 What is feminist philosophy? Why has the world of ideas been historically dominated by male thinkers? Is the discrimination faced by female intellectuals in the past still with us in the present? These are the questions I'm trying to answer on the 51st episode of Patterson in Pursuit. Hello everybody and welcome to the 51st episode of Patterson in Pursuit. We're talking today about a topic I know virtually nothing about, but I'm interested in learning. That is feminist philosophy. You might think to yourself, what is feminist philosophy? And don't worry, you're not alone. That is the first question I asked my guest this week, Dr. Michelle Bullos Walker, who teaches at the University of Queensland. So when trying to learn any discipline or any subject or any skill, there is a phenomenon called beginner's mind and it is an ideal state for you to put your mind in. Imagine that you're trying to undertake a project that you know absolutely nothing about and you want to try to learn the very basic concepts, the fundamentals about that particular subject. You would ask really elementary questions and those happen to be the most important questions. Far too many people start talking about advanced subjects before they establish the basics. So that's the mindset I'm trying to approach the topic of feminist philosophy with. I don't really know anything about it and I'm excited that I don't. Dr. Bullos Walker teaches on this subject and she's written a book called Philosophy and the Maternal Body, which I'll have a link to on this week's show notes page, Steve-Patterson.com slash 51. Before we start, I want to give my deepest thanks to all of the Patreon supporters at Patreon.com slash Steve Patterson. We're over 80 now and we're building a little community of rationalists who are seeking the truth, perhaps in a slightly unconventional way. Your guys' support makes this show possible and for most of my life, I have been radically independent in pursuing these things on my own but to have a group of people that are listening and valuing this content and value Patterson in pursuit, it just means the world to me. So do stay engaged with the show. Shoot me an email, leave comments on YouTube. If you want to help out, leave a rating and review on iTunes or you can also become a patron of the show at Patreon.com slash Steve Patterson. Alright, I hope you enjoy my interview, trying to get down to the basics of feminist philosophy. First of all, I want to thank you for sitting down and talking with me today. You're welcome. I've got a bunch of elementary questions for you. In the history of philosophy, it's dominated by male thinkers. Throughout history, virtually all of them are male thinkers and the question arises, why is that the case? And we can theorize about all different potential explanations but it's a really unique fact that in terms of when we look back over history who the thinkers are that everybody looks up to, that everybody gets taught, it's all men practically. So I want to start with two questions. First of all, what does the term feminist philosophy mean? And then the next question would be, what is your explanation and your perspective for that fact of history that it's so biased towards men? Okay, well there's a huge amount in both of those questions. Really a huge amount. Let me start with the first and that is a provisional definition of feminist philosophy. That's really tricky because it's so different depending on who's practicing. But let me give you a provisional or a tentative definition and let's see where we can go from there. And one is that if we look at the terms say feminist, women and philosophy, the feminist bit there is doing the specific work of saying when you are a woman and you're doing philosophy or when you're doing anything in a social context, it always matters that you're a woman. There's something attached to that. Feminism is the term or the approach or the understanding that helps us to make sense of why it matters and how it matters. So feminist philosophy, taking that as a starting point, feminist philosophy would be something along the lines of a kind of methodology or an approach to asking questions about what it means for women to be in this specific case involved in the institutional discourses of philosophy. So let me ask you, right off the get go, a follow up question about that. When you say that it is an essential part of doing philosophy as a woman, is that you are a woman? Now is that because of the social pressures or the social way of thinking about women doing philosophy or are you saying that an inherent part of being a woman is that your take on philosophy is going to be a little bit different or is it both? It possibly hovers between the two but it's not about there is no essential question here for me at least. It is more about the social construction here of it's going to matter socially and culturally, it's going to matter in terms of authority or lack of authority that you're a woman doing this work. And so rather than try and sweep that under the carpet and just go ahead and do philosophy as if one's in a sense literally disembodied the feminist element helps us ask questions about what is going on when it is or why it is an issue that being a woman and doing philosophy is a big deal. It shouldn't be a big deal. So when you say it's a big deal are you saying is this an institutional criticism from about the philosophy profession or are you saying this is a more and even broader critique of society in general? It's both. As you'd imagine it's both because at the institutional level we know statistically that there are definitely fewer of us women doing being paid let's say as professional philosophers but that fits within a social context that assumes that the philosopher is already a male or a male body or a masculine body and is confused when confronted with this notion of a woman occupying this very privileged position. Reason and rationality and philosophy occupy well for most people maybe not too much space at all. But in the kind of cultural imaginary of the West they are very elite and specialized roles or positions and for women to gain access to those spaces has been somewhat of an event. So then does that answer the second part of the question then that when you look at the history of philosophy has it been essentially the same story for thousands of years and that is at least a partial explanation for why there are so few historical female philosophers is because of this kind of cultural atmosphere. Well it's there's two sides to this I guess and one is that in the West we're looking at the work the philosophical work that comes from