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Books

How To Think Like A Woman by Regan Penaluna

Hugo Whately argues that analysing the problems of philosophy’s history is doing philosophy.

At the start of her career in philosophy, Regan Penaluna thought that “contemplating eternal truths” was the “closest a human could come to immortality” (How To Think Like A Woman, pp.248-9), by reflecting “human thought at its greatest magnitude… [embodying] a culture’s quest for truth and self-knowledge” (p.xii). Fired up and harbouring idealistic dreams, she starts out wanting to think like her philosophy professors. However, in a lecture, her male professor quotes approvingly, proudly even, Plato’s view of women being unfit to rule. Penaluna is initially silenced. But later she nails down the incoherence of the sexist philosopher: on one hand philosophy done by women is (apparently) inseparable from their femininity; yet at the same time, philosophy done by men is (apparently) entirely separate from their masculinity.

Humiliated by this public sexism, what her younger self needed in that moment was what she has now produced: a conceptual renegotiation of what it means for anyone to think philosophically from the perspective in which they find themselves. Her underlying point is that justice matters in philosophy: “the plight of women in philosophy is part of a much larger story of the suppression of individuals who are not white, male, heterosexual, cis, and able-bodied” (p.xiii). She points out that academic boundary policing can explain how work undertaken from a feminist, queer, disabled, black or other marginalized perspective can be dismissed as ‘unphilosophical’. It seems that the ideally abstract, unbiased truth-seeking of mainstream philosophy automatically fails when it’s undertaken from a non-dominant perspective – that is, from a non-white-male perspective. The logic of such an exclusion is precisely that the white male position is as much a perspective as any other – it just happens to enjoy dominance. (For transparency, I am a white male, and I have been recommending her book to anyone and everyone.) For Penaluna, philosophy is a holistic project, and her experience shines a bright light on the nature of mainstream philosophy. It’s not some kind of identity-free utopia of objective truth-seeking thought-work in which ‘true’ philosophers have no actual body and certainly no domestic responsibilities that might shape their thinking. Instead it’s a boundaried and necessarily partial culture of truth-seeking carried out from the perspective of, mostly, white men.

For Penaluna, the experience of having to think from within the categories of white male philosophy was alienating. She ‘lost herself’, and eventually had to leave philosophy wholesale – physically, professionally, conceptually, and romantically. Her rediscovery of herself was through the lives and works of the four women she researches here – just four of her questing, curious, determined, talented philosophical ancestors, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Catherine Cockburn. They too were conceptually and professionally excluded. They too faced the tragedy of being compelled to think in the face of massive barriers to thought.

However, Penaluna has received some kickback for attempting this reorientation, even from other women. Before I managed to get hold of a copy of the book, I read Becca Rothfeld’s review of it in the New York Times – read it in disbelief, as the Harvard Philosophy PhD candidate ruthlessly policed her discipline on behalf of the status quo. Penaluna is, Rothfeld claims, a scholar who ‘left the field’, nay “ abandoned the field”, and has nevertheless published a “rather uncharitable and distorted” “general lament” “indicting sexism in contemporary academic philosophy.” Penaluna must be onto something, I thought, if she’s provoked a real philosopher to use phrases like ‘mushy and maudlin’ and ‘shallow and cursory’ to show that Penaluna is not a real philosopher, and cannot therefore do philosophy. Even the ‘field’ concept is nauseating: some select few have been chosen for paid employment at universities, and although the rest of us (amongst whom Rothfeld presumably includes Hume, Descartes, and Wollstonecraft) are free to ‘cogitate outside of the academy’, (Rothfeld’s phrase), proper philosophy lies beyond our reach. Really?

When I got hold of the book a couple of months later, I went back to Rothfeld’s review to give a calmer response. It seems to me that there are four charges Rothfeld levels at Penaluna:

1. She lacks an appropriate methodology.

2. She practices essentialism.

3. She lacks objectivity.

4. She propagates identarianism.

If true, then Rothfeld may have a point. But I think these charges can be rebutted, and furthermore, that Penaluna has penned something far more interesting than a ‘lament’. She poses questions that cut to the root of philosophy’s own self-understanding. More on this later.

First, methodology. Rothfeld writes that Penaluna’s book merely “takes philosophy to task”, posing “wispy rhetorical questions along the way”, doing lots of ‘agonizing about philosophy but little philosophy itself”. Moreover, the ‘capsule history’ chapters in which she documents her evidence-base for the workings of patriarchal discrimination stand as ‘short anecdotes’, from which “no broader conclusions are drawn”.

Granted, ‘taking to task’ is not a recognised methodology in philosophy, either on the field or off it. But a fairer characterisation of Penaluna’s method might be that she uses evidence to substantiate her claims. Women, she points out, have been excluded from mainstream philosophy over centuries via strategies as numerous as their victims: clever women with no money; clever women with no confidence; clever women whose ideas were taken without attribution; clever women who wrote letters that were never answered; clever women who tried to start schools and colleges; and clever women who wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and who were simply told, time and again, “No, not you.” Penaluna documents these histories in chapters that stand as litanies of evidence which build and build.

Such biography is not the absence of philosophy; it is rather a mark of its intellectual honesty, since Penaluna’s insight is based on evidence; stacks upon stacks of it, personal, historical, institutional – and all of it offering philosophy the opportunity to be honest about its actual nature and practice. How is it not philosophy to research, document, and analyse the historical conditions that have shaped philosophy over time? Does philosophy have no right to know its own genesis? Or simply no interest in it? ‘Taking to task’ makes it sound like Penaluna is merely complaining. She is not. Rather, her method includes reflexive self-awareness as part of her evidence base, and it drives her insight that the distinction of philosophical practice from patriarchy is unclear; and yet it needs, for the sake of justice, to be made clear.

