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)

pedantic post on πίστεως

The really serious bibliobloggers are looking at this Greek word πίστεως. Well, the funny biblioblogger named N.T. Wrong is anyway: 100 Reasons πίστις Χριστοῦ is an Objective Genitive. Those who think that he's real, that he's really writing a book for real publication, and that Jesus is real are getting really excited.

What's their real question and his?  

Did Paul write in Greek to mean Jesus himself has real saving "faith" 

OR did Paul mean that others should have real saving "faith in Jesus" 

(OR is there "some other genitive meaning")?

So why should I get involved?  I shouldn't.  But Aristotle already wrote about this stuff, sort of. It's a philological mess now.  Pedantic.  

(At least Wrong warns readers about the pedantry, calling it a "rather esoteric, subtle, and arcane grammatical dispute."  

And I've already tried to say, again and again, that Aristotle didn't want us native-speakers of barbarian mother tongues to be messing around with his elite language for the boys at the Academy.

Haven't I also warned, again and again, that New Testament scholars and translators don't want others messing around with their Greek?  And that philosophers don't want others messing around with their Greek?  And that rhetoricians don't want others messing around with their Greek?  And that classicists don't want others messing around with their Greek?)

Pedantic is what this stuff is.  And, therefore, it's vastly important to Greek New Testament scholars and to Greek Rhetoric scholars too, for two different reasons.  NT scholars want the Greek word to mean "faith."  Rhetoric scholars want the Greek word to mean "proof."  (Philosophers care about other more important things, and classicists have a critical story or two to tell.)

It's a mess before anyone starts arguing about the "genitive" case (i.e., πίστεως), which is how Jesus gets dragged in.  So would I surprise you if I said women got dragged into the conversation a lot earlier than Jesus did?  Except, in contrast to the genitive question for Jesus, there was among Greek men no question as to whether women could have "faith" or "proof" or anything so valuable that men had.  The question, rather, was whether men can believe women, period.

You want examples, don't you?  

In his Anabasis, Xenophon tells of how his namesake character would not believe the man Eucleides:

ὁ δ’ αὐτῷ οὐκ ἐπίστευεν . . . .
And Eucleides would not believe him. . . .

ἰδὼν δὲ τὰ ἱερὰ ὁ Εὐκλείδης εἶπεν
and when Eucleides saw the vitals of the victims, he said

ὅτι πείθοιτο αὐτῷ μὴ εἶναι χρήματα.
that he was well persuaded that Xenophon had no money.

(lines 7.8.2-3
translated by classicist Carleton L. Brownson
with one little change by me).

Okay, fair enough.  That example had nothing to do with women.  I was just trying to show different Greek words in narrative context, where one man couldn't believe another and where "persuasion" (i.e., as in "rhetoric") was at play but is something altogether different from "belief."

Now to women.  In his Work and Days, Hesiod writes to men telling them how to trust their "brothers."  But then he transitions to how they ought not to believe women:

πίστεις δ' ἄρα ὁμῶς καὶ ἀπιστίαι ὤλεσαν ἄνδρας
Certainly trust [believability] and distrust [unbelievability] prove equally fatal to men.

μηδὲ γυνή σε νόον πυγοστόλος ἐξαπατάτω
Don't let a wily, wheedling woman who wiggles her bottom

αἱμύλα κωτίλλουσα, τεὴν διφῶσα καλιήν:
Wholly befuddle your wits: her purpose is rifling your pantry.

ὃς δὲ γυναικὶ πέποιθε, πέποιθ' ὅ γε φιλήτῃσιν.
One who is persuaded by a woman is persuaded by cheats and deceivers.

(lines 372-375
translated by classicist Friedrich W. Solmsen
with a couple of small changes by me).

And then there's this from Homer's Odyssey (lines 455-56 with a translation by classicist James Huddleston, with a touch-up by me):

κρύβδην, μηδ' ἀναφανδά, φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν
Take your ship to your beloved fatherland

νῆα κατισχέμεναι: ἐπεὶ οὐκέτι πιστὰ γυναιξίν.
secretly, not openly, since there's no way now to believe in women.

