Hume and Aristotle on Women

Or, "How to think about great philosophers spouting embarrassing bullshit."

“The past,” L.P. Hartley wrote in his 1953 novel The Go-Between, “is a foreign country…”

1953 itself had long since been annexed by that foreign country when Stephen King wrote his book Hearts in Atlantis. The title comes from an extended metaphor about the past (by then the 1960s) as a kind of lost world. It’s not King’s best book, but it has its moments. There’s a scene that’s always stuck in my head where some of the characters end up in the emergency room of the hospital. A doctor comes out to meet them, smoking a cigarette, and the narrator breaks the fourth wall for a moment to note that, “In Atlantis even the doctors smoked.”

The full L.P. Hartley line is, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

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That’s at least as true of the history of philosophy as any other kind of history. One of the basic premises Hegel uses to motivate the idea of a World-Spirit is that there are, of course, such things as distinct “national characters.” (Paging Curtis Yarvin.) Descartes suggested that the pineal gland was the center of the soul’s interaction with the brain. Berkeley took it for granted that, as microscopes got better, we’d find out that amoebae had tiny sensory organs as complex as larger animals.

Bluntly, the standards of intellectual hygiene are worse in the past. You maybe don’t want to drink the water.

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I’ve been thinking about this since I happened to see a review by Andrea Falcon of Marguerite Deslauriers’s book Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics.

Does it surprise you, dear reader, that Aristotle had views on gender that don’t withstand twenty-first century scrutiny?

Probably not!

But the review makes for odd reading.

For example:

[T]he female meets the requirement for the essence which in the context of the theory of animal reproduction entails the capacity to reach the natural goal (telos) of producing a fertile residue (sperma as menses/katamenia). To the extent that it reaches this end, the female lacks nothing with respect to the male. What the female cannot do, due to its lack of natural heat, is to produce a fully concocted fertile residue (sperma as semen/gonê). In other words, both the male and the female participate in the natural goal of reproduction when this goal is described in terms of the capacity to produce a fertile residue. However, the female falls short of the male because it does not reach a subordinate natural goal (telos), which is the production of the purer kind of fertile residue (the semen/gonê). For Aristotle, this is the vehicle for the transmission of the form (eidos). The form ends up being transmitted only by the male because the male alone can produce semen. In the hylomorphic theory of reproduction advocated by Aristotle, the female can only provide the matter, not the form.

After a few more twists and turns in exploring Aristotle’s categories and distinctions:

The female turns out to be an inferior embodiment of the eidos which is nonetheless indispensable, and indeed good, for the perpetuation of the eidos via sexual reproduction.

How, though, to connect this account of biological sex differences with Aristotle’s belief in the Politics that women are best confined to the domestic sphere rather than participating in the governance of cities? There’s no obvious connection between an ability to produce the matter but not the form of new life and an inability to be an active citizen, and, Falco notes, “Aristotle is not as forthcoming as we would like him to be on this point.” But eventually she unpacks Deslauriers’s reading of how these two questions were connected in Aristotle’s worldview:

Recall that, at least for Aristotle, the female body is colder than the male body. But this lack of vital heat is now connected to a different degree of thumos.  Thumos is a non-rational kind of desire alongside appetitive desire (epithumia). The connection between the relative lack of thumos and the exclusion of women from the political sphere is not immediately obvious. But on the painstaking interpretation developed by Deslauriers, being more or less thumotic (i.e., having a higher or lower degree of thumos) does not have an impact on the ability to deliberate. Women can grasp what is just and what is good on their own, so they can engage in deliberation and figure out on their own what they ought to do in a given situation. But since women have a lower degree of thumos, they end up being less decisive and less forceful than men. So women should be ruled rather than rule not because they suffer from a moral or intellectual deficit but because they lack in the capacity for command and leadership.

This is, to stretch the Hart/King metaphor, a particularly remote part of the foreign country. The nearest currency exchange is hours away. There’s a Starbucks, but no one who works there speaks a word of your language.

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If you have even the faintest glimmer of belief in intellectual progress, this is all to be expected. On some level, it might even be reassuring.

Moral standards get more consistent over time as weird carveouts for particularly favored or disfavored groups are questioned. Empirical premises get less goofy as knowledge progresses. Even if there’s no metaphysical guarantee that the arc of the universe bends in these directions, progress clearly happens and it’s nice to be reminded of that.

Even so, there are times when these reminders of the foreignness of the past don’t go down so easily. Sometimes, an Atlantean author is making a a good and interesting argument about some subject that remains controversial in the twenty-first century, you’re reading not as an intellectual historian but as an interested party in an ongoing debate, and then the author goes and casually drops some assumption that’s as natural to him and as foreign to us as a white-coated doctor walking around a hospital with a lit cigarette.

Sometimes, this can be fun. Eighteenth-century philosophers, for example, make a lot more references to the possibility of space aliens than you might expect. Some of them seemed to expect that astronomy would reveal the existence of life on nearby planets any time now. Other times, it’s…well…embarrassing.

