3.9 - List, Eisabeth - Reclaming An Undivided Human Reason (En)

ReclaminganUndividedHumanReason
ReclaminganUndividedHumanReason
byElisabethList

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:3/1986,pages:382390,onwww.ceeol.com.
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RECLAIMING AN UNDIVIDED HUMAN REASON*

Elisabeth List In the last decades women have begun to rethink, and to contribute to various fields of academic research in a critical and self-conscious way. A network of womens studies and feminist research projects has emerged, visible in the increasing number of feminist journals edited, conferences and public debates held. These are acknowledged by the (male) scientific public with considerable hesitancy, but welcomed by many women scientists, who till now had tried to find a stand in scientific life more or less as outsiders. Undoubtedly the feminist movement outside the universities has been the main force for this development and the main intellectual resource for feminist theorizing. Meanwhile feminist criticism in the academic context has proceeded from a social criticism of the male-dominated scientific institutions to a more radical critique of the cognitive styles of scientific thinking. This venture finds indirect support from post-Kuhnian controversies in the philosophy of science, which have led to a profound skepticism vis vis the dogmas of normal science and the claims of traditional theories of the logic of science. Evelyn Fox Keller is one of the women theorists, who, among others, has inaugurated a new dimension in the critique of scientific reasoning, based on reflections on the relation between gender and science. Gender and Science is the title of her last book which recapitulates the results of a series of articles and a book-long study of the work and life of the biologist Catherine McClintock (published 1984.) Evelyn Fox Keller, a practicing scientist in the field of mathematical biology, believed, according to her own words, wholeheartedly in the laws of physics, until she became preoccupied by the question, How much of the nature of science is bound up with the idea of masculinity. (3) Traditional discourse on the relation between gender and reason, or gender and science, hinged on the allegedly intuitive and irrational nature of women; such arguments served to legitimize the long-lasting and implicit claim of the Western intellectual tradition that reason and objective thinking are a priori masculine. Keller takes up this point. That scientific institutions, even the whole scientific culture is in fact male-dominated, is beyond dispute. Why then have social studies of science so far failed to take note of this fact? Their blindness to the genderization of science is, according to Keller, the result of the failure
* Discussed in this review are Evelyn Fox Keller, Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), and Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1984).
Praxis International Vol 6 No 3 A Philsophical Journal October 1986 redigitized by Central and Eastern European Online Library - www.ceeol.com
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to acknowledge that science is not only a social, but a deeply personal activity. Their personal involvement seems to be something scientists are at the same time unwilling and unable to see. Recent feminist theory and practice that makes the experience of womens oppression in their personal lives into a political issue, has developed the slogan that the personal/private is the political. Women have begun to realize that the rhetoric of the impersonal in science and politics serves an eminently political function, namely to legitimize male hegemony in society. They now discover that this rhetoric is built into the very meaning of the terms defining culture, science and society: We see our world divided by a multiplicity of conceptual and cultural dichotomies mutually sanctioning, mutually supportive, and mutually defining: public or private, masculine or feminine, objective or subjective, power or love. (8) The traditional conception of science is embedded in this network of associations and disjunctions, which Keller terms the gender-sciencesystem. By retracing its meaning to the personal lives of scientists, Keller not only demonstrates how gender and science are related, but also makes a unique contribution to the study of science by elucidating, to use a term of Thomas Kuhn, the personal matrix of scientific activity. Furthermore, revealing the masculinist ideology dominating the traditional understanding of science, she proposes a transformation of the key concepts of knowledge and objectivity, preparing the ground for a new dimension of the immanent critique of science. Whereas the myth of impersonality dominates scientific rhetoric, common sense and popular belief still take objectivity, reason and mind as male, feeling and nature as female. This belief is part of the tacit or implicit knowledge of all members of our culture. The intention of Kellers book is to give an explicit account of this implicit knowledge. In the first part of her book, Keller tries to clarify the historical roots of the genderization of science; the second part traces the underlying psychodynamic structure of the androcentric delimitation of subject and object in the design of scientific thinking. In the last part of her book Keller discusses the epistemological and methodological consequences of her account of the history and psychology of the genderization of science. I. The Science-Gender-System from Plato to the Scientific Revolution Knowledge fundamentally is a relation between object and subject. The way this relation is thought of depends on the images of subject and object involved; in the case of science these are the images of mind and nature. As these images change, the meaning of the relation will also change. Keller leads our attention to the fact that throughout the history of Western thinking the images of sex and sexual relations have been omnipresent as images of knowledge. She illustrates with reference to three thinkers: Plato, Bacon and the dispute between mechanical and hermetic philosophy in the founding years of the Royal Society at the time of birth of modern science. In Platos philosophy the relation between the knower and the known is a
