Phyllis Rooney - Gendered Reason: Sex Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason

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Gendered Reason: Sex Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason

Author(s): Phyllis Rooney
Source: Hypatia, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 77-103
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc.
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Gendered Reason: Sex Metaphor and
Conceptions of Reason
PHYLLIS ROONEY
Reason has regularly been portrayed and understood in terms of images and met
that involve the exclusion or denigration of some element-body, passion, na
instinct-that is cast as "feminine." Drawing upon philosophical insight into
phor, I examine the impact of this gendering of reason. I argue that our conce
of mind, reason, unreason, female, and male have been distorted. The polit
"rational" discourse has been set up in ways that still subtly but powerfully in
the voice and agency of women.
Initially it seemed that the physical exclusion of women from the h

rationality was our main concern with the reason-gender issue. The fem
challenge has begun to show that this is only the beginning of the story.1
In addition to the physical prohibition of women, we have literal a
metaphorical exclusions from the realm of rational knowing as that ha
conceived in our Western philosophical tradition. On the more literal sid
have claims that women are less rational than men, or that they have a dif
rationality due to their different "nature." It is my goal in this paper to a
that a certain type of metaphorical exclusion or denigration is no less w
of serious attention. I wish to explore that aspect of the history of reason
revolves around the fact that reason (sometimes with its allied concepts,
and knowledge) has regularly been conceived and understood in terms
images, metaphors, and allegories that implicitly or explicitly involve
exclusion or denigration of some element that is cast as "feminine," where
element would typically be something like body, nature, passion, inst
sense, or emotion.
Feminists sometimes talk about the "maleness" of reason and of our ne
examine dichotomies like that between reason and emotion, but often w
fully developing what those things mean or what their examination i
involve. I hope to contribute to these questions by exploring one aspect
Hypatia vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1991) ? by Phyllis Rooney
78 Hypatia
maleness of reason in a way that brings to light what exactly it is that makes
that maleness suspect. This will also include an examination of some of the
historical and philosophical ramifications of splits like that between reason
and emotion.
Bacon's famous marriage metaphor, "let us establish a chaste and lawful
marriage between Mind and Nature ... ," is one that is often cited in discus-
sions about the role that certain images of control and domination have played
in the development of moder science (Harding 1986; Keller 1985; Merchant
1980). In focusing more specifically on reason, I am in part taking off from the
work of Genevieve Lloyd in her book The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female"
in Western Philosophy (1984). Lloyd explores the regular juxtaposition of reason
and maleness in the works of many of the major figures in the history of Western
philosophy, and she argues that this is not a superficial linguistic bias but
something that lies deep within our philosophical tradition. Yet apart from
saying that such associations have an effect on "the philosophical imagina-
tion," that they "forge powerful symbolic connections," she does not pursue
in much detail what that effect is. It is such questions raised by her work that
have led to my explorations in this paper. With my attention to metaphor I
am also narrowing the focus somewhat more than Lloyd has done. My plan is
to take advantage of philosophical insight into metaphor to bring into clearer
focus central problems surrounding the metaphorical gendering of reason.
I use the term "metaphor" as it is often used in philosophical discussions-it
can include uses of image and simile, as well as instances of allegory and model
considered as extended metaphors. I use the term "sex metaphor" to refer to
metaphors that draw upon some aspect of a male-female dynamic, such as a
voyeuristic act, a sexual act, or a relationship or marriage situation. I am
particularly interested in the use of sex metaphors to highlight certain aspects
of the dynamics of reason and unreason. The term "reason" encompasses
various senses that it has had in the history of philosophy: usually it refers to
that faculty or process by means of which we gain "proper" knowledge or truth.
The term "reason" in this broad sense can also include uses of the term
"rationality." With this latter term the emphasis is more on paradigm processes
or models of reasoning as in the currently popular conceptions of instrumental
rationality.2
In some cases it is possible to separate what a particular philosopher said
about women from his characterization of irrationality or unreason as "femi-
nine." Plato comes to mind here. While he prized rationality in the form of a
spirited reason, he conceived of it as involving a shedding of what was at least
symbolically associated with femaleness, as we will see. Yet he also held that
women were, in principle, capable of high degrees of rationality, and some have
speculated about "Plato's feminism." Plato is, however, more the exception in
this regard. In this paper I separate the issue of the metaphorical construal of
unreason as feminine from claims about women's (literal) irrationality. This is
Phyllis Rooney 79
not meant to diminish the importance of the examination of philosophers'

views of women.3 (Though beyond the scope of this paper, the full analysis
would exhibit the links among all of these exclusions.) I argue here that the
metaphorical casting of unreason as feminine is, in the end, at least as damaging
as the more literal dismissals. The damage, I maintain, applies not just to our
conceptions of male and female but also to our conceptions of reason, emotion,
and related concepts.
In anticipation of the later discussion, it will be helpful in the first section
below to keep the following questions in mind: How does the (metaphorical)
male-female dynamic highlight certain aspects of the reason-unreason
dynamic? What constitutes the relationship that is being set up between the
male and female nodes? When, for example, are images of combat, control, or
domination being set up? In cases where I refer to a specific passage or footnote,
I do not mean to imply that if the "offending" passage were removed then all
would be well. Often such passages provide a key to the deeper implications
of the surrounding discussions.
In the second part of the paper I take a closer look at philosophical insights
into the function and impact of metaphor more generally. In the last part I
draw together the earlier discussions to explore what I think are some of the
long-term detrimental effects of the fairly persistent characterization of unrea-
son as feminine. I pay particular attention to our understanding of mind and
reason, of male and female, our conception of rational discourse, and our view
of the enterprise of philosophy itself. I also point to ways in which this should
help us arrive at a clearer understanding of some recurring tensions in feminist
theory.
I. THE SEX HISTORY OF REASON
One can hardly turn one's gaze to Greek philosophy with this issue in mind
without recalling the Pythagorean table of the opposites. Aligned with "male"
on one side we have one, rest, straight, light, good; and aligned with "female"
on the other we have many, motion, curved, darkness, bad.4 The original
mythic theme involved associating the forces of unreason with the Furies, the
earth goddesses who represented dark forces with mysterious subterranean
female powers. The pervasive thematic dichotomy in Greek thought between
form and formlessness, or between form and matter, is almost inevitably played
out with the associations clearly drawn: reason and form are aligned with
maleness, and formlessness and matter are aligned with femaleness. This is
played out in numerous metaphorical and literal ways. Aristotle, for example,
bolstered this further with his theory of generation: in procreation the male
imparts the motion or the form to the child, while the female provides only
the passive indeterminate matter.5 We get, well established, a theme that in
one way or another informs the imagination (sometimes unconsciously) of just
80 Hypatia
about every well-known philosopher to follow. The path of reason, the path
to knowledge and truth, will involve in some way a transcendence of the
"feminine." The words "female" or "feminine" need not be used. We may
simply get a discussion about the need to control irrational impulses, instincts,
"lower" passions, or the vagaries of nature. Yet the imaginative and emotional
substructure that makes such needs seem self-evident is often revealed quite
surprisingly in an overt reference, or in the workings of what may seem like a
superfluous metaphor.6
The imaging of reason as male is not as overt with Plato as it is with
Aristotle-initially, that is. For Plato the bearer of immortality is the rational
soul and the path of reason involves some kind of escape from the body. Reason
is not opposed to passion simpliciter: when properly guided by the nobler strings
of Eros, the man of wisdom reaches for transcendence, for true knowledge of
the forms. However, the Phaedrus image of the pull of the two winged horses-
depicting the proper and improper pull of Eros-is elsewhere connected
symbolically with the distinction between male homosexual and heterosexual
love.7 More particularly, certain forms of association with women do not bode
well for the man intent on the path of wisdom. The well-known allegory of
the cave in the Republic (Bk. 7), the ascent from which marks the path toward
true knowledge, does not seem to draw explicitly on gender imagery. Yet, it
surely comes to life anew with Luce Irigaray's call to "Read it this time as a
metaphor of the inner space, of the den, the womb or hystera, sometimes of the
earth... an attempt at making metaphor, at trying out detours, which not only
is a silent prescription for Western metaphysics but also, more explicitly,
proclaims (itself as) everything publicly designated as metaphysics, its fulfill-
ment, and its interpretation" (Irigaray 1985, 243; Plato 1937, 1: 773ff.).
Plato's Theaetetus metaphor of the philosopher of ideas as a midwife may seem
to reverse the gender orientation of the creator, the generator, the arbiter of
ideas and truth. Yet we should notice that Socrates is presenting himself as the
midwife ministering to Theaetetus's philosophical confusions (Plato 1937, 2:
150-53). I would also suggest that a fuller exploration of the play of imagery
here reveals a pattern not unlike that discussed by Evelyn Fox Keller in her
analysis of Bacon's imagery in his account of the "virilization of the scientist."
She argues that behind the simple denial of the feminine as subject is "a prior
co-optation of the female mode-a co-optation which, given the initial
impulse toward denial, necessitates an ever more urgent and aggressive
repudiation" (1985, 40-42). For Bacon this also involved, in part, appropriat-
ing the imagery of birthing. Juxtaposing the allegory of the cave with the image
of the philosopher as midwife gives a fairly compelling picture of a drawing
away from the realm of the maternal and the female in what is surely another
paradigm example of the "simultaneous appropriation and denial of the
feminine" (Keller 1985, 41). In Greek mythology Athena, the goddess of
wisdom, reason, and military strategy (among other things), represents the
Phyllis Rooney 81
personification of this pattern. Bom from the head of her father Zeus, she
assumes the role of the archetypal father's daughter.8
With Aristotle the form-matter split emerges in a somewhat different way,
and its connection with a male-female dialectic is often more explicit, an
instance of which we have already seen in Aristotle's theory of generation. The
forms no longer belong in their purity to a separable transcendental realm, but
form now becomes the intelligible principle of matter, and the soul becomes
the form or intelligible principle of the body. The rational part of the soul
"naturally" rules the irrational part, yet this relationship is often explicated in
terms of political metaphors-the "natural" authority of master over slave and
of free man over free woman. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle writes:
. . . while in the body we see that which moves astray, in the