the pre-Socratics so before Plato's time and from Plato's time on so we're looking roughly around 500 BC on which is a long period of time. Now in that time we don't come up with too many names of women philosophers but we do but there are women philosophers from these times so on the one hand yes it's true that women have been somewhat marginalized often downrightly excluded like the 18th century particularly we talk about a period of time where women are physically barred from the practice of philosophy but throughout that entire history of philosophy women do exist and one of the important things to point to is where they do exist and when they do exist to point out who they are and to learn as much as we can about the work that exists so on the one hand feminist philosophers are involved in recuperative work finding that work that does exist it's not easy to do obviously but championing it once that work is found and discussed and there are some very very high profile and classic cases and names there and the work of those women philosophers who haven't been mainstream but who have existed is just fabulous work so on the one hand I would want to say look women have always done philosophy and we even know that in certain senses from Plato's dialogues there's the really the beautiful dialogue that Plato's constructed the symposium one of the key characters who's admittedly not present in that dialogue but is Socrates speaks on her behalf is Dayotima the wise woman and some of the work that she does in that particular context is the foundation of a very interesting approach to philosophy so those voices exist and we want to claim those voices on the other hand women have been sadly lacking in number and you know effectively we have been marginalised and in many instances excluded and silenced and that's a problem So can you give just a few examples where you said there are some notable figures who have done really interesting work can you let's say from the presocratics can you give a few examples? From the presocratics it's much harder to do much harder to do but if we jump way ahead well what I'm claiming is that we've got figures or characters in some of the platonic works that we can point to Dayotima being one of them although you know her role is very contested in the discussions but if we jump way ahead we've got people like Emily Duchâtelet we've got people like Sophie Vallon we've got people women like Elizabeth of Bohemia who were absolutely crucial correspondents with the well-known philosophers of their time perhaps around the time of the Enlightenment we start to see both the names appearing and also disappearing as well of women philosophers but for example someone like Elizabeth is a really important correspondent with René Descartes now we know Descartes' work really very well on the whole those that have read philosophy tend to know Descartes' work few people know Elizabeth's work and yet it's Elizabeth's letters and continual enquiring and pushing of Descartes that moves him further in his own work but in her letters to him there is a really rich and elaborated philosophical position there and so it's often what we'll find is that the philosophical work of women exists in places like correspondence or letters because that was their only avenue that was how they were not published but gained some kind of context for philosophical dialogue Now with that correspondence with Descartes you know what the topic was was it some of his mathematical work some of his strict philosophical work and so her letters in response really respond very strongly to the meditations and the meditations are many of us they're the crucial and central works for Descartes So Descartes setting up a kind of skeptical position about what's possible for him to know and not know and it's Elizabeth who in a sense really refines and pushes and prompts through her responses to him about his work I like that too so often on the podcast I'll bring up my wife Julia and she by far has heard she has been a consistent correspondent first line correspondent constantly for the work that I'm doing and trying to create theories about philosophy and so she definitely would qualify as a philosopher in her own right and what's funny is I remember for years there's this particular idea in metaphysics about the nature of objects do ordinary objects exist or is it just constructed by their constituent particles and be labeled as objects I remember I had this I came to the conclusion totally changed my previous position that ordinary objects as we think of them don't really exist they're just a base level constituent parts and then we label them as particular objects and I told her that and she was like yeah of course is this news and I thought what is this amazing she was like no I thought everybody thought that way so she's got in her mind the way that she thinks about things I bump into that occasionally where it's like she's already sorted out these things well ahead of time and I feel kind of silly because it's like I think something is this profound conclusion there's a lot to say about that and one obvious thing is the supportive role that women often play in relation to the men in their lives but in this tense sense I think both of us are talking more about a provocative role a role that pushes and questions but nonetheless it's quite often historically been the case that the men have gained all the notoriety for what's come out of that but again it goes back particularly to that Plato's dialogue that I mentioned before to the symposium because in the symposium what Socrates does what Plato has Socrates do is that to put it in context Socrates stands up all of the others at the symposium the drinking party that they're attending have given speeches in praise of love Socrates gets up finally to give not a speech in praise of love but to tell the truth about love being the good philosopher that he is and he interestingly he does so by saying well everything I'm about to tell you I've learned from the wise woman Diorama and then basically proceeds to give this account so interestingly at the beginning, at the birth of a certain moment of western philosophy it's we have Plato Socrates providing us with the words a woman of wisdom that found this notion of philosophy and the philosopher's journey and the importance of passionate love and erotic love in that journey and when I think about that trying to come up with a theory and applying it to history is sometimes dubious when I think about like my relationship with my wife there's even the popular saying behind every great man is a great woman Do you think this is a partial