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permanent issue. Knowing for Plato ultimately means the overcoming of difference and the creation of unity, difference being most evident in the illusions of appearance and becoming, and unity in the true being of idea and form. Unity and knowing are accomplished, according to the teachings of Diotima in Platos Symposium by the help of Eros. Therefore, the first discipline of knowing had to be philosophy, the love of wisdom. But love, in Platos view, is divided into two: sexual drive as acted out by animals and in ordinary heterosexual intercourse, and a higher, spiritual love which strives for beauty and leads to knowledge of the true and eternal ideas. This dual vision of Eros mirrors Platos dual image of nature. True nature is what can be conceived by logos, and that means, by the truly knowing mind. Logos is therefore the principle of unity between mind and nature. Yet nature is not only logos, but also surrounded by the dark forces of unreason, materiality and disorder. It is physical desire which leads the soul not to the sublime, to beauty, but to the sordid. The sordid is disorder, matter, the carnal, the female. Platos story of knowing as unity and sameness must be read in the context of a paticular pattern of sexual relations. It is the arrangement of homosexual love in the pederastic relation, described in the Dialogue Phaedrus as legitimate Eros. (26) In theory, as in practice, Plato excludes the vast majority of women from the realm of knowing and love. As true knowledge, true love is directed to a purely spiritual unity of equals, of sames, of men. It should be noted that not all men are included in this celebration of sameness, in fact only a minority that can lead a spiritual life free from labor belong to it. This observation underscores what Keller wants to outline, namely the interconnectedness of epistemology, personal experience, love relations and political organization in the Platonic gender-knowledge-system: Excluding matter from his epistemology, and consummation of sexuality from his definition of ideal Eros, does not leave Plato free to enjoy conceptual egalitarianism any more than banishing slaves from the polis would create conditions for a true democracy. In his politics as in his philosophy, the need for absolutism, however benevolent, remained.(30) Androcentrism in Plato takes the form of an ideocentric epistemology. It is the ideology of an intellectual elite, which has excluded women totally from the realm of culture. This Platonic devaluation of material nature is no longer present in the modern scientific mind, but still, the modern search for laws in physics believes that the material obeys the logical essence, and manifests the logocentric attitude of Platonic epistemology. But, as Keller points out, the old epistemological frame is adapted to the changed meaning of sexuality and the relations between subject and object, between mind and nature. Homoerotic relations are no longer an accepted paradigm, and the object of interest is no longer true being, but material nature and the female body. The most significant change from Plato to Bacon concerns the goal of knowledge: it shifts from communion to power, from unity to distance and control. In the writings of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) the new vision of knowledge
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is most clearly manifest, not only in his dictum that knowledge is power, but through the frequent use Bacon makes of sexual metaphors to describe the new ways of knowledge in science. The new science in his word should establish a chaste and lawful marriage between mind and Nature and by this Masculine Birth of Time a blessed race of Heroes and Supermen should arise, its aim being to conquer and subdue Nature (quoted in Keller, 53, 54). Finally, the marriage between mind and Nature will make of Nature a slave in the service of the masculine mind (48). While Platos theory of knowledge and Eros is designed to exclude the female, the carnal and matter from the desired goal of unity, Bacon clearly describes the relations of knowledge and love in the language of power and domination. One of the most embarrassing facts in the history of modern science is that its founding fathers believed in Witchcraft and by their pervasive and popular testimony indirectly took part in the prosecution and murder of thousands of women. Belief in witchcraft was a significant point of disagreement between the members of the Royal Society and the adherents of the hermetic tradition. The latter viewed knowledge and nature as resting on a symmetry between masculine and feminine principles. For the project of a purely masculine science such as that of the mechanic philosophy, allowing the kinship between knowledge and erotic sexuality was untenable, endangering the pursuit of proper knowledge and the clear demarcation between the male self and nature (58). The pioneers of the scientific revolution, Keller concludes, have in many ways supported the formation of the modern gender-science-system as required by industrial capitalism: In sympathy with, and even in response to, the growing division between male and female, public and private, work and home, modern science opted for an even greater polarization of mind and nature, reason and feeling, objective and subjective; in parallel with the gradual desexualization