In “Regarding the Cave” the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero offers a reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave that expands on an interpretation of that same narrative by Hannah Arendt. Cavarero is perhaps the first to notice how Arendt’s remarks in “Tradition and the Modern Age,” “What is Authority?,” and
The Human Condition connect, how together they form a spirited critique of Western philosophy, and how indispensable they are for a feminist reckoning with what might be called masculinist ontology. This last project is further developed by Cavarero in her monograph
In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (1995), which presents Arendtian natality alongside the philosophy of sexual difference to bend ancient myths toward their slighted female heroines. In her discussion, the question whether Hannah Arendt was a feminist is immaterial to Cavarero, and yet in reading Cavarero and Arendt together I am left with the sense that any feminism worth arguing for would centrally be concerned with the possibility of women-as-philosophers, and with their dialogue. In this spirit, I want to follow feminist readers of Arendt in engaging her in a dialogue with two female philosophers — Cavarero and the French philosopher Catherine Malabou — as all three of them wrestle with the legacy of the philosophical universal.
“No doubt woman will never become impenetrable, inviolable. That’s why it is necessary to imagine the possibility of woman starting from the structural impossibility she experiences of not being violated, in herself and outside, everywhere. An impossibility that echoes the impossibility of her welcome in philosophy” (Changing, 140).
In her book
Changing Difference, Catherine Malabou underscores that the impossibility of a woman philosopher — “there is no woman philosopher” — is foundational to the
possibility of philosophy because only the long exclusion of women has rendered the thinking of its concepts “pure.” If women were to challenge philosophy as they have challenged art and literature, Malabou claims, they would “change the given rules” rather than continuing to receive the same old questions (102). Because the feminine is split between its actual, ontological, and metaphorical repression by philosophy, which renders it a modality of being that is always yet to arrive,
and its simultaneous boundedness to an essential position, which forever ties it back to established dichotomies, Malabou turns to a reconsideration of the concept of essence as “plastic.” In the female body she locates an “essence” which resists the immateriality of the trace (121).
Malabou’s insistence on embodiment joins her approach with most varieties of feminist critique — a shared emphasis that stems from the fundamental fact that women have not recognized themselves in the mirror that representations by men hold up to them. Women find themselves the “object, not the subject, of the other’s thought” (
In Spite, 2) such that a mere reference by a woman to herself and to her sexed body can have a disruptive effect on the assumptions of neutrality and universality that come with the notion of “man” (or its contemporary replacement, the supposedly even more disinterested “guys”). “Man,” this Arendt knew, is a dangerous abstraction — not, to be sure, because she was interested in the overwriting of sexual difference. Rather, Arendt’s critique of the concept of man aims at the philosophical solipsism of thinking man as
one. But — and this I would call Arendt’s feminism — the two criticisms are inextricably linked; feminism is necessarily a tearing down of individualism. Thus, much like thinkers of sexual difference, Arendt announces that the new political philosophy would have to begin with two, not one. And again like feminist interpreters, she underlines that the
two of difference describes, at its most basic level, the distinction between male and female: “‘Male and female created He
them’” (
HC, 8). Thus, the
given is plural; “in its elementary form” it is the difference that marks “them.” Plurality begins with the plurality of sexes.
In this light, the important question for feminists should not be whether Hannah Arendt is a fellow traveler but in what sense she is a “woman philosopher”? Does Arendt challenge the rules of the game of philosophy in Malabou’s sense? Are her questions different from those posed by a long line of (male) philosophers? Does she allow us to posit a different notion of “woman”? To ask this question is to advance a definition of “woman” that is neither essentialist — as some critics have understood Arendt’s frequently cited admission of a “rather old-fashioned” attitude toward the woman question and the “problem as such” (
Last Interview, 4) — nor entirely “empty” (i.e. completely exhausted by its social function) but tries to open the signifier “woman” to its more than binary possibilities. Arguably, Arendt begins to do so herself when she defines her position as “
feminini generis” in her acceptance speech upon receiving the Sonning Prize in 1975. There she speaks of her femininity as phenomenologically tied, from the get-go, to other qualities of being: “I am, as you know, a Jew,
feminini generis as you can see, born and educated in Germany as, no doubt, you can hear […]” (
Responsibility, 4). Vis-à-vis the binary options of being either female or male, another logic operates here: Jewish as you know, female as you can see, German as you can hear. Thus, if Arendt offers a change in perspective it is because she begins to rewrite political philosophy by taking “the structural impossibility” of not being divided as her premise.
