Tag Archives: Descartes

The Man of Reason: Part Three

Posted on by under Ideology, Philosophy

In the eighteenth century there took place a revaluation of the emotions which, in the previous century, as ‘the passions’, had been considered a disturbance to reason, because of the ‘mind’s’ union with the body. The emotions then were regarded as threats to the purity of reason, and they were to be transcended or ‘transformed by reason into higher modes of thought.’17 In the eighteenth century there was a defence of ‘the passions’ ‘as the well springs of action’.18 By the nineteenth century, in Romanticism, ‘passion’, ‘a motivating force in its own right’,19 represented a challenge to the domination of reason. This Romantic ‘exaltation’ of imagination and feeling resulted in the ‘pedestalising’ of women through Romantic love as the desired – again, leaving the Man of Reason intact. The dichotomy between reason and feeling was strengthened.

Although ‘the Man of Reason was created in, and largely in response to, savage times’, there is now a ‘decline in optimism about the eventual victory of reason…the eventual triumph of reason.’20 Lloyd notes that  the Man of Reason ‘himself’ poses a threat to humanity and that the reaction against reason in the nineteenth century has made it difficult to critically address current notions of rationality – for example, the value of intuition. Regarding this, she wrote favourably on the philosophy of Bergson and on Pirsig’s attempt in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ‘to get at the unity underlying “Classical” and “Romantic” thought styles’, which attempt ‘points to the possibility of an expansion of reason, rather than an abandoning of it.’21

Lloyd argues that a critique of the Man of Reason from a specifically feminist standpoint runs the risk of becoming ‘a catalogue of the atrocities he has perpetrated on women.’22 He is an ideal for both genders and has been maintained by both. The impoverishment of women with this sexual stereotype is accompanied by a less obvious impoverishment of men. Thus the critique of him as an ideal should be done with this in ‘mind’. ‘What is needed for the Man of Reason is realisation of his limitations as a human ideal, in the hope that men and women alike might come to enjoy a more human life, free of the sexual stereotypes that have evolved in his shadow.’23

Yet a spectre is haunting Lloyd’s essay…not the harbinger of a new understanding of reason and of a new ethics but the representative of stasis, of patriarchal control, of anti-life – what Plumwood considers the philosophy of death. Plato’s presence is everywhere in Lloyd’s essay – in the concepts she deals with and through the influence he and those who developed on his philosophy had on the work of those she analyses.

It is astonishing that she made no mention of him let alone include him in her analysis. Lloyd corrects this crucial omission in her book of the same title as her essay, published in 1984 (the essay was first published in 1979). The Man of Reason cannot be understood without reference to Platonism and Neoplatonism and this ‘male character ideal’ did not arise from the soil of seventeenth century philosophy – particularly (as Lloyd claimed) that of Descartes – but was a construct of Plato’s. Lloyd points to this in her book – ‘The maleness of the Man of Reason, I will try to show, is no superficial linguistic bias. It lies deep in our philosophical tradition’.24

Part three of nine/to be continued…

Notes

17. G. Lloyd, ‘The Man of Reason’, in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy. Eds., A. Garry and M. Pearsall. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989, 125 ↩

18.  Ibid. ↩

19. Ibid. ↩

20. Ibid. 126 ↩

21. Ibid. 127 ↩

22. Ibid. 127 ↩

23. Ibid. 127 ↩

24. G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason, ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy. London: Methuen, 1984, ix. The form and content of Plumwood’s analysis, though broader than Lloyd’s (in that she treats the mind/body dualism as one of a web of dualisms maintaining oppression, focusing on that of culture/nature), is very similar. On Plato she wrote: ‘It is difficult to overestimate the enduring influence of Plato’s thought…Elaborations of Platonic thought in the work of Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas and others formed the intellectual foundations of Christian doctrine, and of the dominant western intellectual and philosophical traditions of rationalism until the Enlightenment…(his philosophy) reaches its fullest development and distinctively modern form in the thought of Descartes and his successors…Plato thus foreshadows Descartes’ later denial of dependency on the senses and his treatment of the senses as sources of error’. V. Plumwood. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. op. cit. 88-91 ↩

