Metaphysics

Novy SP08

Are there women, really?

Beauvoir: “Woman as Other” from The Second Sex

 

She is defined & differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other

 

General Theory

  1. Two fundamental & irreducible dimensions to human existence
    1. Facticity
    2. Transcendence
  2. It is an illusion that we are purely one or the other
    1. To accept the illusion is to treat oneself as an object rather than a subject;
    2. i.e., to deny one’s self-responsibility
  3. Basic existential claim: self-responsibility is crucial to our humanity
    1. Self-responsibility is both a social privilege and an individual achievement
    2. Some groups have been excluded from self-surpassing projects
    3. As such their members are seen not to count as fully human
    4. Such exclusion is the essence of oppression

 

If we are to gain understanding, how are we to pose the question “What is a woman?”

  1. Who best to answer: Men, Women, Angels, Hermaphrodites?
    1. Only a woman have the facticity of actually being a woman
    2. Some lucky women actually have full human status
    3. Only women can recognize what it means to a human being to be a woman
  2. How can a human being in a woman’s situation attain fulfillment?
    1. The only public good is the assurance of ever-expanding private good (i.e., liberty)
    2. Liberty is the ability to engage in freely chosen projects
    3. So, the pursuit of ever expansive knowledge is the only way to judge the good
    4. Denial of this pursuit is the definition of oppression

 

What is the ontological status of “woman”?

  1. “Woman” is determined

                                                               i.      Not by Biology

                                                             ii.      Not by an “Eternal Feminine” essence

                                                            iii.      Not by Nominalism

                                                            iv.      But rather by Some Other Thing

  1. Some Other Thing
    1. “Woman:” a particular socio-cultural construct categorizing that class of human beings who just happen to have female bodies
  2. How this Some Other Thing came to be
    1. There is an innate and necessary polarized dynamic to human understanding
    2. Dominant side is both the positive pole and the neutral – i.e., the norm
    3. A Subject requires an Object/ Other for self-definition

 

Woman as “Pure Otherness”

  1. Submission didn’t occur, rather Otherness seems to have been absolute in our history
    1. Women are complicit in their Otherness
    2. They have not “authentically assumed a subjective attitude”
    3. Woman have failed to claim Subject status due to lack of resources, necessary bond to men (dependence), and benefits of the gilded cage
  2. Unlike other Others, women have a special problem: Mitsein (“Being-with”)

 

Once more into the “Ship of Theseus” breach

  1. Fundamental question: What are the appropriate identity-conferring features of things?