The Anthropocentric Idealism of Judith Butler

Those who, with Judith Butler, deny a distinction between sex and gender, however they may think of themselves, are either classical philosophical idealists, or they are anthropocentrist human-exceptionalists, and thus heirs to the legacy of the Christian theological model of the human being.

Consider this from a recent online ‘syllabus’: "Butler proves that the distinction between sex and gender does not hold. A sexed body cannot signal itself as different sexually without cultural gender categories, and the idea that sex comes before cultural factors (which are believed to be only overlaid on top of sex), is disproven in this book. Gender is performance, there’s no solid universal gender basis beneath these always creative performances. There is no concrete sexed body without constructed human categories to interpret it."

At least since Fichte dispensed with the Kantian thing-in-itself, we have been aware of the possibility that there is no concrete external world without human categories to interpret it. That is, if we acknowledge that the world beyond our experience is entirely inaccessible to us by definition, then there are good arguments to the effect that we should not believe it exists at all.

But the philosophical possibility of absolute idealism in no way prevents us from continuing on with our research programmes in, say, fluid dynamics or vulcanology. What makes the human body so different?

The concrete sexed human body is, alongside volcanoes, worms, etc., a thing of nature-- unless, that is, you are an idealist and you think there is no such thing as nature at all. But in any case, the sexed human body, the volcano, and the worms, whether ‘constructs’ or natural objects, can only have the same ontological status-- unless, that is, you are a human exceptionalist.

Which brings us to our second point. Let’s take a purportedly natural object that is somewhat closer to a human, in the classical scale of being, than it is to a volcano: the male of some species of anglerfish (e.g., Haplophryne mollis). It is several times smaller and vastly weaker than its female counterpart. In order to mate, the only option it has is to bite into the side of the female’s body, to pass its seminal material into her blood stream, and then slowly to wither away, eventually becoming a tiny appendage of its polyandrous spouse.

Now, is there anything ‘constructed’ about this? Anglerfish sexual dimorphism is extreme, but it is not different in principle from that of mammals. And if we insist that anglerfish reproduction is just a natural fact, while human sex and sex difference is ‘constructed’, then we are more or less explicitly claiming that human beings are not animals alongside others, but that their essence is non-natural in origin. 

This is a fundamentally conservative stance to take, and Butlerites share it with traditional Christian theology, among other currents of thought. Butlerism buys its sex constructionism by means of a deepened commitment to species essentialism-- and at a terrible exchange rate.

I am not saying this view is wrong, or right. I enjoy reading both Thomas Aquinas and Charles Darwin. But to the extent that I take up positive stances on substantive philosophical issues, I do like to be clear on who my associates are.

I know Butler has distanced herself from the more simplistic versions of her own theory, and in one interview I have seen her affirming the truth of Darwinian evolution, and of human kinship with apes. But this only sharpens the question: is sex difference in apes constructed? If it is not in apes, yet is in humans, what happened in the past five million years to make humans such exceptional creatures? No defender of the basic thesis of Gender Trouble has ever coherently addressed these questions. 

I have been going back to this book periodically for twenty years now, to see whether there is something I've missed. The problem seems too glaring to go unadressed. But Butler's critics are for their part generally too scoffing and dismissive to address particular problems of her work at all, while her supporters probably assume that such a big problem must have been taken up somewhere or other.

Butler herself has, since the late 1980s, matured into a towering and authoritative intellectual, but this doesn't mean that all who invoke her are in a position to share that authority, and it remains reasonable to ask them for clarification.

Look at that syllabus again. It says that Butler has proven that the distinction between sex and gender does not hold, while gender, in turn, is constructed. Therefore, sex is constructed. But again, does this include ape sex, anglerfish sex, etc., or only human sex? And if only human sex, does it follow that human beings are not part of the same natural order that includes apes and anglerfish?

None of these questions are meant to suggest that sexual dimorphism in the animal world is simple, obvious, or universal. We know there is tremendous variety out there, and this variety is frequently invoked by neo-Butlerites as biological evidence for the constructedness of human sexual binarism. But invoking this evidence, they only complicate matters. If it is true that a number of species of lizards can switch from sexual reproduction to asexual parthenogenesis in the absence of suitable mates, then there is at least some natural fact about lizards and sex. But the neo-Butlerite claim is that there is no natural fact about humans and sex ('there is no concrete sexed body'). What is the difference between humans and lizards that justifies this distinction?

Orangutans show not so much a high degree of sexual dimorphism within the species, between male and female, as a dimorphism between males: some mature males get 'flanges', that strange condition that makes their faces into enormous discs, while others remain as they all had looked in adolescence, which is also the way female orangutans look across the life-cycle. Look at a flanged male orangutan and tell me there is something performative about that. You'll know I know you know you're bullshitting. The flanges are there. They are there, that is, unless nothing is really there, including also volcanoes, galaxies, &c. 

