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Kant and Feminist Political Thought, Redux: Complicity, Accountability and Refusal

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Abstract

This chapter troubles how contemporary feminist political philosophy should make use of Kant. Huseyinzadegan and Pascoe argue against contemporary recuperations or reconstructions of Kantian political concepts, which proceed by excising, ignoring, or setting aside Kant’s problematic claims regarding the natural immaturity and dependency of women and or people of color. Here, they engage with his non-ideal philosophy in order to show that the Kantian ideal of a politically mature subject and citizen cannot be universal, because it is thoroughly defined, determined, and structured by intersectional exclusions. They show that Kantian ideals are not and have never been universal, transhistorical, or neutral; rather, they are grounded in and necessarily constructed/constituted by the non-ideal, i.e. material, historical, economic relations of power in the age of ongoing colonialism and conquest.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Katarina Deligiorgi, Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment (New York: State University of New York Press, 2005); Samuel Fleishhacker, What is Enlightenment? (New York: Routledge, 2013); Helga Varden, “Kant and women,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98, no. 4 (2017): 653–694.

  2. 2.

    Pauline Kleingeld, “The Problematic Status of Gender-Neutral Language in the History of Philosophy: The Case of Kant,” Philosophical Forum 25, no. 2 (1993): 134–150; Charlotte Sabourin, “Kant’s Enlightenment and Women’s Peculiar Immaturity,” Kantian Review 26, no. 2 (2021): 235–260; Robin May-Schott, “The Gender of Enlightenment,” in Feminist Interpretations of Kant, ed. Robin May-Schott (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1997), 319–337.

  3. 3.

    Dilek Huseyinzadegan, “For What Can the Kantian Feminist Hope? Constructive Complicity in Appropriations of the Canon,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 4, no. 1 (2018), Article 3. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/article/view/3122/2387.

  4. 4.

    Ibid.

  5. 5.

    Dilek Huseyinzadegan, Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 8–10.

  6. 6.

    John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971); Charles W. Mills, “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 20, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 165–184; Laura Valentini, “Ideal vs. non-ideal theory: a conceptual map,” Philosophy Compass 7, no. 9 (2012): 654–664.

  7. 7.

    For an earlier iteration of the argument that an antiracist reading of Kant requires that we see his philosophy, both its ideal and nonideal part, as a complementary whole, see also Charles W. Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Walls (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 169–193.

  8. 8.

    He continues in this passage, “It is true that when it comes to talking, woman by the nature of her sex has enough of a mouth [Mund] to represent both herself and her husband, even in court, and so could literally be declared to be over-mature [übermundig]. But just as it does not belong to women to go to war, so women cannot personally defend their rights and pursue civil affairs for themselves, but only by means of a representative” (An; Ak 7: 208–209).

  9. 9.

    Kleingeld, “The Problematic Status of Gender-Neutral Language in the History of Philosophy: The Case of Kant,” 136; May-Schott, “The Gender of Enlightenment,” 327; Sabourin, “Women’s Peculiar Immaturity,” 251; See also: Allen Wood, Kant’s Ethical Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 339, n4; Inder Marwah “What Nature Makes of Her: Kant’s Gendered Metaphysics,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 28, no. 3 (2013): 551–567.

  10. 10.

    Huseyinzadegan, Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics, 3–20.

  11. 11.

    Jordan Pascoe, “Rethinking Race and Gender in Kant: Toward a Non-Ideal, Intersectional Kant,” SGIR Review 2, no. 2 (2019): 84–99, 96; this parallels what Huseyinzadegan terms a “more honest Kantianism” in Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics, 165–167.

  12. 12.

    Jordan Pascoe, “Domestic Labor, Citizenship, and Exceptionalism: Rethinking Kant’s ‘Woman Problem’,” Journal of Social Philosophy 46, no. 3 (2015): 340–356.

  13. 13.

    Huseyinzadegan, Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics, 7.

  14. 14.

    Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

  15. 15.

    Pauline Kleingeld, “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race,” The Philosophical Quarterly 57, no. 229 (October 2007): 573–592; and “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Colonialism,” in Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives, ed. Katrin Flikshuh and Lea Ypi, 43–67 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  16. 16.

