way in which he raises questions and problematises things which are sometimes taken for granted.
Freud questions any easy (or utopian) idea or ideal of the unity of the self, he questions the idea that self-knowledge could ever be a matter of simple introspection, and he sees issues about desire and fantasy as central to subjectivity.
He stresses the way in which the acquisition of a gendered subjectivity is necessarily conflictual and involves struggle.
And above all, perhaps, he forces a radical questioning of the concepts of the ' individual ' and the ' social '.
Nothing could be further from the truth than Kate Millett's accusation that Freud believed that women's destiny was a simple outcome of their biology.
In Freudian theory, there is a constant concern with the way in which entry into culture and human relationships, and the conflicts and struggle this causes, should be seen as constitutive of the human self.
Freud's particular view of human culture was problematic.
He stressed that psychoanalysis was never concerned solely with desires seen as arising unmediated from the body, but always with psychic representations of these.
But he also believed in a sort of Lamarckian view of the inheritance of a ' primal schema ' of desires and fantasies which determined the form taken by the Oedipal situation.
The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, argued that Freud himself (as well as virtually all the psychoanalysts who revised Freud's theories) never managed to escape fully from the assumption of an already existing gendered subjectivity which entered into the Oedipal situation.
And Lacan argued that the human subject must be seen as constituted through language, through entry into the Symbolic Order.
According to Lacan, the aim of psychoanalysis should be rigorously to deconstruct and expose the contradictions and radical fissues in which human subjectivity is born.
Feminism, as I have said, needs to preserve a critical distance from all theories of self.
But it needs also to engage with those theories which deconstruct the distinction between the ' individual ' and the ' social ', which recognise the power of desire and fantasy and the problems of supposing any ' original ' unity in the self, while at the same time preserving its concern with lived experience and the practical and material struggles of women to achieve more autonomy and control over their lives.
The appeal of what I have called the ' humanist paradigm ' lies, I think, in the way it can seem to conceptualise the need women have experienced for this greater degree of autonomy and control, for overcoming the fragmentation and contradictions in their lives, and for a capacity for self-definition.
No theory of self should lose sight of these things.
I have argued, however, that there are also aspects of women's experience which the humanist paradigm is unable to conceptualise adequately; hence the appeal of theories which attempt to ' deconstruct ' the self in more radical ways.
But the danger in some ' deconstructionist ' theories, however, is that they seem to leave no space for the material struggles or ordinary aspirations of women.
Thus it seems that Lacanian psychoanalysis, both in theory and practice, aims merely to show what a fragmented, decentred thing the human subject is, and Lacan has dismissed all talk of ' unity ' or ' identity ' as an illusion.
It can be argued (though I do not have space to do it here), that there is an incoherence in a view of the subject which regards all notions of unity as an illusion.
But there is also a practical and political problem, since it is difficult to see how such a theory could speak in any way to the practical or material concerns of women.
The problem, then, is not to be seen as one of whether we should continue to use concepts like ' identity ' or ' autonomy ' at all, or simply reject them out of hand.
It is a problem, rather, of how to offer an interpretation of them which neither assumes the original unitary self of the humanist paradigm, nor ignores the needs of women.
And Freud can again provide a useful starting point.
It is true that Freudian theory questions any notion of the original unity of the self.
But it is not true that Freudian theory has no space for ideas of unity or autonomy.
The purpose of psychoanalytic therapy, according to Freud, was to remove the power of the symptom by making it intelligible, by showing the sense that it had.
Psychoanalysis aimed to trace its roots in unconscious desires (though this was not a process merely of intellectual understanding).
The unintelligible, alien quality of the symptom will be removed.
But for this to happen, a person's conception of themselves must also be transformed.
They must, for example, be able to think of themselves as' the sort of person who does have incestuous sexual desires', is prepared to avow them as' part ' of the self, and ceases to be so threatened by them.
Part of this process of change is a greater tolerance of certain aspects of oneself, and a lesser propensity for these to cause guilt or anxiety.
But, paradoxically perhaps, this greater tolerance may result in less fragmentation, more coherence, and less subjection to the forms of anxiety or guilt or compulsive behaviour that may once have been so deeply disturbing or threatening.
It seems to me that there is a sort of dialectic we need to preserve when thinking about autonomy.
There is no authentic or unified ' original ' self which can simply be recovered or discovered as the source of ' autonomous' actions.
But we are often faced with the experienced need to make ' sense ' of our lives and our feelings and goals, to relate confused fragments of ourselves into something that seems more coherent and of which we feel more in control.
We are often also faced, however, with the need to tolerate contradictions, not to strive for an illusory or impossible ideal, and to avoid self-punishing forms of anxiety, defence and guilt (and feminist guilt can be as punishing as any other kind).
The dialectic of autonomy is one in which a constant (but never static or final) search for control and coherence needs balancing against a realism and tolerance born out of efforts to understand ourselves (and others) better.
7
Luce Irigaray's Critique of Rationality
Margaret Whitford
This paper is about a feminist philosopher, Luce Irigaray, whose work raises particular difficulties for the Anglo-Saxon reader unfamiliar with the Continental tradition of philosophy.
I In attempting to elucidate, with reference to its context, one of the strands of her critique of Western metaphysics, I hope to make her work more accessible for discussion to a wider readership.
I must emphasise that this paper is only attempting to deal with one aspect of Irigaray's thought and will inevitably touch on issues that I won't have space to develop.
The work of Irigaray raises questions about the edifice of Western rationality.
I would like here to approach these questions indirectly, to clarify their import by means of a detour through the concept of the imaginary.
The term imaginary as a noun is current in French theoretical work, but not in English (except via Lacan, who gives the Imaginary, with a capital I, a major role in his theory).
Like its English cognate, imagination, however, it is rich in connotations and operates differently in the different conceptual frameworks of the different authors who use it (authors as varied as Sartre, Bachelard, Barthes, Lacan, Castoriadis, Althusser).
My view is that Anglo-American feminists have tended to assimilate, and then dismiss Irigaray's work too quickly, in part because the concept of the imaginary has not been closely examined.
Either the imaginary has been ignored altogether, in which case Irigaray is mistakenly described as a biological essentialist (Sayers, 1982, p. 131; 1986, pp. 42C8), or else it has been interpreted as purely and simply a Lacanian concept, in which case the conclusion is that Irigaray has misunderstood or misread Lacan, and has not taken on board the implications of his theory (see Mitchell and Rose, 1982, pp. 54 6; Rose, 1985, pp. 136, 140; Ragland-Sullivan, 1986, pp. 273C80).
