TOWARDS A NEW PHILOSOPHICAL IMAGINARY

Abstract

The paper builds on the postulate of “myths we live by,” which shape our imaginative life (and hence our social expectations), but which are also open to reflective study and reinvention. It applies this principle, in particular, to the concepts of love and vulnerability. We are accustomed to think of the condition of vulnerability in an objectifying and distancing way, as something that affects the bearers of specific (disadvantaged) social identities. Against this picture, which can serve as a pretext for paternalist and controlling attitudes to the groups in question – notably to women – Anderson urges us to reimagine our vulnerability as a condition not merely of exposure to violence but of openness to mutual affection, love, and friendship. Hegel’s celebrated image of the owl of Minerva, which takes wing only with the coming of dusk, suggests an association of (philosophical) wisdom with negativity – with the experience of death or loss. Anderson, by contrast, proposes an alternative and more hopeful image of the dawn of enlightenment, in the guise of new ethical dispositions shaped by an emancipatory (and so, no longer an oppressive or sexist) conception of our capacity for love. Her main interlocutors or influences in this piece are Judith Butler (who contributes the idea of a “relational ontology”), Michèle Le Doeuff, and Mary Midgley.

Keywords:

• Judith Butler
• Michèle Le Doeuff
• Mary Midgley
• philosophical imaginary
• vulnerability
• relational ontology

Notes

Completion of this paper was made possible through the support of a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, via the Enhancing Life Project. The opinions expressed in it are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. The paper will eventually be part of a monograph on Love, Vulnerability and Affection: New Concepts to Live By … or, Enhancing Vulnerable Life: Love, Confidence and Affection … 

1 Editors’ note: we have restricted editorial changes to the correction of typographical errors and the amendment of clear infelicities of “draft” style. In Anderson’s original text, some passages were highlighted in yellow, others were typed in red, and others were typed in bold. In none of these cases was there any indication what the rationale for the typographical device was. We have registered her use of yellow highlighting by means of underlining, her use of red type by means of bold, and her own use of bold (which it seems clear was just her way of emphasizing material) by means of italics.

2 Here I am thinking of myths which have been constructed by “the philosophical imaginary” (cf. Michèle Le Doeuff, Recherches sur l’imaginaire philosophique (Paris: Payot, 1980); The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London: Athlone, 1989; Berkeley: Stanford UP, 1990; republished London: Continuum, 2002); cf. Max Deutscher, ed., Operative Philosophy and Imaginary Practice: Michèle Le Doeuff (New York: Humanity, 2000)), especially those about fathers and their daughters, wives, mothers; when living by patriarchal myths, we are motivated by hierarchical, asymmetrical affections, including violence, fear and vulnerability.

3 Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary.

4 Michèle Le Doeuff, “Not a Goddess, She!,” Lecture 4 of “The Spirit of Secularism: On Fables, Gender and Ethics,” Weidenfeld Professorial Lectures, University of Oxford, Trinity Term 2006. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark, Brian Leiter, and R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).

5 Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, eds. John Wall, William Schweiker, and David Hall (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 284.

6 For another example of a new story of vulnerability and loving attention, which liberates – “tames” (from the French verb apprivoiser) – love, see Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (Harmondsworth: Heinemann, 1945; rpt. by Puffin, 1962) 79–84.

7 Ibid. 83–84.

8 See Judith Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015); Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).

9 See the unnumbered note at the head of this Notes section.

10 The present attempt to expose the contradiction of “selfing and un-selfing” should be distinguished from the concerns of Weil and of Murdoch, who each have slightly different conceptions and conclusions concerning love of self from my own and each other. Yet both Murdoch and Weil have a common reaction to their European contemporary philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose conceptions of unbearable freedom and self-deception render genuine love impossible. For discussion of Sartre’s influence on Murdoch, see Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 62–75; and again, see my discussion of Newton-Smith’s reading of Sartre in “‘Moralizing’ Love in Philosophy of Religion” in Philosophy of Religion for a New Century, eds. Jerald T. Wallulis and Jeremiah Hackett (Amsterdam: Kluwer, 2004) 235–37.

