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Is
it rational to believe that Aristotle's philosophy insists
that women are irrational
by nature?
Was
Aristotle
a
male chauvinist pig? Yes, says current consensus, and this
is within as much as without academic circles. Bill Gate's
Microsoft Encarta 2000 entry on Aristotle says so as
a point of fact, without providing any kind of supporting
argument for the claim: the entry says that Aristotle
believe women to be incapable of doing philosophy.
Meanwhile, also on the side of pop-knowledge, a recently
published novel on the Egyptian Pharaoh,
Cleopatra,
has her saying that Aristotle's philosophy determines
women to be 'by nature irrational: not capable of rational
thinking'.
Whether
our fictionalized spokesperson for Aristotle's view on the
female capacity to be rational was herself rational enough
to gauge what is and what is not rational is likely not a
question that will haunt the popular audience's mind, even
though it definitely should. Cleopatra, in truth and in
fiction, held what Aristotle believed to be one of the most
irrational beliefs about herself that any human being could
hold: that some human beings are in actual fact gods, and
that she is one of them.
Just maybe then, Cleopatra failed to hold a rationally
arrived at view of Aristotle's position on the
intellectual capacities of women? According to Aristotle's
view of megalomaniacs (people who believe they are gods),
Cleopatra's own irrationality disallows that she could
hold a rational view about pretty much anything, let alone
about Aristotle's position on women. However, academic
consensus supports her claim, and this is the very consensus
that licenses the popularly embraced belief that
Aristotle's philosophy is blighted by male chauvinism.
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As the book in question is the novelized script of one
of those huge Hollywood productions, one just about to
hit the big-screen, chances are that the view that
Aristotle's philosophy does state this will become yet
more popular (it is such a terribly written and boring
book, that I have decided to not give either its title
or its author's name). This is especially likely since
the titillating scenario under which its author has
Cleopatra saying this is in the context of love scene
between a very kinky Mark Anthony and Cleopatra; whose
respective kink, ironically I think, is sado-masochistic,
the supposedly feminist and purportedly unusually petite
ruler of the Egyptians forever swooning at the hands
(and other huge bits) of the gargantuan, swarthy
Mark's brutal sex-techniques, whose sexual appetite is
so huge, that in her exhausted efforts to keep up with
it - let alone sate it - she sends him entire female
sex-slave battalions, one after the other, over and
over, year after year. Was Cleopatra rational to believe
that she had the right to do so, and was she rational
enough to form the kind of depth of friendship with her
lovers that could allow that either she or they actually
ever friendly enough with each other to genuinely love
each other?
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Just
as in popular circles, academics now seem to take it for
granted that Aristotle's philosophy is chauvinist against
women, a view that has held sway since at least the 1970's
when the philosophical systems of the greats were placed
under the scrutiny of Patriarchy-fearing feminists. At that
time, it was noted that Aristotle's Generation of
Animals argues that
the female is the 'contrary' of the male so that women
are 'impotent' males.
Aristotle's
biological claim that women are 'impotent males'
attaches to his argument about how human reproduction
occurs: the male semen is the catalyst that imbues the
non-causative matter held in the female womb with logos, so
that the female matter and male semen both contribute to the
formation of the embryo. His theory accountis for why human
females are not capable of virgin (parthenos) birth,
and also for why it is that human children are typically
born with physiological features and psychological
capacities inherited from both parents - no matter the sex
of the children themselves. As the female womb does not
produce semen - against the beliefs of some of the persons
against whom Aristotle is arguing - it is not the female who
is potent with respect to procreation, but the male, and in
this sense, the female reproductive principle is a 'privation' of the male reproductive principle, as it is
not as powerful as the male's: no women can inseminate a
male and make him pregnant. In this sense, says Aristotle,
due their respective roles in procreation, women are the 'contrary' of men.
However,
according to one commentator, Christine Allen, what
Aristotle actually means by the claim that women are
impotent males with respect to procreation is that women are
the 'opposite' of men, which means that women are
deprived of full humanity as they are biologically
determined to have 'impotent minds'.
Assuming that modern academics are correct to embrace
Allen's interpretation of the terms 'contrary', 'opposite', and
'impotent male', it would be
rational for our fictive Cleopatra and us to believe that
Aristotle disallowed that women can achieve rationality: if
men are rational by nature, and women are their opposites,
then women are irrational by nature.
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