Kenji Hosokawa's column "On Women and Philosophy" [March 26, 1996] shows a confused attempt to understand why, as a generalization, men and women define and discuss life's most profound questions in different ways. We can discard Hosokawa's ridiculous thesis that "pregnancy and childcare curtail women's philosophical intellectualism." As rebuttals of the past few days have suggested, prospects of pregnancy and childcare may affect a woman's attitude towards or choice of career, but have no effect on her philosophical inclinations. The question of why Hosokawa has not found his philosophical discussions with women to be intellectually satisfying needs to be asked anew. Before I delve into this issue directly, however, let me say something about the different meanings of "philosophy."
First, there is philosophy as an academic discipline, which Webster's dictionary defines as "a discipline comprising at its core logic, aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology" My discussion will not focus on this sense of philosophy as a specialized field. As Professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong pointed out in a letter to the Editor [March 28, 1996], "many of our best philosophy majors and philosophy honors students at Dartmouth, as well as many of the top philosophers alive today in all fields of philosophy, are women."
Moving on to other definitions of philosophy, we spot a fundamental problem with Hosokawa's column: his argument equates philosophy as "a system of philosophical concepts" with philosophy as "an overall vision of or attitude toward life and the purpose of life." Hosokawa's identification of the "great philosophers"--Dostoevsky, Satre, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Nietzsche--reveals that he is looking for a particular type of philosophical dialogue with women; namely that he wants to discuss that "system of philosophical concepts" known as existentialism.
Hosokawa writes that "[n]o woman has given me answers to some of the essential questions that have tormented mankind." The "essential questions" that he wants a women to answer are questions defined and pondered by men of a certain tradition. While asking these particular questions (of suffering, responsibility, and free will) and referring to these particular thinkers is one manner of approaching philosophy, Hosokawa must recognize that women, as well as other men, may identify other questions as more important. As for answers, I am going to have to wish Hosokawa luck in finding men or women, especially of our level of knowledge and experience, who are able to put an end to any of humanity's most enduring speculations.
Having identified the type of philosophical discourse Hosokawa is looking for, I will consider why it is that he perceives his discussions with women to be less intellectually satisfying than those had with men. Personal experience bears out the observation that women are less likely to engage in open debate on philosophical texts. The same personal experience, however, leads me to disagree vehemently with any assertion that women are less interested in or less capable of developing a life philosophy.
Why do people hold the world view that they do? What do I believe? How do my beliefs reflect or contradict my experience? What does it mean to be human? These are only some of the questions that I, one woman among many, am asking. If most, if not all, women at Dartmouth are asking themselves similar questions, how did Hosokawa even consider the idea of "an unphilosophical female mentality?"
I would say that Hosokawa is frustrated because although many women are asking themselves "meaning of life" questions, they do not tend to articulate them in terms of a system that can account for the past, present and future of humanity. This tendency is not an indication of the inferiority of women's philosophical thought, however, but rather an outcome of the fact that intellectual women tend to think holistically. My exact meaning is clarified by a quote from the book "Women's Ways of Knowing" (1986): "[W]omen want to embrace all the pieces of the self in some ultimate sense of the whole -- daughter, friend, mother, lover, nurturer, thinker, artist, advocate. They want to avoid what they perceive to be a shortcoming in many men--the tendency to compartmentalize thought and feeling, home and work, self and other. In women, there is an impetus to try to deal with life, internal and external, in all its complexity" (Belenky, et al., 137).
Hosokawa "compartmentalized" when he tried to separate women's thought and philosophy from pregnancy and motherhood. In a woman's more holistic approach, pregnancy and motherhood are part of life's complexity, parts that probably have more to teach her about Life's meaning than any other experience. An approach to life that encompasses all of its aspects does not easily lend itself to systemic, normative philosophies.
Lest some equate my position with relativism, with the assertion that men and women think about and experience life so differently that truth itself is itself gendered, let me close by saying that I do not think that, ultimately, there need be any fundamental difference in the way that men and women perceive the world. During our undergraduate years in particular, we are engaged in the process of knowledge. Though the stages that we move through, stages that at various times emphasize different combinations of subjectivity and objectivity, may differ generally between men and women, the goal for both can and must be the same: to channel subjectivity towards empathy and objectivity to reason. A fusion of empathy and reason will hold direction-giving systems accountable for all of life's aspects, and lead to the construction of life philosophies that both men and women can espouse.