11 Compare this search to Le Doeuff’s account of the “I” who seeks identity which is not that proposed by social representation. Le Doeuff illustrates this with the choice of the ancient woman philosopher of mathematics, Hipparchia, seeking knowledge rather than remaining “at the loom” where society expected her to be: see Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc., trans. Trista Selous (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 206; 2nd ed. and rev. trans. (New York: Columbia UP, 2007); this could be explored further as the (un)selfing necessary for doing philosophy, that is, for both finding oneself and losing oneself in the wisdom of love.

12 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970) 47. Concerning a woman who “unfinds herself” through exile from her social identity, see Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice 206.

13 At the same time, if we follow Le Doeuff’s argument, then this multiplicity of specific concrete situations of (un)selfing would be most evident in the times and places in history when and where women’s “identity” in reality makes up “a collective disarray”: Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice 207.

14 Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2004) xi, 1, 2, 5.

15 Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate: Humans, Freedom and Morality (London: Routledge, 1994) 109: Midgley asserts that “Myths are not lies, nor need they be taken as literally true,” and gives a highly useful, philosophical definition of myth; this basic, relatively uncontentious treatment renders mythical symbolism a necessary addition to scientific facts. For her initial use of the term, see Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay (London: Routledge, 1984) 10–12, 162. For the more technical use of myth, see Midgley, The Ethical Primate 109, 117–18; the latter is repeated and elaborated ten years later in Midgley, The Myths We Live By xi, 1, 2, 5.

16 Midgley, The Ethical Primate 117; more generally 109–20. To read more from this: the way in which myths work is often very obscure to us. But, besides their value-implications – which are often very subtle – they also function as summaries of certain selected sets of facts (117) … When we attend to the range of facts that any particular myth sums up, we are always strongly led to draw the moral that belongs to that myth. But that range of facts is always highly selective. It is limited by the imaginative vision that lies behind that particular story. This vision can, of course, generate actual lies, which is what makes it plausible to think of the myth itself as a lie. Thus, myths about the inferiority of women, or of particular ethnic groups, have supported themselves by false factual beliefs about these people (ibid. 117–18).

17 Mary Midgley, The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir (London: Routledge, 2005) x–xii.

18 G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood; trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 23.

19 If one wanted to make this argument, a premise would need to be defended; that is, Mary’s memoirs testify to Geoff Midgley’s wisdom which lives in the various forms of her love and her practices of philosophy. But it is unfair to push the argument this far. The reverse is more likely to be true: Mary is the source of inspiration for Geoff’s wisdom.

20 Midgley, The Owl of Minerva xi.

21 Cecilia Sjoholm, Kristeva and the Political (London: Routledge, 2006) 50, 54–58; cf. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1989) 27–30.

22 Kristeva, Black Sun 30.

23 Grace M. Jantzen died on 2 May 2006. So this present claim extrapolates from the project on which she was working – a first volume of which is published: Grace M. Jantzen, Foundations of Violence: Death and the Displacement of Beauty, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2004) 11–20.

24 For the examples and implications of this eclipse, see Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice 28. Cf. Michèle Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), especially Part 1, “Cast-Offs.”

25 Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice 28; cf. Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary 100–28.

26 Paul Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability: A Response” in Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, eds. John Wall, William Schweiker, and David Hall (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 280, 282, 284.

27 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005) 460.

28 Ibid. 459–66.

29 Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability” 284; cf. Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Chicago: Regnery, 1965); rev. trans. Kelbley with a new Introduction by Walter J. Lowe (New York: Fordham UP, 1986) 9–15, 144–45; The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York and London: Harper, 1967) 152, 156–57.