[1]Cavarero notes that it is Arendt who, before similar poststructuralist critiques became commonplace, queries the philosophical tradition for its institution of the logic of binary oppositions. In Plato Arendt locates “a first turning-about which institutes the philosophical tradition ‘in terms of opposites’ and acts as a model for all successive overturnings which populate the history of philosophy” (“Regarding,” 2,3). As her early essay “Tradition and the Modern Age” (1954) and its drafts show, Arendt’s recognition of plurality thus flows from another “structural” insight: the oppositions and turns of Western philosophy are “predetermined by the conceptual structure” set by Plato’s cave allegory. Though dichotomous thinking does not yet rule Socrates’ dialogues, it begins to take shape in the “turnings-about” of the allegory. For Arendt, the story of the cave is a story of three turns, each of which implicates a “loss of sense”:
The story of the cave unfolds in three stages: The first turning around takes place in the cave itself when the cave-inhabitant frees himself from the chains which keep him and his outlook glued to the screen on which the [sh]adows and images of things appear and turns around to the rear of the cave where an artificial fire illuminates the things in the cave as they really are. There is second the turning from the cave to the clear sky where the ideas appear as true and eternal essences of the things in the cave, because they are illuminated by the sun, the idea of ideas, which makes it possible for man to see and for the ideas to appear. There is third the necessity of returning to the cave, of leaving the realm of eternal essences and move again in the realm of perishable things and mortal men. Each of these turnings is accompanied by a loss of sense and orientation: the eyes used to the shadowy appearance on the screen are blinded by the fire in the cave; the eyes then adjusted to the dim light of the artificial fire are blinded by the light that illuminates the ideas; finally, the eyes adjusted to the light of the sun must re-adjust to the dimness of the cave. (Modern Challenge, 478)
A story about truth thus proceeds by blinding vision, disorienting the senses, and by cleaving the soul from the measures of the body. As in the
Phaedo, the task of philosophy must be to “untie the soul from the body” (84a), to free it for contemplation and, ultimately, for death. Though the cave-dwelling philosopher must return to the cave of ignorance — armed with the criteria he gathered on his second turn –, his deprivation actually sets him apart from the others who continue to trust their impressions. Unlike them, his soul has learned “not [to] return to prior pleasures and pains, nor deliver itself to their chains”; it has realigned itself exclusively toward “discourse [
logismos] and always keeping within it, by contemplating truth, the divine and what is not appearance” (
Phaedo, 84a-b).
In “Tradition and the Modern Age,” Arendt’s provocative thesis is that Western dichotomies are established and “predetermined by the conceptual structure itself,” a structure that Plato advances for polemical effect — “solely for political purposes” (
Modern Challenge, 499) — against Homer and the world-embracing, sense-based ethos of literature. As a result, Plato’s ideas are transcendent mainly with respect to the common world of the polis, which appears to him as a version of Hades. The “yardsticks” he seeks to set in stone transcend only that to which they are applied, the ever-relative “realm where everything seems to dissolve into relationships and to be relative by definition” (481). Most of all, these measures resist being relatable to a human scale. Their transcendence lies in their “speechlessness.” Nevertheless, the Platonic abstractions are enthroned as universals and only those who are permitted to recognize themselves in their blinding light, only those who are similarly abstracted — disembodied, unsexed, unworldly — are fit to apply them to those who are not. It is through the depreciation of the polis as fakery that a novel mode of thinking gains traction: This is the mode of thinking in order to “unrelate.”