soul we do not. No doubt, however, we must none the less
suppose that in the soul too there is something contrary to the
rational principle, resisting and opposing it.... Metaphorically
and in virtue of a certain resemblance there is a justice, not
indeed between a man and himself, but between certain parts
of him; yet not every kind of justice but that of master and
servant or that of husband and wife. For these are the ratios in
which the part of the soul that has a rational principle stands
to the irrational part. ( 102b20-25; 1138b5-13; Aristotle 1941,
951, 1022)
In this passage Aristotle illustrates his sense of the proper and just relation-
ship between the rational and irrational parts of the soul by means of such
"proper" relationships between master and slave and between husband and
wife. The irrational part also conflicts and struggles with the rational principle.
It is important to note here that the gender metaphor is class specific, referring
to free citizens of the state.9 In exploring Aristotle's use of such analogies
Elizabeth Spelman suggests that there is a type of circularity here. Aristotle
speaks of the natural ordering of the soul in terms of these political analogies.
Yet, this "natural" rule between persons is argued for in part by drawing upon
the dynamics of the ordering in the soul, coupled with Aristotle's view that
the rational principle has proper authority in the souls of free men while it does
not in free women or in slave women and men.0l It is useful to keep such
possibilities of circularity in mind, for, as I will suggest later, they typically
reveal the workings of a deep metaphor.
While the first-century Alexandrian Philo does not stand out in our history
like Plato and Aristotle, Lloyd highlights his use of the story of the Fall as an
allegory to help elucidate the relationship between mind and sense perception.
Woman, representing sense perception, is the source of the Fall for man, who
represents sovereign mind. Lloyd draws our attention to the following passage
82 Hypatia
in Philo which may well be the most explicit statement of the symbolic
associations under discussion:
The male is more complete, more dominant than the female,

closer akin to causal activity, for the female is incomplete and
in subjection and belongs to the category of the passive rather
than the active. So too with the two ingredients which consti-
tute our life-principle, the rational and the irrational; the
rational which belongs to mind and reason is of the masculine
gender, the irrational, the province of sense, is of the feminine.
Mind belongs to a genus wholly superior to sense as man is to
woman."
A fairly consistent picture emerges from the ancient era in our tradition,
and it is one that will be played out later in various ways. Already we see that
merging of the "natural" and the political that is so familiar to feminists. And
the metaphorical pattern is set in place: it structures the "given" or desired
relationship of reason and unreason that is to provide an invisible, if not visible,
first premise for many philosophers to come.
Later philosophers certainly present different variations on the theme. With
Augustine, for example, woman is not presented as something alien to reason,
yet she symbolizes the mind's lesser intellectual functioning in its attention to
managing the practical affairs of life: "Just as in man and woman there is one
flesh of two, so the one nature of the mind embraces our intellect and action,
or our council and execution, or our reason and reasonable appetite." Aquinas,
largely echoing Aristotle, sees man as symbolizing the human vital functioning
that includes reason, and woman provides the means for the material genera-
tion of that vital functioning principle.12
As we move on to later centuries and the flourishing of Enlightenment
ideals, we may imagine that many of these underlying images (associated with
the Aristotelian view) are left behind. But we get what is at best a shift in the
articulated, explicit claims about reason and mind. Descartes described the
"natural light of reason" in ways that did not clearly involve some form of
exclusion of a feminine element, and he allowed that "even women" could
develop his rational method. Susan Bordo argues, however, that this rationalist
project-with its interweaving of ideals of clarity, dispassion, and detachment
into Cartesian conceptions of rationality and objectivity-comes into a some-
what different focus when viewed in terms of the great anxiety of the intellec-
tual culture in which Descartes found himself, an anxiety due to a kind of
separation from the organic female universe of the Middle Ages. Drawing upon
themes of modern developmental psychology, specifically an understanding of
the development of masculine ideals of separation and individuation, Bordo
thus suggests a psychocultural reading of the work of Descartes.13 Lloyd also
argues that the Cartesian split between mind and body was, in part, an
Phyllis Rooney 83
extension of previous gendered polarities such as that between different parts

of the soul (1983, 505-6). Reason becomes "a highly abstract mode of thought,
separable, in principle, from the emotional complexities and practical demands
of ordinary life" (Lloyd 1984, 49). She argues that this provides support for a
"powerful version of the sexual division of mental labor," where women are
still expected to be primarily involved in the realm of the sensuous and the
practical, granting men of higher classes the "privilege" of being able to remove
themselves to the realm of pure reason. It is important to emphasize here that
drawing upon, and further promoting, this division between the public world
of autonomous action and the private domestic realm is something that goes
deeper than a superficial social arrangement. In their theoretical discussions,
Descartes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel all relied to some extent on the
sense of a deepening division between a private feminine realm of domestic
retreat and a realm of public action that was central to development toward a
fully rational, autonomous self-consciousness.14
With Rousseau and Hegel, however, we also seem to get a celebration of
"nature" that in some contexts had been portrayed as a feminine element that
had to be controlled or transcended. But we should note that now nature is
construed as the embodiment of an unfolding reason, and the "feminine"
(sometimes explicitly associated with female consciousness) informs the realm
of the natural but somewhat preconscious or immature, undifferentiated
feeling stage of consciousness, a stage that must be transcended in the full
self-conscious realization of nature, reason, or spirit. With Hegel, for example,
the theme is not so much rejection but preservation in a higher synthesis.
In some of these contexts we may not get an outright denigration of the
female or the feminine; the private realm may be perceived as the place for
women's cultivation of their own special "feminine virtues." Yet even where
we do not get such a denigration or even an explicit division in terms of a
male-female split, we still get some kind of exclusion of the private (from the
public), of the particular and immanent (from the universal and transcendent),
of the sensuous, the imaginary, and the emotional (from the mental and the
spiritual), and it is clear that the female is at least symbolically, if not literally,
associated with these excluded dimensions.
The pull of deep associations in the historical gendering of reason has not
disappeared from the subconscious of later philosophers of reason. Reminders
appear in strange places, much like Freudian slips echoing the original suppres-
sion. I finish off this section with a sampling, drawing attention specifically to
instances of metaphor.
In a discussion concerning the correct use of reason with respect to the
absolutely good will, Kant warns us to beware of the laxity of reason, which in
its weariness may present us with less than true virtue. He adds in a footnote:
84 Hypatia
To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else than to

