Kant’s philosophical system is one of those master discourses in the discipline of philosophy (and beyond) – a whole architecture – that everyone, including feminist philosophers, feels the need to pay a visit. He offers a vast edifice that houses questions of knowledge, morality, aesthetics, sex/gender, race, history, science, anthropology, and politics, which are in turn taken as the way to ask philosophical questions in any of these areas, without much dispute. Here we focus on the relationship between Kantianism and feminism and offer our reflections on the uneasy inheritance of Kantian philosophy by feminists. We ask how this feminist inheritance of Kant shifts when we interrogate it using all of the feminist tools that we have in our toolbox. In this, we owe a debt to Audre Lorde’s famous line “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” which has been deployed by Kantian, critical race, and feminist philosophers to make the case for, in fact, using the “master’s tools”–Kant’s tools–to dismantle the master’s house. We want to trouble this reliance on Kantian tools to dismantle Kantian frames by insisting, first and foremost, that we put Kant in his place.
Kant certainly knew how to put women “in our place.” In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant said that scholarly women like to wear a watch but cannot really tell the time (404). Yet feminist scholarship seems quite comfortable with Kantian frames and categories. Feminists tend to take up Kant for contemporary purposes in two ways: either by focusing on his ideas and arguments to the exclusion of their historico-political context and the effects of this context on his thought or by locating ourselves in the text where Kant thought about women: his arguments about sex, marriage and domestic labor, or his anthropological reflections upon gender and the household. Both approaches assume that Kant’s own framing of the philosophical issues under investigation is structurally solid.
What goes unnoticed and unquestioned – and what decades of Black, radical, intersectional, and decolonial feminist thought teaches us – is that his ideas, even seemingly transhistorical and universal ones like the ideal of cosmopolitanism, of which political philosophers are so fond, are undergirded by the long axis of the history of modernity/coloniality and Kant’s own place in this living history.
By approaching the feminist appropriations of Kant from this direction, oriented through feminist, rather than Kantian categories, frames, and methodologies, we ask: who is the “we” that inherits Kant, and to whom is this “we” accountable?
Let us start by noting that Kantian philosophy and all its tools arise out of the specific epistemic, moral, aesthetic, and political problems western European philosophy faces at a particular time and place in history that we call the Enlightenment. In a way, Kant’s critical system of philosophy consists of attempts at framing and solving these problems once and for all. He is theorizing, after all, during what Achille Mbembe calls “the gregarious phase of Western thinking,” or what Enrique Dussel calls the period of the buttressing of the “myth of modernity”: that is, at a time when crucial questions of difference with respect to race, gender, and coloniality are being disputed and settled by various discursive regimes, including philosophy. As post- and decolonial thinkers remind us, then, Kant and Kantian philosophy simply do not make sense without the “Atlantic detour,” the long history of racial capitalism that includes the transatlantic slave trade as well as the violent conquest and colonization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas by dying European empires.
There is no Kantian inheritance without this history and context, whether it is made explicit, or left implicit. Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” which put “man” at the center of our conceptual universe is a gendered, raced, classed, and imperial project in which we must locate ourselves. Sylvia Wynter traces our “present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself,” back to Renaissance humanism, and her historical reading allows us to see the current political struggles of our times – from struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexuality and climate change – as “differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.” (260-61) We contend that this overrepresentation is reinforced in and through Kantian philosophy and our inheritances of it. By placing “man” at the “center,” Kant obscures both the embodied and social identity of philosophy’s subject, and his location: the “center” is an everywhere that is nowhere — certainly not merely an armchair in Königsberg.
In her “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” Adrienne Rich rejects the view from nowhere and reflects on her location in feminist theorizing in order to make visible the white circumscribing of all theory in a white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal society. If Kant makes “Man” nowhere and everywhere, white feminist theory distorts the world about which it theorizes by failing to consider where it lives. Rich reminds us that it is made evident in Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977 that patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism are simultaneously pervasive in Black women’s lives as well as in the lives of working class women of color, that for a majority of women on the planet “there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual.” (19) The problem, then, is that unreflective of its starting point of theorizing and even in its struggle against free-floating abstraction, white western feminist theory reinforces a “faceless, raceless, classless category of all women,” (219) which she argues rests on “a creation of Western self-centeredness,” that centers a false notion of an abstract and universal “we” who in fact live in a white middle- and upper-class world, and frames that world as the correct and the original one. Drawing on Gloria Joseph’s work, Rich calls this all-too-common tendency “white circumscribing of theory” and challenges us to come to terms with the circumscribing nature of (our) whiteness in doing theory. (210)
Feminism’s attendance to location, we argue, gives us tools to locate ourselves in relation to Kant’s edifice, and thus to hold ourselves accountable for our own inherited tendency towards gregarious theorizing. Thus, Lorraine Code proposes that a politics of location might effect “a revolution in philosophy comparable to Kant’s Copernican revolution,” one that disrupted Kant’s own centering of “man” – of White, European man – at the center of our conception of the universe, locating inquiry “down on the ground,” attentive to our locations, relations, and intersections. (3-5) For Code, a politics of location begins by locating Kantian philosophy as local and parochial, and then seeking political and epistemic frameworks capable of recognizing themselves as local, located, and lived: ecological thinking, which takes us to be inhabitants of our (multidimensional) locations. It is clear that a Kantian view from nowhere is not a tenable standpoint for feminist theorizing.
