Kant, Christianity, and Free Will

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Dec 28 19:16:02 PST 1999


Charles Brown:

<< CB: Yes, agreed, and what about whose interests were served by portraying Eve, a woman , as causing a fall , instead of a rise. Why the interests of patriarchy, of course. Now correct my history, but didn't patriarchy go all of the way back to Abraham , in 1900 BC, way before the Roman Empire and Christianity ?>>

Charles, you slip into history of ideas and hence into idealism (defined here the assumption ideas have a history of their own, in abstraction from human activity). And, as has always been the case (going back to the discipline's founder, A.O. Lovejoy), this assumption leads to bad history of ideas.

Ideas which justify a given practice (of exploitation or oppression) do *not* arise with the development of the practice but only with the growth of *opposition* to the practice. For example, if you survey ancient and medieval discussions of slavery you will find very few attempts to justify it, and those attempts rather casual. In contrast, by the 19th century the most amazingly developed and systematic defenses of slavery were being written by southern intellectuals in the U.S. The difference lay in the fact that there was no real opposition to slavery in the ancient and medieval world, so there were no defenses of it, just as today no one bothers to defend the proposition that students not carry automatic weapons on the playground. There *are* some articles written defending the principle of teachers' not carrying weapons, since some horses asses have begun proposing that teachers *should* carry weapons.

If by patriarchy you mean the subordination of women it probably goes back at least to late paleolithic times, and perhaps much further. Certainly the evidence of widespread arthritis in the knees of neolithic women in the near east (developed through spending most of the day kneeling while grinding grain for baking) dates it at least to that period. So the OT reflects not so much the defense of "patriarchy" (not needed) as the automatic assumptions of (unchallenged) male supremacy (which is why certain passages incompatible with male supremacy sneak in -- as is the case with one of the two creation story, which speaks of the simultaneous creation of men and women).

So no interests in particular were served by the story of Eve, because those interests did not require being served. They were given. When one strains too hard to fit every detail of history and of human behavior into generalized political principles there arises a real danger of Platonic idealism (realism) in which abstractions are given a reality outside history.

Carrol

P.S. You find defenses of *misogyny* in medieval texts but not of male supremacy or the subordination of women as such. Those are taken for granted. Don't confuse Christian uses of the Eve story for misognynistic purposes (common) with uses of it for the defense of male supremacy (uncommon or non-existent before the last few centuries). And don't assume *any* necessary connection between the Hebrew Bible (and its interpreters) and Christian theological use of what they call the Old Testament. The coincidence of the stories in the two quite different books (different even when word for word identical) is just that, coincidental, and the identity of stories does not extend even to the relationship of the meanings ascribed to them.



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