exhibit morality stripped of all admixture of sensuous things and
of every spurious adornment of reward or self-love. How much
she then eclipses everything which appears charming to the
senses can easily be seen by everyone with the least effort of his
reason, if it be not spoiled for all abstraction. (1959, 44)
While virtue in its pure form is portrayed as a woman, she is the passive
object of male vision, and we see where the voice of power and reason is
located. We should also note that the perception and exercise of morality in
its lesser form (due to a lapse of reason) is portrayed in terms of captivation by
the charms of the sensuously adorned woman.
This philosophical use of woman as vehicle for metaphor is clearly related
to the use of gender-interaction metaphors to depict the workings of rationality
and irrationality. Eva Feder Kittay (1988) has examined this use of woman
more explicitly and presents a view of the mediational role for men that both
metaphor and women have played. Of particular interest for my project are
examples where woman is cast as the other of the knowing subject, or in
opposition to such "proper" knowing. An example from Locke illustrates his
connection between woman and deception:
... all the art of rhetorick, besides order and clearness, all the
artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath
invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas,
move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment ... elo-
quence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer
itself ever to be spoken against. And it is vain to find fault with
those arts of deceiving wherein men find pleasure to be
deceived. ( bk. 3, chap. 10, sec. 34; Locke 1975, 508)
One cannot pass here without noticing Locke's eloquent use of a "figurative
application of words" to persuade us of the deceptions of eloquence!
In distinguishing the feeling of the sublime from that of the beautiful,
Schopenhauer discusses the "transition into the state of pure perception"
where the state of pure knowing "is obtained first of all by a conscious and
violent tearing away." He continues:
... there result several degrees of the sublime, in fact transitions

from the beautiful to the sublime, according as this addition is
strong, clamorous, urgent, and near, or only feeble, remote, and
merely suggested. ... Just as man is simultaneously impetuous
and dark impulse of willing (indicated by the pole of the genitals
as its focal point), and eternal, free, serene subject of pure
knowing (indicated by the pole of the brain), so, in keeping
with this antithesis, the sun is simultaneously the source of light,
Phyllis Rooney 85
the condition for the most perfect kind of knowledge ... and
the source of heat, the first condition of all life ... 15
Of the various elements in this passage we note the strong sexual imagery, and
insofar as the "female" is suggested, she is not aligned with the "eternal, free,
serene subject of pure knowing" but with its oppositional moment. And we
notice the recurring images of violence and struggle.
In the American pragmatist tradition we see efforts to relinquish ties with
what is perceived to be the burden of old, worn-out metaphysical systems.
Gone, for example, are appeals to flights to transcendental realms in the
explication of reason, knowledge, and truth. Yet in what would typically be
called the "seminal work" in the pragmatist tradition, C. S. Peirce's paper
"How to Make Our Ideas Clear," we hear again that call to form clear and
distinct ideas as we set out to shape our conceptions and frame our truths. At
the end of the first section of the paper, the urgency of this call is drawn to our
attention quite vividly by a description of what a single unclear idea lurking
in a young man's head will do:
Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague
shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has,
nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion
by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life,
leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived
with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his
flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some
bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the
beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone
with it. (1982, 82-83)
The pattern is well set in place. Many of the earlier uses of metaphor portray
the growth of reason and true knowledge in terms of an extrusion of some
aspect that is seen as female or feminine. Many of the later examples charac-
terize a lapse in reason, or the surfacing of unreason, as involving an explicit
or implicit intrusion of a feminine element, not untypically as the lure of
shadowy feminine charms.
II. METAPHOR AND THOUGHT
Some general questions arise at this point. Granted that the use of sex and
sexist metaphors was fairly persistent in philosophical conceptions of reason
and knowledge in our Western tradition, does that necessarily mean that the
way philosophers actually proceeded in their reasoning practices was in some
sense biased or defective? Even if we grant that such images played an
important role in historical conceptions of reason, how are we to argue from
86 Hypatia
that to the claim that reason as we now understand it is gender inflected in

