ABSTRACT
These snapshots over one hundred years of literature and law indicate the interconnectedness of different worlds, of fact and value, individual and community, female and male, private and public, judge and judged, the texts of philosophy and the philosophies of texts. Tangentially, the texts have permitted consideration of issues already identified by feminist theorists as pivotal in the critique of male/female relations, agencies and identities. Somewhere between the worlds of nature and nurture, constructions appear which reflect the tectonic tensions and elisions perpetuated in malefemale relations – in differing perceptions of the public and private, of identity, history, economics, social contract. Enmeshed within these broad philosophical and cultural frameworks, are issues regarded as more ‘local’, more ‘social’ or ‘doctrinal’ – provocation, rape, abortion, pornography, even treason. Yet the studies within this text suggest the unseen yet seamless links between the broad and the local, of the assumptions behind theory and practice, behind ‘natural’ and ‘cultivated’ aspects of our world. And this seamless linkage flows too into the constructions undertaken in jurisprudence and philosophy; in both deductive and inductive, a priori and a posteriori reasoning. Simply, the struggle to stand free of the material and contingent, to adjudicate, theorise and assess impartially – to achieve the integrity of disinterested engagement with the world of ideas in any form – is severely hampered. Our location and attachments to the forces which shape and influence us – and these include our physical, material and ideological conditions – inscribe our identities and identify our inscriptions. The disability, and the struggle to float free of it, is exacerbated by two issues largely denied. Firstly, the integral alignment to a view of nature, of nurture, of male, of female, of humanity and existence itself, is inevitably encrypted into every text, whether of positivist or natural jurisprudence, literary, feminist, scientific. Springing from this is the second locus of denial, residing in the claim that the realm of impartial judgements and values is attainable. There is insufficient acknowledgement that objectivity is impossible.1 Flagging this state, the tension between intellectual freedom and unfreedom, is an exercise in intellectual humility necessary to intellectual integrity. We are as much the creatures of the worlds of ideas and values as they are our creatures – certainly, much more so than the architectures of theory and doctrine admit.