explanation maybe for why the men get the credit is because often there is that more supportive role that the women play and then the men, I don't want to say they take credit for it as if it's like it's a nefarious thing but it's something like they, they're that out's like the marketing piece for the idea. Some of the beliefs I have about the importance of love I only came to these conclusions precisely because of engagements that I've had with her and she's taught me a great deal but do you think that's a dubious way to think maybe this is what has happened throughout history It's complex. You've actually I think asked a lot of things there and raised a lot of things it's complex. What I think is that the idea of a man and a woman, two people being able to explore and express and motivate each other to think more carefully about issues whether they be love or reason or rationality or whatever that this is a marvellous thing I think this is a fabulous thing but that's occurred historically within the context of let us just loosely refer to it as a patriarchal social context now that's changed from time to time and that's changed from place to place patriarchy doesn't exist in the same form under all circumstances but what I mean by that is that structurally what happens is that what might even occur within the context of a really supportive relationship between two people then is contextualized within a social context that says the man is usually paid for that work and gets the social recognition in the public sphere and the woman's contribution to that becomes the silent foundation of the identity that that man then builds and develops through his public career so that makes sense so a couple of questions why do you think that's the case that there is this the male I think that's a good way of putting it for it or as seen as part of his career and then the woman most frequently not as much why is that the case if that's kind of a social thing so that's the first question go ahead can we go straight to that then well very simply at one level it's because structurally at various times women are literally excluded from the public domain so they cannot or have not obtained work, paid work in this case as philosophers so economically ideologically culturally there are ways of excluding women from the public domain so in one sense one of the important things that we need to talk about is the fact that you've got these various oppositions in western culture not only in western culture but specifically for us and they vary over time and place too but let's say we've got man and woman we've got men and women we've got masculinity and femininity but we've also got the public and the private and the public domain historically this is what patriarchy how we can define patriarchy in one sense if you like the public domain is the domain that men have a privileged access to men go back and gain sustenance and support in the private domain in and through the family in and through the wife partner in and through the mother importantly but they then once sustained and nourished they go back out into the public domain to be social subjects or citizens or whatever they become and historically women have had limited access to that public domain so it's not surprising that women have had limited access to careers in philosophy or to identities as philosophers that's exactly the second question that I wanted to ask you about the patriarchy when we apply that lens historically I think that's pretty clear especially if you read some of the writing of various philosophers on their thoughts about women it's pretty explicitly that they're not fit for this particular domain so do you think that that is still the standard western culture today because when I would have these conversations with people and when I interact with the world at least I mean I've only been around for a couple of decades but it doesn't seem like it has that same explicit exclusion from the workplace so that's the first question do you think that that type of deliberate exclusion from the workplace is still going on today and if not where did things start changing? Okay well there's ways of thinking about this and one is that you have periods where women are literally excluded from the public domain or the workplace or the institutional practice of philosophy and that's obviously problematic but there are we can say now that that in certain western countries in certain parts of the western world women now have that access that access though is still mediated because that access depends on available finances and we know that women are financially less well off than men we know statistically that's the case so there are still prohibitions or mediations that make it difficult for women to access say the institutional study but even when women do access the institutional study or even a career in philosophy there are still dangers and pitfalls and some of those go along the lines of what kind of philosophy do you do once you're there so it's not just enough to study philosophy or to become a philosopher but do you then get a chance to in a sense think independently write independently or do you which historically has also been the case for some women who've gained that privilege access they've become faithful faithful kind of disciples of male philosophers and have worked often these philosophers are long dead but they've often become faithful commentators on the work of these philosophers in an attempt to make sure that the work of that particular philosopher lives on while not in a sense promoting their own work or their own independent thought that's what I'm not saying that happens all the time it doesn't not by any means but historically as women have made partial gains into the public domain it hasn't always been the case that just accessing the public domain has been enough for women to actually become philosophers in their own right so how would you respond to somebody that says the key part is that women have the access kind of structurally and culturally that people aren't explicitly saying you know in this career as a woman that is important and let's say that that's been achieved in the west that there's not a gender requirement for being a philosopher how would you respond to somebody saying the discrepancy that we see in the different areas of research from biology to philosophy to social sciences and economics those gender differences are based on the choices of women so if somebody said women in general aren't usually as interested in original contributions to philosophy as men how would you respond to that obviously I'd disagree but I'd