HOW TO THINK LIKE A WOMAN: 4 Girls Philosophers Who Taught Me The way to Love the Lifetime of the Thoughts, by Regan Penaluna
To the sexist’s basic query, What do girls need?, we’d add a contemporary corollary: What do girls take into consideration? Do they brood concerning the web’s results on fiction, as one in all my graduate faculty classmates does? Or are they consumed with fear concerning the evils of the legal justice system, as one in all my finest mates is? Or are they intrigued by the connection between notion and data, as one in all my favourite professors is? From a short and fully unscientific survey of ladies I do know, I really feel snug concluding that there isn’t a single approach of “pondering like a girl” — besides insofar as most girls assume it’s irritating that they’re assumed to assume alike.
Regan Penaluna, the creator of “The way to Suppose Like a Girl: 4 Girls Philosophers Who Taught Me The way to Love the Lifetime of the Thoughts,” typically appears to agree that there isn’t a such factor as the feminine thoughts. She chafes on the suggestion that ladies are intrinsically caring and rejects the concept they’re naturally ill-suited to rational pursuits. It’s suspicious, then, that the primary level of connection among the many 4 thinkers she has chosen to put in writing about, or a minimum of the one which she stresses, is just that every is feminine.
In fact, “The way to Suppose Like a Girl” is greater than a resuscitation of early fashionable philosophers who’ve been unjustly excised from the canon due to their intercourse. It’s additionally an indictment of sexism in modern educational philosophy, in addition to a memoir. The weakest sections of the ebook observe Penaluna’s rocky path by graduate faculty at an unnamed establishment as she loses confidence in her skills, marries, divorces and abandons her area for a profession as a journalist, posing wispy rhetorical questions alongside the way in which. “May I be in love and proceed to construct independence?” she wonders within the wake of her failed relationship.
If the non-public reflections in “The way to Suppose Like a Girl” are sometimes mushy and maudlin, its portrait of philosophy’s misogyny is extra firmly wrought. At instances, Penaluna paints a fairly uncharitable and distorted image of the self-discipline. She claims that the pioneering early fashionable thinker Margaret Cavendish, the topic of a current renaissance, has largely been written out of historical past, and that mainstream philosophy focuses totally on Kant and his legacy, when in reality the traditional, medieval and early fashionable subfields are flourishing. However her basic lament rings true.
She opens her account by recalling a professor in her Ph.D. program who instructed his college students “to think about the likelihood that ladies weren’t as sensible as males.” Almost each girl within the area has encountered some model of this comment, if not from a professor or mentor, then from a colleague. The explanation that, as Penaluna notes, “there are fewer girls in senior positions in philosophy than in some other area within the humanities and in lots of the sciences as effectively” is that the talents that rely as virtues within the self-discipline have historically counted as demerits in a girl: Good philosophers are probing, combative and intellectually aggressive, whereas good girls, we’re informed, are demure, retiring and childlike. Most feminine philosophers will acknowledge with an intimate jolt the ache Penaluna experiences upon realizing that figures like Hegel and Aristotle would have regarded her as a servile helpmeet, unfit for the pains of pondering.
Enter, then, the formidable girls brave sufficient to tackle their detractors centuries earlier than the appearance of contemporary feminism. Penaluna pays homage to Mary Astell (1666-1731), who argued in favor of building an all-women’s school; Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659-1708), a pal (and someday love curiosity) of John Locke and an adamant defender of human company in a mechanistic universe (and feminine company in a patriarchal society); Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), finest identified of the 4, who audaciously advised that ladies may perceive their very own situation higher than male observers; and Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679?-1749), a playwright turned thinker who tried to reconcile “Locke’s empirical account of human understanding with the everlasting soul.”
These girls have strikingly related tales, however what, if something, unites their thought? We be taught an ideal deal concerning the oppression they confronted, which was after all appreciable, and little or no concerning the content material of their philosophies. What Penaluna does must say about their precise commitments is commonly shallow and cursory. Of Wollstonecraft’s prescient name for gender equality, she writes, “The feminist creativeness reveals that you’re not solely what you’re, but additionally what you might be.” Of Astell’s conception of autonomy, she notes, “For Astell and lots of different early fashionable philosophers, motive was important to freedom. To observe the instructions of another person was to be not actually free” — a comment too generic to offer us a lot sense of what was distinctive or influential about Astell’s strategy, or what the stakes of early fashionable debates is likely to be. On the one event when Penaluna delves extra deeply into the argumentative sediment, analyzing Masham’s assault on the French thinker Malebranche, she apologizes: “I’ll appear to be heading down the trail of an obscure Seventeenth-century debate.”
I want she had hurtled additional down that path, which could have revealed why Astell, Masham, Wollstonecraft and Cockburn belong collectively, not simply as girls, however as thinkers. As issues stand, nonetheless, Penaluna appears to have chosen them largely as a result of their predicament recollects her personal. She confesses as a lot. When she tells her adviser that she desires to give attention to early fashionable feminine thinkers in her dissertation, he asks whether or not she is concerned about “the concepts of those philosophers or the truth that they have been girls.” She replies, “Their concepts,” however reveals to us that “this wasn’t true. Nearly from the second I found these girls philosophers, I’d set out on a separate, extra private inquiry that had nothing to do with my dissertation. I thirsted to understand how they turned intellectuals and what obstacles they confronted as girls.”
The emphasis on identification over concepts is underscored in a chapter dedicated to feminine philosophers who’ve been oppressed all through historical past (a minimum of one in all whom, Woman Murasaki, was truly a novelist, the creator of “The Story of Genji,” not a thinker), together with a lot biographical coloration however subsequent to no dialogue of their work. Of the one feminine member of her dissertation committee, Penaluna writes, “Her space of analysis was solely completely different from my very own, but I used to be impressed by the truth that she was a sensible, profitable girl.” No additional details about the girl’s analysis seems within the ebook.
Normally, “The way to Suppose Like a Girl” incorporates quite a lot of agonizing about philosophy however little philosophy itself. Penaluna by no means explains why she loves the sector besides in probably the most generic phrases, so we by no means get any sense of what she stands to lose when she leaves. We’d assume it’s potential for a girl to cogitate exterior of the academy, if not inside it, and that public intellectualism presents a type of refuge, however the ebook, too, shies away from the enterprise of argument. Three of its chapters are capsule histories made up of brief anecdotes — one about sexist males within the historical past of philosophy, one about girls in romantic relationships with celebrated male philosophers, one about ignored feminine thinkers — from which no broader conclusions are drawn. The few hints at a idea don’t cohere. “What can we ignore about Aristotle to take him significantly, for his legacy to endure? What should we ignore in ourselves?” Penaluna asks. However should we ignore something? Is it actually so troublesome to understand that the identical individual can have each good and dangerous ideas concurrently, and that we will reject the latter?
Penaluna studies that the hurt she suffers when her professor asks if girls are intellectually inferior is that she begins to suspect that she “wasn’t a thinker in any case however fairly a girl thinker.” In lowering 4 wealthy philosophers to mere avatars of their demographic, she commits the identical offense. Ultimately, her identitarianism is so thoroughgoing that it involves resemble the very essentialism she got down to reject. Not as a girl, however as an individual, I feel this isn’t the right way to assume.
Becca Rothfeld is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Harvard and a contributing editor at The Level and Boston Overview. Her debut essay assortment, “All Issues Are Too Small,” is forthcoming.
HOW TO THINK LIKE A WOMAN: 4 Girls Philosophers Who Taught Me The way to Love the Lifetime of the Thoughts | By Regan Penaluna | 296 pp. | Grove Press | $28
Supply: NY Times