The Man of Reason: Part Two

Posted on by under Ideology, Philosophy

Lloyd noted that the distinction between male/rational and female/non-rational dates to the development of ‘rationality’ in Greek philosophy, and towards this she cites Aristotle. She then cites Augustine who also denied to females the degree of rationality both Aristotle and he accorded to males. Touching briefly on the Renaissance, Lloyd arrives at her point of focus, the treatment of reason in the seventeenth century – essentially by Descartes and Spinoza.

A major point for Lloyd is Descartes’ attempt to contain reason in a method depending on deduction and intuition for attaining certainty. His equation between reason and reality, on the basis of a veracious God, gave reason a divine aspect. Lloyd noted that crucial to Descartes’ treatment of reason is its connection with his antithesis between ‘mind’ and matter. What existed previously as contrasts – intellect versus the emotions, reason versus imagination and ‘mind’ versus matter, now became polarisations of male (as transcendent) and female (to sustain him). ‘The stage is now set for the emergence of the Man of Reason as a male character ideal.’5

Lloyd argues that the ‘benefits’ of gaining control of one’s thoughts was fully set out in the Ethics of Spinoza who aspired to ‘nothing less than the attaining of eternity of the mind’.6 Spinoza believed ‘the passions’ should not be ignored but transformed from confused modes of perception into active ‘rational emotions’. ‘The ultimate horror for Spinoza’s Man of Reason is to be “womanish”…under the sway of passions, untransformed by reason.’7 He sought ‘detachment from the transient and…attachment to the unchanging’.8 Death has no sting for him. Lloyd regards this as ‘the ultimate glorification of reason in its ethical dimension.’9

She wrote that Spinoza’s emphasis on self-interest (through the aspiration to eternity of ‘mind’ which rises above unconnected, fragmentary ideas and a limited standpoint) anticipates the attitude in the eighteenth century towards ‘the passions’. This eternity of ‘mind’ is to be attained by “Scientia Intuitiva’ – a knowledge superior to reason. It ‘proceeds from an…idea of the absolute essence of the attributes of God.’10

Lloyd distinguished Spinoza’s form of thought from those of both Descartes, and that of the later nineteenth century ‘which saw reason as limited in contrast to the access to reality provided by the will or the imagination’,11 even though she notes that Descartes also had some awareness of ‘the limitations of reason’ with regard to his intuitions, which he intended to be ‘the fresh, spontaneous, unclouded apprehensions of a “mind” operating in accordance with its understanding of its own nature.’12 Lloyd writes that Descartes’ intuitions were bound by method and she uses that method to exemplify the Man of Reason’s conception of reason as the encapsulation of thought into artificial and discrete mental states, subject to a rigorous discipline – ‘it then becomes easy to mistake this artificial creation for the real nature of consciousness’13 which, quoting Leibniz, ‘comes from the continual beatings of innumerable waves’.14

So the Man of Reason stands as an ‘ideal of method, construed as expressing the true nature of the “mind”…this rationalist model still underlies our “rational” thought styles.’15 Intuition is currently considered to both stand in opposition to this and to be associated with specifically female thought processes. In excluding from reason that which is attributed to and thereby encouraged in the female, the female is excluded from power. Lloyd urges that ‘an awareness of the claims of “intuition” can, nonetheless, be part of a constructive assessment of the claims and the ideals of reason.’16

Part two of nine/to be continued…

Notes

5 G. Lloyd, ‘The Man of Reason’, in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, Eds., A. Garry and M. Pearsall. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989, 117

6 Ibid. 118

7 Ibid. 120

8 Ibid. 119

9 Ibid.120

10 Ibid. 122

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.123

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.124

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.