look again to the structural the structural conditions that support or don't support women in educational possibilities and I'd say I don't think it's ever the case that women are not interested in those things but I would say that again structurally young girls and young women are often dissuaded in a range of complex ways from having an interest in those things and I think that's a different thing Can you give some examples of that where they would start Well that's complex Steven I think again that comes back to really basic ideas or the really basic oppositions that still throb in the heart in cultural imaginary and that is something along the lines of we still have this division this oppositional division between reason or rationality on the one hand and irrationality we still have this division between reason and emotion we still think primarily in terms of body or mind and body and the problem is that particularly with that dichotomy reason and irrationality it is still has historically been and is still in the contemporary day used to ground the difference between men and women and masculinity and femininity in really often subtle ways sometimes not so subtle too but whether from advertising to you know to scientific discourses and the presumptions that go behind certain scientific methodologies or philosophical methodologies we still can find plenty of evidence of this separation of reason and irrationality alighting with masculinity and femininity so in something like you said there are the presuppositions in our approaches to scientific inquiry my intuition is to think of course I'm open to being wrong here my intuition is to think that some division between rational and irrational not on gender lines but some division between those spheres is correct that there is something like rational thinking about something and there is irrational thinking about something are you saying that that division itself is a mistaken division or are you saying that when it's tied to gender that's when that's a mistake I think it's a difficult thing I think that we all intuitively feel comfortable the sense that there are reasonable statements and there are rational statements or there are reasonable worlds and irrational worlds particularly in the modern time but it is that overlay it's the series of very complex interconnections between reason and rationality and masculinity and scientific notions of proof and evidence and whatever it's the interconnections that separate femininity and the feminine and woman and passionate spheres from those realms that to me is the most obvious problem so are you saying that the way that kind of the standard approach to science the reason evidence logic data gathering very linear approach are you saying that that is itself something which is masculine or are you saying that that is socially considered as being the masculine approach to how we definitely the latter I don't see it as masculine and I certainly don't see it as male but I do see it as a tradition that many men have been engaged in and I like to think of these things more in terms of a kind of cultural imaginary that we have this this kind of set of beliefs about reality which we don't question very readily about how we divide the world how we understand the world and our beliefs about masculinity and femininity are structured by this imaginary not by reality but by this imaginary so this is operating at a not yet conscious level really and and that's important that that then just does so much work in determining or structuring the possibilities of little boys and little girls and various groups you know from an early stage on so if I were to try to rephrase that correct me if I'm wrong is your claim that even the way that most people conceive of the nature of the world of reality is already structured in maybe an incorrect fashion that even the way that we approach thinking about the world already contains some kind of a an elimination of possibilities what I'd say is that it's mediated and that for us reality is connected with a set of fantasies as well and I don't mean that that's absolutely terrible and possible that's just the way I think things operate we have a kind of fantastic view of reality in a sense and in that we separate these notions of masculinity and femininity out all too strongly and that's because the overlying structure or let's call it really the underlying structure is still a patriarchal one if our society were not patriarchal the imaginary wouldn't separate masculinity out into the superior categories of rationality and femininity out into the inferior categories of irrationality but just to go back a step to you mentioned before or you asked whether or not I saw that as a fair distinction whether or not rationality and irrationality I guess intuitively you know I do but at the same time I acknowledge along with a lot of other philosophers that rationality and irrationality are not it's not a fixed relation and it's not a fixed opposition it's absolutely historically constructed it changes it varies it modifies and that that's important we have in the west we have dominant ways of thinking about those terms rationality and irrationality but the claims of rationality largely produce the question of what is irrational so irrationality doesn't exist in its own right it is the kind of it's produced through the imaginary of rationality if you like if that makes sense so yes so you're kind of saying once you accept a certain framework then we get to the category of what is considered irrational when you're in that framework you use the term the fantastical and imaginary for talking about descriptions of reality can you unpack that a little bit more for me so are you saying that we really don't have any kind of reasonable connection or reliable connection to the nature of the world and we're and we're kind of making things up because when I think of those words that's just what comes to mind it's fantastic it's just like storytelling that may or may not correspond to anything it's not as extreme as it seems I don't think that we are out of touch with reality I just think realistically that reality is produced in the sense that we overlay from the experiences and the events of our lives we overlay a whole realm of cultural knowledge or cultural history or what I was referring to before as the imaginary and that we filter our reality through those beliefs and values that we have inherited largely so no I'm not trying to pretend that reality is that we are totally out of touch with reality intuitively we have a sense of what's happening around us but our relation with everything that happens