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Feminism now is an accepted area of political philosophy, in the sense that politics means power and the female half is controlled, politically, by the
other half of men. And this is the meaning of the term "patriarchal" which was coined, in this sense, by Kate Millet in her book "SexuaI Politics" (1970).
Through this term feminism was influenced by three trends: dialectical materialism, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism. But they have
cross-fertilized each other resulting in a break through with both Marxism and liberalism. But the problematic, implied in the result, is that feminist movements were led astray from enlightenment being the root of
both Marxism and liberalism. In this sense, the feminist movement was unable to dig deeper into the woman's mind to see what is lacking and what is defective.
The movement was satisfied with raising such questions as the following: Is there a single human nature, the same in both sexes? If so, why are they
not social equals?
With these questions things became complicated because the feminist movement had to tackle social issues such as the notion of womanhood, marriage,
family, and the specific work that suits women. Consequently, they totally ignored the analysis of woman's reason. The result was that feminist movements fell into the optical illusion of women's liberation.
And this optical illusion has an history. In part 6 of "The Republic", Plato discusses women and the family in his ideal society. He states
the disabilities that prevent woman from having the opportunity to compete with men, even though he recognizes that one major disability that women face in competing with men is being expected to care for children.
Then came Aristotle and stated that women have defective reason, therefore, it is proper, according to him, that husbands should rule over their wives within the household.
However, if we go back to the roots of human civilization we find that in his most primitive stages, when the human species was emerging out of the
realm of the animal, it was at one with nature in the sense that both men and women were fully controlled by nature. This stage was accompanied by the intimate and organic unity between man and woman who, both, were
the object of nature and not the subject of history. In their pursuit to liberate themselves from the control of nature and to become subjects of history instead of objects of nature, man and woman were in complete
harmony to the extent that ancient myths tell us that they were one androgynous being with a double male/female sex.
The historic shift from being objects of nature to becoming subjects of history resulted in the rupture of the unity between man and woman which has
lasted to this day.
How?
In the hunting age, when both man and woman were still controlled by nature, they had to face what was known as the "food crisis" due to the
scarcity of animals as a result of their migration and due to the change in climate. It is anthropologically verified that it was the woman who discovered the creative solution that saved the human species from
extinction due to the food crisis by inventing the technique of agriculture. (Bernal, Science in History). This technique is a symbol of the fact that the woman possesses the ability, due to her reason, of
changing nature and controlling her. This resulted in the historic shift from the hunting to the agricultural age which marks the true beginning of human civilization. Due to her invention of the agricultural
technique, woman was always in authority and it was she who determined the social system and the value system in what was termed as the matriarchal civilization. In the matriarchal civilization everything was
related to the biological nature of women, namely to fertility which was identified with the fertility of the earth.
The shift from matriarchy to patriarchy marked a transformation in the domination of woman over man. However, the value system which was prevailing in
the matriarchy survived in patriarchy but was made to serve the domination of men over women. So that when were dominant the gods were feminine and so was the religion to cope with the essential and universal
feature of woman's experience, namely, fertility which was identified with 'Mother Earth!'.
The most essential feature of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy was woman's alienation from nature, or from the external world and her
isolation in the most distinctive aspect of the household, namely, the kitchen. Woman's isolation within the kitchen has resulted in a qualitative by radical change in her mental framework which has led to the
emergence of what I call the "culinary reason". This has survived until today and is embodied in the famous saying "the easiest way to a man's heart is through his stomach."
The "culinary reason" is a rupture in the history of human civilization. Our task then is to seek the roots of this rupture. It happened when
the matriarchal regime was at its utmost peak during the Eleusinian religion founded by the Goddess Demeter. To overthrow matriarchy men invented what Betty Friedan has called the "feminine mystique" which
transformed woman into "a puzzle" according to Freud's terminology.
Now, we try to solve this puzzle using the Kantian categories as a symbol not of the theory of knowledge per se but as a symbol of the reason of
Enlightenment. In this sense, we can say that the "culinary reason" is anti-Enlightenment, in the sense that it gives the priority to sentiments and affections and to what is accidental and not to what is
essential. In this way, woman loses her control over reality and is ready for submission rather than for equality.