ways that negate its purported neutrality, abstraction, and universality? Is it
clear that we should take these sex metaphors any more seriously than any of
a multitude of other kinds of stylistic embellishment? In this section and the
following one I address many of the issues raised by these questions. The full
impact of this gendering of reason cannot be adequately addressed in one paper;
however, I will explore reasons why I think this metaphorical structure
warrants much closer scrutiny than it has received in traditional epistemology.
For a start, it would be very difficult to argue for a view of metaphor as simply
"stylistic embellishment," given the analysis of metaphor-philosophical and
literary-during the last fifty years or so. There is general agreement that
metaphor contributes in some way to content and argumentation in philo-
sophical and scientific discourse, though there has been some disagreement
about what form that contribution takes. In any case, with many of the
examples above it is fairly clear that the philosopher in question did not intend
the metaphorical connection to be simply a matter of style. The association of
reason with maleness was often intended to bolster the argument concerning
reason's "natural" status in relation to sense, the "lower" passions, instinct, or
whatever. And even where such an intention is not clear, it turs out, as we
will see, that the metaphor reveals much more about historical background
assumptions and imaginative underpinnings than that philosopher ever
dreamed of revealing.
Disagreement about the conceptual contribution of metaphor has centered
on different views of metaphor. The comparison view takes seriously an analysis
of metaphor as a truncated or extended simile, yielding, in philosophical
contexts, a type of argument by analogy. Such an analysis might fit a few of
our examples above. Philo's claim that "mind belongs to a genus wholly
superior to sense as man is to woman" seems to suggest an argument by analogy.
But what if we were to subject such an argument to philosophical critique,
where we would first question the premise, "man is (wholly) superior to
woman," and then examine the inductive analogy step, the strength of which
depends on relevant similarities between the two domains in question?
With such examples we get very poor arguments, to put it mildly! This also
points to a more global issue of circular reasoning, akin to that suggested by
Spelman in the case of Aristotle. It becomes unclear at certain points which
is being used to argue for which: whether the supposed superiority of man to
woman is being assumed in order to argue for the "proper" relation of reason
to body, passions, and instincts; or whether it is assumed that reason is superior
to the passions (and related "feminine" elements), and it is also assumed that
males embody reason (or more of it) and females embody unreason (or more
of it), and then one infers that man is superior to woman. Or do we have a
global fallacy of circular reasoning surfacing in the history of philosophy? It
may well turn out that a situation like this typically signals the operation of a
Phyllis Rooney 87
root metaphor, one that has become so deeply embedded in our thought that
we no longer even recognize it as such, though its offshoots are everywhere
visible and play an active role in the way we frame our conceptual truths. Some
of the recent work on metaphor helps shed light on this predicament.
There is general agreement about the overall structure of metaphor: "the
presentation of the facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate
to another" (Ryle 1949, 10); "the essence of metaphor is understanding and
experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (Lakoffand Johnson 1980,
5). Some are reluctant to give a precise definition, and it has been suggested
that metaphors share at best a kind of Wittgensteinian family resemblance
(Ortony 1979, 5).
Max Black has given a very useful analysis, one that I think is particularly
helpful in our examination of sex metaphors and reason. He first distinguishes
between what he calls the primary subject (or primary domain) and the secondary
subject (or secondary domain). In most of the examples above the primary
domain is the realm of reason, mind, or soul; it is that which is being described
or explained. The realm of male-female relations is the secondary domain,
aspects of which are being used to help explain or describe the primary domain.
Black's interaction view of metaphor involves understanding the thoughts and
structures of the two domains as being "active together" and "interacting" to
produce a meaning that is the resultant of the interaction. Spelling this out in
more detail, he explains how the reader takes the system of implications from
the secondary domain and constructs a corresponding system of implications
about the primary subject.16
With a metaphor, Black claims, the reader is forced to connect the two ideas
or subjects by a "system of associated commonplaces" relating to the secondary
subject, where "the important thing for the metaphor's effectiveness is not that
the commonplaces shall be true, but that they should be readily and freely
evoked." The structure of the secondary domain, defined in large part by focal
words or phrases, acts as a screen through which we see the primary subject:
"The metaphor selects, emphasizes, suppresses, and organizes features of the
[primary] subject by implying statements about it that normally apply to the
[secondary] subject." He illustrates this with an example. If we want to describe
a battle in the language of chess, that choice requires that some aspects of the
battle will be emphasized while others will be neglected. He points out that,
"to describe a battle as if it were a game of chess is accordingly to exclude, by
the choice of language, all the more emotionally disturbing aspects of warfare,"
and he adds, in parentheses, that "similar by-products are not rare in philo-
sophical uses of metaphor." We should take special note also of an aspect that
Black mentions but doesn't seem to emphasize-that the interaction goes both
ways. We must not think that the implication system of the metaphorical
expression (the secondary subject) remains unaltered by the metaphorical
juxtaposition, for "if to call a man a wolf is to put him in a special light, we
88 Hypatia
must not forget that the metaphor makes the wolf seem more human than he
otherwise would." And last, but not least, we should pay attention to cases
where "it would be more illuminating ... to say that the metaphor creates the
similarity than to say that it formulates some similarity antecedently existing."
Black argues that interaction instances of metaphor are the only kind that are
of importance in philosophy (1962, 37-47).
I will draw upon this analysis later in my examination of the use of sex
metaphors. First, I want to look at an interesting extension of Black's view, one
that bears some similarity to our situation with sex metaphors and reason in
involving the repeated use of a particular metaphor. Some have suggested
exploring a parallelism between the use of metaphor in a literary (and perhaps
philosophical) text and the use of models in theoretical science, where a model
is understood in terms of the sustained and systematic use of a metaphor. Mary
Hesse has taken advantage of this direction to present an expanded picture of
scientific explanation, one that, she claims, avoids many of the problems of
the traditional deductive account of explanation (1980, 111-24). She holds
that the traditional account should be modified and supplemented by a view
of theoretical explanation as metaphoric redescription of the domain of the
explanandum, that which is being explained or described. She argues that the
observation language of science, like all natural languages, is continually being
extended by metaphoric use. As a result of model "interaction" new observa-
tion predicates come into the picture, allowing new predictions to become
possible.
In a discussion of the impact of gender metaphors in the development of
modern science, Sandra Harding argues that Hesse appears to lose the logic of
her argument when Hesse claims elsewhere that pragmatic success in descrip-
tion and prediction eventually takes over and that social or political values
involved in the initial formulation of a theory (and possibly expressed through
metaphor) are no longer implicated. Harding is right in suggesting that the
later disappearance of explicit appeals to such metaphors may well signal not
their dispensability as "mere" heuristic devices but their actual success in
shifting theoretical concepts and priorities.17 The idea of a metaphor being
adopted to the point of its own disappearance into invisibility or transparency
is also brought to our attention by Black when he warns about a metaphor
turning into a self-certifying myth:
There is an ever-present and serious risk that the [conceptual]

archetype will be used metaphysically, so that its consequences
will be permanently insulated from empirical disproof. The
more persuasive the archetype, the greater the danger of its
becoming a self-certifying myth. (1962, 242)
Some might argue that the instances cited above of sex metaphor charac-
terizing reason are more like the "spontaneous" use of literary and poetic
Phyllis Rooney 89
metaphor; however, the foregoing analysis provides sufficient justification to

implicate both the grounds and the impact of such "spontaneity." The fairly
persistent use of this metaphorical association throughout our philosophical
history does bear resemblance to the more conscious, systematic exploitation
of a scientific model. The comparison is, I think, strong enough to warrant
serious consideration of several implications. If it can be reasonably argued (as
Hesse and others have done) that metaphor models play a vital role in the
cognitive development of science at the level of discovery, description, and
explanation-where the domain under consideration is reasonably clear-cut
with respect to some level of intersubjective agreement about data and
results-then how much greater must that impact be when the primary domain
is much less tractable, much less open to some kind of objective view, which
is surely the case with the domains that philosophers have traditionally been
concerned with describing and explaining. The nature of mind, soul, reason
has been notoriously intractable for philosophers, which makes theorizing
about this whole area so much more susceptible to the dictates of a dominant
metaphor. As I discuss further in the next section, this is one of the areas where
the influence of sex metaphors has probably been the greatest. And the danger
of an (archetypal) metaphor becoming a self-certifying myth whose conse-
quences become insulated from empirical disproof is surely one that, for similar
reasons, is even more looming in the philosophical situation, especially when
insulation from empirical disproof just about goes with the territory.
I round off this section with an example that illustrates the need for vigilance
with respect to the workings of metaphor. Nancy Stephan has explored the use
of gender and race metaphors in the "scientific" study of human difference in
the nineteenth century, when gender metaphors were commonly used to
describe the "natural" order and relationship among the races and vice versa:
"Lower races represented the 'female' type of the human species, and females
the 'lower race' of gender" (Stephan 1986, 264). The juxtaposition of meta-
phors in this case underscores the point made earlier that gender metaphor
often signals literal and metaphorical privilege for males of "superior races"
only.
Stephan has examined the role of these analogies in the construction of the
very similarities and differences supposedly "discovered" by scientists. The
scientists' contribution, she argues, often involved the elevation of hitherto
unconsciously held race and gender analogies into self-conscious theory by
making them more precise through the developing vocabulary of anatomy,
craniology, and phrenology. In addition to the "finding" that women of
"superior" races and people of "lower" races had smaller brains, similarities
were found in the degree of protrusion of the jaw, tendencies toward longhead-
edness or roundheadedness, and so on. The inevitable "discoveries" of corre-
lations between anatomical features and levels of intelligence and social
90 Hypatia
behavior resulted. At the same time, such theories managed to account for
occasional small-brained male "geniuses"!
Now that we think of ourselves as belonging to a more sophisticated
scientific era we may be somewhat amused by all of this. However, before we
let the smile sink too deep we should take a closer look at the current
"scientific" search for that elusive gene or hormone level, or that elusive aspect
of brain lateralization that would "explain" why men are more mathematical
(or rational) than women. As feminist biologists and philosophers of science
are bringing to light, these studies show interesting lapses in reasoning when
it comes to setting up the experimental situations and interpreting actual
findings.18 It may well turn out that the factor sought is no more hidden, though
perhaps no less elusive, than the subtle workings of a deep metaphor.
III. THE IMPACT OF GENDERED REASON
I want to stress that it is not my intention to argue that metaphors should

