Women and Philosophy
I just made this ultra-long comment to a friend on Facebook, and it's important enough to me that I decided to post it here.
My friend had linked this blog.
Normally when type is too small and faint for me to read online, I can just embiggen the page using the browser. This blog is protected against that, so the only way I could read a post was by copying and pasting it into a word document. A pain! Also, there is no way to contact the people making the posts or to leave a comment complaining about the effect on my aging, female, philosophy-major eyes. This seems, somehow, like a metaphor for part of what I feel about philosophy. (A) philosophers should know better than to make a blog that behaves like this (QED: the authors are failing as philosophers) and (B) the whole thing is unreachable and beyond me.
Since of the 3 philosophers I know well, 2 are among the kindest men I've ever known, who truly saved the possibility of an intellectual life for me and promoted me very strongly, getting me into 2 elite grad programs and still speaking of me as "the best student they ever had," and the third is a woman, I do have slightly different perspective. Philosophy is isolated within the humanities. I am interested in reading the critiques, have serious reservations about the discipline as it exists now, and think some major adjustments (possibly impossible) are needed to allow it to contribute usefully to the humanities. However, in the absence of actually being able to read the damn blog, I feel a bit guarded.
I am partly sad about my shortcomings and failures as a student/scholar because they prevented me from doing anything to help integrate philosophy better with what is done in English and affiliated disciplines, which was one of my ambitions when I first started at UCB and still exists in fantasies of my alternate life (which includes a set of 3 philosophical essays, one on "rigor," one on Marxism in the humanities, and one on the purpose of literature). I had reasons for leaving philosophy, though, that went very deep. It wasn't just "not right for me" - there is something wrong with philosophy; I do believe that. And I was aware during my flirtation with going into the field that there were departments where women found it tough going, and it depressed the hell out of me. I can see where it could easily be intolerable.
At the same time, though, there were ways in which I did not meet the gender standard for women that made me feel like I was being targeted by sexism *from women* who didn't like philosophy. I *did* like to argue; I wanted to learn to do it in a way that was safe and sane. I still feel like that magic moment when I was an undergraduate philosophy major was the last and only time I was "OK" in the academic world. It's not because I didn't do well later. I got praised for "brilliance" much more after I'd been in English for a while. But it didn't feel real. No one called me "brilliant" in philosophy (the preferred term is "very smart," which seems a lot more reasonable. I ♥ reason!). But no one made me feel like there was something fundamentally wrong with me, either. Which, since there *are* things fundamentally wrong with me, may not be a positive reflection on the field. But I do feel like there is a feminist case to be made for me in that situation. It was a home for my version of my gender. The men weren't manly and I wasn't womanly, and it was a kind of freedom.
Wait, I have another final point, it seems. Philosophy has suffered from a lot of things, some of which have also affected the rest of the humanities, like hyper-competitiveness (due to the stupid structure and economy of our education system when viewed as a whole). Also the move to ever greater levels of specialization, and the consequent strong split between the humanities and the natural sciences. Philosophy is way older than that divide, and it didn't have a way to handle it. Its initial instinct to fetishize science did not serve it well institutionally or spiritually. But that doesn't mean that the Socratic style of philosophy doesn't have an continuing contribution to make.
Note: I now note that yes, I can make it bigger - must have been a browser glitch. So those comments (the "QED" was ironic, anyway) are obsolete, and I can now actually read what I already nominally responded to. Please do treat the "response" as only nominal; what I said about philosophy and my experience is about those two topics and not about the blog. I am eager to see (now that I can see) what the blog is up to.
This entry was originally posted at http://idlerat.dreamwidth.org/232887.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
My friend had linked this blog.
Normally when type is too small and faint for me to read online, I can just embiggen the page using the browser. This blog is protected against that, so the only way I could read a post was by copying and pasting it into a word document. A pain! Also, there is no way to contact the people making the posts or to leave a comment complaining about the effect on my aging, female, philosophy-major eyes. This seems, somehow, like a metaphor for part of what I feel about philosophy. (A) philosophers should know better than to make a blog that behaves like this (QED: the authors are failing as philosophers) and (B) the whole thing is unreachable and beyond me.
Since of the 3 philosophers I know well, 2 are among the kindest men I've ever known, who truly saved the possibility of an intellectual life for me and promoted me very strongly, getting me into 2 elite grad programs and still speaking of me as "the best student they ever had," and the third is a woman, I do have slightly different perspective. Philosophy is isolated within the humanities. I am interested in reading the critiques, have serious reservations about the discipline as it exists now, and think some major adjustments (possibly impossible) are needed to allow it to contribute usefully to the humanities. However, in the absence of actually being able to read the damn blog, I feel a bit guarded.
I am partly sad about my shortcomings and failures as a student/scholar because they prevented me from doing anything to help integrate philosophy better with what is done in English and affiliated disciplines, which was one of my ambitions when I first started at UCB and still exists in fantasies of my alternate life (which includes a set of 3 philosophical essays, one on "rigor," one on Marxism in the humanities, and one on the purpose of literature). I had reasons for leaving philosophy, though, that went very deep. It wasn't just "not right for me" - there is something wrong with philosophy; I do believe that. And I was aware during my flirtation with going into the field that there were departments where women found it tough going, and it depressed the hell out of me. I can see where it could easily be intolerable.
At the same time, though, there were ways in which I did not meet the gender standard for women that made me feel like I was being targeted by sexism *from women* who didn't like philosophy. I *did* like to argue; I wanted to learn to do it in a way that was safe and sane. I still feel like that magic moment when I was an undergraduate philosophy major was the last and only time I was "OK" in the academic world. It's not because I didn't do well later. I got praised for "brilliance" much more after I'd been in English for a while. But it didn't feel real. No one called me "brilliant" in philosophy (the preferred term is "very smart," which seems a lot more reasonable. I ♥ reason!). But no one made me feel like there was something fundamentally wrong with me, either. Which, since there *are* things fundamentally wrong with me, may not be a positive reflection on the field. But I do feel like there is a feminist case to be made for me in that situation. It was a home for my version of my gender. The men weren't manly and I wasn't womanly, and it was a kind of freedom.
Wait, I have another final point, it seems. Philosophy has suffered from a lot of things, some of which have also affected the rest of the humanities, like hyper-competitiveness (due to the stupid structure and economy of our education system when viewed as a whole). Also the move to ever greater levels of specialization, and the consequent strong split between the humanities and the natural sciences. Philosophy is way older than that divide, and it didn't have a way to handle it. Its initial instinct to fetishize science did not serve it well institutionally or spiritually. But that doesn't mean that the Socratic style of philosophy doesn't have an continuing contribution to make.
Note: I now note that yes, I can make it bigger - must have been a browser glitch. So those comments (the "QED" was ironic, anyway) are obsolete, and I can now actually read what I already nominally responded to. Please do treat the "response" as only nominal; what I said about philosophy and my experience is about those two topics and not about the blog. I am eager to see (now that I can see) what the blog is up to.
This entry was originally posted at http://idlerat.dreamwidth.org/232887.html. Please comment there using OpenID.