    Tsenay Serequeberhan, “Eurocentrism in Philosophy: The Case of Immanuel Kant,” Philosophical Forum 27, no. 4 (1996): 333–356; Emanuel Chukwudi Eze, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of “Race” in Kant’s Anthropology,” in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader, ed. Emanuel Chukwudi Eze (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), 103–140. Robert Bernasconi, “Will the Real Kant Please Stand Up: The Challenge of Enlightenment Racism to the Study of the History of Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy 117 (2003):13–22 and “Kant’s Third Thoughts on Race” in Reading Kant’s Geography, ed. Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011), 291–318 and “Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Racism,” in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, ed. Julia K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2002), 145–165; John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Jennifer Mensch, “Caught Between Character and Race: ‘Temperament’ in Kant’s Lectures on Anthropology,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 43, no. 1 (2017): 125–144; Inder Marwah, “Bridging Nature and Culture? Kant, Culture, and Cultivation,” Social Theory and Practice 38, no. 3 (2012): 385–406; Elvira Basevich, “Reckoning with Kant on Race,” in The Philosophical Forum 51, no. 3 (2020): 221–245.

  17. 17.

    Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 32–33.

  18. 18.

    Jasmine Gani, “The Erasure of Race: Cosmopolitanism and the Illusion of Kantian Hospitality,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45, no. 3 (2017): 445.

  19. 19.

    Dilek Huseyinzadegan and Jordan Pascoe, “Dismantling Kantian Frames: Notes toward a Feminist Politics of Location and Accountability,” in American Philosophical Association Women in Philosophy Blog, https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/04/07/dismantling-kantian-frames-notes-toward-a-feminist-politics-of-location-and-accountability/.

  20. 20.

    May-Schott, “The Gender of Enlightenment,” 320–321.

  21. 21.

    Serene Khader, Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 21. See also Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 783–790; Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  22. 22.

    Khader, Decolonizing Universalism, 22.

  23. 23.

    Spivak’s postcolonial feminist reading of Kant also integrates his ideal and nonideal writings, to argue that Kantian philosophy gives us the foundational premise of postcolonial theory, namely, that the white upper-middle-class male subject of the Global North is centered as THE subject of philosophy and politics, and that the women of color from the Global South was foreclosed from humanity; see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward A History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1–37; On Spivak and Kant, see also Huseyinzadegan, “For What can the Kantian Feminist Hope?”.

  24. 24.

    Basevich, “Reckoning with Kant on Race,” 230; JR Fisette, “At the bar of conscience: A Kantian argument for slavery reparations,” Philosophy & Social Criticism (March 2021), https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537211001916.

  25. 25.

    Deligiorgi, Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment, 2005; Fleishhacker, What is Enlightenment?; Varden, “Kant and Women”; Carol Hay, Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism: Resisting Oppression (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

  26. 26.

    Kleingeld, “The Problematic Status of Gender-Neutral Language in the History of Philosophy: The Case of Kant”; Wood, Kant’s ethical thought; Marwah “What Nature Makes of Her”.

  27. 27.

    May-Schott, “The Gender of Enlightenment,” 327.

  28. 28.

    May-Schott tracks the concrete historical conditions for women in Enlightenment France and Prussia to contextualize Kant’s scornful and dismissive comments towards Madame de Châtelet and Maria von Herbert, two significant intellectual women that were his contemporaries. Clearly, Kant did not think highly of the intellectual capacities of women, as evidenced in his writings, so it is far from the case that he meant to include them in the public use of reason, even as he included them, parenthetically, in his condemnation of the lazy and cowardly unenlightened masses. (“The Gender of Enlightenment,” 332).

  29. 29.

    May-Schott, “The Gender of Enlightenment,” 333–334.

  30. 30.

    Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 365.

  31. 31.

    Jürgen Habermas, Sara Lennox, and Frank Lennox. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964).” New German Critique, no. 3 (1974): 49–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/487737, 49.

  32. 32.

    Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text 25, no. 26 (1990): 59.

  33. 33.

    Ibid.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 64.

  35. 35.

    Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Impartiality and the Civic Public,” in Justice and the Politics of Difference (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 104. See also Iris Marion-Young, “Feminism and the Public Sphere: Asymmetrical Reciprocity: On Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought,” Constellations 3, no. 3 (1997): 340–363.

  36. 36.

    Young, “The Ideal of Impartiality and the Civic Public,” 97.

  37. 37.

    Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 62.

  38. 38.

    Ibid.; our emphases.

  39. 39.

    Ibid., 57.

  40. 40.

    Jordan Pascoe, Kant’s Theory of Labor (Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Practical and contextual considerations motivated Kant’s argument: as Howard Williams has argued, the distinction reflected a concern with the independence of voters in nascent democracies, in conditions in which landholders and employers could and did coerce their tenants and employees to vote as they wished. See Howard L. Williams, ed. Essays on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); See also Reidar Maliks, Kant’s Politics in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  41. 41.

    Pascoe, “Domestic Labor, Citizenship, and Exceptionalism,” 345.

  42. 42.

    Pascoe, Kant’s Theory of Labor.

  43. 43.

    By the time Metaphysics of Morals is published, this “third domain’s specific right is subsumed under Private Right; see MM, Ak 6:276, 425–426.

