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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
The contemporary debate about the place and role of women in the Church is proving to be a painful and difficult business. Language itself contributes to the problems in the sense that certain tacit assumptions —overwhelmingly negative about women—are embedded deep in our talk about human persons. The answer is not to be found simply in tinkering with non-sexist language. The practical difficulties facing women are compounded by the fact that the language in which the discussion is conducted depends for its meaning on gender images that are implicitly discriminatory. The clue to this problem is to be found in certain key assumptions about the nature of human persons.
The experience of intra-human discrimination has certain common elements. Those discriminated against are in one way or another denied rights accorded to other human beings, their needs are subordinated to those of others, and their behaviour tends to be interpreted in causal rather than psychological terms. What is characteristic about this experience is that it involves a refusal to treat those discriminated against as persons in the full sense of that term, for to recognize someone as a person is precisely to accord them certain rights, to take note of their needs, and to see them as subjects whose experience can only be adequately explained in terms of psychology. In this essay we shall attempt to uncover those features of our talk about persons that give rise to the possibility of discrimination and following this we shall consider the particular difficulties facing women.
It has been customary for philosophers when analysing the concept of a person to begin by listing the kinds of things we say about persons.
1 Strawson, P.F., Individuals (Methuen, London, 1959), pp. 87–116Google Scholar.
2 It is important to note here that personal predicates are those implying that something has a conscious, rational, and moral life. This does not mean that bodily/physiological identity and personal identity are two separate and distinct things. But it does mean that there is a conceptual distinction between talk about persons (and consequently about human beings as persons) and talk about bodily identity. To talk about a human being as a person is to invoke a framework of reference and explanation which is distinct from the empirical framework of biology and physiology. Persons may have bodies but when we talk about them as persons we are addressing aspects of experience that cannot be reduced to bodily experience. The identification of the feminine with the bodily senses is therefore an important factor in the conceptual exclusion of women from their full status as persons. To identify their gender with images of the body is effectively to rule them out of the category of persons.
3 Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and its Discontents, (Hogarth Press, London, 1930), p.73Google Scholar.
4 D. Spender in her book Man Made Language (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1980)Google Scholar argues that language is man made, and that as a consequence ‘maleness’ pervades language as a whole.
5 Lloyd, Genevieve, The Man of Reason (Methuen, London, 1984), p. 103Google Scholar.
6 Aristotle, , Generation of Animals (Heinemann, London, 1943), 728a. 17, p. 103Google Scholar; 775. 15, p. 461.
7 For a discussion of this strand in early Christian thinking see Vogt, Kari “Becoming Male”: One Aspect of an Early Christian Anthropology’, Concilium, 182, December 1985, pp. 72–83Google Scholar.
8 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. 3 part iv, p. 177.
9 Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1972)Google Scholar.
10 Lloyd, op. cit. pp. 96–107, offers an interesting feminist critique of The Second Sex. She notes that in it de Beauvoir is heavily indebted to the Sartrean idea that human fulfilment is to be found in the transcendence of creaturely dependance and immanence. The difficulty, as Lloyd sees it, is that in Sartre the female body is portrayed as the epitome of immanence. As Lloyd comments: ‘… the ideal of transcendence is, in a more fundamental way than de Beauvoir allows, a male ideal; that it feeds on the exclusion of the feminine’, (p. 101)
11 Ibid. p. 103.
12 Shere Hite, The Hue Report on Male Sexuality (Macdonald, London, 1981).
13 There is a growing literature onthe subject of gender bias in our models of Rationality. See, for example: Blum, L., ‘Kant's and Hegel's Moral Rationalism: A Feminist Perspective’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, XII, 1982, pp. 287–302CrossRefGoogle ScholarLloyd, G., “The Man of Reason’, Metaphilosophy, 10, 1979, pp. 18–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McMillan, C., Women, Reason and Nature (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982)Google Scholar Thomson, J., ‘Women and the High Priests of Reason’, Radical Philosophy, 34, 1983, pp. 10–14Google Scholar.
14 Philo, Special Laws, 1, sec. xxxdvii, quoted in G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason (1984), p. 27.
15 De Trinitate, XII, vii, 12.
16 De Trinitate, XII, iii, 3; see also, De Genesi contra Manichaeos, xi, 15 and xiv, 21.
17 De Trinitate, XII, iii, 3.
18 Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Methuen, London, 1958), pp. 613–614.
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