not be used in philosophy. Metaphor provides an imaginative and creative
vehicle in philosophy, as elsewhere. That is not to say, however, that we should
remain unaware of the impact of a particular metaphor, especially when, as a
dominant metaphor, it suppresses others that might be more productive and
enlightening in the development of philosophical insight. Some argue that
one of the most effective ways to uproot a metaphor is to replace it with another
one (Turbayne, 1970).
It may be useful at this point to draw together the important elements in
the structure of the metaphor under consideration. Metaphor theorists talk
about the analogical structure that a metaphor sets up, the isomorphism that
is perceived or constructed between the primary and secondary domains. The
examples we have examined present us with a fairly consistent picture of the
dynamics of reason and unreason as that draws upon a male-female dynamic.
The main aspects of this structure include the following:
1. The basic elements of the structure are a male node (aligned with
reason), a female node (aligned with unreason), and some sort of
relationship between them.
2. When reason is operating correctly the male node represents the locus
of activity, and a "proper" relation with the female node has been
established.
3. When there is a lapse in reason or when unreason has surfaced, the

female node is "active," with the activity taking the form of wily
charms, contrary impulses, or shadowy interference.
Phyllis Rooney 91
4. The activity of reason in (2) almost always includes some form of

denigration, extrusion, domination, or control of the female node, with
related images of battle or struggle not uncommon.
It should also be noted that when the relationship assumes the form of an
"agreeable harmony," it is still the male node that is given the voice of agency,
that sets the parameters of the harmonious exchange, while the female is
relatively passive or silent. For the purpose of my argument it does not matter
that different philosophers construed the nodes and relationship slightly
differently: the female node has variously represented body, sense, passion,
nature, instinct, feeling. While many philosophers associated passions with a
denigrated female node, Plato's and Hume's positions could not easily be so
characterized. In the case of these two philosophers we see a division more in
terms of "higher" and "lower" passions or calmer and more violent passions,
and we don't need to speculate at great length about which node the "lower"
passions are associated with.19
I will first examine the impact of this gendered reason on what is seen as the
primary domain, our understanding of the nature of mind and its "contents"-
reason, thought, emotion, intuition. Later I will focus on issues that pertain
more to the secondary domain, the nature of woman, man, and the relationship
between them, as well as the general impact of the recurring conjunction of
maleness and reason, femaleness and unreason. In our discussions in feminist
theory we have to be ever mindful of our history when we make claims about
reason or about women, but particularly when we make claims about women's
reasoning. The full impact of the distortions that are our legacy is only
beginning to come to light. Within the scope of this paper I can discuss only
a few of the many issues that need to be examined.
We have seen that a metaphor regularly functions as a screen through which
different aspects of the subject under view can be organized, emphasized, or
suppressed. Metaphor theorists often talk about how the metaphor sets the
focus and frame of the subject of discourse. How has the operation of a gendered
reason informed our philosophical understanding of mind and reason? The
general strategy here is to become more consciously aware of the frame by
means of which we construct our problems and theories. By doing so we may
facilitate the dissolution of many of these problems. Here I draw in part upon
what I consider an important aspect of Wittgenstein's philosophical method-
ology. By drawing our attention to somewhat naive images presupposed in our
philosophical questions, he continually prompts us to see-often by means of
the "shock value" of exposing a metaphor-that those presuppositions may be
precisely what is at issue in the problem. Wittgenstein's "therapeutic" approach
includes making us aware of the ways in which our intellectual problems are
often brought about by what he calls our "bewitchment" by language!20 A
92 Hypatia
feminist analysis adds an important dimension of criticism and therapy tradi-

tionally overlooked.
A particular example from twentieth-century philosophy of mind illustrates
both the role of deep metaphors and the ways in which we might set about
uprooting them. Though not originally feminist inspired, such examples point
toward useful feminist extensions. Under Wittgenstein's influence, Gilbert
Ryle set out to expose what he considered mistaken views about the relation-
ship between mind and body, in particular, exhibiting "category mistakes"
linked to the underlying image of that relationship as a "ghost in a machine,"
a legacy traced to Descartes in a "myth which continues to distort the
continental geography of the subject" (1949, 10). Colin Turbayne mentions
this as an example of the insight we can gain when we "explode" a hidden
metaphor; there is a sense here that by giving voice to the metaphor-with
his well-known phrase-Ryle brought to awareness a subconsciously held
picture that had influenced the way many previous philosophers had concep-
tualized problems in philosophy of mind, including the mind-body problem
itself. Turbayne uses a metaphor to illustrate what happens when we become
such unconscious victims of metaphor: "After the disguise or mask has been
worn for a considerable time it tends to blend with the face and it becomes
extremely difficult to 'see through' it" (1970, 4). What has been the effect of
sex metaphors on our understanding of body, mind, consciousness, and reason?
At the outset, this sex metaphor structure operates in at least facilitating
the view that the contents of mind or consciousness can be neatly partitioned
into various groupings- beliefs, thoughts, desires, feelings, instincts, and so
on. More significantly, it helps animate the image of a type of great divide:
constellated around reason on one side we have understanding, a properly
disciplined will, rational beliefs, and so on; and constellated around unreason
on the other side are feelings (especially irrational ones), impulses, imaginings,
dreams, and intuitions. While some of these latter elements may well be
acknowledged as elements in a chain of mental causation, for example, it is
usually important that they are identified as nonrational mental causes. There
is an additional influence tied to the fact that root metaphors usually generate
subordinate metaphors. Politicizing parts of mind essentially involves anthro-
pomorphizing mind's contents, and this surely informs the predilection toward
viewing those contents as discrete entities. Philosophical tendencies toward
atomism (along with theoretical explanations in terms of the interaction of
separable, independent units) have come under particular scrutiny by femi-
nists. We may be more familiar with such criticisms in moral, social, and
political theory, but this issue has also surfaced in epistemology and philosophy
of mind.21
Some of these suggestions about the various workings of gendered reason
can be illustrated by drawing upon a recent discussion of a traditional problem.
It concerns the question of akrasia, the problem of weakness of the will. With
Phyllis Rooney 93
the metaphorical picture of a great divide, the following articulation of the