of women, it offered a deanimated, desanctified, and increasingly mechanized concept of nature. In doing so, science itself became an active agent of change. (63 ff.) II. The Psychodynamics of Objectivism The values articulated by the early modern scientists are still present in the cognitive design and the cultural background of present day science. The images of science are still laden with the connotations of a masculinist ideology. The same holds for the professional images of economics and politics. Kellers studies on the psychodynamics of the scientific mind have to be understood against this cultural background. While prescientific thinking often is conceived as projection of the subjective, of human hopes, desires and fears onto the natural world (69), scientific thinking is seen as completely self-detached by virtue of its methodology. Kellers thesis is, that not simply the dream of a completely objective science is in principle unrealizable, but that it contains precisely what it rejects: the vivid traces of a reflected self-image. (70) The objectivist illusion is itself a projection: the projection of disinterest, of autonomy, of
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alienation (70). In other words, behind the objectivist ideology lurks a particular paradigm of subjectivity, the self-image of modern man, who claims to be independent of wishes, desires and beliefs. According to Keller, the emotional substructure underlying the conjunction of science and masculinity can be explained by the interdependence of crucial aspects of cognitive, emotional and sexual development of male and female individuals in the social framework of modern society. Such an explanation is supported by the insights of certain branches of psychoanalytic theory like object relations theory (Winnicot) and by recent feminist criticisms of psychoanalytic accounts of gender development (Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller). From this perspective, the polarity of masculine and feminine is the result of a polarization of conflicts and strategies concerning separation and relatedness in the course of self-development. The concern of the masculine self with separation and autonomy vis vis the primary object who is usually the mother and therefore a female self, i.e., the other, is fed by fears and desires associated with merging and relatedness with the mother. This very image of a masculine autonomous self, in rigid separation from a female, non-self, underlies the construction of the subject-object dichotomy in traditional conception of scientific knowledge. And it is the same psychodynamics, the same need for control of fears and desires of belonging which, within the project of a masculine science, leads to a construction of objectivity which for Keller properly speaking is a human goal as objectivism, a masculine goal, whereas subjectivity becomes construed as subjectivism, a feminine prerogative (71). To overcome objectivism and subjectivism as ideologies of a genderized science, both autonomy and objectivity need a reconceptualization. Above all, it must be understood that the tension between autonomy and intimacy, between separation and connection, between aggression and love a tension only apparently removed by the traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity in fact is unresolvable (112). Moreover, the development of mature self and agency can only be the result of the acceptance of that tension. Mature autonomy is, therefore, according to Keller, dynamic autonomy, presupposing the cognizance of difference between self and other and, at the same time, of a certain flexibility of the boundaries between self and nonself, admitting a sense of sameness between self and other. Only dynamic autonomy allows for a satisfactory interchange and relation between subject and object, whether this interchange is guided by the goal of knowledge or of love (100). Such an ideal of a balance of difference and sameness, of separateness and union, is not completely alien to the Western tradition, but it is certainly negated by a masculinist ideology, which fosters separateness, rigid autonomy and control as absolute values, refusing unity, sameness and intimacy as threatening and female. The idea of a balanced interdependence between subject and object, between subject and subject, not only changes the meaning of self and autonomy, but also the meaning of power as distinguished from domination and asymmetric control: Power, as a result, can be redefined in terms of mutual interest and well-being rather than primarily in
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terms of conflict. And, consequently, there is space for a positive sense of the power of knowing (114). The oppositon of love and power, characterizing the emotional development of both men and women, dictated by the culturally dominating ideology of masculinity, is, according to Keller, responsible for the kinship between knowledge, power and domination. To rescue the proper meaning of knowledge, Keller proposes a distinction between static and dynamic objectivity. The pursuit of knowledge, of a reliable understanding of the world is dynamic to the extent that it actively draws on the commonality between mind and nature as a resource of understanding. Dynamic objectivity aims at a form of knowledge that grants to the world around us its independent integrity but does so in a way that remains cognizant of, indeed relies on, our connectivity with that world (116, 117). I call static objectivity the pursuit of knowledge that begins with the severance of subject from object rather than aiming at the disentanglement of one from the other (11). The concept of static objectivity is prevalent in the ideology of science, but not always in its practice. The testimony of many scientists shows that within science as well the form of attention