In her gloss of Plato’s and Arendt’s texts, Cavarero concentrates on the persistent strangeness of the image of the cave. No explanation illuminates that dark hollow for her since the political world “hardly resembles the cave imagined by Plato, with all of its tricks, traps, and devices” (“Regarding,” 10). Rather than presenting us with an analogue of the polis (“a shared scene in which ‘human affairs’ have the unforeseeable character of action and men themselves are shown to be a plurality of unique beings”), Plato’s construction presents men as hypnotized “puppets […] without any relation” (10) and the realm of ordinary life as if it “were a collective hypnosis or a cinema which always shows the same film” (14). For Cavarero, “[t]he cave remains an image which is not adaptable to any notion of politics” (10). According to her reading, the reasons for what she calls the “bizarre” imagery of the allegory derive from the narrative doubling that allows Plato, the narrator, to escape Socrates’ fate. While the “original” philosopher, who dwells very much among the living and whose philosophy consists in talking to ordinary people, is killed off, along with Homer’s alluring stories, Plato escapes scot-free. In turn, the allegory also offers a visual substitute and persiflage, “a world centered around coerced visions where no one is looked at or spoken to” (19), to the oral, communicative fascination of the voice. It marks the regime change from Socratic dialogue to Platonic solitude. Contemplator: last man standing.
Clichés aside, the problem with Plato’s survival (or “
Selbstbehauptung”) is, as Arendt shows in
The Modern Challenge to Tradition, that the plural political realm begins to be ruled by the singular criteria of the philosopher. From then on, the subject of politics becomes the object of rule. Hannah Arendt’s decisive contribution to a rethinking of Western political theory and to feminism is the insistent reminder that the subject of politics is
not one. One of the most interesting questions for her work grows out of this density: How, from the insight that “plurality is
the condition […] of political life” (HC, 7), does Arendt arrive at the contention that “natality […] may be the central category of political, as distinguished from metaphysical, thought” (9)?
Never indivisible, never not violable but also, and surely this is as important, more than one in her openness, “woman” complicates the very dualities she has been so firmly embedded in. Though this alternative ontology must ward off essentialist idealizations of pregnancy or motherhood, the long exclusion of pregnancy from masculine ontologies appears conspicuous — a strange gap in our accounts of being. Wouldn’t a phenomenology of being have to begin with the beginning of being? Wouldn’t it have to reckon with the simple fact that each one of us came not from “nowhere” but was born to a mother, who was also the first witness, the first other, the body and consciousness from whose divisibility issues a “new beginning”? Unlike the cave dwellers’ static regard, seeing here does not imply a kind of passivity. The mother watches and brings her child into appearance. Unless prevented from doing so — and here we might speculate on the organization of childbirth in Western societies, replete with a theater of cutouts and sheets, screens and anesthesia –, her gaze accords recognition and thus
reality to the newcomer. “Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a
spectator” (
Life, 19). Arendt here repeats what she had asserted almost twenty years earlier, at this time explicitly in the context of birth: “In other words, nothing that is, insofar as it appears, exists in the singular; everything that is is meant to be perceived by somebody.
Not Man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality is the law of the earth” (19, my italics).
[2]If “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world” (7), as Arendt had first argued in
The Human Condition, this means that as beings who are born we are never alone. Acknowledging our “bornness” also implies something else, something that she stresses in
The Life of the Mind: we are born on a particular planet called earth (“this planet”), and thus are “predetermined” in at least one way: our judgments and actions are “earthly,” embodied and “born” judgments and actions. For feminist critics such as Cavarero or the Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, this does not mean that our existence is fixed, or that the parameters for action have already been staked out, but that the specificity of our appearance and the special,
born and
birthing form of our being-in-the-world can only be rendered neutral, isolated and unilateral through an enormous expenditure of habitual and largely unexceptional, daily violence.
Philosophically, the separation of birth from being enables a vision of being as suppressing mere “existence” (as
Dasein and
Mitsein). By assuming a deeper truth behind all appearances and ascribing to the “ground” a “higher rank of reality than what merely appeared” (
Life, 24), everything that appears takes on the attribute of that which is to be repressed, denied, and questioned. And yet as “ground,” each manifestation of “being” is already shaped by the phenomenon of appearance. It follows that birth might be seen as that unique interface of two levels which never otherwise touch: the level of “expressiveness” that expresses nothing but itself and the level of the life process that exists “for the appearances,” but does not itself appear. Birth, in other words, is plastic; it simultaneously
receives and
gives form
(Changing, 63).
The constitution of philosophy is bound up with the simultaneous exclusion of the maternal body and the political sphere of action. Hence, there is no woman philosopher. Except there are: In reading women philosophers like Cavarero, Malabou, Kristeva, and Arendt, philosophy and ontology appear in a new light to us — as violable, divisible, (inter)dependent, “plastic,” disruptive, as beginning from the other.