problem is surely suggested. How is it that despite our best efforts to align the
will with reason on this side, it occasionally (or often, perhaps!) hops across
the great divide and aligns itself with the more unsavory desires? What happens
to the presentation and seeming importance of the "problem" here if we seek
to uproot presuppositions fed by the gendering of reason and unreason? What
happens if we emerge from the shadow of this particular metaphor to find that
there is no clear divide between the "rational" and "irrational," or we no longer
have good reason to think that there ideally ought to be one-when it is no
longer thought meaningful to think in terms of such a divide.
A recent response by Annette Baier (1985) to Donald Davidson's (1982)
analysis of akratic action helps highlight some of the issues involved here. Part
of Davidson's project involves understanding when mental causes are rational
(that is, are "reasons") and when they are nonrational, and when, in particular,
the operation of nonrational causes warrants a charge of irrationality for the
agent. In certain cases of akratic action the akrates is freed of the charge of
inconsistency, he claims, if she does not have a second-order principle that she
ought to act on all first-order judgments about how best to act. In such cases
the akrates's action may be irrational from our point of view, but it need not
be from hers. In addition to raising questions about specific points in
Davidson's account, Baier addresses a more general concern related to what
she calls the account's "intellectualism, its individualism, and its intolerance
of uncertainty over which moves are mismoves, which guide is our best guide"
(1985, 128). She questions whether the whole model of deliberative reason
will in any effective sense account for human action in very human situations,
particularly those involving social interaction. She writes, "We will only find
it puzzling that deliberative reason should fail to control our action if we both
see that reason as most authoritative, and expect authorities to possess prepon-
derant power over other forces," and she sets out to challenge both of these
presumptions (1985, 121-22). She mentions Hume's insights about how our
best policies of belief formation and guidance in action employ "culture as well
as nature, tradition as well as passion,... imagination as well as logic, rhyme
as well as reason" (1985, 128-29).
Baier's points could be further underscored by a feminist critique, something
that she does not explicitly draw upon. She refers briefly to the image of a
"governor" and "rebellious subjects" (1985, 122). Sovereign reason's political,
gender, and class affiliations need to be examined more expressly. How does
the image of a separable male ruler exerting sovereign authority over his unruly
"feminine" subjects inform persistent, unconscious views of reason as ideally
separable from and exerting control over the more "feminine" elements of the
psyche? The imaginative pull of certain male ideal social arrangements are
surely not far from the surface here also. The resulting image of an isolable,
sometimes besieged, yet ideally sovereign reason surely casts a limiting shadow
94 Hypatia
over our theorizing about human thought and reasoning. This ideal of an
"abstract" or "universal" reason gives us at best a highly constrained or
distorted view of what we do when we think and act, including-or perhaps
above all-when we think and act well.
More specifically, we have inherited in our philosophical tradition a some-
what impoverished language and discourse, making it difficult to even talk
about what Hume and Baier are suggesting. We have difficulty articulating
what it is to think and act with "imagination as well as logic, rhyme as well as
reason." These terms have been given fairly clear gender alliances in an
oppositional structure nurtured largely by gendered reason's articulated flight
from the emotional, the imaginative, and the natural. The problem here, not
just for our understanding of akratic action but for many of our philosophical
discussions on mind and knowledge, is that we then try to force our analyses
into simplistic and distorted structures-we have to deal with oppositions and
paradoxes that reside primarily in the frame through which we view the
problem. Concerning philosophical debates in this area, then, the feminist
challenge must include the following questions: What sets the frame and focus
of the discussion? Why are certain concepts thought worthy of analysis and
others not? How do certain ideas acquire the status of fundamental notions
and first principles while others are seen as derivative or trivial? Why is a
certain mode of analysis thought to be the ideal, "rational" way to proceed?
With the specific example of akrasia we might ask, why is the "charge of
irrationality" an overarching issue for our understanding of akratic action?
Excepting acts that harm self or others, is it even a general problem that in a
rich life of engagement, change, and surprise we sometimes do things we had
not intended to do or had intended not to do?22 A controlled predictable life
directed mostly by a humorless sovereign reason would in the end be a fairly
dull one!
We next turn our attention to the secondary domain of the metaphorical
structure under discussion. How has the persistent association of maleness with
reason and femaleness with unreason helped constitute our understanding of
male, female and the relationship between these? For a start, there has been a
pernicious blurring of the literal and the metaphorical in claims about women
and rationality-such a blurring is just about inevitable with any powerful
metaphor that captures the imagination and intellect. We can now begin to
understand why philosophers' misogynistic views and their incessant claims
about women's (literal) lesser rationality were often adopted without the
minimal level of scrutiny that these thinkers applied in other areas. Such
claims, though presented as empirical "descriptions" or "findings," surely had
their basis elsewhere. Given a long history of physical and metaphorical
exclusions of women from the domain of the "rational" (as well as the gendered
construction of reason itself), it is questionable whether such claims even make
philosophical sense. What propels the idea that reason is some kind of distinct,
Phyllis Rooney 95
isolable quality or faculty that is clearly measurable? To what extent is this

assumption motivated by political interests in establishing and promoting
particular measurements of power, value, and worth?
There is a special way in which the exclusion of women is written into our
traditional texts in philosophy, where that tradition is projected as essentially
a conversation among men. We can ask why a particular philosopher chose
the sex metaphor that he did, a question that looms large with the repeated
use of such a metaphor. We recall Black's claim that a metaphor works if there
is a "system of associated commonplaces" (about the secondary domain) shared
among writer and readers, where "the important thing for the metaphor's
effectiveness is not that the commonplaces shall be true, but that they should
be readily and freely evoked." The metaphors under discussion present woman
or the "feminine" as the other of reason, and the other of philosophical
discourse. In addition, the content and tone of particular metaphors makes one
pause and wonder about the sources of emotional inspiration underlying the
supposedly abstract, neutral theorizing. Given what many philosophers said
elsewhere about actual women, a picture emerges of a system of "associated
commonplaces" that assumed a significant level of misogyny. We surely need
something like this in philosophical imaginations in order to understand why
the association of some element of unreason with the "feminine" or the
"womanly" was taken as sufficient warrant for the "obvious" inference that
that element is defective, is to be denigrated, controlled, or whatever. In an
essay on her relationship as a philosopher with Reason, Sara Ruddick writes,
"For a woman to love Reason was to risk both self-contempt and a self-alien-
ating misogyny" (1989, 5). In light of what we have uncovered so far, her
statement is no longer the exaggeration that it might once have seemed to
be.23
What, then, are we feminists to do about reason? Are we to reject reason
and anything historically associated with it, and endorse everything histori-
cally associated with the feminine, be that feeling, emotion, intuition, or
nature? Or are we to seek simply to "balance out," to value equally qualities
traditionally associated with the masculine and the feminine? Both of these
directions are potentially problematic. For there is a fundamental asymmetry
in our metaphorical structure that speaks against adopting such positions.
If we recall the basic features of the structure of reason's sex metaphors, we
notice immediately that we do not have a situation of symmetry or reciprocity.
The problem is not simply that a male-female division is set up but that the
loci of voice, of agency, of subjectivity, of (rational) power and knowledge are
all located with the male node. The dialectic of rational discourse is such that
the female is given the minimal agency of interference or simply the voice of
silence. (Given the powerful effect of our deep metaphors over a long period
of time, it is not surprising that recent books about women's emerging voice-
especially in academic spheres-often have a section titled simply "Silence"
96 Hypatia
[Rich 1979; Belenky et al. 1986]). It is not simply a question of whether reason
is good or bad, for, given its history, we hardly know what reason is. A central
issue is that the parameters and politics of "rational" method, discourse, and
voice are defined in ways that still subtly but powerfully diminish women's
voices. Nor is it simply a matter of revaluing that traditionally associated with
the feminine, because the very language of valuation and validation is itself
infected by the metaphorical structure. The continuing feminist struggle to
create a world that encourages women to their full expression in words and
action must be supported by nothing short of the remythologizing of voice and
agency and the remythologizing of reason, emotion, intuition, and nature.
In discussing the historical creation of woman as Other in her introduction
to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir talks about the historical representation
of woman as incidental, as inessential, in opposition to man, the essential, the
subject, the absolute. She then points out:
In truth, however, the nature of things is no more immutably

given, once for all, than is historical reality. If woman seems to
be the inessential which never becomes the essential, it is
because she herself fails to bring about this change ... [women]
do not authentically assume a subjective attitude. . . . The
reason for this is that women lack concrete means for organizing
themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the
correlative unit. (1952, xviii-xxii)
There is, we now see, more involved in women's inability to authentically

assume a subjective attitude than factors relating to their historical lack of
concrete means for organizing, though that certainly is important. The obsta-
cles here are not just practical ones but also deep conceptual and metaphorical
ones. The problem is not one of biology either, nor even one directly related
to social conditioning. In her discussion of gender images in science Keller
writes:
It has become abundantly clear that our ideas about the differ-
ences between the sexes far exceed what can be traced to mere
biology; that, once formed, these ideas take on a life of their
own-a life sustained by powerful cultural and psychological
forces. . . . The task of explaining the associations between
masculine and scientific thus becomes, short of reverting to an
untenable biological reductionism, the task of understanding
the emotional substructure that links our experience of gender
with our cognitive experience. (1985, 80)
We have been left with conceptions of masculine, feminine, reason, feeling,

intuition which all share a particular form of distortion: they are largely
caricatures fed by a metaphorical structure that sets them up in various
Phyllis Rooney 97
oppositions to one another. When we seek simply to revalue the "feminine,"