around us is also mediated at a somewhat not quite conscious level by unacknowledged assumptions, beliefs and prejudices a lot of what we've been talking about comes back to the question of philosophy not just as an institution although that's really important but philosophy as a discipline and a lot of what we've been talking about is kind of maybe it's a little clearer when we think about what it is that philosophy as a discipline is or what it does. Disciplines on the whole are mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion so philosophy sets itself up in the west as a discipline at specific times and places and in doing that it excludes whole worlds outside of itself and says that's not philosophy and to a large extent philosophy starts by its definition or its disciplinary nature is to say philosophy is not what's irrational or philosophy is not what's feminine or philosophy is not what's literary or any number of other things and so its definition often starts in a negative sense and then reason, rationality careful consideration ideas like this are often then seen as counters to what's irrational so one of the things that I'm trying to suggest here is that masculinity and femininity get mapped on to that complex process and that in philosophy the whole notion of discipline is to include and exclude and in that sense masculinity and femininity get caught up in that inclusion and exclusion and on the whole in the west masculinity gets included inside all of the positive terms and values whether they be reason or rationality or whatever they are and femininity gets constructed outside of that disciplinary boundary so on one level we can just simply say that masculinity is a kind of inside to philosophy and femininity is a kind of outside so of course that explains historically why women have been excluded from philosophy on the whole but the situation is so much more complex because by setting up an excluded zone outside of the discipline of philosophy philosophy actually has brought the feminine into its core because it needs the notion of the feminine to define itself against so it's central to philosophy even though it's kind of silenced in that center so the normal spatial logics that we'd think about in terms of inside and out women men inside women out masculine inside masculine out feminine out these don't operate really so in that direction they are so much more complex and philosophy has is inhabited by what it's trying to expel so if we set up those parameters and we say masculine on the inside by definition we're going to say that means the other stuff on the outside which would be caught up and that would be femininity natures out there too we should never forget nature and a whole host of other things so can you give me some specifics for claims that are so if I were to say something like philosophy can be understood as pursuing the true nature of the way things are in the world that's the kind of really abstract way of thinking about it can you give me an example of where that would exclude the feminine part of that the femininity in that conception your description is philosophy is the philosophy is the pursuit of truth and or trying to explain the all the phenomena that we experience in some kind of coherent way well at a basic level I mean some of the feminist epistemologists would respond to that by saying whose truth and whose particular journey you know which journey is this that we're specifically talking about how do we proceed what are our methodologies and whose limiting the question of truth here so maybe to put it more simply Steve is to say at any given time who the philosopher that is undertaking that particular pursuit the daily, the real bodily experiences and context of that philosophy matter the fact of who that philosophy is what that philosophy is in that philosophy is that matters and so the question of truth then is contextualized a little more than then eternalized so are you saying that it is a mistaken way to conceive of philosophy as thinking you can separate the ideas from the person pursuing the ideas that you have all this other context the individual truth seekers background or education their socioeconomic status there's this very rich history that really can't be separated from the ideas of that particular thinker I'm not sure I'd say mistaken but I would certainly say that the embedded and embodied nature of the philosopher is a question and an important one and probably that's one of one can't generalize about feminist philosophy because there are so many approaches to feminist philosophy but maybe that is one thing that we can say is that the question of embodiment has become a really important part for many feminist philosophers the question of the actual materiality of our ways of knowing so yeah that's important so when you ask the question whose truth that comes that question is also a statement about the nature of truth what we mean by the term truth when you ask the question or when a feminist epistemologist would ask that question is the claim that the nature of truth is itself kind of unique to the individual pursuing it or is the claim that there is no such thing as this this objective truth out there that everybody has access to is that itself a kind of claim about the nature of truth there are so many different perspectives on this honestly and it's not for me to actually answer that question but what I would do is to say go and look at the myriad different approaches to feminist epistemology that have emerged in the last couple of decades it's amazing what's out there and each of those approaches will give you a slightly different response I mean it's not dissimilar to the fact that epistemology generally will give you those kinds of incredibly varied responses feminist epistemology is similar in that sense that there's there's such an array of different possible responses there so one question that we didn't talk a lot about and I really want to know I want to go into more detail with you is if somebody were to say that distinctions we see in the pursuit of different fields not just in terms of academic pursuits but also career pursuits we see a very large amount percentage wise of startup founders or men let's say in my observations of the world I do see differences on average there are certainly exceptions between the behavior of your stereotypical man the behavior of your stereotypical woman where I would say it seems like the individual choices on net that are being made by women seem to be less risky isn't the right word risky in an economic sense so that to be the founder of a startup seems to be itself a more masculine