Abstract
Contemporary feminist philosophers have consistently decried the binary oppositions of Western philosophy and Western culture, perhaps most notably the oppositions: mind/body, reason/emotion, (or rational/irrational), and culture/nature. They attribute these oppositions to male ways of thinking. They have furthermore decried the uneven valorizations attaching to the oppositions and lay these too at the feet—or rather, heads—of males. Of course, binary oppositions and uneven valorizations inform the thinking and practices of other cultures as well, these oppositions being in some cases different from the predominant ones of Western culture—tame/wild, sky/earth, and right/left, for example.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Rodney Needham, ed., Right & Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 ).
Rodney Needham, Counterpoints ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987 ), 1
G.E.R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966 ).
Robert Hertz, “The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity,” in Right & Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification,3–31.
Ibid., 210. There is reason to suspect that Needham gets the idea of looking upon classifications simply as ideals from Aristotle. As Geoffrey Lloyd points out, “In Aristotle, the distinction between right and left is conceived not merely as a physiological fact, but as an ideal,to which the animal kingdom aspires, but which is most fully exemplified in man.” See Geoffrey Lloyd, “Right and Left in Greek Philosophy,” in Right & Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification,167–86.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990 ).
See Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “The Body as Cultural Object/The Body as Pan-Cultural Universal,” in Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, ed. Mano Daniel and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994 ), 85–114.
See Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies ( Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1994 ), 329–30.
Husserl’s privileging of the imaginary over the empirical is of course well known: e.g., Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book,trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), Section 4, 11–12.
Augustine, City of God,Book XIV (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1952), 388–89. Note in this specifically sexual context the near absolute opposition between reason and passion; the peak of sexual excitement “practically paralyses all power of deliberate thought.”
Daniel Rancour-Laferrière, Signs of the Flesh (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1985). But note too that to say personification of the penis is cross-cultural is not to say that it is pan-cultural. See Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Power,176–78.
One might answer, reversing Derrida’s formula, “by summarily inflating the organ.” See Jacques Derrida, “La parole soufflée,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978 ), 169–95.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Corporeal Archetypes and Power: Preliminary Clarifications and Considerations of Sex,” Hypatia 7, no. 3 (Summer 1992); see also The Roots of Power,Chapter 3.
William H. Masters, Virginia E. Johnson, Robert C. Kolodny, Human Sexuality ( Boston: Little, and Company, 1982 ), 368.
It is also of interest to point out that nocturnal penile erections are ignored even though “it has been well established that penile erections regularly accompany REM sleep” (Allan Rechtschaffen, “The Psychophysiology of Mental Activity During Sleep,” in The Psychophysiology of Thinking: Studies of Covert Processes,ed. F.J. McGuigan and R.A. Schoonover [New York: Academic Press, 1973], 153–205, 171). Of considerable interest is the fact that if one asks “whether the regularly occurring erections of REM sleep are associated with sexual content,” “the answer is a clear `no,’ at least insofar as we deal with manifest content and with everyday definitions of what is sexual” (171). The idea that penile erections signal something other than sexual desire—for example, an overall anxiety or simply an aroused state or state of alertness—is an idea yet to dawn in present-day Western culture. Yet on the basis of research, Rechtschaffen states that “If we were to predict sexual content on the basis of penile erections, we would have to predict that 8095% of REM dreams should have the kind of manifest erotic content that is usually associated with erection—not just speaking with a member of the opposite sex, but engaging in expressly sexual physical contact or at least having explicit sexual fantasies. There is just not that much sexuality in dreams” (171–72).
Peter Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 19, 212.
Jacques Lacan, “The Meaning of the Phallus,” in Feminine Sexuality, ed. Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982 ), 82.
For a full discussion of the notion of females’ being receptive “year-round,” see Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Power.
Psychiatrist Robert Stoller writes that “With practically no exception, all the males we shall ever see, in our practices or anywhere else, fear castration” (Robert Stoller, “Facts and Fancies: An Examination of Freud’s Concept of Bisexuality,” in Women and Analysis,ed. Jean Strouse [Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985], 343–64, 353). Monick concurs, putting the fact in perhaps even stronger terms: “As phallos enters a situation,” he says, “an apprehension…takes place…That is the horror of castration. It has always been so.” (Monick, Phallos,16.) Clearly, castration fears pale in face of an indomitable, ever-present, well-veiled phallus.
See Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Power,Chapters 7–10.
See Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Power for a full discussion.
Sigmund Freud, “The Acquisition of Power over Fire,” in Collected Papers,Vol. V (Miscellaneous Papers, 1888–1938),ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 288–94, 289. Part of the analysis and discussion given here of Freud’s essay originally appeared in Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Power.
Freud, “The Acquisition of Power over Fire,” 291.
Ibid., 294. As I noted in The Roots of Power (393, note 29): “There is no reason of course to believe that only ‘primitive’ conceptual and comportmental practices are tied to animate form and to correlative tactile-kinesthetic experiences thereof, or in other words, that only `primitive people’ think analogically.” For a thorough examination of the origin of fundamental (i.e., primate-derived and pan-cultural) human concepts and a defense of the idea that thinking is modelled on the body, see Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking.
Freud, “The Acquisition of Power over Fire,” 288.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2000). Binary Opposition as an Ordering Principle of (Male?) Human Thought. In: Fisher, L., Embree, L. (eds) Feminist Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9488-2_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9488-2_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5563-7
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9488-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive