Women in Philosophy: Why Spinoza and Feminism?

by Hasana Sharp

Spinoza was generally silent on the topic of women. When he was not silent, feminists wish he had been. Nevertheless, despite Spinoza’s noxious remarks on women in, for example, his Political Treatise, several feminist theorists have found resources and inspiration in his philosophy. What accounts for this unlikely companionship between Spinoza and feminism? Why, despite Spinoza’s anti-feminist position on the question of sexual equality, do several feminists find it useful (even empowering) to think with him?

A couple of prefatory remarks: First, I love the history of philosophy. I find it deeply pleasurable to read old books. I don’t think anyone needs much more reason than that to do her work. If alien ideas from another time offer insights and alternative ways of seeing the world and its problems, we ought to make use of them. Some argue that heterodox thinkers who would not endorse the reigning ideas of our time are especially useful for those seeking to challenge current values, arguments, or styles of thinking. Engaging with a thinker such as Spinoza is exciting, as Genevieve Lloyd claims, for this reason. But I don’t want to overvalue his much-touted heresy. Surely, feminists also gain immensely from studying philosophers, like Kant, to whom we owe our most cherished orthodoxies.

Second, although Spinoza was not a feminist, or a proto-feminist, we should not dismiss his antipathy toward women’s equality as a mere reflection of his times. In certain respects, two of his most significant contemporaries, Descartes and Hobbes, were proto-feminist. We don’t need to excuse or explain away Spinoza’s views on women in order to find inspiration in his philosophy for feminism today. Feminist thinkers – and this is to our credit rather than to his – have made something of his philosophy that he could neither have anticipated nor endorsed. But why? And what have they made of it? This is what I will try to explain. I am working on a longer essay outlining the promising features feminist theorists identify in Spinoza’s philosophy. For this post, I will focus on two aspects that most inform my own work: Spinoza’s (1) anti-individualism and his (2) anti-dualism. I welcome feedback and further thoughts from readers.

Anti-Individualism

Despite feminism’s diversity, it might be fair to say that feminist thought generally depends upon a kind of structural analysis. Feminist theory and practice in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, was described as an effort to reframe the idiosyncratic experience of individuals in terms of the structural conditions that gave rise to that experience. At the level of practice, this involved a technique of “consciousness raising.” Women would come together in groups and describe their feelings and experiences in detail. In these groups, women found that perfect strangers had similar descriptions of their struggles: feelings of inferiority; discontent with a life of domesticity; regular exposure to the threat of sexual violence; and finding it impossible to satisfy the conflicting demands of femininity, demands which varied depending on class and race. As Catharine MacKinnon put it, “what may have begun as a working assumption becomes a working discovery: women are a group.” Consciousness raising aims to reveal that what feel like personal defects can be explained by larger patterns and structures. What appears as an anomaly – “what’s wrong with me?” – is better understood as the product of a pattern, a rigged system. Feminism thus regards women as a group not by virtue of innate characteristics common to all women, but rather by virtue of a shared history of treatment, and the experience of navigating social life within sufficiently similar webs of meaning. The history of feminist theory and politics involves significant dispute over the generality of patterns that have been identified, and the extent to which they vary for women in different times and places with different relationships to other forms of social stratification. Likewise, feminists disagree about the appropriate political responses to patterns of domination based on sex and gender, in part because the response ought to vary depending on how they intersect with those based upon race, class, ability, sexuality, and so on. Nevertheless, if one could identify a shared theoretical-methodological premise of feminism, it would reside in its grasp of individual gendered experience in terms of larger webs of meaning as well as institutional, cultural, and political structures.