decision or something like that so do you think that those kind of traits that we see really are purely as a function of social constructions and kind of cultural conditioning or do you think that there is a genuine difference between the choices that women make on their own free will or the and the choices that men make well again you've asked a lot of questions all together it's complex but one would answer please number one I guess I've got I've got to think about the word choices there because for me choices I mean we can get caught in a very liberal individualist kind of way of thinking there and I want to resist that in some senses that choices don't occur in any free context choices occur within a context that already I've been referring to here as as patriarchal in that sense so if we talk about if we try and put these two things side by side men's choices and women's choices already we have this intuition that the way men choose and the way women choose is maybe not equal and that goes into a whole range of different experiences and educational possibilities and limitations that may or may not have occurred within those contexts so it does come back to the sense that if you've got a culture that is reinforcing in subtle and not so subtle ways time and time again that men are active and defiant and risk taking and women are risk averse and more passive and more relational then it won't be very surprising to find that that may or may not be the case if we go and do some empirical evidence out in the world of start-ups but to me that doesn't confirm a difference between masculinity and femininity it suggests more that masculinity and femininity are still linked to these defining kind of oppositional terms or couples in the western imaginary male female rationality irrationality active passive in this account I mean that's a really important one activity and passivity is prime a way of thinking through how we can understand the difference between man and woman or masculinity and femininity So in a hypothetical scenario if you were to interview let's say 50 different women and most of them say I'm not really interested in doing a start-up they might report they might say it's my own free decision to make but would you say they're even in the way that they're conceiving of their choices it's already going to be it's already going to be kind of framed for them to some extent yes but I think that's absolutely true for young men as well because you know young men will see themselves as more actively pursuing more risk-taking more challenging projects so it's something that occurs on both levels I think So in a society where you didn't have that let's just idealize a society do you think that we would see an equal distribution of career choices and life choices between the sexes Well part of what feminism is is to think utopian in an utopian manner and yes we can all think toward a notion where yes all of those things would be possible but then we're talking about a society that would uncouple those conceptual connections so you would uncouple masculinity from rationality from activity from risk risk-taking and you would uncouple femininity from passivity from irrationality or whatever of oppositions you want to talk about that's no easy task obviously but it's an important task and that's partially the work of feminism and that's why and this is often I think a really misunderstood aspect of feminist work whether it be in philosophy or elsewhere my understanding of feminism my personal understanding of feminism is that it's a political intervention into the possibilities of the lives of both women and men into the lives of girls and boys because if we free the possibility of if we free and open possibilities for girls and for women I think we do that equally for boys and men as well so there are I mean we can talk about all of the advantages that accrue for men by being associated with masculinity and rationality but there are disadvantages as well and feminism is about saying let us in this sense actually try and think reasonably about humanity as options that are open so maybe a better way for me to ask this the starting point is biological differences so we would agree that there are biological differences that's complex there are obviously differences but biology never occurs outside of culture so the way that we determine what those biological differences are that way is always going to be mediated again by the social context so yes of course there are bodily differences but what those bodily differences are can be absolutely discussed okay so let's say there are bodily differences and let's not quite get to the cultural implications of where those bodily differences manifest and how we describe them but there are bodily differences do you think that also applies to the mind and the way that those bodily differences give rise to different physical traits that we have do you think it will also give rise just naturally starting with the bodily differences to different ways of thinking it's a loaded question let me backtrack let me backtrack and say that there are bodily differences but biology and body and difference take on different values valued differently in different contexts and so the values of those differences are not stable and not fixed so the way that we absolutely appreciate and understand those differences is complex it's really complex and we really don't give enough credit to how complex that is I actually do think there are differences of course between bodies and those are now complex differences because the question of masculine feminine or male female is not the only range that we have to consider but I do think there are differences and I do think those differences give rise to different experiences with some obvious examples on both sides but the way that we come to understand or appreciate what means is complex and it's still occurring within a context that values masculinity and devalues femininity so if we were to take the line of reasoning that said there are bodily differences that are manifested as somebody gets older and we have what we call men and what we call women in a biological sense you're going to see in general have careers doing manual labor for bodily differences you're going to see more lumberjacks that have those bodily differences that to me would largely explain some career choices the literal the big beefy guy is going to have a more successful career doing big beefy things and somebody skinny and wimpy like me this is going to be not going to have a successful career doing difficult things so that I could see the career discrepancy there but