"Culinary reason" is mainly characterized by being capricious, and is not subject to any laws but is rather subject only to the taste of the
food consumer which is purely subjective. This has alienated woman from any general or universal laws by which she could understand what was happening in the external world and by which she could interpret her own
experiences. Instead she was confined in her explanation, understanding, and interpretation of experience to her own caprice, and if this wasn't sufficient, she resorted to mythical thinking as an alternative to the
inability of her mood or caprice to explain matters around her. As an example is women's belief in superstition (horoscope, cup reading, cards, ....) In this way woman became an alienated from her civilisational
role which she practised at the beginning of civilization, and she was transformed from being the subject of civilization to being a mere object of culture under patriarchal culture. In this way woman was strictly
limited to the act of responding to and fulfilling man's wishes and ambitions.
If a man proclaimed that a woman was a mere beautiful object to gratify the taste for beauty in men, she hastened to beautify herself to be accepted
and to be wanted by man, and in this way woman was totally alienated from producing the value system which became the sole monopoly of man. (laws, legislation, religions, customs, traditions. . .etc).
However, woman did not completely submit to this condition, but she remained in a continuous state of tension and resistance, and this tension
characterized her personality and made her ready at any point to explode. The question then is: how can we turn this suppressed tension and resistance into a positive revolution against all forms of dichotomies
which characterize patriarchal cultures?
The answer to this question starts with woman herself in the sense that she has to become conscious of the reasons of their tension in her relation
with others, including other women and the impact of this tension on her life. Consciousness begins with looking for the roots of woman's illusions which characterize her 'culinary reason'. These illusions could be
limited to four:
First illusion: woman's belief that her security lies with man and depends on his own will to grant it to her.
Second illusion: woman's belief that her liberty depends on man.
Third illusion: woman's belief that she is an object of man's desire, (being wanted by man).
Fourth illusion: woman's belief that her ambition lies in fulfilling man's own ambition (behind every great man is a woman).
The first four illusions rely on the belief that man is superior to woman in terms of power, authority, and liberty, and consequently in the ability to
control his own destiny. The illusion is the result of lack of consciousness of the historical dimensions which cover an oppressive reality for both women and men and which created the optical illusion that man is
superior to woman and is oppressive in his relationship with her.
It is also evident that the spreading of these four illusions depends on woman and not on man despite the fact that man is the origin of the illusions,
or strictly, the patriarchal society because it is based on man's authority and domination.
In order to uncover the roots of woman's illusions, woman has to apply critical reason to her own illusions.
In my view, the most dangerous illusion is the fourth one because it is responsible for the culinary reason which is the true obstacle to woman's
development out of the dichotomous relation with man. Woman's ambition has to evolve out of her deep self or in Bergson's terms the "moi profond" and not out of the superficial self or the "moi
social". The social self (moi social), which is inauthentic and is, therefore, superficial in contradistinction with the profound or authentic self (moi profond) is created by the patriarchal society to force
women to suppress her moi profond in order to make her deny her legitimate ambition to become a fully realised human being. It has done so by giving her the illusion that fulfilling man's ambition is her ultimate
aim and supreme ambition. This has created in woman certain personality traits which have been identified with femininity such as hypocrisy, lying, crookedness which have become part of her psychological structure
as a defense mechanism which woman has developed to survive in the male dominated cultures. In this way woman's total dependence on patriarchal culture resulted in negating her creative role in the history of human
civilization. What remains now is the negation of negation by recuperating lost the unity between man and woman and which necessitates retrieving the natural relation between them which was at the beginning of
civilization.
To conclude, I think that in order to liberate women from culinary reason, feminist movements, especially theoreticians of feminism despite their
diversity, should become aware of the following:
- rejection of universal reason on the ground that it is patriarchal, masculine and logo centric, results in the preservation of culinary reason.
- rejection of enlightenment conceals the true oppressive trends in different cultures against both man and woman such as religious fundamentalism
and conservatism.
- the necessity of formulating what could be called postculinary reason, by working out a new epistemology with new categories derived from Kantian
categories and superseding them in the sense of superseding the dichotomy between man and woman and establishing a new unity between them. This new unity would be directed against the oppressive, de-humanizing
powers by working together towards a movement of de-dogmatization to counteract all kinds of dogmatism, be it religious fundamentalism, or social and political conservatism.
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