In the history of hominid evolution, dimorphism is clearly diminishing. Males of the Australopithecus genus were on average around 50% larger than females. In modern Homo sapiens, the disparity is closer to 15%. That is still not insignificant. (It is, for one thing, enough to yield the physical difference that gets translated into social reality as patriarchy.) A moderately well-trained physical anthropologist can look at the pelvis of a human skeleton and tell you instantly whether it belonged to a man or a woman. The pelvis, like the living male orangutan's flanges, is a plain giveaway.

Let us grant that all of the social and symbolic dimensions of womanhood that have been assigned to bearers of the one sort of pelvis throughout history have been completely and utterly arbitrary. It cannot follow from this that the perception of an anatomical difference so deep as to be immediately evident in the skeleton is nothing more than an illusion. 

Perhaps in contemporary reflection on sex and gender there is a dim awareness of the past few million years of evolution, of the progress we have made from 50% to 15%, and a sense that this trend towards non-dimorphism can be hastened by collective political will. Perhaps it can be. Still, flat denial of dimorphism is an expression of how one would like things to be, not a description of how things are. And when dimorphism is finally reduced to 0%, and reproduction is taken care of by technicians in laboratories, and patriarchy is banished to the past, the claim that there is now no sex difference will still be a factual claim about certain entities in nature (entities that have arrived in their present condition by a combination of evolution and technocultural innovation). 

Imagine that our species had developed in such a way that males were not on average 15% larger than females, but, like the Lamprologus callipterus species of fish, 60 times or so larger. Suppose that nonetheless we managed to develop into a technologically complex, liberal-democratic society that put a high premium on individual thriving, on freedom and equality. Suppose that within that society a school of thought and a political movement emerged that held that, even though men are 60 times larger than women, both sexes nonetheless have the same basic neural equipment to thrive, to the extent that their physical dimensions permit, in more or less the same way.

But suppose then another school of thought emerged, which said that this first one did not go far enough, and insisted that men are not actually 60 times larger than women, and that it is only a result of ideological indoctrination that we have believed they are up until now. "But my mate can only fit a single tip of an antenna into our home," some traditionalist woman might protest, "while I can swim around inside freely. He keeps accidentally eating me and having to spit me back out because I’m literally too small for him to detect, while when I’m with him he literally obstructs everything else from my field of vision. I think he's gaining weight-- at this point it takes me more than a day just to circumnavigate him. Surely I’m not imagining that." And then of course she would be mobbed on Twitter for these heresies.

The thought experiment starts to founder when we note that such a species would never have ‘homes’, and almost certainly not monogamous mates either, while our species in turn never would have developed into a complex, liberal-democratic, egalitarian society if males had been, or had remained, 60 times larger than females. Culture, with the innovative technological work-arounds that it has come up with to break the stranglehold of the sexual division of labor, and all the other ways it has been able to some degree to assure that biology, for men and women alike, is not destiny, has been the principal motor of our motion towards non-dimorphism over the past few million years. Behind a veil of ignorance, you could surely know in advance that a species in which the males are 60 times larger than the females is not a species with automated payroll systems, cosmetic surgery, Twitter, or its own version of Judith Butler.

Again, it is likely that some dim awareness that this is the direction culture is pushing quite unsurprisingly leads some to suppose that culture must be pushed in turn, and we must eradicate whatever similarities remain to the L. callipterus. This is an understandable desire, but one also feels the need to warn against undue rashness. Biology may not be exclusive destiny, but it does dictate the terms under which the will is free to do its work. Will is not exclusive destiny either, and you are setting yourself up for ideological extremism, followed by disappointment, if you pretend that it is.

But forget about sex and gender for a second and focus on the more general question: What is a human being?

For Thomas Aquinas, even though we are contingently lodged in a mortal corruptible animal body, our true nature is eternal, and comes from the divine order of things, not the natural one. Later German idealism may be seen in important respects as the project of preserving the non-natural character of human geistlich existence, while removing its theological underpinning. French poststructuralism inherits this project, willy-nilly, as you will surely know if you ever, say, go to a fine restaurant with a high-mandarin Parisian philosophy professor and ask him what he thinks about the moral implications of eating meat. And posturing American radicalism, with its roots in French poststructuralism, inherits these conceits in turn, but with an ever decreasing level of historical self-consciousness, of appreciation of the millennia-old ideas blowing through it like a wind-sock.

Comments

[Paul]

Justin, don't you think you ought to give up philosophy? Idealism is incorrect, and so is Judith Butler, from the sounds of it, so why waste your time? Gender is so obviously a social construct that I don't think argumentation is necessary. The answer, I think, is materialism: you are your body.

