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Notes
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (London: Virago Press, 2004), p. 280.
Not only does an uncritical approach to the theistic conception of divine transcendence serve to sacralise hierarchical relationship between men and women, such that the latter is subordinate to the former, it also, as Anderson reminds us, sustains epistemic and practical norms that quietly yet potently produce gender injustice. See Pamela Sue Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p.2, p.97 and pp. 49-64.
Gillian Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of Method (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 9.
James Conant, ‘On Going the Bloody Hard Way in Philosophy’, in John H. Whittaker (ed.), The Possibilities of Sense (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 85.
In Culture and Value Wittgenstein writes ‘Working in philosophy...is really more a working on oneself...On one’s way of seeing things’ (p. 16). The suggestion here is that doing philosophy is in some way personally therapeutic. Of course, such a view is contentious for it is not obviously the case that better argumentation makes one a morally better person. However, if philosophy is concerned with ‘learning to think better’ this can broadly be understood to mean learning to think in such a way that resists settling for undemanding generalizations and simple dichotomies, which invites not only the theoretical but practical distortion of the world’s fluid, multifarious character.
Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, p. 44. Also, Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism, p. 7
See, for example, Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 31-32.
Geoffrey Scarre, On Courage (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 5.
Pamela Sue Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 23.
Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘A Turn to Spiritual Virtues in Philosophy of Religion’, in Philosophers and God: At the Frontiers of Faith and Reason (London and New York: Continuum, Anderson et al. 2009), p. 177. See also Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘A Thoughtful Love of Life: A Spiritual Turn in Philosophy of Religion’, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, Ǻrg. 85 (2009).
Anderson, ‘A Turn to Spiritual Virtues in Philosophy of Religion’, p. 177.
Gillian Howie and Ashley Tauchert,’Feminist Dissonance: The Logic of Late Feminism’, in Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford (eds.), Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2007), p. 47.
Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism, p. 2.
Ibid, pp. 2-3.
On the distinction between ‘theory as play’ and ‘theory as explanation’ see Teresa L. Ebert, Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan, 1996), p 15.
Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘Feminist Theology as Philosophy of Religion’, in Susan Frank Parson’s (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 53-54.
Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, p. 118.
Ibid, p. 114.
A. W. Moore cited by Anderson, ibid, p. 115 (Anderson’s emphasis).
Ibid, p. 119.
Ibid, pp. 123-126.
Ibid, p. 124.
hooks cited by Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, p. 125.
Ibid, p. 122.
Ibid, p. 126.
Ibid, p. 127.
Ibid, p. 127.
In this paper I use the terms ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ in an Adornian way. Simply put, the former term refers to the structures of social reality, which are never ultimately fixed since they are historically constituted, while the latter refers to consciousness, or more precisely ‘body-consciousness’, a term Howie borrows from Richard Shusterman in order to designate ‘the affective, embodied, intentional, and situated character of subjectivity’ (Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism, p. 210, n. 16). Importantly, while, for Adorno, subjectivity (body-consciousness) is mediated by objectivity this is never in a thoroughly comprehensive way. The reification of reason is never fully total and so the subject’s particular lived experience is capable of betraying the tidy coherence of social determinations simply by being at odds with it.
Ibid, p. 120.
Ibid, p. 126.
Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism, p. 128. Howie’s reflections on ‘dissonance’ draws on the work of Rosi Braidotti.
Ibid, p. 129.
Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, p. 135.
See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London, Verso: 1986).
Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism, p. 6.
Adorno distinguishes between two ways in which rationality can be understood. The first is historically and thus highlights contingent features of reason. For Adorno, the Enlightenment prioritizes the norms of instrumental rationality since they better enable mastery over nature. The second is philosophically, which is to recognise that ‘we cannot think without identifying’ and that the concept is ‘the organon of thinking’. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London and New York: Routledge, 1973), p. 149 and p. 15. Conceptual thinking operates by subsuming particular instances under a universal concept. For Adorno, the problem is not identity-thinking per se but the error of believing that thought has grasped/identified the object definitively, rather than simply indicated the general category it falls under as this elides the object in its sensuous particularity.
Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism, p. 83.
Ibid, p. 83.
Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1978), p. 145.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 17-18.
‘Whoever is hard with himself earns the right to be hard with others as well and avenges himself for the pain whose manifestations he was not allowed to show and had to repress’. Adorno cited by Kate Schick, ‘“To Lend a Voice to Suffering is a Condition For All Truth”: Adorno and International Political Thought’, Journal of International Political Theory, vol. 5, no. 2 (2009), p. 151. This article is particularly helpful in seeing how connections might be drawn between Adorno’s and Anderson’s political projects, especially with regards to the notion of ‘an education toward critical self-reflection’ (Adorno) or ‘reflective critical openness’ (Anderson). In reading Anderson’s latest book it strikes me that there is something deeply pedagogical about her feminist philosophy of religion: she wishes to foster our capacity to learn new ways of looking, of thinking, of loving, of reconceptualising the divine, which is mindful of our epistemic locatedness.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 374.
Ref to Adorno and ineffable knowledge???
Anderson, ‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’, p. 123, my italics.
Anderson, ‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’, p. 119.
By thin concepts, Anderson recalls Bernard William’s notion of ‘thin’ ethical concepts that are not embedded deeply in a social location, as are ‘thick’ ones.
Anderson, ‘A Turn to Spiritual Virtues in Philosophy of Religion’, p. 176.
Anderson, ‘A Thoughtful Love of Life’, p. 125.
Ibid, p. 129, my italics.
See Gillian Howie’s presentation ‘How to Think About Death: Living With Dying’, available online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czaaTDr09bc This paragraph is based on remarks made by Howie in this presentation.
Here I am grateful to Clare Carlisle’s analysis on the concept of courage as it applies to Kierkegaard’s work. See Clare Carlisle, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: A Reader’s Guide (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), pp.193-199, especially p. 194.
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp.119-120, underline mine.
Ibid, p. 123.
For Lear, the hopefulness of someone like Plenty Coups ‘is basically the hope for revival: for coming back to life in a form that is not yet intelligible’. Ibid, p. 95.
As Claire Carlisle suggests, we can think of courage as being open-hearted as well as strong-hearted. Carlisle, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, p. 198. The open/receptive aspect of courage is important given the traditional associations of ‘courage’ with masculinity. Indeed, the Greek and Latin words for courage—andreia and virtus—derive from their word for man. For a brief discussion on the gendered nature of this virtue see Scarre, On Courage, pp. 62-81. Rather than courage, Anderson chooses the closely related word ‘confidence’ as that which gives us power to act. Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, pp.141-142. I think it would be interesting to explore the relationship between these two ideas for a feminist philosophy of religion.
Howie, Between Feminism and Materialism, p. 198.
References
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Adorno, Theodor, and Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London, Verso: 1986).
Anderson, Pamela Sue, ‘A turn to spiritual virtues in philosophy of religion’, in John Cornwell and Michael McGhee (eds.), Philosophers and God: at the frontiers of faith and reason (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 167-185.
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Ebert, T. L. (1996). Ludic feminism and after: postmodernism, desire, and labor in late capitalism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Gillian, H., & Ashley, T. (2007). Feminist sissonance: the logic of late feminism. In G. Stacy, H. Gillian, & M. Rebecca (Eds.), Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (pp. 46–58). Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave.
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Haynes, P. Encouraging a Thoughtful Love of Life: Pamela Sue Anderson and Gillian Howie on Practising Philosophy. SOPHIA 53, 199–213 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0408-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0408-2