musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god


Is Philosophy gendered? I don’t mean in terms of the number of men who, until very recently, considered themselves the only able arbiters of the discipline. And I’m not sure I could even comment on whether being married could make a difference in the field one way or another. And yet…

I was an obstetrician for most of my adult life; I was also married for a lot of it and have children, but do I really understand how differently women must view the world? Not so much because of the cultural practices that disadvantaged them, that imprisoned them in childrearing and child-bearing roles, or that assumed their difference in some way limited the way they could evaluate things; but more about why they might invalidate the rules drawn up for them by men.

And yet, we are social creatures, village creatures, and seldom live apart from others. We depend on society for our basic needs, much as society depends on us for our contributions: solus, nihil sumus. So it seems surprising that many of us think of philosophy as a solo activity: deep thinking which requires, as none other than Virginia Woolf observed, ‘a room of one’s own’.

But, if true, surely this deep thinking may not be as accurate a reflection of the world at large as it might have been if the philosopher had been more engaged with those things the rest of us cannot avoid. Still, ideas are timeless, and should transcend the personal experience of the individual, however socially engaged they may find themselves. Isn’t that what wisdom -the foundation of philosophy- purports to analyse?

The twentieth century British philosopher, Mary Midgley wasn’t so sure, however. She thought that by missing out on close meaningful relationships in their personal lives, many philosophers were encouraged to think of philosophy itself in a particular way – as the opposite of intimate and relational: abstract and remote. In short, Midgley thought that forms of social detachment may foster forms of philosophical detachment.[i] The necessary detachment that apparently comes with being male…

Take Descartes as an example of a male approach to philosophy. ‘For Descartes, other people’s existence has to be inferred, and the inference is a most insecure one … Now I [Midgley] rather think that nobody who was playing a normal active part among other human beings could regard them like this. But what I am quite sure of is that for anybody living intimately with them as a genuine member of a family … their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own… the experiences of those caring for children, in particular, could help illuminate the extent to which we really are entangled with one another’s existences.’

Midgley points to the example of the so-called ‘problem of other minds’ –the epistemic problem of working out whether we can really know that anyone other than ourselves exists. Midgley argues that someone who has been pregnant, ie, had another someone living inside them, would never consider this an important question worthy of deep, philosophical contemplation. She wondered ‘whether they would have said the same if they [philosophers like Descartes] had been frequently pregnant and suckling, if they had been constantly faced with questions like, ‘What have you been eating to make him ill?’, constantly experiencing that strange physical sympathy between child and parent … if in a word they had got used to the idea that their bodies were by no means exclusively their own? That, I suggest, is typical human experience.’ 

Is the mind, in other words, ever really freed from its body? Midgley, even dared to suggest that  almost all the authoritative thinkers in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men who might never have thought in terms of social, or even bodily entanglement.

Bertrand Russell, (a frequently married male philosopher) on the other hand, felt that a good philosopher: ‘will see as God might see, without a here and now, without hopes and fears, without the trammels of customary beliefs and traditional prejudices, calmly, dispassionately, in the sole and exclusive desire for knowledge – knowledge as impersonal, as purely contemplative, as it is possible for man to attain.’ Hmm…

I hesitate to venture too deeply into the idea that knowledge might be situated, (‘standpoint epistemology’), as contrasted with the traditional approach to knowledge, but as a curious amateur in the field I find myself attracted by Midgley’s argument.

According to traditional epistemology, what can be said to ‘really’ exist must be objective – existing independently of a given knower or their body. But why shouldn’t knowledge be seen as socially entangled with our emotions, interests, relationships, background beliefs and bodies? And yet, in my admittedly naïve understanding of the field, I’m given to understand that until relatively recently the perspective of an embodied person has been unfamiliar to the philosophical tradition; indeed it seems to have been deemed an unphilosophical perspective.  So, is knowledge really only available to us once we’ve freed ourselves from our bodies?

It seems a difficult task to remain neutral and avoid being drawn into the whirlpool of feminist politics, but not only has knowledge changed over the centuries, so have ideas and the societies that fostered them. This does not negate the ideas offered by those who came before us, rather I think it adds to them, enriches them, expands their relevance in a world that sees itself in different clothes. Cogito ergo sum will not disappear from our wardrobe but it may find  that it, like in any marriage, shares space in the closet with the apparel of Cogitamus ergo sumus. I mean, we can all think, can’t we…?

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/for-mary-midgley-philosophy-must-be-entangled-in-daily-life?

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