Spinoza’s philosophy might be understood as a unique and comprehensive form of structural analysis. His view of reality is such that we are connected by a web of causal relationships governed by natural laws from which we cannot escape. What seems to be a property of my personal experience can only be explained by impersonal laws and my particular history of determinations. As will be familiar to many, Spinoza maintains that all of reality is expressed by a single substance, called God or Nature. Although beings appear to us as individual substances, they are in fact modes, or finite determinations, of one infinite substance. There is one infinite, extended power (or attribute) with infinitely many finite “expressions,” or modifications: octopus, book, blade of grass, baby, sensation of light, quickening of a heartbeat, pulse of electricity. Thoughts, like bodies, may appear to be numerically individual, but they are, for Spinoza, variable expressions of a single natural power, whose “existence and action” depends upon those of the infinitely many others thoughts to which they are invariably connected. In short, all ideas, like all bodies, are involved in a community of cause and effect. Natural things (finite modes) cannot be explained in isolation. It may be obvious that the “existence and action” of an organic body can only be explained by its relationship with other bodies. I breathe by virtue of the peculiar powers of my body but also due to my immersion in an elaborate carbon cycle affecting countless life forms in the biosphere. The powers of my body, of course, are partly owed to those of my biological parents, my many caregivers, and the social system of cooperation into which I was born. An exhaustive account of how a single human body persists would clearly be an interminable task. Ideas are likewise interdependent and rich with connections and determinations.

Even if it is impossible to know the complete order and connection of causes explaining any single phenomenon, Spinoza’s anti-isolationist perspective liberates our perception. Spinoza claims that ceasing to explain things, especially human actions, by a kind of original spontaneity proper to individuals “contributes to social life, insofar as it teaches us to hate no one, to disesteem no one, to mock no one, to be angry at no one, to envy no one” (Ethics IIp49s). This shares something with the feminist and anti-colonial argument that the grasp of individual experience as part of a causal pattern liberates the oppressed from self-hatred and self-punishment. In addition to freeing up destructive energy, new explanations reveal new sites of intervention and new practices of transformative resistance.

According to Étienne Balibar, Spinoza’s “originality appears from the outset in the fact that for him ‘the mass’ is the principle object of investigation, reflection, and historical analysis.” If minds and bodies exist and act within and by virtue of the “mass” of which they are a part, each of us knows and feels by virtue of, and not in spite of, that mass. Importantly, for Balibar, this is not holism, but a view of diverse masses with distinctive powers and laws (“complexions”). Spinoza’s neither individualist nor holist perspective (arguably) coheres with feminist insight and is not widely emphasized in the history of Western philosophy. One of the implications is that, if we want to fight domination, we cannot change ourselves independent of changing the character of the mass to which we belong. We need to act on what acts on us, in order to feel and live differently.

Anti-dualism

The feature of Spinoza’s philosophy that has unquestioningly received the most attention from feminists is his rejection of dualism. Whereas Cartesianism has long been seen as objectionable by those feminists who seek to valorize the body as a site of knowledge and activity, Spinozism allows feminists to conceptualize bodies as inseparable from minds, to affirm reason as “an active emotion,” and to understand culture not as an imposition upon inert nature but as something that nature does.

Spinoza, of course, maintains that the mind is the idea of its body (E IIp13). The mind and body are one and the same thing, one certain and determinate way in which nature exists. Without going into the details of his complex theory of mind and body, we can observe at least two important consequences of this view. First, in contrast to Descartes, the mind and body are active, and thus free, in precisely the same measure. Freedom is not the rule of the mind over its body. As Genevieve Lloyd maintains, in a symbolic order that associates femininity with corporeality and masculinity with thought, the model of freedom as the subordination of the body to the mind reinforces a view of women as incapable of self-determination. Women are creatures of passion whose bodily necessity putatively defines them to a greater extent than it does men. Many feminists reject a view that identifies freedom with the mind and servitude with the body.

