Bigoted views in our philosophical heroes: the case of Spinoza's misogynistic views

Another look at the "child of his time" defense

Pieter de Hooch - Mother Lacing Her Bodice beside a Cradle, ca 1660.

Spinoza's misogynistic views

Recently, several Spinoza biographies have come out, filling a long-standing lacuna in scholarship. The latest one (I have not read), is Spinoza, Life and Legacy by Jonathan Israel, which comes in at an eye-watering 1344 pages. The classic Steven Nadler one, Spinoza: A Life I recently read with great interest, and I've now recently begun Within reason, a life of Spinoza by Margaret Gullan-Whur (2000).

Nadler makes a brief remark about Spinoza's less than favorable views on women, in the following almost apologetic manner:

Spinoza was among the most enlightened and liberal thinkers of his age; he was not, however, free from all its prejudices. It is unfortunate that the very last words we have by him, at the end of the extant chapters of the Political Treatise, are a short digression, in the opening sections on democracy, on the natural unsuitability of women to hold political power—Nadler, Spinoza, a life, p. 348.

By contrast, Margaret Gullan-Whur explores Spinoza's misogynistic views in more detail:

Spinoza does not seem, however, to have submitted to testing by first principles the view of women that he inherited. Instead, we find, starting around 1661-1662 and hardening over the course of his lifetime, negative pronouncements on their whimpering, partiality, foolish pity, superstition, inconstancy, deceptiveness, weakness and mental inferiority.” — Gullan-Whur, Within reason, p. 14).

Let's look at the example Nadler mentions in detail, which occurs at the end of the unfinished Political Treatise. That work discusses monarchy, aristocracy, and (Spinoza's favorite form of government), democracy. Spinoza considers whether foreigners, servants, children, and women should have part in the democratic decision process. He argues they should not, because they are under the power of others (respectively, the native population, masters, parents, and husbands). I quote it here at length so you can read it for yourself:

But perhaps someone will ask whether women are under the power of their husbands by nature or by custom. If this has happened only by custom, then no reason compels us to exclude women from rule. But if we consult experience, we’ll see that this occurs only because of their weakness. Wherever we find men and women [living together], they have never ruled together. What we see is that there the men rule and the women are ruled, and that in this way both sexes live in harmony. On the other hand, the Amazons, who according to tradition once ruled, did not allow men to remain on their soil, but raised only the females and killed the males they bore.
If women were by nature equal to men, both in strength of character and in native intelligence…surely among so many and such diverse nations we would find some where each sex ruled equally, and others where men were ruled by women, and so educated that they could do less with their native intelligence. But since this has not happened anywhere, we can say without reservation that women do not, by nature, have a right equal to men’s, but that they necessarily submit to men. So it cannot happen that each sex rules equally, much less that men are ruled by women.
Furthermore, if we consider human affects, namely, that for the most part men love women only from an affect of lust, and that they judge their native intelligence and wisdom greater the more beautiful they are, and furthermore, that men find it intolerable that the women they love should favor others in some way, etc., we’ll have no difficulty seeing that men and women can’t rule equally without great harm to the peace. But enough of these matters. — Spinoza, Political Treatise.

It's always disappointing to read philosophers one admires write such bigotry, and there's a continued question of how we, as educators, writers, people who are inspired by these philosophers, need to deal with this. Should we paper over these views? Dismiss the entire philosophical projects in which they occur? One of the more popular moves to deal with this problem is the “child of his time” apology, which Gullan-Whur resists.

She writes how the gender norms among Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam were much more disadvantageous to women than those of the surrounding Dutch culture. Jewish women in Spinoza's time and milieu did not receive an education (unlike Dutch well-to-do women), they did not have access to sacred scripture. The Jewish community found the outspoken, independent Dutch women unfeminine, “big, strong, and bossy.” (p. 13). So what Gullan-Whur discerns in Spinoza's sporadic misogynistic comments would be a reflection of the community he grew up in, was expelled from, but never quite interrogated using the cool demands of reason.

Vermeer's woman tuning a lute is interesting because baroque lute is a complicated instrument that requires a fair degree of literacy to perform the requisite music and many years of dedicated study.

It's interesting, looking at this brief argument in Political Treatise that Spinoza does consider some objections to his view of natural female inferiority (“What about the Amazons?”) and doesn't adequately respond to it. So, it's not a slip of the pen, but a well-considered position, which Gullan-Whur suspects many other commenters have papered over for the sake of “political correctness” (as it was called when she wrote).