or value equally the "masculine" and the "feminine," we hardly remove the
distortion and the gender stereotyping, and we may continue to render them
invisible. In her discussion about differences in moral deliberation, Carol
Gilligan has talked about "care reasoning" as a respectable alternative to
"justice reasoning."24 Distinctions such as this are potentially limiting in
sidestepping the central issue. We have to be especially careful when we
reintroduce discussion about the voicings and power of the "feminine," that
we do not do so in a way that leaves unexamined the original division that
constituted the "feminine" through exclusion from rational knowing. In this
respect I certainly agree with a concluding remark by Lloyd: "The affirmation
of the value and importance of 'the feminine' cannot of itself be expected to
shake the underlying normative structures for, ironically, it will occur in a space
already prepared for it by the intellectual tradition it seeks to reject."25
There are many reasons why women in a particular context might be
thought to have a different approach to a particular subject or issue, though
claims about "fundamental" differences are inherently problematic. Explana-
tions that stress particularities of their social conditioning must also stress the
corresponding particularities and contingencies of male conditioning. Such
explorations will render suspect any implicit assumptions about men's reason-
ing being inherently more "universal" or "neutral," thus "better" according to
traditional conceptions. There is also a more general consideration. If women
seem to have a different approach toward reasoning in certain contexts it may
simply be due to the fact that they have less allegiance, less reason to want to
conform to the dictates of a deep metaphor that excludes them or, in one way
or another, is premised upon a denigration of the "feminine." If this is so, then
it emerges as a peculiar irony of reason's history that women may now have a
distinct advantage when it comes to developing less distorted conceptions of
reason and knowledge.26
In reconceptualizing reason and its allies knowledge and truth, we have to
uproot a rhetorical matrix that admits these concepts to the realm of action,
insight, and power yet has expelled feeling, passion, instinct, and nature from
any enduring claims to rational power and knowledge. In learning to authen-
tically speak anew our insights and truths about our experience as embodied
humans, we need an empowering reason, one that doesn't require an opposing
force over which it needs to gain transcendence with all of the deep conceptual
trappings that have gone along with this gendering of reason. Our history has
given us what, at best, can only be described as a very impoverished discourse.
We have been able to talk about the power of reason but not about the power
of empathy. We can talk about the insight and understanding that rational
knowledge brings, but we cannot talk about the understanding a deepening
sense of compassion brings. Just as we have at best a caricature of reason, we
also are left with a caricature of feeling, feeling robbed of any claim to
98 Hypatia
rationality and understanding. We don't have the means to talk about how our
intuitions, impulses, and instincts sometimes bespeak a deeper knowing. And
yet we get the clear sense that the most creative insights in the history of
thought emerge in part out of a special and rare ability to go beyond the
caricatures of such enforced divisions.27
The history of reason, emotion, and imagination has surely been a curious
one. Despite reason's articulated stance of separation from emotion and
imagination, it has embedded itself in an emotional and imaginative substruc-
ture characterized largely by fear of, or aversion to, the "feminine." And so,
allied with its metaphor that has become a myth, there is a sense in which
reason has come full circle. In its attempt to gain distance from myth and fable,
it has propelled itself, not by the power of reason (whatever that would be),
but by the power of a myth.
NOTES
An early version of this paper was presented at the University of Iowa's Project on the
Rhetoric of Inquiry spring 1989 conference Discourse, Rhetoric, and Culture. I would like
to thank Christiane Hartnack, Katherine Hayles, Evelyn Fox Keller, Robert McKim,
Nancey Murphy, Cecilia Ridgeway, and anonymous Hypatia reviewers for helpful com-
ments on an earlier draft of this paper.
1. For useful discussions of the theoretical, social, and political ramifications of the
reason-gender issue, see Harding (1982) and Ruddick (1987). Grimshaw (1986) discusses
the "maleness" of philosophy and reason-see especially her introduction and chaps. 1
and 2. Lloyd (1984) is a central reference for my discussion that follows.
2. I am paying attention particularly to that "grand" sense of reason in our philo-
sophical tradition. Some might claim that my arguments do not affect specific concep-
tions or instances of reasoning and rationality. Though beyond the scope of this paper, I
would argue that the "grand" conception has influenced our thinking about reasoning
and rationality in its specific forms: it influences what we admit as paradigm cases of
reasoning, and it influences the way we conceptualize those processes to ourselves.
3. For an examination of historical philosophical conceptions of "woman," see
Mahowald (1978).
4. Aristotle discusses the Pythagorean table of opposites in his Metaphysics, bk. 1,
chap. 5, 986a-986b (Aristotle 1941, 698-99). See also Whitbeck (1976, 55-60).
5. Aristotle, Metaphysics, bk. 1, chap. 6, 988a (Aristotle 1941, 702); Aristotle,
Generation of Animals, bk. 2, 732aff. (Aristotle 1953, 131ff). See also Lloyd (1984, 2-9).
6. The phrase "emotional substructure," used by Keller ( 1985, 80), is one that I think
is especially useful in describing the workings of these types of metaphors.
7. On the figure of the pair of winged horses and the charioteer, see Phaedrus, secs.
246ff. (Plato 1937, vol. 1, 250ff.) On knowledge and the different forms of love, see
Symposium, especially secs. 209-12 (Plato 1937, vol. 1, 333-35). For further discussion of
this, see Keller (1985, 21-42) and Lloyd (1984, 18-22). Andrea Nye (1990), in her
feminist reading of the history of logic, also explores this weaving of imagery in the ancient
opposition between poetry and logic.
Phyllis Rooney 99
8. Athena is presented perhaps most clearly in this role in Aeschylus's Eumenides.