Rothfeld admits that we learn a great deal about oppression in How To Think Like A Woman; her criticism is that we learn little about the content of anyone’s philosophy. But this seems to miss the point. Investigating oppression seems an appropriate method for generating insight into whether philosophy engenders such oppression – is inherently discriminatory – or whether such injustice comes from outside it.

Second, essentialism. Rothfeld opens her review in a state of irritation that all women are ‘assumed to think alike’ (because the book’s title is How To Think Like A Woman). No. Penaluna is clear from start to finish: the concept of woman is dynamic (p.xv), and not one thing. “I don’t believe there is one way to think like a woman, just as I don’t believe there is a single way to be a woman” she writes (p.249). Her extensive evidence-base also demonstrates a close sensitivity to complexity, multiplicity and diversity.

Third, does Penaluna lack objectivity? Yes, she’s searingly honest about her marriage, her divorce, and the ruin of her personal and professional dreams. Yes, she has empathy with the women who inspire her, move her, and with whom she finds kinship across time. But rather than using Rothfeld’s terms – ‘mushy and maudlin’ or ‘distorted’ – wouldn’t the terms ‘truth’ and ‘historical accuracy’ be more appropriate to evaluating Penaluna’s judgements? And if the logic of the philosopher-in-the-field can’t recognise well-documented injustice, then perhaps the problem lies with the logic, not the topic.

Fourth, identarianism. I had to look it up, for a start. To Rothfeld it means the emphasis on identity over ideas – and it’s apparently ‘so thoroughgoing’ in Penaluna’s work as to render her whole project self-contradictory – the implication being that proper field-based-philosophy is able (being so institutionally and professionally high-minded) to bracket out a thinker’s identity and treat the content of their thought ahistorically, as if without any context.

Let us be mindful of nuances here. It could be argued that, to an extent, at the start of her book Penaluna does collude in the notion that the personal and the biographical have nothing to do with philosophy. But later she faces head-on the issue of the relationship between the life of a person and the content of their thought: “What do we ignore about Aristotle to take him seriously, for his legacy to endure?” she asks. This is a question about the relationship between identity and thought. It’s making the point that, far from being irrelevancies, there is some meaningful extent to which the facts of Aristotle’s social and financial standing, and the relationships he had with those around him (to women, yes, but perhaps especially to the slaves who did the manual labour) actually enabled his thought, coloured it, and carried it. So it is for each of us. And so it is also for Democritus, Aquinas, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and other peddlers of sexist content in their philosophy. Given her work witnessing patterns of sexism across time, it is with artful restraint that Penaluna notes how, historically, “male philosophers wrote extensively about the shortcomings of the female mind” (p.xiv), and that “Philosophers have been some of the most consistent and fruitful contributors to theories of women’s inferiority” (p.xii).

Mary Wollstonecraft, Damaris Masham and Catherine Cockburn, with John Locke in the background. By Gail Campbell 2024

Real Philosophy

So how, exactly, is documenting and challenging the logic of how philosophy sustains itself somehow not philosophy? Indeed, how can we better understand the messy relationship between identity and thought, than to consider the pursuit of thought with determination and curiosity – not sitting alone in a quiet, well-furnished study in a university somewhere, but in the full storm of life, amidst motherhood and marriage, prejudice, homekeeping, despair, love, hope and the work – the compulsion to do philosophy?

The philosophical question Penaluna lays before us, and which Rothfeld seems to ignore, is this: In which do we find more justice and truth – in institutional philosophy, or in ‘identarian’ philosophy? Institutional philosophy makes the claim that, done properly, philosophy is not the work of real philosophers, in the sense that it is abstracted beyond the personal identities of those who practice it, reaching standards of objectivity commensurate with those of science. The sociological fact that it just so happens to be carried out by a cast of mainly white, male, paid academics – who cannot, we should remember, give birth to a child – is therefore not relevant, clearly.

The charge of ‘identarianism’ levelled by Rothfeld at Penaluna can perhaps stick. Indeed, how could it not? Identarian philosophy would have it that thought requires a real thinker, and that the nature of that thinker is the context of the thought. The two interconnect, inseparably. But this implies that there are such things as ‘female thoughts’ or ‘male thoughts’, or ‘white male thoughts’ and ‘black female thoughts’, and so on – and that we transgress those borders only at risk of explicit subjugation, whether through mansplaining or through full-blown racism. Either way, conceptual boundary policing follows: under current institutional philosophy, either the white males are policing everyone else (even as they claim they’re not), or under identarianism, where everyone gets to boundary police each other, on a more level playing field – in which case, at least it has more credible democratic credentials. Perhaps, then, that is the reform package on offer here. Maybe an alternative title to the book could be: How To Think Like A Woman: Or, How To Democratise Philosophy Boundary Policing To Let More People Have Their Say.

I hope I have rebutted Rothfeld’s criticisms. I hope as well that I have not posed too many ‘wispy’ rhetorical questions along the way. My final contention, just to make it obvious, is this: This book would not have been better written by a white male philosophy professor at a high status university.

Tentatively, I would humbly suggest one other revision. The book’s subtitle is: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How To Love The Life Of The Mind. Not four. It should say five.

Hugo Whately is a trustee of Wyedean School and Sixth Form College, and teaches Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Haberdashers’ School in Monmouth.

• How To Think Like A Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How To Love The Life Of The Mind, Regan Penaluna, Grove Press, 2023, hb, 320 pages, $14.99