  44. 44.

    Pascoe, “Domestic Labor, Citizenship, and Exceptionalism,” 344 and Kant’s Theory of Labor.

  45. 45.

    Pascoe, Kant’s Theory of Labor.

  46. 46.

    See Pascoe, Kant’s Theory of Labor.

  47. 47.

    Sabourin notes that Kant anticipates, in his anthropological arguments, the dependency and immaturity of the householder, showing that the scholar might be “immature” in domestic matters, just as the householder might be “immature” in caregiving. The master’s “immaturity” in these domains ensures that it is those doing domestic labor—wives and servants—who must engage in some form of reasoning to determine what reproductive, or caregiving labor is necessary for the good of the household; see Sabourin, “Kant’s Enlightenment and Women’s Peculiar Immaturity”.

  48. 48.

    This move to outsource domestic labor often makes feminism unable to see its own complicity with the liberal framework that is committed to making reproductive labor invisible as they participate in public forums—As Audre Lorde asks a majority white intellectual audience in her speech: “how do you [feminists] deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend to your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?” See Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 112.

  49. 49.

    See A. R. Hochschild, “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value,” in On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, ed. W. Hutton and A. Giddens, 130–146 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000).

  50. 50.

    Pascoe, Kant’s Theory of Labor.

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    Enrique Dussel, “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” Boundary 2 20, no 3 (1993): 65–76.

  53. 53.

    Walter D. Mignolo, “The Darker Side of the Enlightenment: A De-colonial Reading of Kant’s Geography,” in Reading Kant’s Geography, ed. Stuart Elden and Eduardo Mendieta (New York: State University of New York Press, 2011), 319–344.

  54. 54.

    Huseyinzadegan, “For What Can the Kantian Feminist Hope?”.

  55. 55.

    Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 261–262.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 276–277; 280–282.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 264.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 263–264.

  59. 59.

    Mills, “Kant’s Untermenschen”, 170–171.

  60. 60.

    In this sense, Pascoe argues that Kant’s “each can work his way up” operates as what Kimberlé Crenshaw calls a “but-for” argument, ensuring that those burdened by a single form of oppression can work their way up, but those contending with intersecting forms of oppression cannot. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics,” u. Chi. Legal f. (1989): 139; Pascoe, Kant’s Theory of Labor.

  61. 61.

    Jordan Pascoe, “Patriarchy and Enlightenment in Immanuel Kant,” in Patriarchal Moments: Reading Patriarchal Texts, ed. Cuttica, Cesare and Gaby Mahlberg, 115–124 (London, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015).

  62. 62.

    Pauline Kleingeld, “The Problematic Status of Gender-Neutral Language in the History of Philosophy: The Case of Kant,” Philosophical Forum 25, no. 2 (1993): 134–150.

  63. 63.

    On the Eurocentrism of Kant’s view of “culture,” see also Serequeberhan, “Eurocentrism in Philosophy”; Marwah, “What Nature Makes of Her”; Marwah, “Bridging Nature and Culture?” and Huseyinzadegan, Kant’s Nonideal Theory of Politics.

  64. 64.

    Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” 261–262.

  65. 65.

    On the distinction between white liberal feminism and a feminism for the majority of the planet’s population, see Aruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2019).

  66. 66.

    Jasmine Gani, “The Erasure of Race: Cosmopolitanism and the Illusion of Kantian Hospitality,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45, no. 3 (2017): 445.

  67. 67.

    Cynthia Freeland, “Feminism and Ideology in Ancient Philosophy,” Apeiron 32, no. 4 (2000): 365–406.

  68. 68.

    Tiffany Lethabo King tracks two forms of decolonial refusal, namely, “Native feminist refusal” (in the works of Audra Simpson, Eve Tuck, Jody Byrd, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith) and “Black feminist suspicion” (in the works of Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Amber Jamilla Musser). Note that King is specifically speaking to the posthumanist turn in continental theory and Black and Indigenous feminist engagements with and around this turn; see Tiffany Lethabo King, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 162–185; see especially 163–167. Our contention is that the method she develops for interrupting Western theory can be applied to feminist political theorizing that deals with Kant’s and Kantian thought.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Dilek Huseyinzadegan

  2. Manhattan College, Riverdale, NY, USA

    Jordan Pascoe

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  1. Dilek Huseyinzadegan
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Correspondence to Dilek Huseyinzadegan .

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  1. Institute for Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Susanne Lettow

  2. Gender Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Tuija Pulkkinen

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Huseyinzadegan, D., Pascoe, J. (2022). Kant and Feminist Political Thought, Redux: Complicity, Accountability and Refusal. In: Lettow, S., Pulkkinen, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13123-3_3

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