Mary Daly's Meta Definitions (and Meta Methods)

I'm imaging your response as you read my post's title.  Perhaps you're rolling your eyes (as my teenage daughter did this morning when -- upon my asking her again why she was has having to serve detention at her private Christian school -- she said, "I forgot to get my Bible out of my locker for Bible class, okay?").  Or maybe you're just a little intrigued (as my spouse and I are - upon being invited to a Seder this evening after just being invited to a "Lord's Supper" palm Sunday service yesterday).  Or could it be that you're laughing nervously (as the college students of my Vietnamese colleague snickered and shifted when trying to understand and to role play the scene of a U.S. film in which the characters do things not entirely appropriate in a Southeast Asian context)?

I really have intended to write my post here to reflect on Mary Daly's "meta" definitions and such methods.  Here's a little of what I think.

Who you think you are -- your self-reflective situation -- very much determines what you do with Mary Daly's writings, particularly her book Gyn/Ecology:  the Metaethics of Radical Feminism.  The fact is that such a book demands your response.  Yours.  You may, for example, decide that you need not to read it, or at least not again.  Or don't have time for it, unless someone nice invites you to read along.  Or, when reading it, you might see that you do not get it.  You might accuse it of making your eyes roll or of other things.

My particular interest (at least one of my interests in particular) is the subjectivities that Daly's "radical feminism" evokes and invokes.  How we -- you and I -- might be provoked 35 years later still is of interest.  I am bringing this up during your women's history month.  (I am suggesting that you are doing things, as I am, without necessarily even knowing what or why or how exactly.  But, I am also hopeful and optimistic that we can pay attention.  I don't believe for a second what the anonymous writer of the British Times speculates when he or she suggests that Daly's "initial challenge to established theological doctrines and emerging feminist movements may not appear radical today.")

With her own 1990 introduction to her book Gyn/Ecology, Daly is already writing a 15-year-old history of the writing of her book.  The history includes her most kind and her most critical readers and some of their responses.  Her brief history about her book also includes some of her "exigencies" for writing in the first place.  This is what Lloyd Bitzer, in developing his theory of rhetorical criticism, would call Daly's "rhetorical situation."  She did not write in 1975 in a vacuum; and she was not re-writing in 1990 in a vacuum; and now there's no abstract happy-world vacuum that she's written in, now that she's dead and you're still alive with me, we now part of her history (even if you, or I, ignore or yawn at what she's written and re-written).  Daly's brief history writing is a reflection on, a bringing up to date, the past problems.  And it's one of her reflections on some of the varied responses.  She is not herself alone, so it seems, intending to write the final, the perfect, the definitive, the "super" constructed, the true, the only, the authoritative response.  She is not intending to write anything at all like a definitive response.  However "radical" it comes across to you, it is therefore in some way open to your response.  If her writing is not radical, as you see it, at least it's fairly miraculous, I think, that you've continued reading this blog post on her (radical) writings thus far.

One of the most important statements of re-membering that Daly makes is this memory:

      My reversing of patriarchal reversals in Gyn/Ecology involved/ required functioning in what might be called "a subliminal mode."  This way of thinking/ writing probably would not have been possible for me if I had not spent years studying medieval theology and philosophy, and writing dissertations in these fields at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, the medieval city in which I lived and studied for seven years.  For there I learned to think and write in a theological/ philosophical language that could not say what I was trying to say.  So in my dissertations [both in philosophy and in theology] I was writing in code without realizing that I was doing this.
      ....  Having caught on in some deep way to the multileveled nature of discourse, I was enabled to reverse the process I had learned in Fribourg and decode patriarchal texts, thus exposing their hidden meanings. [pages xxvi-xxvii of the 1990, 15-year-retrospective introduction to her 1975 book.]

What I'd like you and me to re-read is that bit about "writing" that's "without realizing."  This is profound.  Daly is confessing that she has had to catch "on in some deep way to the multileveled nature of discourse."  Elsewhere, in the new Preface of her book, she explains the need to de-mystify some four very specific "male methods of mystification":  Erasure, Reversal, False polarization (i.e., male-defined feminism vs. male-defined sexism), and Divide and conquer.

And in the very next section of her Preface, she explains very clearly (or at least straightforwardly, so it seems) the title and then the subtitle of her book (i.e., Gyn/Ecology and then the Metaethics of Radical Feminism).  These are "a way of wrenching back some wordpower."  She gives the "Merriam-Webster" given definitions of "meta."  She re-views the inventors of (male) ethics, including Aristotle (who, I'm recalling, coined the term "ethics" by smashing together a common Greek word with an uncommon [feminine] suffix).  And she so begins un-erasing and re-versing and exposing the untruths of binarying and of the patriarchal con-questing.  Daly intends to reverse the "reversal."  Men, she sees, have through their history (of women) reversed many things.  Daly's project is akin to post-modernisms' de-conconstructions of constructs of power that come after her.  It's akin to that coined imperative of meta-noia [μετα-νοεῖτε] of the very Jewish Matthew's John-the-Baptist and his equally Jewish Jesus that comes before her.