Second, in contrast to a dualism according to which the laws of cause and effect govern the realm of matter but not the realm of thought, an individual’s mind and body are equally (and identically) constituted by its relationships. The mind no less than the body must be understood as “relational,” as something we only come to know in and through our encounters with others. Although the Spinozistic mind is never free of external determination, it is also never alone alone. There is no possibility for solipsism in Spinoza. If we are free, we are free together. We are free by virtue of the ability of our mind-bodies to combine and produce enabling effects with and for others. If we are servile, it is not owed to defects unique to our mind-bodies. Rather, we are disempowered due to a disabling constellation of relationships within which we live, feel, act, and think. Because it is highly variable and responsive to its context, the power of each mind-body is not self-identical over time. The body is “productive and creative,” limited by others, but also connected to them.

Those feminists who have brought the most attention to Spinoza work in the tradition of “sexual difference” feminism. This tradition of feminism does not argue for women’s mental or moral equality with men. Egalitarian feminism draws on the liberal tradition, according to which there are no morally relevant differences between men and women. We are equal with respect to our humanity, which is typically grounded in a universal capacity to reason or to exercise moral agency. We recognize the Cartesian and Kantian resonance of this kind of argument, which has had its feminist advocates throughout history. The tradition of sexual difference feminism, however, does not argue from either the fact or the desirability of human sameness. These thinkers argue for a feminist theory that appreciates and reveals rather than subtracts differences. It yields an ethics and politics that highlights, explores, interrogates, and cultivates differences. Thus, rather than basing our ethics on a universally shared property in virtue of which each is owed equal respect, the ethics of sexual difference seeks an openness and responsiveness to how we are irreducible to one another. Most fundamentally, it rejects the notion that we are fungible as ethical beings. It seeks an ethics and politics that resists the assimilation of each individual to a single identity or value (e.g., personhood).

Sexual difference feminism is often misunderstood to assert an essential difference between women and men, to assert the importance of recognizing one axis of difference: the sexual (anatomical) difference between male and female. Although I can’t speak for the tradition as a whole, sexual difference feminists who draw upon Spinoza are attracted precisely to the idea of differences as local and changeable. Differences between bodies and groups emerge through historical processes, in response to specific relationships and institutions, and undergo constant transformation, such that they are, in the words or Gatens, “never decided a priori but recognized in the unfolding of shared (or conflicting) aims of groups or bodies.” Lloyd notes appreciatively that, for Spinoza, it is not the case that the body is sexed while the mind is neutral. Rather, sexual difference “reaches into” the mind. If a body’s powers and affects are shaped in a context that differentiates opportunities and practices based according to one’s assigned sex, the mind will likewise be empowered or limited in precisely the same way. Diverse minds correlate with diverse bodies. Yet mind-bodies are not just distinguished by salient features of their anatomy, but by the whole range of their powers, pleasures, and capabilities. Elizabeth Grosz, drawing indirectly on Spinoza’s rejection of the nature-culture binary and his insistence on the unique proportions of motion and rest that define each body, elaborates an ethics of sexual difference that asserts “a thousand tiny sexes.” Even if sexual difference is real and irreducible, it is not fixed, binary, or predictable. Spinoza’s conception of the body whose “openness is the condition of its life” serves a feminist ethics of sexual difference that envisions new modes of cultivating and responding to a proliferation of bodily and psychic differences.

It may seem strange that feminists single out both Spinoza’s monism and his embrace of local and myriad differences. But his denial of substantial individuality, I think, forces us to say more rather than less about what makes each mode what it is. An individual in nature (and it’s not clear what all counts as such) is constituted by its diverse and changing relationships with others, impersonal laws governing its existence, its particular striving to persevere in being, and the various and changing sources of (and threats to) its power. This perspective lends support to thinking about macro-patterns of domination as any feminist theory must do. At the same time, the understanding of bodies and minds that are richly differentiated and variable lends itself to a non-reductive, non-binary, and creative feminist theory according to which “nobody knows what a body can do.”

Hasana Sharp is associate professor and chair of the philosophy department at McGill University. Her research focuses on Spinoza, in conversation with feminism and contemporary political philosophy. She is interested in too many things, including early modern philosophy, the history of political thought, the philosophy of race, and political ecology. For more, see here.