our if we follow that line of reasoning would be say well some of those bodily differences are also mind differences and would naturally result in differences of choices so like with women for example there's a dominance of women in like caretaking industries is that because this is something that is that women are more disposed to do for those bodily differences or is it that those are those emerge from our kind of cultural categorizations of how those people with the bodily differences should act so if somebody were to take the position that in an ideal society where you still have bodily differences you would have a substantive striation of people with these bodily differences these career choices these people with other bodily differences have those other career choices how would you respond to that if I said even in an ideal world we'd see something like that there's always going to be difference and division of labor of course but I guess I don't agree with your line of thinking so much what I would say and certainly if we go back to your example of the the worker in childcare or was that the example that you gave? Yes, so there was two the one was the lumberjack versus me would be a terrible lumberjack and then the childcare which seems to be a more what we consider to be the feminine caring okay what I think about childcare is that it's well I'm going to approach this from a really different way I want to say first that I think childcare is one of the most important things that we could or should be doing in our society it's the basis of so much but because it has been historically associated with women and women's work and defined as women's work it has no cultural value or it has very little cultural value unfortunately it's very poorly paid at least in this country it's very extremely poorly paid poorly remunerated and that goes along with its low status all of this isn't because of the work that's done it's very hard it's very demanding and it's very important work but it goes along with the fact that by being considered the epitome of women's work it's not really seen as work at all and that makes it possible for us to refuse to remunerate that work at a level that it should be remunerated at and the fact that it's seen as non-professional work and that it has very low cultural status these things are all important so it's that to me that makes more sense of what's going on men are not going to be attracted to work of that status I don't know the situation of lumberjacks it's really outside of my field of expertise but I imagine that one of the things that may occur in the case of lumberjack is that in exchange for extremely physical and possibly dangerous work that there would be fairly good compensation that's a realm that's so often not open to women interesting so when you are viewing compensation for work you're viewing it as this relationship with how a culture values that work being done so if there's a low child care work that's very low played you say that is directly correlated to how a culture values that work see my intuition is to view it more just in terms of economics or supply and demand or something like that I would say well there's a huge amount of labor that's available for child care and so naturally we would have relatively low wages in that area just because there's so much supply that's available and versus something like being a lumberjack there's a lot fewer people that want to be lumberjacks and so we would have the amount of compensation go up how would you respond to something like that well I'd have to resist from saying something like that it's delightfully naive because I guess from my own perspective I just think there's so much more over determining those what counts as work in the first place and I think one of the problems with the question or the example of child care is that it is not actually seen as work at all and thus and yet it has to occur and so how do we deal with it we deal with it by totally undervaluing it devaluing it and underpaying it so when you I had so funny I'm very biased in this I can see even in the way that I'm approaching these questions but when you say that it's not seen as work why do you say that if it's the case that people are getting some kind of compensation why would we say well it's not seen as work I think it comes back to what I was saying before or suggesting before about the division again in western societies it operates differently everywhere between the public and the private I think child care is this confusing state that is actually now occurring the public domain but it's seen in terms of it's you know being the relic of the private domain women are working now and thus child care paid child care is needed and yet it's a confusion of public and private this is really a problem for the kind of the dominant imaginary or the we might even think of it as the capitalist imaginary here now I think capitalism has no problems with it it can just extract surplus labor and it's done with it I don't think that's a problem but in the masculine or the patriarchal way that our society orients itself this is work that really still should be happening unpaid and unseen in the private sphere and so it is not valued and it is not well paid it confounds having child care in the public domain confounds the purity of the public sphere and the private sphere and we're not supposed to confound those two things so surely this is not the only circumstance you would say there are other areas in which there is this of two minds you have the public sphere and the private sphere can you give some other examples of where the very obvious case is elderly care exactly the same mentality operating the sense that this is traditionally women's unpaid work and it should be occurring in the private domain what on earth is it doing in the public domain ok we have to do it then let's devalue it and let's underpay it do you think that that is kind of a conscious thing do you think people are conscious are you thinking about or this is just all kind of behind the scenes of subconscious no no I don't think it's conscious and I don't think it's subconscious I think it's not yet conscious or not quite conscious these are what I'm trying to suggest is that philosophy operates here in a more important way than we give it credit for these conceptual divisions between the public and the private these matter and yet they're not things that we tend to talk about in a conscious way at work over the photocopier we don't tend to think of well how's your public and private going today Steve are you managing to mingle or not but I think so in the west we make