Therefore -- well before Daly so carefully lets readers in on what she's doing as an intentional author with her title and her subtitle -- she has said this.  (Are you ready?  Am I?  Do we get the nuances here, the changes there, and the generative qualities of self-transformation and not only mere reformation?)

      I have coined the term metapatriarchal to describe the journey, because the prefix meta has multiple meanings.  It incorporates the idea of "postpatriarchal," for it means occurring later.  It puts patriarchy in the past without denying that its walls/ ruins and demons are still around.  Since meta also means "situated behind," it suggests that the direction of the journey is into the Background.  Another meaning of this prefix is "change in, transformation of."  This, of course, suggests the transforming power of the journey.  By this I do not mean that women's movement "reforms" patriarchy, but that it transforms our Selves.  Since meta means "beyond, transcending," it contains a built-in corrective to reductive notions of mere reformism. 
      This metapatriarchal process of encountering the unknown involves also a continual conversion of the previously unknown into the familiar.... (pages 7 - 8)

Births, Babies, and Bastards: Just Words

Eliminating racism
Empowering women

--sign on the side of the ywca van west-bound on I-30 this morning in Fort Worth, Texas USA

The origin is a masculine myth. . . .
The question, ‘Where do I come from?’ is basically a masculine, much more than a feminine question. The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, doesn’t haunt a feminine unconscious. Rather it’s the beginning, or beginnings, the manner of beginning, not promptly with the phallus, but starting on all sides at once, that makes a feminine writing. A feminine text starts on all sides at once, starts twenty times, thirty times, over.

--Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” tr. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7 (Autumn 1981): 53. fr. Nancy Mairs, “Essaying the Feminine,” Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, 85

Around the blogosphere are signs of word birth, and questions of origins or of beginnings, with more questions about legitimacy or otherings.

• April DeConick has begun a new word for better work in history writing. So far, the begininngs are here, and here, and here, and here, and here.
• Some men (yes some of us men) are concerned about the origin of an old word. (Don’t ask us what haunts us, please; and you have to scroll down past the pics of one Mr. Bean to the real serious hauntings.)
• Othering men (yes that kind) used original words to dis-empower women through words
• Other othering men used others original words, not to eliminate, but to perpetuate the denigration of human beings of races "darker."
• Jonathan Tilove more than a year ago wanted to know the origins of one of Barack Obama’s phrases.

Ethics: A Dead, White Man’s Habit-ism?

Aristotle invented ethics. We could call him the first father and absolute original author of ethics. More on that in a moment.

First this:
Some of my blogger friends have been recycling and playing the “Ethical Philosophy Selector” (at Curt Anderson’s selectsmart.com). Here’s the game: Answer 12 multiple choice questions and you get a list that ranks, by percentage, how close your ethics matches the ethics of these:

• 13 men: Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Jeremy Bentham, David Hume, Thomas Hobbs, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill, William of Ockham, Plato, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Baruch Spinoza.
• 5 –isms (all fathered by men like Epicurus and John Stuart Mill): Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Universal Prescriptivism, and General Utilitarianism
• Oh, and 3 women (2 unmistakable feminists): Simone de Beauvoir, Nel Noddings, and Ayn Rand.

What is fascinating to us onlookers is how Aristotle invariably and always makes the lists. But Simone de Beauvoir never does. So right now let’s say no more about them, or her.

Now let’s go back to Aristotle:
Aristotle’s ethics are not feminist, but are rather sexist (surprise, surprise). Look here (and in the comments) at the “man”-ly word play in Nichomachian Ethics (NE), the treatise he names for his father Nichomachus, the Macedonian King’s scientist physician.

But since we’re playing with lists and numbers, also look at this. Elsewhere in NE, Aristotle explicitly uses the term “ethics” (which is the transliteration of his Greek ἠθικὴ) some 27 times. Aristotle also writes a few other works in which he explicitly uses ἠθικὴ (a number of times): Economics (2), Eudemian Ethics (24), Great Ethics (of disputed authorship, 29), Poetics (5), Politics (20), and Rhetoric (18).

The thing to note is that Aristotle seems to coin the word “ethics.” No one before father Aristotle uses ἠθικὴ, not even Plato.
Some related things to note are these:
1) Plato is Aristotle’s teacher;
2) Plato coins a lot of words, such as “rhetoric”;
3) Plato’s neologisms are customarily made out of a common word, say “rhetor” (i.e. “speaker”), plus the very uncommon ending “-ike”;
4) Plato’s word ending of choice is that icky feminine suffix, coined by Homer and Hesiod for their “virgins.”
5) (Sappho never uses the perhaps sexist, perhaps pejorative suffix).
6) Plato does use ἠ̂θος (which we transliterate with the English alphabet as, “ethos”); and Plato uses “ethos” as a noun or a verb some 147 times in 17 different treatises when he writes about “ethics” (but just not “ethics” as ἠθικὴ). I just counted them.

