Abstract
This paper is concerned with the nature of feminine bodily comportment described by Iris Marion Young in ‘Throwing Like a Girl.’ According to Young, the style of movement of women, who undergo patriarchal oppression, reveals their existential status as a socio-historically oppressed group. Her claim is that patriarchal oppression acts upon women’s bodily functions, thus causing feminine motility to exhibit an inhibited intentionality, an ambiguous transcendence and a discontinuous unity. In this paper I take issue with these three modalities of feminine comportment. Firstly, I resort to Max Scheler’s phenomenological description of the different stages leading to motor action to show that the bodily functionality of oppressed women is intact when considered from the motor-intentional perspective. Secondly, I advocate, via Scheler’s phenomenology, a different mode through which to interpret the bodily expressivity of oppressed women. My claim is that feminine motility expresses the negative impact that sexism has upon the oppressed women’s emotional pre-theoretical and pre-non-motor level. My (Schelerian) thesis is that patriarchal society negatively influences, and thereby compromises, the constitution of women’s axiological apparatus by inhibiting their preferences of values. Finally, I argue that the axiological apparatus of oppressive men is likewise compromised, and hence needs to be re-educated as much as that of the oppressed women. The main aim of this paper is to suggest a correct reading of the hampered motility of oppressed women, which keeps into consideration the phenomenon of ‘oppression’ in its entirety, and which can thus lead to adequate axiological therapies.
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Notes
Young’s first concern regards those movements in which “the body aims to accomplish a definite purpose or task” (Young 1998, p. 30). She does not address unwanted movements, e.g., spontaneous blinking or heart beating or abstract movements, e.g., dancing, which she considers “aimless” (loc. cit.).
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012).
See ibid., p. 139.
An essential malfunctioning of motor-intentionality jeopardizes for Merleau-Ponty (2012) the execution of actions, as in the case of Schneider, who performs actions only through conceptualizing the movements one by one.
Cf. de Beauvoir (1997, p. 182).
“My suggestion is that the modalities of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality exhibit this same tension between transcendence and immanence, between subjectivity and being a mere object” (Young 1998, p. 32).
For Young not all women are to be subsumed under the stereotype of the woman “physically handicapped” (ibid., p. 42). She specifies that her analyses concern only “the modalities of feminine bodily existence for women situated in contemporary advanced industrial, urban, and commercial society. [The] elements of the account developed here may or may not apply to situation of woman in other societies and other epochs” (ibid., p. 30). On the other hand, she also says that “[o]ne can… sensibly speak of a general feminine style of body comportment and movement” (ibid., p. 35).
These are the “law of the origin of acts… [that] are fulfilled in all phases of the genetic and real volitional development of an individual” (Scheler 1973, p. 127).
The prefix ‘a-’ in a-logical expresses a negation in the sense of being deprived from something: it refers to a ‘privation as absence.’ Conation is therefore for Scheler a-logical in the sense that it is an emotional tending toward values that is deprived of theoretical activity: “’Conation’ here designates the most general basis of experiences that are distinct from all having of objects (representation, sensation, perception), as well as from all feeling [Fiihlen] (feelings [Gefuhlen], etc.)” (ibid., p. 30).
Obviously, one can also take an art course because they have been, e.g., forced to enrol in it by their parents, or because they strive for non-aesthetic valuable things, e.g., reputation.
The experience of resistance is an experience that is given primarily (although not exclusively) in the object: we experience the willed object as resisting our will until it is not in our possession.
Scheler compares the being-able-to-do to “the general feeling of being alive (Lebensgefühl)” (Scheler 1973, p. 129), and defines it as a “unitary and peculiarly lawful varying experience of the whole individual. The being-able-to-do is therefore wholly independent of reproductions of states of sensations [Empfindungszustände] and feelings [Gefühlzustande] connected with the factual movements of limbs during the performance of a deed (or those initially caused by them)” (loc. cit.). Furthermore, it does not depend upon “the consciousness of the ability to perform the partial acts, such as the kinematic ones into which acting split up” (loc. cit.).
For a phenomenological explanation of ‘intentionality’ in terms of ‘practical intentionality’ (Vorsatz) see Salice (2018).
A person has to ‘will-to-do’ something in order to defeat the resistance opposed by the willed content.