Then we fast forward past Aristotle (and Plato and Socrates).  We find, then, there's John's Jesus who does this (2:24 my translating):

αὐτὸς δὲ Ἰησοῦς οὐκ ἐπίστευεν αὐτὸν αὐτοῖς 
Joshua himself, nonetheless, did not believe himself [believable] to them

διὰ τὸ αὐτὸν γινώσκειν πάντας
because he himself knew every one [of these mortals]

And Matthew translates Jesus, who exclaims (15:28):

ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῇ ὦ γύναι μεγάλη σου ἡ πίστις
Joshua said to her, "Oh wow, woman. That belief of yours is huge!"

While earlier Matthew's translated Jesus exclaiming this way (9:22):

ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς στραφεὶς καὶ ἰδὼν αὐτὴν εἶπεν
Joshua, however, turning, looked for himself and said

θάρσει θύγατερ ἡ πίστις σου σέσωκέν σε
"Dauntless Daughter! That belief of yours rescued you!"

καὶ ἐσώθη ἡ γυνὴ ἀπὸ τῆς ὥρας ἐκείνης
Indeed the woman was rescued from that point in the season on.

Timeout for a minute. Let's rewind again. Greek men writing and Greek men speaking are hardly used to finding women believable. Men don't believe women, and men don't believe in women either. Men might be believable to one another on the other hand.  So John writes to say that mortal men are falling all over themselves in belief of this guy Joshua. And yet, he (the Joshua man) treats them like other men have treated women: he doesn't believe those other guys falling for him, and he doesn't believe in those men (because, John says, he "knows" all mortals). But he (the Joshua) does believe women, and does believe in women (which the examples from Matthew show).

So we're going to have to get to Jesus and Paul's genitive for Bible translators.  I promise we will.  Just believe me.  But let's work through Aristotle and his teachers and their translators first.

Here's Plato's Socrates in the Philebus (as also translated by philologist Harold N. Fowler all on his own):

διὰ δὴ τί μάλισθ’ ὑπολαμβάνεις με δεῖξαί σοι τὴν ἐν τῇ κωμῳδίᾳ μεῖξιν; 
Now why do you particularly suppose I pointed out to you the mixture of pain and pleasure in comedy?

ἆρ’ οὐ πίστεως χάριν?
Was it not for the sake of convincing you?

Notice how the genitive form stumps this translator-scholar! All of the sudden, there's the meaning "convincing" (as in "persuasive" and "proof") for πίστεως for Fowler. Who cares what Socrates meant when it's Plato writing about him. What I mean by that is, "Why would Plato have his teacher's character in this dialogue change the meaning of the Greek word in this context from 'Was it not to gain the favor of your belief' to how Fowler means it?" What's wrong with Plato's Socrates meaning, "Was it not to gain the favor of your belief" for "ἆρ’ οὐ πίστεως χάριν"?  (And can I persuade you by some proof to believe that a New Testament scholar-translator would want that to be "Was it not for the sake of grace through faith?"  Let's do that another day; can we?)

Now, we're ready for Aristotle.  Here's his Athenian Constitution (line 18.6, as also translated by philosopher H. Rackham):

καὶ πείσας αὑτῷ τὸν Ἱππίαν δοῦναι τὴν δεξιὰν πίστεως χάριν
and induced Hippias to give him his right hand as a pledge of good faith.

So we notice here that there is "faith," but "good faith" as a "pledge," which is more like "convincing persuasive proof" (even πείσας or "induction") than like "grace through faith"; and neither of those is like "the favor of belief."  In other words, the philosopher and the New Testament scholar tends to depart from the classicist.  Three different directions for the same word in the same context.  But why?  Doesn't the philosopher know Aristotle?  Yes, he does.

The rhetorician also knows Aristotle.  In the Rhetoric, as translated also by rhetorician George A. Kennedy, there's this:

ἐνθυμημάτων . . . ὅπερ ἐστὶ σῶμα τῆς πίστεως
enthymemes, which is the body of persuasion

Let's jump back over to the Bible now. It's only Wisdom of Solomon (3:14), not the bible really is it? And yet, look at the same language but how different the translating by the King James translation team: 

καὶ εὐνοῦχος ὁ μὴ ἐργασάμενος ἐν χειρὶ ἀνόμημα μηδὲ ἐνθυμηθεὶς κατὰ τοῦ κυρίου πονηρά δοθήσεται γὰρ αὐτῷ τῆς πίστεως χάρις ἐκλεκτὴ καὶ κλῆρος ἐν ναῷ κυρίου θυμηρέστερος

And blessed is the eunuch, which with his hands hath wrought no iniquity, nor imagined wicked things against God: for unto him shall be given the special gift of faith, and an inheritance in the temple of the Lord more acceptable to his mind.

