LADY PHILOSOPHY/BREAD PHILOSOPHY

The word “lady” conjurs up multiple formulations:  Lady Di;  Lady and the Tramp; First Lady;  Lady Godiva;  Lady luck.

The word is a companionate one. Long ago the partner was “lord.” More recently,  it was “gentleman.” Now, given a growing sense of male/female equity, “man and woman,” “male and female” have replaced the older “gentleman” and his “lady.”

Not only is the word fading from ordinary usage, but an older meaning has been lost.  I said above that “lady” is a “companionate” term and, as it turns out, “companion” and “lady” share a focus. Both proclaim associations with bread.   A “companion” is someone with whom

bread, pan, is shared.  A “lady,” etymologically,  is one who kneads bread.  Such an association may seem surprising given how “lady” of the lord/lady pair is associated with nobility.  Nobles were those who did not work with their hands. But we’re talking ordinary life and ordinary language here.  In those contexts there is a connection between being female and providing food.

Pregnant women are food for the fetus. Nursing mothers provide the newborn’s

most natural and healthy nutrients.

Traditionally, cooking in the household has also been carried out by women.

Gestating, birth-giving, food-providing. It would be hard to imagine more important activities.  Not one of us would be around or would have stuck around for a long time without them.

Yet, natality and nutrition--where are they in the philosophical corpus?  Mostly absent. Plato had used female imagery, saying that Socrates was like a “midwife” (The Theatetus).  Plato also argued for

female equality in his Republic. Otherwise the record is dismal.

The prize for the most egregious formulations of how women are just naturally defective goes to Arthur Schopenhauer’s  “On Women.” Males, Schopenhauer assumed, represent full humanity. Women, being

different from males, can never quite make it to full humanity. They are “big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is man in the strict sense of the word.”  (“On Women.”)

When such a stand is taken for granted, activities associated with “ladies,” activities such as cooking and child-bearing, get

automatically devalued.  20th and 21st century philosophies, marked by greater female participation, offer fruitful alternatives. One example: a  contemporary philosopher like Corine Pelluchon redresses the balance by making philosophical room for natality and nutrition.

The inclusion of natality and nutrition does not just add new topics to an unchanging framework.  It occasions major shifts in emphasis. Much of Modern (1500-1900) philosophy was dominated by what Susan Bordo called the “father of oneself fantasy.”  This was part and parcel of a great anti-dependence fetish. Autonomy, the ideal of non-dependence, was the order of the day.  It was all part of a “fantasy.” A double eradication of dependence had to take place: erasure of having been born (natality) and of needing food for survival (nutrition).  Once natality and nutrition are removed, we can readily envision ourselves as dependence-free agents. We can then pretend that we are most fully human when we distance ourselves from food and children. After all, they serve as reminders of, not just dependence, but also the responsibilities that accompany interdependence.

The autonomous agent was well articulated by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for whom, the highest form of ethical deliberation involved  abstract reasoning and impersonal moral imperatives. Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987) provided a psychologist’s support with his “stages of

moral development.” The highest stage emphasized autonomy and abstract reasoning. It ranked above the “conventional” stage during which custom, tradition, concern with the perspectives of others, (all dependence-linked) would be front and center.

All well and good, if we fall for the “father of oneself fantasy” and we prize non-dependence as a high achievement in human life.  All well and good also if we take exaggerated male attitudes, shaped by Modernity’s fixation on autonomy, as the determining attitude for human beings in general. Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg took this general tack: when dealing with human beings, deal with

human beings. Do not assume that a pattern based on studies of males should be identified as the single model representing optimal human behavior.

A revised, more concrete, less fanciful, approach might, while (1) recalling the etymological meaning of “lady,” and (2) taking a hint from anthropology, describe humans as the “cooking animals.”  In that context, dependence gets along quite well with intelligence and reasonableness. The latter find their proper place among the various dispositions and capacities which form part of our being. A few things do disappear.  They are fantasies, well-relegated to the disposal bin: (a) the “father of oneself fantasy;” (b) the related illusion that non-dependence should be a guiding ideal.