B: We are not, Nietzsche says, thinking frogs, and I am inclined to agree. We are not some instrument that just records, coolly, objectively. Our thoughts are born from pain, which we as mothers must administer to – nurse them through illness and lavish whatever good thing we can on them. Though of the female gender that again we are not.
A: Why ever not?
B: Woman don't think they waffle. You cannot hold a serious conversation with them. Their brain darts in all different directions.
A: And you can with a man, hold a serious conversation?
B: Certainly. You are with me now.
A: And I a woman!
B: Yes, but I don't think of you as one. I forget you are one.
A: Oh I see...I suppose from you that's a compliment.
B: If you think so...Anyhow, as I was saying what we are not is some puffed-up frog grabbing all the attention – though some philosophers are I daresay exactly this - who with one prick will deflate.
A: I follow, though I'm not sure I agree. (I think one such frog might be sitting in front of me now puffing himself up.)
B: Sorry, did you say something? I was philosophising.
A: Yes. I said could you explain more about this woman business. Why can't a philosopher be a woman, a woman a philosopher?
B: If I must, though I must say you seem quite hung up on this. To Boethius – have you heard of him? - Philosophy was a woman, or at least her appearance was that of the female form when she conversed with him. Well, I say conversed, she sang really, and her maid Music accompanied her. Philosophy as a science, as an art, as one of the Graces even, is represented as feminine, and so it stands to follow that her representatives, or devotees if you prefer, are male. Like Bacchus and his females.
A: But that's the mythology, inspired by ancient civilisations and classical literature; it has nothing to do with philosophy's origins.
B: There is truth in what you say, but it is also an indisputable fact that the greatest most celebrated and still read thinkers have been men. Name me a woman?... You can't can you? Precisely because while they're not unheard of they're not heard of; heard from then airbrushed from history. Women are so very rarely remembered, and those that were said to be philosophers, in my opinion, weren't really that. They are only now considered as such because scholars, historians don't really know in what other camp to place them. They thought, they wrote, they spoke out, therefore they are, for what else can they be, but philosophers. Does that answer your question?
A: It's not really an answer, or a justification, at all, is it? You don't deny they exist, or existed, and yet you deny them a place among the ranks of men.
B: Me? Not me! History. Men have always dominated philosophical discourse. That's just how it was and how some might say it still is. Modern philosophy is, for my taste, too encompassing, which is not to say there is not a place for women, but not all thoughts, all ideas should be termed important thinking that we can learn from. Perhaps you should ask yourself and be asking other women why women don't think more? For how is it my fault that I happen to be male and a philosopher?
A: (Or frog-like.)
Picture credit: Frog, 1931, M C Escher (source: WikiArt)
Written January 2021.