30 Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), especially 4, 21–22, 113–14, 138–43, 245–47; Pamela Sue Anderson, “Myth and Feminist Philosophy” in Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Kevin Schilbrack (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 101–22. Midgley’s understanding of symbolism and myth in the wisdom of our living, learning and knowing bears similarities to Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary 1–20; cf. Midgley, The Myths We Live By, especially 1–5, 88–93, 97–101.

31 The adjective “conative” recalls Baruch Spinoza’s conception of conatus as the human striving to persist in one’s own being.

32 Ricoeur, “Ethics and Human Capability” 282–83.

33 Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005) 91; and more generally chapter 2.

34 See note 4 above.

35 For a crucial backdrop to Le Doeuff’s thinking on “le coeur,” see Maria Zambrano, Les Clairières du bois, trans. from Spanish Marie Laffranque (Paris: L’Éclat, 1989) 65–80; see also note below.

36 Maria Zambrano is born in 1904 in Andalusia, attends the University of Madrid where she studies philosophy and dies in 1991. Zambrano wrote numerous books in Spanish – one of which inspired Le Doeuff with a story about Dawn who remains human, unlike the goddess “Dawn” of classical literature. For the challenge of “la philosophie imaginaire” in Zambrano to the traditional gender stereotypes of divine women, see Maria Zambrano, De l’Aurore, trans. from Spanish Marie Laffranque (Paris: L’Éclat, 1989).

37 An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, ed. J.G. Gaarlandt (New York: Washington Square, 1985) 119. [Editors’ note: Etty Hillesum (1914–43) was a Dutch Jewish victim of the Holocaust.]

38 Pamela Sue Anderson, “Feminism and Patriarchy” in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, eds. David Jasper, Andrew Hass, and Elizabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006) 810–26.

39 Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Biographical Preface by Frank Kermode, ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992) 3. For an example where Woolf moves from the light–dark imagery of waves rising and falling to the figure of a rider on a proud horse who faces a dark enemy advancing against her or him, see ibid. 247–48.

40 Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice 242–43; cf. Woolf, The Waves 3. For a contextualization of French feminism in terms of waves, see Lisa Walsh, “Introduction: The Swell of the Third Wave” in Contemporary French Feminism, eds. Kelly Oliver and Lisa Walsh (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004) 1–11.

41 For more on recognition, or reciprocal equality, see Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice 278–79; Pamela Sue Anderson, “Life, Death and (Inter)subjectivity: Realism and Recognition in Continental Philosophy,” International Journal of Philosophy of Religion 13, Special Issue, Issues in Continental Philosophy of Religion (2006).

42 Hamer and Code translate Le Doeuff’s French term déshérences as “cast-offs”: see Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing 18. Instead, to emphasize the lack of inheritance in this context, the (albeit awkward) “dis-inherited women” is the present translation.

43 For example, Le Doeuff points out that Woolf fails to recognize any renaissance or medieval woman writer; so Le Doeuff singles out a counter-example: Christine de Pisan is a fourteenth-century woman writer who did much to demonstrate the crucial significance of the imaginary for the successful living and thinking of women; see Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowing ix–x, 119, 135–38. Cf. Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. and with Notes by Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, 1999).

44 Concerning the urgent need for a feminist imaginary, see also Penelope Deutscher, “When Feminism is ‘High’ and Ignorance is ‘Low’: Harriet Taylor Mill on the Progress of the Species,” Hypatia 21.3 (2006): 147.

45 Amélie Rorty, “Spinoza on the Pathos of Idolatrous Love and the Hilarity of True Love” in Feminism and the History of Philosophy, ed. Genevieve Lloyd (New York: Oxford UP, 2002) 222; cf. Spinoza, Ethics, trans. and ed. G.H.R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) 314–16.

46 Carol Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (London: Chatto, 2002) 40.

47 For the claim that philosophy is “the wisdom of love in the service of love,” see Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981) 162. For a gloss on Levinas’s statement on “the Said said in the service of the Saying, the ‘justified Said’, in which wisdom has learnt from love, or in which politics is not uninformed by ethics,” see Stella Sandford, The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (London: Athlone, 2000) 91.