Abstract
We will each — at certain times — reflect upon our tèaching and writing in philosophy. In recent reflections on my own work, I have noticed two persistent, underlying yet motivating ideas: love and morality. In A Feminist Philosophy of Religion, I claim both the existence of a yearning for love and a longing to put things in order, as they ought to be. However, following Kant’s philosophy, I cannot help but become critical in this selfreflection. In particular, have I fallen into the feminist trap of `moralizing’, in a negative sense, about the subject of love? The trap may have been set for a tradition of feminist philosophers influenced by French feminist reflections on religion.1 I use the image of a trap because it seems inevitable that, assuming the validity of psychoanalysis, the followers of certain French feminist philosophers make moral judgments about the repressed desire of men and women; but it is not clear that, even if it can be demonstrated to exist, repression is something for which individuals can be morally responsible repressed desire is not my concern in this paper, so I will leave for another time the question as to whether or not the French feminist position is self-defeating. It is the question of moralization, taken ultimately in a positive sense, which motivates my discussion today as a distinctively twenty-first century concern.
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References
For a collection of essays that are representative of this tradition, see Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady and Jill Pozon (eds), French Feminists on Religion: A Reader (London/New York: Routledge, 2002).
For the dangers with this feminist opposition to the authority of reason as the ground of morality, see Sabina Lovibond, “The End of Morality”, in Kathleen Lennon and Margaret Whitford (eds), Knowing the Difference: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 63–78.
For her more recent account, see Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); and
Beverley Clack, Sex and Death (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
For scholarly background on the use of eros in the Christian tradition, see Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and The Love of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Osborne goes some way to bring eros back into accounts of Christian love, especially after Anders Nygren’s emphasis on agape to the exclusion of eros as a Greek idea of love (cf. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. P. S. Watson, London: SPCK, 1957). Yet Osborne does not go far enough to engage with the female mystic’s descriptions of eros, or sensual love, for God. For a serious and scholarly engagement with female mysticism, see Amy
Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History (Chicago, University Chicagoof 5 H. P. Owen, “Why Morality Implies the Existence of God”, in Brian Davies (ed.), Philosophy of Religion: A Guide and Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 651; Owen cites Farrer: “what claims our regard is not simply our neighbour, but God in our neighbour and our neighbour in God”
(A. W. Farrer, Faith and Logic, London, 1957, p. 26).
At the extreme, difficulties generated by sexual relations can lead to horrendous evils; on the latter, see Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999).
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, edited with an Introduction by Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985), pp. 113ff, 142ff, 174, 278.
For careful textual argument on Wollstonecraft and Kant, see Susan Mendus, Feminism and Emotion (London: Macmillan, 2000).
Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History (Chicago. IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Lovibond, “The End of Morality”, pp. 66–68. cf. Miranda Fricker, “Feminism in Epistemology: Pluralism without Postmodernism”, in Miranda Fricker and Jennifer Hornsby (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 146–65.
Mary Wollstonecraft, “Letters to Imlay”, in Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd (eds), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 6, LXVII (London: Chatto & Pickering, 1989).
For notable critiques of Kant, see Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Books, 1985), pp. 55–70, 104; and
Sally Sedgwick, “Can Kant’s Ethics Survive the Feminist Critique”, in Robin May Schott (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Kant (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997), pp. 77–100.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and edited by H. J. Paton in The Moral Law (London: Huthinson & Co., 1951), pp. 63–5 (original text, 398–9).
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (London: Methuen, 1930), p. 197; and Metaphysic of Morals, trans. and edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
For further discussion of `gendering’, see Pamela Sue Anderson, “Autonomy, Vulnerability and Gender”, in Linda Hogan and Sasha Roseneil (eds), Feminism, Agency and Ethics (forthcoming).
bell hooks, Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997); and All About Love: New Visions (London: The Women’s Press, 2000).
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 1; New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 27ff.
Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 1.
Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, pp. 43–4.
Kristeva, Tales of Love, pp. 382–3. Kristeva portrays this crisis of love and atheism in a novel where persons are metamorphosed into wolves: The Old Man and the Wolves, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and for my account of Kristeva’s language of exiles in this novel, see “Writing on Exiles and Excess: Toward a New Form of Subjectivity”, in Heather Walton and Andrew Hass (eds), Self/Same/Other: Revisioning the Subject in Literature and Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 20 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 209–10.
Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 99–100.