Here there's now "faith" where once there was "proofs" (and "imagined wicked things" where once there were "enthymemes," and "gift" where once there was "grace" and "favor" in other contexts).

What are men like Aristotle and men like Paul and their translators doing with Greek?with the genitive form πίστεως?  

Unbelievable.

Barnstone on Better Bibles

The mutual self-isolation
of linguistic and philosophical studies on translation
and the theory and practice of literary translators
is absolute.

Were linguistics to be serious about literary translation . . .
it would be welcome.

A deeper infidelity in Bible translation goes undetected, however.
For although it is assumed that the felony of contemporary Bible translators
is literary insensitivity, mediocrity, or overliteralism,
few people realize that from earliest Bible translation to the present
there has only been the appearance of literalism. . .

The translations of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures,
consciously or not, are similar to
the controlled news information in authoritarian states.
In other words, license (register c) and extreme freedom
has been applied to Bible translations, yet passed off as literalism (register a).

There is nothing uncommon about a misalliance of theory and practice,
of intention and realization.
The gap between proclaimed intention and realization
in regard to Bible translation is extreme, however.

The epigraphs above are all from Willis Barnstone in his book, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. Just reading the “absolute” and “extreme” rhetoric in his sentences (yanked by me out of his context for mine), one might be tempted to blame Barnstone for (a) the isolation he notes between linguistic and literary translators and for (b) the lack of recognition of his work among Bible translators.

I want, then, to start this post on “Barnstone on better Bible translations” just by acknowledging the divide between translators of various sorts. And to note that (so far) Bible translators (at least the blogging ones, drinking Coke and discussing literary translation and debating Better Bibles) ignore Barnstone and his work.

The challenge that Barnstone provides invites less of a wedge between translators and more of a bridge. I would encourage anyone interested in translation, to read, to study, to critically review Barnstone’s work, especially his Poetics of Translation. As a fledgling rhetorician (and as a linguist much more mature), I find what he says incredibly important. We rhetoricians (in Communications, in Classics, in Composition, with Literature or opposing Philosophy) and we linguists (whether theoretical or field working) do isolate ourselves in our own work by our own approaches in our own small societies for our own goals. My blog here has been to show, in part, how dangerous that exclusivism can be. We from the West in various academic and missionic pursuits far too long have followed Aristotle in his dominant Aristotelianism (fostering intellectualism, ethnocentricism, classicism, kingdom-building imperialism, a self-referential politics, and misogynistic sexism.) And yet, translation and feminisms, in the directions Barnstone might lead us, are radically helpful alternatives. (I’ll just risk losing a few more readers by quoting Barnstone here by saying, “Eve is the mother of translation.” And that’s hardly all of what he says on this woman and translation.)

So, it’s been a breath of fresh air to be welcomed into conversation by Bible translators in the blogosphere. Check the blogroll here for sites and conversations of an incredibly intelligent and friendly lot. But, from time to time, we all retreat to the safe group of our own kind. Then we lob labels across and at: “feminist,” “postmodernist,” “egalitarian,” “complementarian,” “literary,” “literalist,” “Ph.D.,” “amateur,” “infamous,” “fabulous,” and so forth (often simply trying to understand the others’ perspectives). In a bad week, a (first order) comment may hurt another (unwittingly and, unfortunately sometimes, through acerbic wit.)

I think Barnstone has experienced some of that. And he’s not even blogging. His beef is with translation that purports to do one thing but that does another. Translation that pretends to build bridges, but sharply divides. Contemporary Bible translation has done that, he says. So what is a better Bible according to Barnstone?

Barnstone is quite conservative in naming English Bible translators he valorizes. But he doesn’t shy away from criticism of those whose translations would divide the linguistic and the literary:

As we have seen in the instance of the Bay Psalm Book, the claims of fidelity have, in older glorious translations, interfered neither with the magnificence of style nor with accuracy. Translators and exegetes alike have invented meanings and words with the full powers of their determined imaginations.

