Philosophical Conceptions of Femaleness in Aristotelian and Platonic Epistemology

It is not by accident that Plato's work may be seen as both a starting point for what eventually became epistemological theory as well as a starting point for the construction of gender identity in what eventually became a critique of the received epistemic construction(s). The relationship between epistemic developments in western thought and particular constructions of femaleness can be called systematic; systematic in the sense that both epistemology and gender identity belong to complimentary characterizations throughout their development. Feminist critics of epistemology can point to a particular conception of what it means to know something (for instance, 'S knows that p' means S uses Reason to know the form 'P') and show that it motivates or is complimentary to a particular conception of what it means to be a woman (for instance, 'S is a woman' means S is identified with an opposition to Reason, or S is identified with that which is opposed to knowledge, the sensational, et cetera).

In what follows I will discuss the relative differences between Platonic and Aristotelian epistemology, especially with respect to the particular concept of femaleness implicit in each. I will also examine what could be called a contemporary example of femaleness that meshes well with the construction of femaleness in Platonic epistemology, and will explain its import in Platonic terms. Lastly, I will discuss the relative import of each epistemology theory, and why it is that Aristotle's theory allows for the possibility of the 'woman as object' theme prevalent in contemporary sex culture. My conclusions will be driven mostly by standard philosophical interpretations of Plato's epistemology and Aristotle's epistemology. That said, I don't presuppose that "Plato actually thought this or that"--when I refer to Plato's epistemology, or what Plato makes possible, I mean only the interpretation which we happen to take as 'the standard', the one we're taught in 100-level philosophy courses.

In other matters, there are significant obstacles when one goes about trying to draw a sharp boundary that is meant to represent a particular historical-ideological development. Here though, I think that the systematic and (thus) complimentary constructions of epistemic conditions and female identity go towards removing some of these difficulties if not only because wherever one chooses to begin a discussion of "where the received epistemological view came from" one correspondingly begins a discussion of "where the received femaleness view came from": the somewhat arbitrary method for starting with a discussion of Plato over say, the Sophists does nothing to affect Platonic epistemology's relationship with a particular construction of femaleness. In linguistic terms, they are necessarily coextensive; that is, they do not refer to the same thing: e.g., it is not the case that where one points to the non-knower in Platonic epistemology is also where one points to a particular female identity it motivates as a negation of the conditions for knowledge. It is the case though that by implication, one can systematically go from a particular epistemological theory to a particular identification of femaleness, and in that way they are very much part of the same grammar.

The received view on Plato's epistemology can be characterized in more or less simple terms via the following stipulations: 1) knowledge requires a coherence between form and mind: only minds, characterized by their use in Reason, can come to know Forms, ideas that represent the essence of particulars; 2) rationality is predicable of minds only, and since minds can only know forms, the world of matter and objects is simply essentially irrelevant to epistemology. As Genevieve Lloyd describes, Plato's epistemology is significant because it identifies rationality with the world of the forms, an identity that thinkers before him did not make (i.e., the Pythagoreans saw everything as a mixture between form and matter, although certainly there was a distinction between the extent to which maleness represented the determinate): "Plato recast the idea of the world as mind-imbued in terms of the form-matter distinction; it was only in respect of form that that the world was rational." (Lloyd, 44) Couple these characterizations with Plato's writings in the Timaeus, where "Plato compared the role of limiting form to that of the father, and the role of indefinite matter to the mother" (Lloyd, 43) and by implication, femaleness is characterized as that which is opposed to the use of reason (since she is relegated to the world of matter), and therefore is not in any epistemic situation at all: that which is not in the use of reason, and that cannot form ideas the objects of which are forms, cannot properly be said to be an epistemic subject at all.