Scheler differentiates the ‘willing-to-do’ from “the willing ‘of such doing’” (Scheler 1973, p. 127): “I do not ‘will’ to perform a ‘movement’ when I take my hat off the shelf and put it on, for I will ‘to have my hat on my head.’ Of course a ‘movement’ can be a willed state of affairs, e.g., in gymnastics, etc. But even if it were a question of the same movement, the two cases would remain different… There are two entirely different cases here. On the one hand willing is primarily directed toward a state of affairs, whereupon the will-to-do (as a special kind of willing) ensues without any hindrance; on the other hand it is the doing itself which is the primary state of affairs of willing. Thus a common arsonist, e.g., an envious farmer, wills that his neighbor’s rich and attractive farm ‘cease to exist.’ He wills its destruction. A pathological arsonist, however, wills perhaps only ‘to set fire’” (ibid., pp. 126–127).
Kinematic intention “is dependent on the point of departure (the situation) and the object and the content of the will-to-do, and it varies with these” (ibid., p. 132).
The full list of the elements that for Scheler must be distinguish in an action are: “(1) the presence of the situation and the object of the deed; (2) the content to be realized by the deed; (3) the willing of this content and its levels, leading from the moral tenor, through intentions [Abischt], deliberation [Überlegung], and resolution (Vorsatz), to decision [Entschluss]; (4) the class of activities directed toward the lived body leading to movements of the members (the ‘willing-to-do’); (5) the states of sensation and feelings connected with these activities; (6) the experienced realization of the content (the ‘performance’)” (ibid., p. 121).
The experience of not-being-able-to-do is an “inhibition exercised by the being-able-to-do on a part of ‘willing’… [, which thus] can become a ‘mere’ wish” (ibid., p. 124). The wished content is thus the “object of the will failed with respect to the ‘being-able-to-do’” (loc. cit.).
For example, a paralysed person cannot want to run; she can, at most, wish to do that: “If a paralyzed person happens to see someone drowning, he is no less moral than someone else not paralyzed who actually rescues the man—provided… that the paralyzed person has the will to come to the rescue… But it would be too much to assert that the same act of willing with its moral value is present in the ‘paralyzed’ person. For this cannot be the case, simply because in his situation there is no possibility of a ‘willing-to-do.’ Much as the paralyzed man may ‘wish’ to perform the rescuing act, he cannot ‘will’ it” (ibid., p. 119).
To be arrested on the threshold of ‘wishing’ means, therefore, not to perform any action at all.
Cf., Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. 108).
To clarify, they are thus projected even before moving because they are, as it were, ready to ‘throw the ball’ and not merely ‘wishing to do it.’.
See above, Sect. 1.1.
By “a priori awareness” I mean, in the current context, a pre-reflective, pre-judgemental and pre-experiential (in the sense of prior to, and independent of, empirical experience) awareness of one’s own ability to enact a physical action.
“[E]verything against which there occurs an experience of the ‘not-being-able-to-do’ or of ‘weakness’ [Ohnmacht] in factual doing is immediately removed from the original volitional content” (Scheler 1973, p. 125). Weakness is a “positive experience of the not-being-able-to” (ibid., p. 129).
I specify in this reference that the purpose of the will can also be a pure theoretical purpose, whose achievement implies motility only accidentally. For instance, if I want to become a doctor, I need to, e.g., take books to study. Possible motor actions, such as taking medicine textbooks, are in this scenario contingent to the realisation of the volitional content.
See Merleau-Ponty (2012, pp. 101ff).
Kinematic intentionality must not be considered as a rule that governs the “succession of different organic sensations (in the sense of motion through different organs)” (Scheler 1973, p. 131). Nor is it to be conceived as dependent on the relation between the body and the “external objects in regard to which objective motion takes place” (loc. cit.); that is, as though kinematic intentionality were a rule of movement resulting from previous motor experiences of “varying positional manifolds of the organs in relation to an external body” (loc. cit.). Moreover, “kinematic intention is also independent of the special character of the entire organic cooperation necessary in executing a motion” (loc. cit.).
Cf. Young (1998, p. 30).
Cf. ibid., p. 42.
Such a person “would have the experience of resistance, setting in against his kinematic intention and the subsequent graduated series of kinematic impulses, as an experience of the practically ‘impossible’” (Scheler 1973, p. 120).
Such a misplacement is given, for example, when a person asks herself if she could realize the willed content, if she “could do that which is to be realized through… [her] will (and which is given as such)” (ibid., p. 136). To ask if ‘they thus willed,’ entails that “the question itself betrays an objectification of the state of affairs ‘that… [she] thus willed! This objectification does not increase but decrease willing” (loc. cit.). The withstanding is also placed in a person’s ‘will-to-do’ when she asks herself whether she “’willed-to-do’ the willed with sufficient energy” (loc. cit.).