for the phenomena under study ideally is like the form of attention to the human world: it is a form of love (117), By contrast, research in normal science, at least as described in standard textbooks, is practised as a form of control. Although the cognitive use of perception in the interest of control, of defensive or offensive purposes, however successful for the purposes of domination and mastery, may fail to lead to a proper understanding of what is perceived, the rhetoric of domination and control and the underlying ideology of masculinity serves to select a scientific community with a particular cognitive and emotional style (123), when, for instance, students learn to understand that good science is hard science. Following Kuhn, such slogans about good science have to be seen as extralogical criteria operating in the process of theory competition and theory choice. The last section of Kellers book provides evidence for this assumption. III. Rethinking Science as a Human Project There are at least three reasons why Kellers arguments for a critical philosophy of science are significant: 1.) Keller provides a convincing account of what current theories and social studies of science have neglected: the hidden personal and emotional background of scientific activity. It is only very recently that these deeply personal aspects of scientific work are taken as relevant for the study of science (Th. Kuhn, M. Polanyi, G. Holton). 2.) Kellers analysis of objectivism as an androcentric ideology refers primarily to the natural, and not to the social sciences. At least the study of nature has long been taken to be really free from myth and ideology; Keller casts doubt on this image of the natural sciences. She maintains that the conjunction of knowledge and power is rooted in the conceptual and epistemological design of scientific knowledge. If this is the case, the usual distinction between pure and applied science cannot absolve pure science from any
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responsibility for the consequences of the technical use and abuse of science. 3.) Finally, Keller successfully identifies the bias of objectivism in the theoretical core of modern physics and biology. Taking the examples of quantum physics and molecular biology, Keller argues that, in spite of the evident progress of new insights in these fields, both physics and biology so far have failed to develop an adequate cognitive paradigm or epistemology for their theories (139). One major source of bias in the so-called exact sciences is the widely shared assumption that their field of study is directly accessible by logic and experiment, and therefore their language purely descriptive, neutral and transparent (130). Yet, scientific discourse about the laws of nature reveals a host of connotations of political origin, which, because of the assumption of a neutral scientific language, have remained unreflected. The idea of a law of Nature, established by the authority of an omniscient and omnipotent creator God, has survived in the more secular versions of contemporary science, along with its coercive, hierarchical and centralizing implications, that bear a striking resemblance to laws of an authoritarian state (132). This preconception of deterministic causal laws, excluding from theory what does not fit its framework, inevitably leads to cognitive repression in science, to a state of affairs contrasting strangely with scientific claims of objectivity. While quantum mechanics has ruled out the deterministic and mechanistic universe of Newtonian physics, the ongoing discussions concerning the interpretations of quantum mechanics reveal that even in their context, the old epistemological tenets of classical physics, the dogmas of complete objectifiability and knowability of nature are still present, preventing an adequate cognitive evaluation of its revolutionary scientific results. Stephen Toulmin was one of the first philosophers of science who claimed that understanding science requires more than understanding its logic. Toulmin sees the history of science as a history of struggles for intellectual hegemony, as a history of ongoing competition between rival theories striving to be the fittest to survive. The decisive criterion of success, Toulmin tells us, is not simply prediction, as some theories of science have thought. It is the criterion of understanding reality. But what does understanding reality mean? Answering this question, Toulmin leads our attention to the changing, taken for granted, preconceptions guiding the scientific process of naming nature. Notably enough, Toulmin himself, in his effort of naming science, makes ready use of one such preconception namely Darwins theory of evolution calling the struggle for intellectual hegemony in science a natural phenomenon. From his point of view, understanding reality, i.e., naming nature, amounts to the establishment of a master theory, or, as McClintock calls it, a central dogma strong enough to fully explain the whole array of phenomena under investigation. It is exactly this way of doing and naming science Keller wants to confront with an alternative vision of science. Therefore, it seems of critical relevance, not only for science, but also for the philosophy of science, that Kellers witness for an alternative way of doing science is a biologist, a woman biologist, whose extraordinary contribution to genetics and molecular biology