Orestes is on trial for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra. Apollo defends him, but
the Furies seek justice for Clytemnestra's death. Athena, casting the deciding vote in
favor of Orestes's acquittal, states: "... no mother gave me birth, and in all things save
marriage I, my father's child indeed, with all my heart commend the masculine ..." (11.
736-42; The Oresteia of Aeschylus, trans. George Thomson [Cambridge University Press,
1938] vol. 1, p. 333). Julie Ward directed my attention to this passage.
9. Elizabeth Spelman stresses the need to be aware of race and class distinctions here,
noting that when Aristotle talks of men and women he is usually referring to free men
and women. Aristotle grants free women a different level of reason from that which he
grants slave men and women: in free women the deliberative capacity is without authority,
but slave men and women are not really granted the capacity to deliberate. See Spelman
(1988, chap. 2).
10. Spelman (1983). Some of these issues are also discussed in the early chapters of
Spelman (1988).
11. Lloyd (1984, 27). This passage comes from Philo, Special Laws, bk. 1, sec. 37, in
F. Colson and G. Whitaker, Philo, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann), 1929,
vol. 7, p. 215.
12. For further discussion of Augustine and Aquinas, see Lloyd (1984, 28-37). The
Augustine quote is from De Trinitate, bk. 12, chap. 3.
13. Bordo (1986 and 1987). Bordo's views draw in part on the work of Nancy
Chodorow (1978) in her analysis of the value placed upon separation, distance, individ-
uation, and detachment in male development in cultures where infant care is primarily
the work of the mother. Bordo, among others, argues that these male qualities are not
without epistemological and metaphysical significance in "neutral" developments in
philosophy and the sciences that have been undertaken largely by males.
14. See Lloyd (1983 and 1984, chap. 3). Jean Bethke Elshtain (1981) explores the
connection between the public-private split and the male-female one, examining the
impact of that on views of women in social and political thought.
15. Schopenhauer (1984) sec. 39, p. 179. Kathleen Schmidt drew my attention to
these examples in Kant and Schopenhauer.
16. This view is outlined in Black (1962); see especially chaps. 3 and 13. A more
recent account is given in Black (1979). In the earlier account he talked about the
"principal" and "subsidiary" subjects rather than the "primary" and "secondary" ones.
17. Harding (1986, 233-39); Hesse (1978). In order to develop the argument here,
one would need to explore more fully the relationship between a metaphor and different
types of values associated with it. Presumably Hesse could argue here that those aspects
of metaphor which remain-extending the observation language of science-are those
that can be dissociated from the more politically motivated values (if any) connected
with the metaphor, and that these latter are eventually filtered out. But can one make
such a neat dissociation in the case of gender metaphors, when the valuation of the
masculine over the feminine is the main point and purpose of the metaphor?
18. See Bleier (1984) and Fausto-Sterling (1985) for feminist discussions of biological
theories on women. Longino (1990) also discusses the role of values and background
assumptions in sex differences research. See also Genova (1988) for a discussion of the
ideological commitments and models of thought processing that underlie many of these
research programs.
19. For a discussion of Hume's position, see Lloyd (1984, 50-56). Lloyd argues that
Hume's view of reason takes on an association with maleness through the social context
100 Hypatia
(with its distinction between civic and private realms) rather than through a more explicit
gendering. Hume's view in this respect is not unlike that of Descartes. There has been
much discussion of Hume's seeming inversion of the power relationship between reason
and the passions: "[Reason] is and ought to be nothing but the slave of the passions"
(Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 2, pt. 3, sec. 3). By this he means that the passions supply
the ends, and reason can only work out the means toward those ends. Hume's position
cannot be seen to "solve" many of the central concerns raised in this paper. There is still
a strict division between reason and the passions and they still function in a type of
opposition or battle. And he does not explicitly dissociate reason from maleness and the
passions from femaleness. To suggest that Hume solves the gender issue here is akin to
suggesting that feminism is simply about the battle over who gets to "wear the trousers"
in the household!
20. This approach is well illustrated in Wittgenstein (1953). A large part of this text
is devoted to issues in philosophy of language and mind, with Wittgenstein's continual
promptings about the role of philosophy as a kind of therapy to help us find our way back
out of our intellectual confusions, to help "shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."
See, for example, secs. 109ff., 133, 309.
21. Naomi Scheman (1983) discusses this issue with mind, connecting male experi-
ence of individualism with the individualist assumption underlying philosophical
accounts of the nature of the objects of psychology. Nancy Holland (1990) also discusses
this issue, specifically with regard to tendencies toward atomism in Locke's epistemology
and metaphysics. Some may point out that critiques of various versions of atomism are
not new in our philosophical tradition, suggesting that the feminist critique adds nothing
new. I would argue, on the contrary, that insofar as the development of a "problem"
(atomism or whatever) has something to do with gender, class, or race associations, then
that problem cannot be fully understood or resolved until a feminist analysis exposes the
impact of those historical associations.
22. Questions can be raised about specific acts that hurt ourselves or others, acts that
we may not intend and that we later regret. I am not suggesting that there is no problem
with such acts-I don't think that the "problem" of akrasia captures it. (The problem of
akrasia is also generally taken to include acts that would not normally be considered
immoral.) What is suggested, however, is that a deeper understanding of human action,
within the purview of ethics or without, cannot be achieved within a highly individual-
istic, traditionally rationalistic narrative that does not take into account the very social
and changing nature of the individual and of the reasoning processes themselves. With
such an understanding we can also hope to get a clearer picture of which acts are
problematic and why, and which are not. See Baier (1985) and Scheman (1983) for
discussions pointing in this direction.
23. It may be of interest here also to connect the metaphorical workings of an
embattled reason (fending off the unruly impulses and passions) with the metaphorical
structure of argument as war discussed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 4-6). In arguments
we adopt positions, attack and defend points, demolish arguments and, and shoot down our
opponents. We might then perhaps better understand the strong hold of the adversary
method in philosophical discussion, often carried on past the point of constructive
dialogue. Janice Moulton (1983) discusses the adversary paradigm in philosophy from a
somewhat different perspective.
24. See Gilligan (1987, 27 and 31). Feminist concerns have been raised about
whether Gilligan's "care perspective" embodies too much of what philosophers have
traditionally said about women as they placed them aside into their special private realm
Phyllis Rooney 101
with their special "feminine" virtues. See Kittay and Meyers (1987) for helpful discussions
of the philosophical implications of Gilligan's work. I examine this whole issue, paying
particular attention to the implications of gendering (including the gendering of ratio-
nality) in traditional moral theory, in "A Different Differenct Voice: On the Feminist
Challenge in Moral Theory," forthcoming in The Philosophical Forum.
25. Lloyd (1984, 105). Sherry Ortner (1986) strikes a similar theme. She considers it
misguided to "focus only upon women's actual though culturally unrecognized and
unvalued powers in any given society, without first understanding the overarching
ideology and deeper assumptions of the culture that render such powers trivial" (1986,
63).
26. In speaking of "distorted" and "less distorted" conceptions of reason I do not mean
to suggest that there is a true, pure reason that has yet to be discovered-particularly
because such an "ideal" reason, conceptually separable from the more "unruly" aspects of
life and psyche, draws its inspiration from the historical gendering of reason, as argued in
this paper. When I speak about "less distorted" conceptions of reason or reasoning I mean
conceptions that are more empowering of all sentient creatures, that are unifying rather
than divisionary, and that get us into greater connection and understanding with all
aspects of our human thought and experience. Code (1987) stresses this aspect of
maintaining continuity with experience as a necessary part of "epistemic responsibility."
My argument in this paper is about the kind of conceptual, imaginative, and mythological
work that needs to be done as a necessary step toward the elaboration of such conceptions
of reasoning.
27. One of the important developments that is emerging out of feminist philosophy
is a shifting of this gender-oppositional discourse that is our legacy, along with the creation
of new types of discourses. The feminist debate in ethics is contributing to the develop-
ment of a new discourse of moral deliberation, of responsibility, of self, of autonomy, of
agency. See Kittay and Meyers (1987). For a very useful discussion on the possibilities of
reconceptualizing the epistemological import of emotion, seeJaggar (1989). Keller (1983)
has explored a model of empathy as a way of knowing in her biography of Nobel geneticist
Barbara McClintock.
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Hypatia, Inc.

Gendered Reason: Sex Metaphor and Conceptions of Reason

Initially it seemed that the physical exclusion of women from the h

Hypatia vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1991) ? by Phyllis Rooney

not meant to diminish the importance of the examination of philosophers'

I. THE SEX HISTORY OF REASON

. . . while in the body we see that which moves astray, in the

The male is more complete, more dominant than the female,

extension of previous gendered polarities such as that between different parts

To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else than to

... there result several degrees of the sublime, in fact transitions

II. METAPHOR AND THOUGHT

that to the claim that reason as we now understand it is gender inflected in

There is an ever-present and serious risk that the [conceptual]

metaphor; however, the foregoing analysis provides sufficient justification to

III. THE IMPACT OF GENDERED REASON

I want to stress that it is not my intention to argue that metaphors should

3. When there is a lapse in reason or when unreason has surfaced, the

4. The activity of reason in (2) almost always includes some form of

feminist analysis adds an important dimension of criticism and therapy tradi-

the metaphorical picture of a great divide, the following articulation of the

isolable quality or faculty that is clearly measurable? To what extent is this

In truth, however, the nature of things is no more immutably

There is, we now see, more involved in women's inability to authentically

We have been left with conceptions of masculine, feminine, reason, feeling,

oppositions to one another. When we seek simply to revalue the "feminine,"

8. Athena is presented perhaps most clearly in this role in Aeschylus's Eumenides.

. 1953. Generation of animals. A. L. Peck, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University

Harding, Sandra. 1982. Is gender a variable in conceptions of rationality? A survey of

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