The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast
A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog
This episode will feature Azzurra Crispino, whom you might recall from our Kant on epistemology episode. We're reading two works that were significant for the development of her interest in feminist philosophy:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland
Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice
[…] preparation for the feminism discussion, I decided to reconfigure my iPod so as to listen only to female artists from the moment we […]
[…] Featuring the return of Seth and guest podcaster Azzurra Crispino, whom you might recall from our Kant epistemology episode. We wanted this to be an introduction to feminist philosophy, and so talk a bit about exploitation and whether heterosexual sex is inherently oppressive, and other fun topics, but mostly it's just a discussion of two books. But they're good ones! Read more about the topic. […]
[…] Mark, Seth, and Dylan are joined by Azzurra Crispino. We wanted this to be an introduction to feminist philosophy, and so talk a bit about exploitation and whether heterosexual sex is inherently oppressive, and other fun topics, but mostly it's just a discussion of two books. But they're good ones! Read more about the topic. […]
Will the original three be back together for this podcast? By my count it’s been six (?) episodes since you were all together, there’s no replacement for that kind of chemistry!
Seth was on the feminism one (we recorded it Sunday night), as was Dylan. Both Seth and Wes will be on the one after that, with a different guest, and the one after that (on the new atheists) is supposed to feature me, Seth, Wes, and Dylan. Seth had personal life changes going on for a few months but is back with us for the foreseeable future. Will either Seth or Wes blog soon? I can only harass them…
Feminists? Where’s Fouccault, Sartre, or Deleuze and his Anti-Oedipus book?
Patience, sir!
This one is one we’ve had planned for over a year; Azzurra pushed it back a couple times. After that, we’ll be fulfilling our atheism-related obligations.
I’m extremely tempted to just spill the rest of the tentative schedule but I’ll restrain myself. Sartre will certainly be w/in the next 5 episodes; both he and Foucault were planned for last winter, but we decided we needed a break from continental after Heidegger and Hegel. Don’t hold your breath for Deleuze.
If you’ve covered Nietzsche and Freud, I’d think Deleuze would be a natural corollary philosopher, especially considering his opus, Anti-Oedipus, is generally seen as a sequel to Nietzche’s The Antichrist.
I’m stoked on the Sarte episode, and whatever aspect of his work you guys focus on will be awesome for sure, but if, I may be so bold as to suggest something, I hope you focus on his idea of Freedom. You’ve brought it up a few times before so I thought it would be cool to hear his notion fleshed out into full detail.
We’ll be doing Transcendence of the Ego to more or less continue the discussion of the self from the Hegel episodes. It’s been long enough since I read that that I don’t remember how much, if at all, that gets into the freedom discussion.
However, I think Sartre definitely deserves more than one episode, and given how long we’ve built up for this, it’s possible that we’ll do more than one on him in quick succession to get incorporate either one of his more overtly existentialist works (e.g. “Existentialism is a Humanism,” a pretty easy essay) or possibly delve a bit into Being and Nothingness, comparably to to how we approached Heidegger. I think we’ll have to see how the first discussion goes to see how to proceed.
“the absence of outsiders for thousands of years that might threaten the society”
Haaha.
It reminds me of something I’ve been wondering about -bothered about-for awhile. To what extent is multiculturalism and pluralism, which is championed by the left/progressives/liberals so much so that it is considered central by many to being “on the left”, actually in direct conflict with left-wing politics? Could word this a bit differently, but you get the gist. Working class people of any country tend NOT to be very pro-immigrant and in love with cultural diversity. To illustrate, here are the most progressive countries on the face of the Earth and “radical socialists” by our wonderful Republican wing-nut party along with links to disturbing articles on man’s seemingly universal intolerance of “others”:
Austria 95.1 % White
Belgium 97% white
Denmark 97% White
Finland 99.8% White
France 92.3% White
Germany 91.5 % white
Ireland 95% white
Luxembourg 94.8% White
Netherlands 90.5% white
Norway 98% white
Spain 95% White
Sweden 98%
White United Kingdom 92% White
Japan 98.5% racially Japaneses
Korea 98% racially Korean
Australia 92% white.
Canada 87% white, 2.01% black, >1% latino – Most non whites live in
Ontario, Toronto, and Vancouver.
United States 65% white, 12.5% black, 15% latino
Diversity is Wunderbar:
France (92.3%) is having a crisis of Identity.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n…
Germany (91.5) is having a crisis of Identity.
http://eurokulture.missouri.ed… The Racist, anti-Muslim, Anti-Jew,
anti-immigrant book “Germany Does Itself In”, (English translation) is
a best seller. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl… Merkel Germany’s
Prime Minister: “Multiculturalism is a failure”.
Illegal Mexican Latino Immigrants find Canada to be more racist as the
U$ of AmeriKKKa
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/…
http://www.canada.com/globaltv…
“Liberal, Progressive” US cities are more segregated now than the
Pre-Civil Rights South. http://www.alternet.org/world/…
Australia hates Aboriginals http://www.survivalinternation…
Australia murders refuges http://www.alternet.org/world/…
Most percentages come from the CIA World Fact Book
https://www.cia.gov/library/pu…
To clarify: Re. “Herland,” what I had in mind was more that there are in Gilman’s scenario no other accessible countries to fight. Still, the reaction of the society to the incursion of the three male explorers who are the protagonists of the novel (keeping them isolated for a long time) shows that she approves of some form of xenophobia. …Though the women are so thoroughly educated that she’s not afraid of them getting “infected” by foreign ideas; rather, they’re open to consideration of anything new, because they’ve been trained to handle it: to rationally assimilate anything that improves their situation and reject anything that doesn’t. For such people, there wouldn’t be any such thing as dangerous ideas. But yeah, there’s nothing in Gilman’s turn-of-the-previous-century viewpoint that I know of that would make me think she’d see the need for ethnic diversity, and like her affection for eugenics, it makes her pretty dated.
