Reason as Intelligibility
A Response to Phyllis Rooney's (Oakland University), "Gendered Reason", from Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Summer 1991.
In her essay “Gendered Reason: Sex Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason”, Phyllis Rooney calls the meaning and usage of ‘reason’ into question. She shows that it has no perennial definition, and that its main characteristic across history and culture has been its association with masculinity, in opposition to traits traditionally considered feminine such as emotionality. But I would like to propose that ‘reason’ has never been defined as a set of specifically masculine traits, but to the contrary that concepts of masculinity have conformed to accommodate ‘reason’ – which is in fact strictly a matter of the social roles that men have traditionally assumed.
Feminist philosophers including Rooney have argued that there are cultural biases which inform scientific hypotheses, and can predispose methods to certain results. This argument is crucial to assessing the degree of relevancy of sex to the historical conception of reason; so the discussion of an illustrative example of this point will serve as the beginning of my argument. Many experiments have been conducted on the relative performance of boys to girls on mathematics and verbal skills tests, and they tend to show that boys are the superior mathematicians, while girls are the superior linguists. The cultural bias in these experiments lies in the fact that their resultant data are taken to show that boys and girls have different scholastic strengths because of the physiological features that distinguish one group from the other – that is, strictly because of their sex. Feminist philosophers suggest that many other features of the experiment subjects have to be correlated to scores in order to isolate the features of the subjects that actually make them stronger mathematicians or linguists. They go as far as to claim that even if boy-girl test score correlations are highly consistent, that it may be the regularity of operative social factors that is responsible rather than physiology. Clearly the feminist suggestion is valid, but determining exactly which features need to be correlated is difficult; every even potentially relevant feature seems to deserve correlation (and of course to generate an exhaustive list of every relevant feature would be very difficult, if not impossible), and it seems profoundly problematic that cultural biases will more than likely inform which features are ultimately considered relevant. So the question is raised as to whether it is even possible to truly isolate the features that make people better at mathematics or linguistics, and whether physiological sex plays any role in this whatever.
In the grand scheme of things, whether boys are inherently better at math than girls is probably fairly unimportant. But the fact that it may not be possible to confirm whether sex relates to specific scholastic aptitudes introduces new difficulty for all of science, as it simultaneously makes the complexity of every similarly-oriented scientific pursuit more obvious and more puzzling. In a very direct way, it evidences the difficulty of making statements about either sex specifically – beyond, of course, “males have penises, females have vaginas” (and some feminist philosophers would surely take issue with even this).
This difficulty is important because it affects how I formulate my meaning for ‘reason’ in the light of these pertinent feminist considerations. I am certainly not capable of making any categorical statements about males or females, but I am still interested in what it means that reason has always been associated with masculinity, and how I am to interpret this historical connection. And most philosophers are probably in the same boat; I imagine that we would all still like to talk about reason, or at least use the word, and that most of us have not – and probably cannot – come to any hard-and-fast philosophical conclusions about the particular roles of sex and external factors in cognition, or how to scientifically investigate them. So it appears that to talk about reason will require some presumption. The question is, which presumption to make? It seems that to presume that the scientific method has proved that there are inherent differences in the male and female brains that regulate cognitive abilities and tendencies entirely would be absurd. This presumption would direct me to investigate all of the fundamental differences between the male and female brains, in order to identify which features are ‘masculine’ and therefore determine a conclusive meaning for reason. The obvious alternative to this presumption is equally extreme, but slightly less absurd: that one’s sex has no role in determining cognitive abilities, and therefore that if boys and girls perform differently on standardized tests that this is totally a result of distinct social conditionings. To reiterate one of my central points, the truth of how sex affects cognitive abilities and tendencies is somewhere in between these extremes – but precisely where in between is not a matter accessible to me.
So I will make the slightly less absurd presumption. And as this presumption is to be the ground for my understanding of reason, the hazards of adopting it directly imply the potential aspects of reason that my meaning will ignore. So what are these hazards? I can only think of one. The main hazard is that my meaning for reason might be too general; the cognitive tendencies that are fundamentally reasonable might be more specific than my meaning will propose. This is because there may be distinct features of male cognition that can more aptly be called ‘reasonable’ than those for which strictly social roles and other external factors can account. This possibility does not seem terribly dangerous; of course historical users of the term ‘reason’ did not know which of these features might be distinctly masculine, if they were even aware of them. It is certain that most of them believed that these inherent features exist, and furthermore that the vast majority of the features that distinguish men from women, males from females, are inherent; Rooney sufficiently demonstrated this in “Gendered Reason” with citations of Aristotle, Philo, and Locke. And these facts only buttress the defense for my approach to the problem of what reason is, and how to think of it. Because if the historical user based his understanding of reason on what he observed in his environment, without the science and technology to thoroughly investigate sex differences (hence his belief in inherent differences), then it seems probable that these observed differences were significantly – if not primarily – the products of social roles and other external factors.
I will try to explain how this is true without employing any misleading details. In most historically patriarchal Western societies, the role of the female had been fairly limited until more recent times. The good wife was subjugated to the almost entirely domestic existence revolving around tending her children, her husband, and her physical home. Her matters were her business exclusively, and only affected the people who lived under her roof. To her husband, a social entity and an agent of history, the good wife had many of the same traits as every other good wife, and assumed an almost identical social role; so it seemed only natural to identify women by this role, and therefore to (generally) indentify archetypically-female traits and characteristics as inherently-female traits and characteristics. But what about these apparently inherent female traits have to do with reason? I return to the point that the good wife’s matters were her business. A dualistic characterization of the traditional patriarchal Western social scheme realizes the inherently feminine to be strictly private, from which if follows that what is masculine, opposing feminine privacy, is ‘publicity’ – a better word for which might be ‘commonness’. Whereas a woman’s interests were all exclusively hers, a man’s interests were also the interests of other people – mostly his business associates and peers, but also just socially-concerned members of his patriarchal society. If it is indeed the case that historically there has been this dualistic characterization of the differences between men and women (which, again, Rooney suggests with textual evidence, as do many other feminist philosophers), then it becomes clear that what has traditionally been demanded of men, based on the feature of their social role that there is public interest in their affairs, is intelligibility. Unlike the women of their times, these men had to think such that the products of their thought made sense to other people; so this intelligibility that was inherent to the traditionally masculine social role became identified as an inherently masculine trait.
It seems reasonable to conclude from these considerations that it was the public character of the male social role in the historical Western patriarchal tradition that realized reason as a male trait. This would mean that ‘reason’ is not an inherently sexist concept, mobilized for the oppression of women, but rather a concept essential to discourse that has been polarized by sexist societies. If it is agreeable to roughly equate ‘reasonability’ with ‘intelligibility’, then it should be very clear that the contemporary philosopher’s relationship to reason is basic; Rooney’s concern about how to think about reason as something distinct from masculine tendency should be, for the most part, resolved.
I hope that this essay is fairly clear, I figured that you wouldn't have to have read Rooney's essay to understand where I am coming from. If you need any clarification on it (or on my essay, for that matter), feel free to contact me! I appreciate all constructive commentary and criticism!