So in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (a central interest at this blog),
in his Book III (where he makes the most explicit references to “γυναικὸς” and “πότνια” (or “woman / wife” and “mistress / queen”),
we begin to get to get some interesting things starting from his 5th Chapter:

We find lessons in “speaking Greek,” which get to “grammar” more for “clarity” than for “correctness.” Then starting Chapter 7, Aristotle, the student of Plato, has a few things new to write to his own students about “ᾐ̂ παθητική τε καὶ ἠθικὴ” (or, transliterally, the “pathe-tics” and even the “etho-tics”). We might follow the classicists who translate παθος (“pathos”) as “feelings” or “passion” and ἠ̂θος (“ethos”) as “character” or “habits” or “customs” or “culture.” And yet there's this new "passion-ism" and even "habit-ism."

But get out your 1926 John H. Freese translation and your 2007 George A. Kennedy, and read along at paragraph 6, on page 1408a:

[6] Character also may be expressed by the proof from signs, because to each class and habit there is an appropriate style. I mean class in reference to age--child, man, or old man; to sex--man or woman; to country--Lacedaemonian or Thessalian. I call habits those moral states which form a man's character in life; [7] for not all habits do this. If then anyone uses the language appropriate to each habit, he will represent the character;

6. Proof from signs is expressive of character, because there is an appropriate style for each genus and moral state. By genus I mean things like age (boy, man, old man; or woman and man or Spartan and Thesslian) and by moral state [hexis] the principles by which someone is the kind of person he is in life; 7. for lives do not have the same character in accordance with [each and] every moral state. (Cf. Nicomachean Ethics 2.1.)

Now before we get to Aristotle’s Greek, we have to see a few things in Freese’s and Kennedy’s English. Aren’t we glad, for example, that Kennedy avoids Freese’s use of the word “class” in the context of various categories of peoples? “Class” might suggest that the Macedonian-born Athenian was actually a bigot, that he deplored Spartans and Thesslian’s perhaps. But Kennedy muddies it more by just transliterating the Greek “genus” which is our English scientif-ic bio-log-ical word for, well, a particular level of classification. It certainly gives Aristotle a little more, shall we say, “ethos”? If it’s genus, then he’s just the innocent, objective observer of phenomena in nature. And we all know that scient-ists cannot be bigots or rac-ists or class-ists.

So how about that sexist habit in Freese’s English: “a man's character in life” but not a woman’s? Kennedy has already highlighted for us in his “Prooemion” one salient “feature” of his own translation: “avoidance of some of the sexist language seen in older translations, which often speak of ‘men’ when Aristotle uses a more general plural.” But Kennedy hedges imagining the historical, customary, cultural habits of the Greeks: “Aristotle usually envisions only males as speaking in public” (“Prooemion” page xxi, my bold font). So Kennedy continues to envision this: “the principles by which someone is the kind of person he is in life,” in which no one is a person who is a woman, although Aristotle has already been writing about women, Spartan and Thesslian, as he writes about boys and men young and old, Spartan and Thesslian.

So let’s get back to the Greek, to papa Aristotle’s coinage of “ethics” (or habit-ism) from “ethos” (or a habit). And do note how the passage begins with the former and ends with the latter. And stay tuned for a more inclusive, less sexist English translation. We may have to learn from the French, from the feminists, from Simone de Beauvoir and her Pour Une Morale de L'ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity) (if that’s at all “eth-ick-al” or the habits of anyone at all):

[6] καὶ ἠθικὴ δὲ αὕτη ἡ ἐκ τω̂ν σημείων δει̂ξις, ὅτε ἀκολουθει̂ ἡ ἁρμόττουσα ἑκάστῳ γένει καὶ ἕξει. λέγω δὲ γένος μὲν καθ' ἡλικίαν, οἱ̂ον παι̂ς ἢ ἀνὴρ ἢ γέρων, καὶ γυνὴ ἢ ἀνήρ, καὶ Λάκων ἢ Θετταλός, ἕξεις δέ, καθ' ἃς ποιός τις τῳ̂ βίῳ: οὐ γὰρ καθ' ἅπασαν (30) ἕξιν οἱ βίοι ποιοί τινες. [7] ἐὰν οὐ̂ν καὶ τὰ ὀνόματα οἰκει̂α λέγῃ τῃ̂ ἕξει, ποιήσει τὸ ἠ̂θος: