"Know thyself," said the few ancient Greek men who enjoyed the leisure to explore "the life of the mind" and the privilege of living the "free life of the citizen" - and who are still mistakenly (those basic errors again) called "the Greeks" as if they were all the Greeks. Thus, they also created ... a haunting not-self that was essential to the admitted, recognized, claimed self. Their not-self - women, slaves, men who worked with their hands, "barbarians" ... - surrounded the self they sought to know, setting its boundaries by constituting some
activities, some feelings, some human functions, some deep desires as forbidden while projecting them onto others. ... (Transforming Knowledge, 88)But then comes this:
We hit absurdity fairly quickly here. Consider the famous syllogism, "Man is mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal." Try it with a woman: "Man is mortal. Alice is ___ ...." what? A man? No one says that, not even philosophers. "Man," the supposedly generic term, does not allow us to say, "Alice is a man." So we say, "Alice is a woman." Then what are we supposed to deduce? "Therefore, Alice is ___ ..." what? It is man, a supposedly universal category that is simultaneously neutral and masculine but not feminine ..., who "is mortal." Is Alice, who is female and thus not in a category that is either neutral or masculine, then immortal? Is she mortal insofar as, for the purposes of such reasoning, she can be subsumed under the category man but not insofar as she is, specifically, female? Are we women, then, immortal insofar as we are female? Alice ends up in the peculiar position of being a somewhat mortal, somewhat immortal, creature. Or, we must admit, we cannot thus reason about Alice while thinking of her as female at all. We can think of Socrates as a man without derailing the syllogism; we cannot think of Alice as a women. Reason flounders; the center holds, with Man in it, but it is an exclusive center, not a universal one. Alice disappears through the looking glass. (89)
Brava! All that remains is to call it the "immortal" syllogism, and mortal and immortal, universal and particular, whole and part, male and female, all come tumbling down, available for new thinking.
One of Minnich's aims is to kindle in her readers a love of thinking rather than a mere quest for knowing, and in passages such as these it's hard not to swoon with love. Just think what a fabulous discussion you could start with this dazzling chain of apperçus... And one can feel New School pride, too: Minnich wrote her dissertation on John Dewey in the Philosophy Department, her advisers Hannah Arendt and Richard Bernstein!