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Perhaps my favorite pre-Marxist philosopher is David Hume, and one of my favorite Hume essays is The Immortality of the Soul. Most of the essay is spent casting doubt on the idea of Heaven and Hell. He has numerous objections to the idea that a just God would set things up this way.

For one thing, Hume seems to think punishment is only justified if it serves some sort of purpose like keeping the public safe from crime. Just inflicting pain on a criminal for pain’s sake isn’t justice. Furthermore, he questions whether the creator of the universe would have the moral right to judge us in the first place:

Every effect implies a cause, which implies another, [and so on backwards] until we reach the first cause of all, which is God. Therefore, everything that happens is ordered to happen by him, [so that] nothing can be the object of his punishment or vengeance.

And even if we concede that God would have the moral right to punish us and a compelling reason to do so, Hume finds the binariness of Heaven and Hell absurd. In my favorite line, he says that if you went around the world trying to separate the righteous from the wicked to give the former “a good supper” and the latter a “thorough beating,” the more you found out about people the harder it would be to cleanly slot them into one category or the other. Most of us, he says, “float between vice and virtue,” neither clearly earning extreme reward nor clearly deserving extreme punishment.

And, of course, all of this just takes for granted that we have immortal souls in the first place. Hume is skeptical about that, too, mostly for straightforward empiricist reasons.

He’s willing to grant that we have souls and not just brains, but he doesn’t think that itself gets us very far. Someone like Descartes would tell you that souls are non-material and hence not subject to decay and decomposition like material things. But “non-material” just tells you what souls aren’t. It doesn’t tell you anything about what they are.

If you say souls are made of a special kind of soul-substance, then what are the properties of that substance? How are we supposed to know whether or not things made out of soul-stuff are subject to decay and decomposition? Everything with properties we can actually observe does decay and decompose. Maybe souls eventually break down into their component soul-parts, and these end up forming new souls.

You can say souls don’t have soul-parts, they’re simple, but then Hume will press you on how you could possibly know that. At the very least, it’s not clear why the “souls die with the body” hypothesis about this alleged different kind of metaphysical substance is any worse than Descartes’s “souls are immortal” assumption.

And, if your basic assumptions and worldview are anything like mine, you’ll nod along with just about all of this. But he also says:

On the theory that the soul is mortal, it is easy to explain why women’s abilities are less than men’s. It is because their domestic life requires no higher capacities of mind or body than they actually have. But this fact becomes absolutely insignificant—it vanishes—on the religious theory, according to which the two sexes have equally large tasks, so that their powers of reason and perseverance ought also to have been equal…

You probably shouldn’t be able to feel intense embarrassment on behalf of someone who’s been dead for centuries. But here we are.

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One of the reasons the Hume passage is more embarrassing than the Aristotle material above may just be that Hume lives closer to the border. It is, in a certain sense, more like spending time somewhere in Ontario that’s so similar to equivalent places in Michigan that it’s easy to forget you’re not in the United States, glancing at the prices on the menu, and having to remind yourself that these are Canadian dollars.

To even figure out why Aristotle thinks what he does about women and politics, you have to splash around a whole flooded basement of deeply alien assumptions. Hume just kind of casually takes it for granted that the “capacities of mind” are less extensive in women than in men. Presumably, it doesn’t occur to him to spell out an argument for this, because it’s something Everyone Knows.

And this kind of example lies in a particularly uncomfortable gray area between the foreign and the familiar. The casual assumption that everyone would think this way has become alien. (Progress!) The thought itself hasn’t receded nearly far enough into the historical rearview for us to just be, like, confused about the idea that someone would think it. Generally speaking, these days we know better, except that maybe not all of us do, and certainly we don’t all act like we know better all the time. So seeing someone making a series of otherwise very smart (and still-controversial) observations and then dropping this particular turd in the punch bowl is especially unpleasant.

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The problem is that, in the most important sense, this is not in fact like doing currency translations in your head or remembering which side of the road to drive on. There’s no terribly compelling normative reason that it’s better to drive on the right or the left as long as everyone is following the same rule to minimize crashes. It’s just different. In this case, the premise Hume is helping himself to without a second thought is just worse.

I think about this every time I assign this particular essay in a class. I often feel a moment of hesitation before putting it on the syllabus, not because I think it’s wrong or bad to assign essays that contain sentiments like these but because I briefly wonder whether this is something I actually feel like setting aside a couple minutes to talk about in class. I always end up assigning it anyway, in part because I do see some educational value in those couple of minutes.

Because if you’re at all reflective about this, what should really strike you here is that this is David Hume saying this. He’s right up there with Aristotle and Kant and Marx and Plato as one of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy. And if even he took for granted that premise about the general intellectual inferiority of women because that kind of thing was being dumped into the cultural drinking water in his time and place, what kind of egregiously stupid shit are the rest of us carrying around in our heads?