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have, after many years of neglect and isolation in the scientific community, finally yielded her the Nobel Prize: Barbara McClintock. What, according to Keller, is peculiar to the work and career of McClintock, are both her eminence and her marginality as a scientist (160). Despite her late recognition, McClintock regards herself as an outsider in science, not because she is a woman but a philosophical and methodological deviant (159). Kellers excellent account of this deviance and its potential for a radical transformation of traditional views of science cannot be discussed here in detail. What seems most important to Keller is the respect for difference and complexity underlying McClintocks conception of nature. What McClintock calls the feeling for the organism one should not read as a participation mystique (165), but as a mode of access to reliable knowledge (as the final vindication of her findings concerning the phenomenon of genetic transposition demonstrates). McClintocks research deviates from standard methodology exactly because it is not guided by an alienating division of self and other, of scientific mind and object. Instead, McClintock describes relations to plants in the vocabulary of respect for difference, of kinship and affection, as a form of attention and empathy, as a form of love. Keller concludes: The crucial point for us is that McClintock can risk the suspension of boundaries between subject and object without jeopardy to science precisely because, to her, science is not premissed on that division. Indeed, the intimacy she experiences with the objects she studies intimacy born of a lifetime of cultivated attentiveness is a wellspring of her powers as scientist (164). From what has been said about the usual associaton of love and intimacy with femininity, it would be tempting to call that a feminist science. For Keller this would be too simplistic a view. As a practicing scientist Keller is convinced that any idea of a different science only can emerge in continuity with existing forms of scientific practice. Nevertheless, she tells us that McClintocks way of doing science is different, and that it has to do with the issue of gender. Kellers account of how gender comes in is quite unique. It comes in, not because McClintock is a woman, but because as a woman she is an outsider in a male-dominated scientific community. Therefore, McClintock never ceased to claim that in science gender should drop away. In a science construed as a male endeavour of naming objects i.e. nature, which is understood to be typically female, a woman is confronted with an a priori contradiction in terms. To resist in authenticity and disidentification, she will have to attempt a radical redefinition in terms: She will rename nature as not female, or at least as not alienated object, and respectively, because she claims to have a mind herself, she will rename, mind as not being necessarily male (174, 175). This is what McClintock, according to Keller, has actually done: I suggest that the radical core of McClintocks stance can be located right here: Because she is not a man, in the world of men, her commitment to a gender-free science is binding; because concepts of gender have so deeply influenced the basic categories of science, that commitment has been transformative (174). McClintocks commitment, as well as Kellers, is a commitment to science
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as a human project. Although Keller locates herself on the radical end of the sprectrum of feminist criticism of science, she neither would agree to reject science altogether nor to replace it by a radically different science (177). But Keller is quite aware that the vision of a gender-free science entails a genuinely political claim: the shift from a tradition of intellectual hegemony to a culture of respect for difference and multiplicity in science. Therefore, even from her own point of view, her strict reservation against any form of social criticism of science from without as extreme relativism, dissolving science into ideology, seems quite surprising (178). It would be at least as plausible to argue that such criticism is necessary, given the fact that a great deal of research is done within the institutions of industrial capitalism. In her very last remarks, Keller herself hints at the limits of a purely immanent criticism of science. Her essays demonstrate that for a transformation of science the critique of its implicit masculinist ideology is necessary. Such a critique must be twofold: first, a critique of the cognitive paradigm imposed by objectivism that is what an immanent critique would amount to and second, a critique of the normative paradigm guiding scientific activity as a personal and interpersonal endeavour. In fact, such a normative pattern is implicit in Kellers book, and it necessarily transcends the framework of epistemological discourse. Talking about love and power, Keller frequently draws parallels between scientific interchange with nature and social interaction between human subjects. Her comments on McClintocks research in plant genetics can be read as comments on the meaning of both love and knowledge. Just as love, she argues, knowledge should be guided not only by the interests and needs of the self, but also by respect for difference and empathy for the other be that other nature or another self. Ideally, knowledge and love coincide (169). Respect and mutuality, as Keller claims them for both kinds of relation between self and other, are the normative core values of her vision of science. Rethinking the relations of self and other, of men and women, of love and power, as Evelyn Fox Keller has done with respect to science and knowledge, might, therefore, necessitate a transformation not only of the cognitive paradigm of science, but also of the normative paradigms of ethics and politics. This is still another indispensable task in reclaiming an undivided human reason.

3.9 - List, Eisabeth - Reclaming An Undivided Human Reason (En)

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ReclaminganUndividedHumanReason

REVIEWS: NEW FEMINIST BOOKS

RECLAIMING AN UNDIVIDED HUMAN REASON*

Access via CEEOL NL Germany

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