Let's be empirical about this. I know one person who started out as a heterosexual female and was poorly adjusted socially, perhaps because of autistic tendencies. After attending Berkeley, which accommodates such ideas, this person decided that he was male. In my view, social awkwardness, along with gender politics and poor judgment led this person to make a gender change. Now we have a person who looks male, but is sexually attracted to males and seems to like sex with them as long as there is no vaginal penetration. This new male is rather timid and likes to knit, while also possessing a Ph.D. in mathematics. My sense is that he became disoriented in high school because he did not fit the extant female model there and was drawn to new gender concepts which did not exist a few years ago. It seems likely to me that this person was bound to be socially awkward under any circumstances, and that those who advocate gender as a personal alternative belong in the same category as religious believers who reject empiricism.

The problem I have with philosophy is that it often relies on archaic concepts, which, historically, are theological in origin, suggesting that man somehow

[Paul]

...transcends nature. We do not.

[Jesse]

"The concrete sexed human body is, alongside volcanoes, worms, etc., a thing of nature-- unless, that is, you are an idealist and you think there is no such thing as nature at all."

One doesn't have to be an idealist to be skeptical that categories like "volcano" are completely objective--the reductionism of modern physics is sufficient to suggest the conclusion that all the natural categories we use in science at scales larger than fundamental particles are somewhat arbitrary matters of human convention. This point was first (as far as I know) made by the atomist Democritus, who said:

"By convention sweet is sweet, by convention bitter is bitter, by convention hot is hot, by convention cold is cold, by convention color is color. But in reality there are atoms and the void. That is, the objects of sense are supposed to be real and it is customary to regard them as such, but in truth they are not."

Think of the recent narrowing of the definition of "planet" which excluded Pluto--I don't think any scientist would say that "planet" is a "natural kind" (a philosophical concept discussed at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/ ), so that we are forced to exclude Pluto because we have recognized the objective reality that it isn't a member of this natural kind. At the same time, scientific categories at the macro level are not chosen completely arbitrarily either, some ways of slicing up clusters of fundamental particles into macroscopic categories like "planets", "volcanos", or "males and females" are bound to be more useful to scientists than others (and that usefulness may in part reflect real statistical clustering in ways that groups of fundamental particles arrange themselves in spacetime--see Eliezer Yudkowsky's post on "the cluster structure of thingspace" at http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/ or Harry Foundalis' paper at http://www.foundalis.com/res/Unification_of_Clustering_Concept_Formation_Categorization_and_Analogy_Making.pdf speculating about how human perceptions of object categories are related to statistical clustering).

Still, even the most natural-seeming categories of "things" in the macro world tend to have fuzzy boundaries, as with the useful definition of "species" in terms of the potential to interbreed and the problem of whether individuals on the two non-interbreeding ends of a ring species should be deemed the same species or not (see http://davehuth.com/blog/?p=694 for details on ring species). Similarly on the subject of biological sex, "male" and "female" can be thought of as useful categories because they reflect the fact that a bunch of bodily traits which we consider sex-linked tend to cluster together statistically, but there will be fuzzy cases here too, like hemaphrodites. And to the extent that there seem to be some statistical differences between male and female brains, it might be the case that trans people have brain configurations that more closely resemble the gender they identify with than the gender they were assigned at birth (for some evidence along these lines see https://www.metabunk.org/ben-shapiro-transgender-is-a-mental-disease.t9089/

The book The Big Picture by physicist Sean Carroll has a good discussion of a notion of "poetic naturalism" that takes fundamental physics to be the most objective description of reality but doesn't dismiss more macro-level descriptions, judging them by how useful they are to people, especially when it comes to making predictions. On p. 142 he talks about sex and gender:

"Poetic naturalism sees things differently. Categories such as 'male' and 'female' are human inventions—stories that we tell because it helps us make sense of our world. The basic stuff of reality is a quantum wave function, or a collection of particles and forces—whatever the fundamental stuff turns out to be. Everything else is an overlay, a vocabulary created by us for particular purposes. Therefore, if a person has two X chormosomes and identifies as male, what of it?

"That doesn't mean we should simply eliminate gender, either. A person who is biologically male but identifies as a woman isn't thinking to themselves, 'Male and female are just arbitrary categories, I can be whatever I want.' They're thinking, 'I'm a woman.' Just because a concept is invented by human beings, it doesn't imply that it's an illusion. Saying, 'I am a woman,' or just knowing it, is absolutely useful and meaningful.

"This can sound reminiscent of the old postmodern slogan that 'reality is socially constructed.' There's a sense in which that's true. What's socially constructed are the ways we talk about the world, and if a particular way of talking involves concepts that are useful and fit the world quite accurately, it's fair to refer to those concepts as 'real.' But we can't forget that there is a single world underlying it all, and there's no sense in which the underlying world is socially constructed. It simply is, and we take on the task of discovering it and inventing vocabularies with which to describe it."

[Richard King]

Justin, this is brilliant!