In our previous work on Kant, we have both referred to this project of locating Kant as an engagement with the non-ideal Kant. Huseyinzadegan argues in Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics that we need to re-tether Kant’s political philosophy, often construed as a form of ideal theory, to its historical, cultural, and geographical location in order to assess its full import for contemporary thought. Dilek centers the racism, sexism, and Eurocentrism that we find in Kant’s writings by gathering them under his system of critical philosophy, because these are the issues with which we are still grappling in political theory and any formulation of justice today. Pascoe argues in “Towards a Non-Ideal, Intersectional Kant” for a non-ideal reading of Kant that centers his own historical and political preoccupations in his account of justice, paying attention to how Kant himself thought that his systematic political philosophy addressed thorny questions of justice in his own time in order to better understand how it might speak to the most slippery questions in ours. For both of us, reading Kant through a non-ideal lens or focusing on his non-ideal writings has been about making his own preoccupations and motivations visible, and seeing how they inform both our reading and our application of his arguments. By paying attention to the political location of Kant’s philosophy – that we had named the non-ideal Kant – we wanted to see what Kant saw the better to see ourselves and contend with Kant’s views.
The language of the “non-ideal” Kant or a “non-ideal theory” in Kant comes from the liberal political tradition, and as such it is limited. While it may have been a useful way to enter into debates about those most widespread adaptations of Kant, we do not want our feminist approach to be beholden to this tradition: we are interested in an intersectional feminism, that is, a feminism for the 99%. More importantly and perhaps more urgently, we want to develop a feminist method for troubling how Kant himself framed philosophical questions, to better understand what Kant did and did not see. This will be a methodology that starts by locating his philosophy and philosophizing in its broader historico-political context to identify its current effects, and then asks what that Kant can do for feminist theorizing. In other words, rather than taking for granted the canonical status of his works, their framing of philosophical questions, and their positive utility for philosophizing today, we want to hold Kant and ourselves accountable to and to make visible the white male circumscribing and canonization of his philosophy. We see this as a crucial first step before we go any further in adopting his ideas for feminism.
Our insistence on centering the historico-political location of Kant’s theorizing seeks, in part, to put Kant in the neighborhood of other thinkers to whom we think he must be accountable. Patricia Hill Collins frames accountability as a refusal to “evaluate the validity of…written ideas without some indication of personal credibility” (769); Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s describes it as an intergenerational practice marked by the refusal to turn away (190). If Kant is to have a place in the community of contemporary feminist theorizing, then we must hold him accountable for the effects of his house on those who surround him.
We see Kantian scholarship struggling with these questions of accountability in the recent and welcome increase in recent years. There is a proliferation of work that takes up questions of sex/gender and race/racism in Kantian philosophy, though the work on sex/gender and the work on race / racism take different theoretical directions and address different sources and tend to be taken up separately, or, treated as analogous, rather than intersecting and enmeshed, problems. These divisions are rooted in Kantian thought insofar as Kant exemplifies perhaps the highest point of categorical thinking, the need to separate out everything to its constitutive elements, to seek purity of formal principles over material content.
Unreflective use of Kantian distinctions suggests that gender and race are easily separable, mutually exclusive, and settled political, philosophical, or historical categories. Such use makes it difficult to locate Kant, as a white male European philosopher, and to locate ourselves – since our identities are likewise multidimensional -in relation to his philosophy. When we locate ourselves in the rooms that Kant built for us – where gender is located in the household and race in reflections on geography and anthropology – we allow Kant to frame our thinking. In Kant’s house, questions of race and/or gender remain separate and separable. That is, as long as we remain in Kant’s house, we cannot encounter the ways that these questions are always present, even when we are not speaking in particular about race, gender, women, or people of color.
For example, there will be no straightforward adaptation of Kantian cosmopolitanism, because if we really want to understand what Kant meant by this idea, we need to understand that he had in mind a legislative community of white west European middle-class cisheterosexual men – an “overrepresentation of a specific ethnoclass of Man,” in Wynter’s formulation. When we read Kant as local in this way, we must ask: what would a Kantian cosmopolitan world look like? How would Kant’s conceptions of Right, his understanding of the institutions required to protect external freedom, his construction of autonomy, reshape worlds beyond Europe? Would it look markedly different from the variant forms of colonialism that emerged after Kant’s own criticism of colonialism? When we locate ourselves in the paradigm of modernity/coloniality, holding ourselves accountable for our reverent inheritance of Kantian framing of philosophical questions and distinctions, it becomes more difficult to say that “we now know better” and to simply “include” women and nonwhite nonEuropeans etc. in this community. We can admit that we become complicit in this practice of white male circumscribing through our eagerness to redeem a Kantian cosmopolitanism that is underwritten by a heteropatriarchal, Eurocentric, and antiBlack view of both world [cosmos] and citizen [politean].
The canonization of white male European philosophers like Kant is often accomplished through a refusal to locate, or localize, their work. When we do not put Kant in his place, attending to the political location and influence of Kantian philosophy, we are forced to take his ideas about history, culture, and humanity to be the ideas for all, subsuming any other views and lineages under his supposedly-universal system. If we as feminists are to challenge the intersecting oppressions in this house, that is, if we want a revolution that dismantles rather than a reform that just reinforces the problematic foundations, then we are going to have to look elsewhere than the Kantian house and its tools.
We are still living in a Kantian world, but we have the tools to read Kant differently. A feminist politics of location calls us to take up feminist tools to orient ourselves here, to uncover our own location in and complicity with this (Kantian) world that we are so eager to change.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.
Dilek Huseyinzadegan
Dilek Huseyinzadegan is Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Affiliated Faculty of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Global and Postcolonial Studies at Emory University. Her work on Kant, political theory, feminism, and Continental philosophy has appeared in Kantian Review, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, Hegel-Jahrbuch, Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, and Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Her website is: www.dhuseyinzadegan.org