In our century, however, the Bible has suffered ignominiously “accurate” translations. Accurate has replaced literal as the word to justify bad translation.

(The Poetics of Translation, 63)

So one may count exemplary this translation by American Puritans, the Bay Psalm Book (aka The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre [Cambridge, MA,1640]).

And Barnstone notes two others “who dedicated themselves to turning one great book of the Bible into a masterpiece, [namely] Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Herbert [Countess of Pembroke] from Elizabethan London” who gave “us a new rendition of the Psalms” (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 16).

But, unfortunately, the Bible today has been

Abandoned by our best-known writer-translators and generations of readers. . . We have had no contemporary English or American equal to Poland’s Nobel laureate in literature, Czeslaw Milosz (who learned Hebrew specifically to translate the Songs of Songs into Polish), who might render distinguished books of the Bible in English. Perhaps it is an unfair burden to ask our leading contemporary religious scholars to become the Luthers and Dantes for our time an refresh the English language. In days of territorial specialization, literature and art are not their terrain. The consequences are clear. (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 16).

Barnstone does find three or four exceptional exceptions. He notes [with my boldings here]:

In 1996 Reynolds Price published The Three Gospels . . . which includes Mark, Matthew, and John, a revision from an earlier version of the four canonical gospels. It is of the same literary quality throughout as the [Richmond] Lattimore [translation mentioned further below], less lofty and more modern, and very close to the Greek. It has extra words and is a literary breakthrough. Price uses “wrong” rather than “sin” as one way of reducing what he calls the “puritan” practice in translating from the koine. As pure observation and no reproach, I note that he comes closer than others, but makes no essential break with a strongly Christianizing bias in converting Greek into English and doesn’t move the text from a Hellenization of name, place, and spirit back to its Hebrew Bible base. He does mitigate, where he can without stylistic contortions, the domination of male gender words. (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 17).

He adds:

A major change from the pedestrian Hebrew Bible translations that our century has sponsored has been the 1996 publication of Genesis in versions by Robert Alter and by Stephen Mitchell and the 1999 translation of Alter’s David. Alter and Mitchell are both literary, the Alter rhythmically rhetorical and austerely beautiful, with significant annotation; the Mitchell more contemporary, clean, and, like the Alter at once close to both the King James and to modern speech. Like the Everett Fox lineated translation of The Five Books of Moses, the first lines of Genesis in the Alter version have orchestral power and balance, although Alter does so in prose rather than in verse. (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 17).

Barnstone dedicates his own translation of The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament to Alter, and calls Alter’s Genesis Barnstone’s “model.” Nonetheless, he praises another:

A masterly instance of close translation is Richmond Lattimore’s books from the New Testament. (The Poetics of Translation, 39)

And although his 1962 publication went largely unnoticed, it remains the finest version we have of the words of the Covenant scriptures in English. (The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament, 16).

But in his version of Scripture we hear the evangelists speak—as if we were hearing koine Greek. In his preface to The Four Gospels and the Revelation, Lattimore affirms the notion of letting Greek word order and rhetoric come through in English, as opposed to converting them to contemporary English idiom. He adopted this same method in brilliantly in his versions of Pindar and Aeschylus. . . The Bible in our time, sorely abused by unliterary handlers, finds in Richmond Lattimore its most effective translator. He re-creates Mark’s elegant plainness. The classical scholar writes in his preface, “I have held throughout to the principle of keeping as close to the Greek as possible, not for sense and for individual words, but in the belief that fidelity to the original word order and syntax may yield an English prose that to some extent reflects the style of the original” (vii). Just as Lattimore’s Pindar sounds like Pindar—not Pindar sounding like a modern, literate Lattimore—so, as Lattimore intended, Mark sounds in English like Mark. (The Poetics of Translation, 39)

Now, I’m excited to see that John F. Hobbins in “Faithful Bible Translation” (at Ancient Hebrew Poetry) seems to praise Lattimore in some of the ways Barnstone does. Even more thrilling is to hear Suzanne McCarthy (at Better Bibles Blog) follow Anne Carson and Robert Alter in her own literary translation of I Corinthians 13. As I look at the translations of Aristotle’s Rhetoric by classicists and rhetoricians, I find the kind of isolation Barnstone writes about and translates against. By working in collaboration, as does Barnstone, Carson, Lattimore, McCarthy, and others, I hope the result will be a translation of Aristotle that leads us more in the ways of his Sappho (and our Eve), a redeemed rhetoric not Aristotelian, not self-isolated (to men only, of any particular tribe).

