I shall make a polemical statement because I find it unfortunately true: compared to men, a vastly smaller percentage of women are philosophical intellectuals -- those attempting to discover the meaning of life. I have discussed with numerous brilliant women topics of welfare, foreign policy and crime; however, I have yet to encounter a woman with an intriguing philosophical insight.
No woman has given me answers to some of the essential questions that have tormented mankind: Why did Dostoevsky profess that suffering is the only origin of "consciousness?" or what did Sartre mean by the "teleological suspension of the ethical?"
Most people who agree with my proposition would rely on two explanations for the lack of female philosophical intellectualism. The first is biological; perhaps, there is a physiological difference between men and women in their brains, whose functions are far from lucid. The second is sociological; a larger portion of women than men could be predisposed to behave unintellectually, as some studies claim. I prefer the second to the first, since none of the physiological gender differences shown by research explain the tremendous gap in the numbers of the female and male philosophers I have met. Men and women are not that different.
So, I attribute my total lack of philosophical dialogue with women to the still powerful sociological--in this case, chauvinistic--forces creating an unphilosophical female mentality. However, I become perturbed when I ruminate on these forces, because most of them stem ultimately from two inescapable characteristics of women -- pregnancy, and consequently, childcare.
The career of any woman who desires to have a family is interrupted during her pregnancy, which inevitably makes her dependent on her husband. Mothers lose a few years in addition, because most of them desire to pass on their values by educating their children without giving them up to nannies. The latter characteristic can be eliminated with the help of the husband; however, most women, I believe, feel the obligation to fulfill this role despite the sacrifice it entails. Let me explain how these two constraints contribute most significantly to the lack of female philosophical intellectualism.
The history of philosophy has been invariably progressive. Further back one goes in time, he would see human thought becoming increasingly simple. Any person of our time who reads Plato's Republic, for instance, would his find his ideal regime ruled by philosophical dictators truly absurd.
However, as the human thought evolved, it slowly gave birth to philosophies motivated by freedom -- the goal after which humans were bound to aspire. Whether you read Jaspers, Kafka, Nietzsche or any other great philosophers, the most powerful of their writings are the products of their struggles to establish the path to complete human liberty. Kierkegaard claims that "dread," or self-inflicted suffering, defines the human sentiment and thus his liberty. On the other hand, Nietzsche and Sartre call the virtue of such suffering a self-deception, which only induces humans to abnegate their freedom and humanity.
It is not a coincidence that most of these thinkers, seeking freedom, were fairly affluent men, who had the leisurely time to think and could freely pursue their individual goals. They could do so because they faced only a few physical confinements, like pregnancy, which help to define social patterns, including the role of women.
Why pregnancy and childcare curtail women's philosophical intellectualism should then be clear. I shall ask the female readers: Have you not had an impulse to pursue a certain path, possibly of a great career, but then, an instant later, suppressed it because the thought of a baby crossed your mind; because you thought pregnancy and childcare would hamper your dream? I feel that many would answer, "Yes." This impulse, with which men often engage in intellectual pursuits, is the key to the development of a sophisticated philosophy. Unfortunately women cannot explore freely because of their biological limitation.
Humans are now equipped with the tools to liberate women from this trap, however. Infants can be reproduced outside fetuses, and institutions exist to take care of children until they become self-sufficient. But our morality still lags behind technology, and we have not adopted a lifestyle compatible with the current science. Virginia Woolf once said: "[A] woman must have money and a room of her own" to develop her philosophy. Now a woman has "money," but not yet a "room of her own." I hope that humans will take another step to evolve philosophically further, so that women can finally become free.