Yes, I wasn’t paying attention! I’m so interested in this issue I bring up. I’d be interested in an episode or two dealing with the identity politics, so-called. Maybe whenever you deal with Foucault and more recent French stuff in general. I’m interested in why the left is a near total failure at least when it comes to more ‘traditional’ issues, like the working class getting ripped off. Anyway. In philosophy it is important to pay attention to what is on the page!
Hmmm. Co-operation, inclusion and non-seperation by seperating from, excluding and not co-operating with… the other sex.
When I first found your podcast I was pretty interested- I listened to episode 0 while I clicked on each podcast’s description to figure out which to download.
When I saw the subject line for #42, I was interested until I saw the specific topics for the episode. Herland is far worse than “dated” and “unconvincing but fun to read” and generally worthwhile.
Herland belongs on an episode like:
-The 5 Great Evilly Stupid Utopias in the History of Western Thought
-Snivelization and its Mz.-contents
-Ten Pounds of Crap in a Five Pound Handbag: Academic Feminism and the Feces that they Championed into the 90’s
-Screeching to the Choir: A Study on Confirmation Bias
But calling it more-or-less worthwhile in the study of feminism…..
well, that’s just a good litmus test of your podcast and I thank you for that.
And what would you instead recommend in this area? Ayn Rand, perhaps?
Seriously, though… one of my motivations in choosing topics is to try to dispel some of the demons of my past, which in this case means people in disciplines adjacent to philosophy whose work I didn’t get and didn’t respect at the time. So we found this guest Azzurra who was into it, and this is what she recommended, so I aimed to give it a fair listen. I found it on the silly side, but I think it a great overreaction to call the vision “evil” or “stupid.” It’s not that I disagree with the substance of your comment (as you’d figure out if you listen to the episode), but the style makes me think you’re either just someone who enjoys all of his criticism (of sloppy thinking and the like) super harsh or that you have an axe to grind (whether of the Ayn Randy kind or some other one) that’s probably just as goofy and wrongheaded as the feminism you’re dismissing.
At around 0:30, the question of “wanting what someone else has” arises. I think that there is a general theme in this novel, and in much of feminist theory. that wholism is to be preferred over reductionism. In the spirit of this, I would say that feelings of jealousy, envy and so forth arise from the fact that certain aptitudes and attributes of personhood are more highly prized by the culture than others. A reductionist culture such as our own, one that wants to answer questions like “what’s the bottom line” or “How can we achieve X” will focus on those questions to the exclusion of others. Once some determination is made about the answer to such questions, the society will be most supportive of aptitudes and attributes that seem to make one more likely to achieve the bottom line.
The wildcrafting of forest trees in Herland is a good example of a wholistic paradigm. The people wanted to maximize food production but in such a way that the ecosystem is left intact. The assumption is that the background from which the food arises is as important as the end product. Contrast that with the modern industrial food system and we see that a bigger, cheaper, chicken, for example, is the preferred outcome and no background considerations are brought into account. This leads directly to exploitation of the chicken, the genetic integrity of the feed supply, the environment, the labor and the public health.
One way to look at the difference I am trying to highlight is that, in general, “patriarchy” emphasizes the achievement of specific, usually abstract goals. I mean abstract here in the sense that the desired result is “abstracted” from the welter of irrelevant “noise” (in this sense the whole “scientific method” could be seen, and often IS seen as a product of patriarchy).
Notice that the goals in reductionism are “individuated”-we are looking for a specific “good” rather than GOOD in general (a whole other discussion but important to the topic). Wholism looks for the thriving of the entire system which ties into Gilman’s emphasis on concern for “the future”.
So, if we believe that society has an equal need fof good mothers, good tree climbers and good geneticists than one will not, at least in theory, be more prestigious than another. If, on the other hand, society is ONLY interested in good geneticists, it will grand prestige to those who show an aptitude in that direction. With prestige comes all sorts of social perks (more money, more praise, etc). It is, I submit, not the aptitudes and attributes of others that fuel jealousy and envy, but rather, the perks granted to those who possess such aptitudes and attributes. It comes to approval, acceptance and love.
As gregarious primates, we have a deep genetic mandate for acceptance and status as these assure security. I think Gilman implies that A more wholistic (hypercontextualized) view of the world (such as what Giligan seems to find in her female subjects) would reduce the occurrence of jealousy and envy by democratizing status through the recognition that it takes a lot of different kinds to make a society function.
Locke believes that when husband and wife disagree about issues of common concern, “the last determination… naturally falls to the man’s share as the abler and the stronger.” Rousseau describes
women as intellectually inferior. I’m skeptical about if these philosophers took seriously the lives and point of view of women when forming their concepts about humankind. If they didn’t truly consider half the population or had bias against them, that could mean that only half the human population was fairly considered when forming their ideas. While androcentricism doesn’t render the philosopher’s ideas void, it certainly is something to keep in mind as something that could be problematic. I was hoping for a deeper conversation about this issue.
The discussion about Herland made me think of a book I recently read called Six Moon Dance. A feminist sci fi also about matriarchy, but a dystopian book. Six Moon Dance pointed more to the corrupting nature of power imbalances. A very different conclusion than Herland.
Overall I thought this was an interesting, but shallow introduction to feminism. Barely scraping the surface. There has been many different lines of thoughts in feminist philosophy, many opposing views. I hope this isn’t going to be the only episode that covers anything feminist related. It’d be interesting to hear a discussion about Judith Butler, Nancy Hartsock , or Mary Wollstonecraft.