ABSTRACT
What exactly does the ‘maleness’ of Reason amount to? It is clear that what we have in the history of philosophical thought is no mere succession of surface misogynist attitudes, which can now be shed, while leaving intact the deeper structures of our ideals of Reason. There is more at stake than the fact that past philosophers believed there to be flaws in female character. Many of them did indeed believe that women are less rational than men; and they have formulated their ideals of rationality with male paradigms in mind. But the maleness of Reason goes deeper than this. Our ideas and ideals of maleness and femaleness have been formed within structures of dominance-of superiority and inferiority, ‘norms’ and ‘difference’, ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, the ‘essential’ and the ‘complementary’. And the malefemale distinction itself has operated not as a straightforwardly descriptive principle of classification, but as an expression of values. We have seen that the equation of maleness with superiority goes back at least as far as the Pythagoreans. What is valued-whether it be odd as against even numbers, ‘aggressive’ as against ‘nurturing’ skills and capacities, or Reason as against emotion-has been readily identified with maleness. Within the context of this association of maleness with preferred traits, it is not just incidental to the feminine that female traits have been construed as inferior-or, more subtly, as
‘complementary’—to male norms of human excellence. Rationality has been conceived as transcendence of the feminine; and the ‘feminine’ itself has been partly constituted by its occurrence within this structure.
