Spinoza on Women

The one place where the geometric order failed, and what it teaches us about the limits of philosophy

I. The Passage

In the unfinished Political Treatise, Chapter XI, Spinoza addresses the question of whether women should be admitted to political participation. His answer is no. His reasoning is remarkable for its weakness, coming from the most rigorous philosopher of the seventeenth century. Women, he argues, are naturally subordinate to men. They are governed by emotion rather than reason. They lack the strength of mind required for political deliberation. If women were equal to men, he asks, why have they never been granted equal political rights in any society in history? The argument from historical universality is deployed to justify a conclusion that contradicts his own principles.

The passage is painful to read. It is not merely wrong. It is inadequately argued in a way that the rest of Spinoza's work is not. The philosopher who demanded geometric rigor, who refused to accept any claim without demonstration, who spent the Ethics establishing that nothing in its account of mind grounds a categorical distinction between male and female minds, here abandons his own method and offers the weakest of empirical generalizations as a sufficient ground for an extraordinary conclusion. The failure is instructive precisely because it is so uncharacteristic.

II. The Internal Contradiction

Spinoza's own system contradicts his conclusion about women. The Ethics argues that the mind is the idea of the body, that every body has a corresponding mind, and that the differences between minds are differences in the complexity and capability of their corresponding bodies. There is nothing in this framework that could justify a categorical distinction between male and female minds. Individual bodies differ. Some individuals are more capable of rational thought than others. But the difference is individual, not categorical. The claim that all women, by virtue of being women, are less capable of rational political participation than men is an inadequate idea by Spinoza's own standards. It mistakes a historically contingent arrangement for a necessary truth.

Why did Spinoza fail to see this? The most plausible answer is not flattering but it is instructive. Spinoza was a man of his time. He had absorbed the assumptions of his culture about the nature of women despite having the intellectual tools to question them. The failure demonstrates that even the most rigorous philosopher is not immune to the inadequate ideas of his environment. Adequate ideas are hard-won, and no one wins them all. Spinoza's failure on the question of women is a reminder that the project of achieving adequate understanding is never complete. There are always assumptions you have not examined, biases you have not traced to their causes, conclusions that feel obvious because you have never subjected them to the full force of your own method.

III. The Spinozan Correction

The Spinozan correction to Spinoza's own error is straightforward. Apply the method. What are the actual causes of the historical exclusion of women from political participation? Not natural inferiority but a network of social, economic, and legal arrangements designed to maintain male power. The arrangements are causes. They produced the effect Spinoza observed: the absence of women from political life. He mistook the effect for the cause. He saw that women did not participate and concluded that they could not. The correct inference is that they were prevented from participating by causes external to their nature. The distinction is the same one Spinoza makes in the analysis of suicide: what appears to be a failure of the individual's nature is actually the effect of external causes overpowering that nature. The analysis applies to women as much as to the suicidal. Spinoza failed to apply his own analysis to this case. The failure is a warning. If Spinoza could fail, anyone can.

IV. The Lesson

The lesson is not that Spinoza was a hypocrite or that his philosophy is contaminated by his sexism. The lesson is that philosophical rigor is domain-specific. A person can be exquisitely rigorous in one domain and completely uncritical in another, because the rigor is not a property of the person but of the attention he has paid to the domain. Spinoza paid enormous attention to the nature of God, the structure of the mind, the mechanics of the affects, and the foundations of political authority. He did not pay equivalent attention to the question of sexual difference. He accepted the conventional answer without subjecting it to the method he applied everywhere else. The convention was wrong. He should have known better. But the fact that he did not is not a reason to discard his method. It is a reason to apply the method more thoroughly, including to the philosopher himself. The method is stronger than its inventor. The method, properly applied, corrects the inventor's errors. That is the sign of a genuine method. A method that cannot transcend its originator is not a method. It is a personality cult. Spinoza's method transcends Spinoza. The correction I have just offered is itself Spinozan. The student corrects the master using the master's own tools. The master, if he were alive, would accept the correction. That is the kind of master he was.