Pamela Sue Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory: Promising, Forgiving and Yearning”, in Graham Ward (ed.), Blackwell’s Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 231–48.
See Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, edited with an Interpretative Essay by Joanna Vecchiarellis Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); The Human Condition second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 175–92. Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000),
University Press, 2001), especially pp. 40–8, 234–40. Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. Xviii, 6–7, 25. 24 Anderson, “An Ethics of Memory”, p. 242.
For a conceptual analysis of love involving sexuality, that reveals the extent to which such love implies commitment, see William Newton-Smith, “A Conceptual Investigation of Love”, in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy and Personal Relations: An Anglo-French Study (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1973), pp. 113–36. For a Christian account of the marital commitment, see
Dave Leal, On Marriage as Vocation (Ridley Hall, Cambridge: Grove Books Ltd, 1996).
Derek Parfit, “Later Selves and Moral Principles”, in Philosophy and Personal Relations, pp. 144–62; and Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), chapter 15 “Personal Identity and Morality”.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. and edited by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 37–44 (5:42–50) University Press, 2001), especially pp. 40–8, 234–40. Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. Xviii, 6–7, 25.
Newton-Smith, “A Conceptual Investigation”, p. 113.
Newton-Smith, “A Conceptual Investigation”, p. 113. In Sartre’s account of relations with others, the subject wants to be loved, but there can be no reciprocity. Instead, “Hell is Other People”; cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
Newton-Smith, “A Conceptual Investigation”, p. 114.
Newton-Smith, “A Conceptual Investigation”, p. 120.
Newton-Smith, “A Conceptual Investigation”, pp. 128–9. He finds these pictures in Iris Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969).
Newton-Smith, “A Conceptual Investigation”, p. 135.
Newton-Smith, “A Conceptual Investigation of Love”, p. 135.
John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Human Limits and God’s Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 32–3; Kant, The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 65 (399).
On promising and promise-keeping, see Pamela Sue Anderson, “Ricoeur’s Reclamation of Autonomy: Unity, Plurality and Totality”, in The Moral Capacity: Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought, edited by John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (New York/London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 18–25.
Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, second edition (London: SPCK; New York: Paulist Press, 2000); and Jantzen, “A Reconfiguration of Desire: Reading Medieval Mystics in Postmodernity”, Women’s Philosophy Review 32, special issue on Philosophy of Religion, edited by Pamela Sue Anderson and Harriet Harris (forthcoming 2003). Also, see Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy.
Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 120–45.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex trans. H. M. Parshley, with an Introduction by Deirdre Bair (New York: Vintage Books, Random House edition, 1989), p. 670, also see pp. 649–50, 670–8.
Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 6, and on the gendering of mysticism, p. 8.
Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 5. For a recent argument concerning Julian of Norwich as a female mystic who anticipated Irigaray’ s account of the bodily and emotional engagement with the other, see Diane Antonio, “The Flesh of All That Is: Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray and Julian’s Showings’’’, Sophia, 40, 1 (December 2001): 47–65.
Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 266–73, 277–9, 354n92, n95, 357n11.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A 819/ B847, A 771/ B799. Also see A. W. Moore, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty: Themes and Variations in Kant’ Moral and Religious Philosophy (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2003).
Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 65 (399)
Kant, The Metaphysic of Morals, pp. 159–160 (original text, 399–400). This passage provides one piece of textual support for contemporary philosophers who aim to bring Kant into the most recent developments in virtue ethics; cf. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 91–107, 120.
Catriona MacKenzie and Natalie Stoljar (eds), Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Anderson, “Autonomy, Vulnerability and Gender”.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A771/ B799; also see A622/ 650 and A814–815/B 842–3. On seeing our ‘self-legislation’ in a divine light as a mere device, see Moore, Noble in Reason. Moore also reconstructs Kant’s account of the moral necessity to believe in God, i.e. belief which is hope-sustaining and a meaning-conferring function.
Lovibond first raised this concern for me, but Fricker develops the postmodern — Foucauldian — question whether we can ever distinguish between reason as authoritative or authoritarian, see Fricker, “Feminism in Epistemology”, p. 156; cf. Lovibond, “The End of Morality”, p. 68–71, 75–76.
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Anderson, P.S. (2004). ‘Moralizing’ Love in Philosophy of Religion. In: Hackett, J., Wallulis, J. (eds) Philosophy of Religion for a New Century. Studies in Philosophy and Religion, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2074-2_14
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