Mansplaining

“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher,” advised Socrates, with a line of thinking that perhaps offers some insight into a troubling issue with the philosophical tradition itself. Mary Midgley pointed this out as she cited the fundamental problem of philosophy is that it has largely been shaped by bachelors who have had no experience living with women or children (click: So Many Unmarried Men).

She submitted her hypothesis some sixty years ago to the BBC for a radio broadcast called “Rings and Books” but this Oxford-educated philosopher was rebuffed and the show never aired on the grounds that it was a trivial, irrelevant intrusion of domestic matters into intellectual life. Oh, the irony. The rationale for that dismissal illustrated her underlying point.

Philosophy at the time, you see, had been dominated by the likes of Descartes who questioned the existence of his friends, family, and everything external, concluding that his only certainty was “I am thinking.” Therefore I am (yes, a thinking machine).

We might share the extent, if at all, to which philosophy has informed our values and guided our behaviour. If the purpose of philosophy is meant to be a systematic study of those fundamental questions about reality, knowledge, and values, how is it that the personal lives of so many “great thinkers” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur Schoenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Michel Foucault – have been so flawed, as chronicled in such books as “Philosophers Behaving Badly.”

Perhaps it takes a woman’s perspective to call out the fact that such philosophers are essentially dealing in stick-figure abstractions of limited value to those actually living in the real world. What can be learned from those who have never borne a baby or, for that matter, even changed a diaper?

Some support was rendered by David Hume (the focus of MM 10/1/18 Hume The Humane) when he maintained that a philosopher tends to forget he is human – man has to be man first and philosopher second. Contrast that view with those like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer who could not separate their search for better understanding from notions of basic humanity, which made them rather irritated at and isolated from the average person. As Midgely asserted, “people leading a normal domestic life would not have fallen into this sort of mistake.”

So, back to Descartes (et al), what’s with these isolated men and their Cartesian suggestion that the mind is separate from the body and the outside world. Yes, no matter the epoch, be careful of advice rendered by that heavier, hairier gender group with too much time on their hands e.g.:

Fourteenth-century essayist Kenko withdrew from the imperial court at Kyoto, settled into a cottage, became a Zen Buddist monk, and brushed his thoughts onto 243 scraps of paper that, according to legend, he glued to the walls of his hermitage. These, later published as Essays On Idleness, included this one that reads in its entirety:

“Do not hold the antlers of a young deer to your nostrils; there may be insects on the antlers that can crawl up your nose to your brain and kill you.”

Mansplaining.

Please note the following RSVP Policy for Member Monday: RSVP sign-up opens up at 11:00am on Fridays via the City Club weekly Newsletter. Seats are first-come, first-served: the first 14 secure a spot at the table, the last 3 on the couch. Cancellations must be made 24 hours in advance or the standard Social Lunch rate applies.