UPDATE: LINK to Jobes on Better Bibles

feministicization: hosting (not targeting) Aristotle our guest

Some feminists who are rhetoricians have been reluctant to include Aristotle and his Rhetoric in the canon of feminist rhetorics. Carol Poster, for example, insists that: “Aristotle has not, and in my opinion, should not be appropriated for feminist rhetoric”; Poster adds:

From the point of view of feminist historiography . . . we need to reposition rhetoric, with its acceptance of subjectivist epistemology and emotional discourse and its traditionally feminine connection with pedagogy closer to the center of philosophy, and reconstitute rhetoric by displacing Aristotle’s philosophical treatise [i.e., the Rhetoric] to the margins of the discipline and reasserting the value of (feminine) pedagogical rhetoric against the agonistic and dialectical Aristotelian model. ("(Re)positioning Pedagogy: A Feminist Historiography of Aristotle's Rhetorica," 327-28)

Similarly, Cheryl Glenn suggests the rhetorical question, “When considering the 'intellect' specifically, where is the historical, textual evidence of Aristotle's (rhetoric's) compatibility with feminism?” Glenn observes:

Aristotle makes no provision for the intellectual woman, except for his nod to Sappho: “Everyone honours the wise . . . . [T]he Mytilenaeans [honour] Sappho, though she was a woman” (Rhetoric 2.23.1389.b). Otherwise, Aristotle denied any philosophical or rhetorical contributions by women. (Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, 49)

Nonetheless, a few feminists who are rhetoricians are more optimistic (and wisely, helpfully realistic) about the relationships between feminist rhetorics and Aristotle's. Glenn, for instance, has a more nuanced view in collaboration with Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede. The three scholars read Aristotle as theorizing a rhetoric which is hardly “manipulative, monologic, and rationalistic” (as is usually suggested by historiography of rhetoric and by translations of Aristotle's treatise). Rather, they say the Rhetoric (presumably in a feminist manner) theorizes “an interactive means of discovering meaning through language” (“Border Crossings: Intersections of Rhetoric and Feminism,” 44).

Furthermore, a few feminists who are philosophers are as optimistic (and wisely, helpfully realistic) about the relationships between feminist rhetorics and Aristotle's. Eve Browning Cole, for example, reminds us that:

Aristotle is not . . . totally silent on the subject of women's virtue.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle describes women's virtues as being two-fold: “. . . in body, beauty and stature; in soul. self-command and an industry that is not sordid.” “Philergia,” translated “industry” above, really means “toil of love” or “delight in hard work”; it is to be dissociated from sordidness (aneleutherias; literally “unfreedom” or perhaps “servility”). ("Women, Slaves, and 'Love of Toil'," 131)

Cole adds how Aristotle attributes what is "naturally" male to a woman: "Agave has appropriated the male virtue of courage, the gender-symmetric partner of the emblem-virture of "philergia," which she has abandoned (cf. the passage from Aristotle's Rhetoric quoted . . . above)" ("Women, Slaves, and 'Love of Toil'," 140).

Likewise, Cynthia A. Freeland observes that Aristotle's rhetoric shares with feminist rhetorics the qualities of subjectivity and social-collaborative interdependence. Freeland writes:

Aristotle maintains that science must begin from premises that are self-evidently true and certain. This appears to require that the scientist be a sort of perfect knower, directly intuiting universal and necessary truths. Feminists sometimes criticize such conceptions of the autonomous and impersonal scientific inquirer. But in fact Aristotle believes that dialectic and rhetoric play an important role in getting the community of scientist to such starting-points. ("Nourishing Speculation," 158)

In what we might coin as "feministicization" (for feminist scholar appropriation of first-glance non-feminist ideas), might we (re)position Aristotle as a more welcome guest?