The positive outcome of having rightly placed the phenomenon of withstanding on the things is possible only if motor-intentionality is not defective. A congenital defective motor-intentionality requires aids from the predicative realms: one is incapable of setting the purpose of a specific doing without having pre-predicatively pictured which motion can enact the volitional content. The movements may be, anyway, caused, but, as Scheler suggests, prior kinematic representations of the limbs, in terms of theoretical reproductions of previously already performed movements (which had also been reflectively planned) (cf. ibid., p. 130).
For Scheler objects are not simple perceptual or representational objects, but also practical objects, namely objects that carry values, and which he defines as value-things (Wertdinge) or goods (Güter).
See above, Sect. 1.1.
To be clear, I do not consider a temperate or restrained bodily movement as a negative bodily expression, which should be overcome. On the contrary, ‘temperance’ or ‘restrain’ are generally speaking positive values, which, in a given contest, should be realised by both men and women. For example, it is advisable to have a restrained or temperate bodily comportment during a police questioning. Yet, it is pretty straightforward that a restrained or temperate bodily comportment is not adequate to the enactment of the gross physical activities of which Young speaks.
The counterconative tendency is a positive experience when it springs from the awareness of our own real capabilities. In this case, it causes us to gain awareness of our own real potentialities, hence it makes us acknowledge that, in certain situations, it is better and wiser to judiciously renounce doing something (cf. Scheler 1973, pp. 125–126).
Consider, for instance, the importance that Chisholm grants to exemplar female climbers like Lynn Hill: “Hill’s free climbing presents a contemporary and kinetic counterexample to Young’s dated and static ‘throwing example.’… Hill exemplifies, above all, how she or any woman can climb like a girl most capably and adventurously without endorsing and performing femininity (or masculinity) even as she lives in a hypermasculinized world… Hill’s exemplary climbing offers for feminist phenomenological analysis modalities of free movement and existence that Hill herself identifies and elaborates from a woman’s evolving perspective” (Chisholm 2008, pp. 35–36).
This state of affairs occurs even if the performer (woman or man) possesses excellent bodily strength, agility, fluidity, and the like.
According to Brennan, female surfers exhibit (1) an ambiguous transcendence: “my contention is that other oppressive features, such as the eroticization of the female athlete, contribute to a reflexive self-awareness that inhibits the full possibilities of nonambiguous transcendence from being realized” (Brennan 2016, p. 913). (2) A discontinuous unity: “[t]he movement required of the surfer to execute tricky maneuvers requires a whole-body movement, and it is undeniable that such whole-body movement is less in evidence and is less dynamic in female professional surfing than in male professional surfing” (loc. cit.). And (3) an inhibited intentionality: “I can only speculate, as thus far there have been no empirical studies on the matter, but it seems likely that the paucity of attempted aerial maneuvers, which are a regular mainstay in the repertoire of male surfers, is due to an inhibited intentionality. It is as if, while on the wave, there is a corresponding ‘I can’t’ to counter the ‘I can’ of consciousness” (loc. cit.).
A good example of a philosophical inquiry into the oppressor (from a racial perspective) is provided by Sullivan’s work Revealing Whiteness. The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (2006). I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out Sullivan’s work to me.
Negative values are the negative counterparts of positive values. A negative value “is not a depriving nothing, which comes from the simple logic negation of a positive value; it constitutes, instead, a quality that is contrary and conflicting with respect to the originally positive quality [my translation]” (Bosio 1995, p. 29). For example, to the positive aesthetic value ‘beautiful’ there corresponds the negative aesthetic value ‘ugly’; to the positive sensible value ‘agreeable,’ the negative sensible value ‘disagreeable’; and to the positive moral value ‘good,’ the negative moral value’ evil.’
This line of reasoning ought to be applied to all oppressive people and related types of oppression—thus also to non-sexually qualified oppressions.
This narrative is useful also to understand the negative effect the male oppression has on men themselves. A male chauvinist environment teaches indeed men not to pursue the realization of that which (ideally) ‘ought to be’: for instance, the realization of a, so to say, ‘feminine’ positive value such as ‘daintiness.’ This state of affairs narrows thus down the expressive capabilities of men as well, and consequently it restricts their overall existential horizon.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the participants of the conference “Phenomenology and Beyond” (Reykjavík, 21–23 April 2016) and the workshop “Phenomenology of Action and Volition” (Prague, 21–23 May 2018) for their feedback. I would like also to express my sincere gratitude to Alessandro Salice and Zachary Davis for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to Joseph Walsh and Jonathan Paul Mitchell for proofreading the final version. The completion of this work was made possible by the research award “Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship” funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (Grant No. GOIPG/2013/1507).
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Ruggeri, C. A criticism of Young’s ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ through Scheler’s understanding of motor action. Cont Philos Rev 52, 335–359 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09475-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-019-09475-8