The correspondence between male/form and female/matter originating in Plato's work continues in contemporary discourses, in the way we think and grasp the world, and in the way our explanations express how we use certain terms. Cognitive psychology is particularly expressive of the sense in which male thinking is opposed to female thinking in terms of innateness: here the sense of innateness meshes well with the sense of the forms as Plato intended them. David Books, in "The Gender Gap at School," recently observed that

"Researchers in Britain asked 400 accomplished women and 500 accomplished men to name their favorite novels. The men preferred novels written by men, often revolving around loneliness and alienation. Camus's "The Stranger," Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" and Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" topped the male list. The women leaned toward books written by women. The women's books described relationships and are a lot better than the books the men chose. The top six women's books were "Jane Eyre," "Wuthering Heights," "The Handmaid's Tale," "Middlemarch," "Pride and Prejudice" and "Beloved."

This may be an empirical fact in the most basic sense, but Books' explanation is more noteworthy for its emphasis on innate gender differences in the cognition of emotion (think: the connectedness between the emotional and the sensational, and the dubiousness of sense experience in Plato as opposed to the certainty and objectivity of knowledge of the forms!):

"There are a couple of reasons why the two lists might diverge so starkly. It could be men are insensitive dolts who don't appreciate subtle human connections and good literature. Or, it could be that the part of the brain where men experience negative emotion, the amygdala, is not well connected to the part of the brain where verbal processing happens, whereas the part of the brain where women experience negative emotion, the cerebral cortex, is well connected."

The explanation can be recast in Platonic terms: men read about characters who are detached and lonely because men are not sensitive to the emotional, whereas women read about people like Jane Austin because their cognition is characterized by their innate proximity to the experience of emotion. Here the opposition between emotion and the use of language more or less fits in the same family as the opposition between the sensible (remember, the objects of sensation are matter for Plato) and Ideas or objective knowledge (remember, the objects of knowledge are the forms).

But the particular relationship described above between the knower and the accompanying notion of femaleness differs significantly from Aristotle, despite the fact that Aristotle was Plato's teacher. Here, as Lloyd describes, the expression of the "metaphor of domination" (Lloyd, 44) is constructed in a different way: especially as one considers the import of Platonic epistemology as distinct from the sort of epistemic backdrop contemporary science has (going back to Newton and Galileo). Aristotle's criticism of the Platonic forms was realized in a reduction of the transcendental character of the forms (for Plato, knowledge of the forms required a sort of transcendence over the matter in which particulars could be said to "resemble" forms). The chief concern for Aristotle was that the epistemic situation of the Platonic knower necessitated an ontological dualism between mind (as the organ of reason) and body (as the organ of the sensible). Whereas the dualism in Plato's theory was cast in a correspondence between what is known and what is (or, between epistemology and metaphysics), "in Aristotle's own system, a dualism remained [only] between what is sensed and what is grasped by Reason. But it no longer coincided with a distinction between changeable, created material things, and uncreated, timeless, non-material forms." (Lloyd, 45) That is, only in the faculties one uses to know/understand things is there an opposition: there cannot be a corresponding opposition in the objects themselves since knowledge of the forms requires particular expressions of the forms in discrete matter. This leads to the possibility of a different conception of femaleness, and a different way of expressing "the metaphor of domination," one that was actualized in Bacon's epistemology (and the first mark of logical empiricism).

Aristotle's closing of the metaphysical gap between form and matter (while retaining the epistemic gap between how the two are known) advances the 'women as object' theme prevalent in contemporary sex culture. Whereas Platonic epistemology is completely detached from the conceivability of a female knower (since she is identified with matter, and what is matter cannot be what is knowable), in Aristotle it is necessary that one uses his senses to dominate the matter in which particular forms are expressed. This amounts to a rigorous study of the thing one wants to know, a rigorous study characterized by the same objectivist attitude prevalent in Platonic epistemology, although motivated in a different way (motivated by the closing of the gap between the realm of change and the realm of unchanged).

Works Cited

Brooks, David. "The Gender Gap at School". http://docs.google.com/Doc.aspx?id=ajcm4hmcdchf_bbkj252ndt3dz. June 11, 2006

Lloyd, Genevieve. The Man of Reason: Male and Female In Western Philosophy. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.