these divisions we have these conceptual oppositions that are hierarchically organized we have the public up here and the private here and the public is the the main of masculinity traditionally and the private is the main of femininity traditionally and so these impact in really significant ways in situations like work in situations in many other situations in educational situations as well too if you think about education there's another similarity there the younger the educator the level of education to the higher the salary and the status goes up so you start at kindergarten what we would call kindergarten or prep here with low status and low salary and by university if you're teaching and educating at that level you have more status and more salary not terrific but you know but more and again I think that's this sense that as the child gets older the child moves from the private to the public domain and so that process of education becomes more validated so when you think of that kind of compensation for work you're putting it in the context of how society in general values it it's not as much supply and demand it's not you know it requires more training or anything like that this is this kind of like a manifestation almost of the cultural values yeah I certainly would see it in those terms supply and demand will come into it but they will operate in complex ways on top of this division between public and private so last question this has been an excellent conversation can you unpack the metaphysics of that of that claim that there are it's not a subconscious belief it's not a conscious belief it's a not yet conscious belief if we're gonna say try to say precisely what is it or where is it yeah what is it so when we say that society is kind of manifestation of some of these cultural values prior to their manifestation and where are they located in like this public conscious how does that work okay complex complex let me try and respond to that at one level it comes back to what I've referred to before is a cultural imaginary which sometimes manifests as a masculine imaginary so it's this this very amorphous set of beliefs and values that exist at the not yet conscious level but that are shared by in a dominant social form or a dominant cultural form so maybe that's one way of thinking about it but the other way of thinking about it comes right back to the fundamental metaphysical distinction between mind and body and we tend to think of understanding and ideas and beliefs and whatever occurring at the purely conscious level of mind what I would take from the phenomenological traditions is something more along the line of an embodied consciousness so that's a complex way of saying or responding to your question where does all of this kind of exist where does it lie I think when things are not yet conscious that's when we know that what we're dealing with is an embodied consciousness so it's not that our mind has all of the conscious contents and that our bodies know nothing of that if we follow a philosopher like someone like say Maurice Muller-Ponty his notion of embodied consciousness makes sense because it's consciousness that in fact we the body subject carries with it or develops or has and that that can become conscious, that knowledge or that belief or that idea can become conscious but it also remains at a level not yet conscious and it's impacting on us without us consciously being aware of it Is that are those not yet conscious beliefs are those in every individual's mind and they're not yet conscious of it or is there some kind of a broader or like a Jungian like meta-conscious I'm just trying to think you're starting to sound like Jung I'm trying to think of if it's the case that there are these what you could call beliefs or values that we're not aware of we're not yet aware of does that mean that there's some kind of an imprint of them in every individual's mind that they could become aware of them or is it that it's bigger than that Again, complex question maybe the only way I can respond to that is to say these things that are not yet conscious I actually see philosophy's role as being precisely to actually plummet these things or to try and to access these things the role of critical thought is to take the not yet conscious and as much as possible make it conscious so we might even talk about that as unexamined assumptions or whatever but something along those lines now feminism here sits beautifully within the context of philosophy for me because it's doing the same thing it's doing the work of taking taking that not yet conscious and trying to make it conscious so in this context what feminism is doing is taking the not yet conscious of the masculine imaginary and of patriarchy and trying to bring it to consciousness in a way that will benefit men and women alike Prior to it's reaching that level of consciousness where is it? It is embodied It is embodied in each individual? Well I guess it's embodied in each individual in so far as we are part of larger social and cultural collectives that share these imaginaries or they share this imaginary So would you say then that the kind of the metaphysical analysis of it is that there is some kind of a larger collective mind maybe that's lack of a better term or unconscious belief system that actually has some kind of existence to it that each individual is illuminating or is it that it's in everybody's individual mind? I wouldn't call it mind at all I would simply call it to use a 60's term ideology Yes we share there's a shared ideology or better still set of ideologies that interact in complex ways and yes we partake of those ideologies I mean the French philosopher Louis Altezer had a good way of making the kind of distinction between the ideological state apparatus and the repressive state apparatus that each culture has its repressive obvious ways of making us toe the line but it has its more subtle ideological ways of helping us toe the line by internalizing the values of that dominant ideology or culture That's an excellent note to end on I appreciate this conversation it's been great All right that was my interview with Dr. Michelle Willos Walker I hope you enjoyed it and found it insightful I certainly did Lots more to say on this particular topic it's obviously a huge area we just scratched the surface so the journey continues for me and my wife two days from now we are leaving and we are heading on a plane to Japan so you can expect a few more interviews that I recorded here in Australia I'm going to talk about Shintoism Buddhism, hopefully Islam Consciousness and Eastern Philosophy So we'll see you then Have a great week