Our “Salvation”: Women's Intervention in Philosophy

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure man at twice its natural size.

In an interview published in Hypatia, Luce Irigaray insists, perhaps to the outrage of many traditional philosophers, that she too is a philosopher (Hirsh and Olson 97).1 Despite her multiple identities—a feminist, a psychoanalyst, and a linguist—Irigaray defines herself solely as a philosopher. This deliberate move2 works to subvert traditional philosophy, which she argues depends upon the repression of women. In a similar critical vein, Michèle Le Doeuff, another French feminist philosopher, in her famous essay “Women and Philosophy,” poses the following rhetorical question:

But what are they worried about? Where is the threat to philosophy in women being capable of it? It might be suggested that the so-called sovereignty of philosophy is at stake here…. When a respected activity admits women it loses its value. … It may be the great dignity of philosophy that keeps women away from it; conversely for this great dignity to be maintained, women must be kept away. (191)

Only through denying that women are capable of stating or judging the credibility of philosophical statements does philosophy earn its status as the “queen of the sciences,” Le Doeuff suggests here. Exclusions operate to exalt one group to a renowned status, while leaving the masses behind. If just anyone was capable of philosophical insight, then philosophical insights would be mediocre utterances proffered by the hoi polloi. Not everyone is able to discern abstract and universal truths, and so we must leave this to those who can—that is, we must leave this, as Hegel says, to men. “The man's dominion,” writes Hegel,

is scientific universal cognition,… [the] universal, a universal idea, the imagination inspired by reason, the Idea of a universal. These are the man's provinces. There can be exceptions for ind