The “child of his time” response

The case of misogyny in Spinoza's writing is hardly unique. It occurs in lots of different philosophers: Hume's racism, Kant's (oh Kant…) misogyny, racism and homophobia, are two other examples. For Hume, Edinburgh University even renamed the Hume tower over his racist views. The Hume society had a very thoughtful response to this,

As we continue to explore Hume’s legacy in various areas of thought, we are committed to increasing awareness of the harmful aspects of that legacy and encouraging an ongoing conversation about these issues. The Hume Society affirms that Black Lives Matter and is committed to fighting white supremacy. Efforts to institutionalize inclusivity and decenter whiteness need not be at odds with efforts to critically examine the intellectual contributions of historical figures.—Hume Society's response to renaming of Hume Tower (archived here)

Huaping Lu-Adler's new book Kant, race and racism considers the problem of racism in Kant's philosophy. A central argument of the book is that racism was an integral element in Kant's philosophy, and that you cannot use his philosophical principles to “defeat” his racist views. She relates how in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, a debate in Kant scholarship was reignited on the topic of Kants Rassismus. The usual “Kind seiner Zeit” (child of his time) apology came up again, alongside some other responses such as that we can use his philosophy (categorical imperative in particular) to defeat his views on e.g., slavery, that he changed his mind late in life, that Kant was really an anti-racist who has been misunderstood, or that his racism is not essential to understand the rest of his philosophy.

The problem Lu-Adler finds with all these responses is that they individualize the racism in Kant, as if we can reduce it to some defective character trait, and as a result, we ignore the broader context. She sees this individualizing discourse also at work in Pauline Kleingeld's influential “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race” (2007), where we see Kant changing his mind about race in a deathbed-like conversion, embracing racial egalitarianism that is much more in line with the rest of his philosophy. The problem with this narrative, says Lu-Adler, is that deathbed conversion or not,

[Kant] could not undo the racist sentiments and worldviews he might have helped to cultivate in the hearts and minds of other people through his numerous publications, decades of lectures, and countless copies of student notes of those lectures that circulated beyond his classroom.15 The notion of racism that best captures this point has little to with what was in Kant’s own head or heart. Rather, it concerns the formation of racist ideology in a network of socially embedded actors and meaning makers. (Lu-Adler 2023, 5-6).

As to whether Kant was a child of his time, Lu-Adler answers yes and no. We are all products of our specific time and space and situation in life. Kant both drew on existing ideas and ideologies about race, but he also (unfortunately) innovated in this domain in his writings. To the extent that they exert some influence in writing, philosophers can further entrench positions that stigmatize and minoritize groups of people, such as women and black people.

Maybe there is no mystery. If we are universalist about human nature, there's nothing special about past philosophers anymore than there is about us today. We tend to put these people up on a pedestal, but they are also living in imperfect conditions and making imperfect decisions. The bigoted views of past philosophers are thus no more a mystery than those of contemporary philosophers, insofar as we resist hagiographies.

Melioristic philosophies

Few philosophers (perhaps maybe excepting those who write in Quillette or Journal of Controversial Ideas) would write what Spinoza wrote at the end of Political Treatise without blushing. It's just not an acceptable position to hold anymore, except maybe in some corners of evolutionary psychology.

Even so, for Spinoza, the choice of doubling down on misogynistic assumptions about women was not the only option. His tutor Franciscus van den Enden, inspired by Native philosophies (as I argue here) held a much more gender-egalitarian view, a view he practiced by admitting women in his Latin school and by having his daughter teach at the school. So, Spinoza must've seen this at work, seen it was possible, conversed and rehearsed theatrical pieces with the female students of van den Enden, and yet ended up in a very different position to van den Enden.

And we can see this for other bigoted views too: for every Kant or Hume you have a John Beattie, the Scottish philosopher (1735 –1803) who explicitly argued against Hume's racist views and expounded a range of views why in his view Black people were not inferior to white people. Beattie said he was inspired by Dido Elizabeth Belle, a Black noblewoman born in England in 1761, in resisting racist ideas.

Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay (1761-1804) and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (1760-1825).

This example shows we aren't mere passive recipients of our culture, we can challenge the views presented to us, even if they're formulated by formidable philosophers. Beattie was hardly the philosophical heavyweight that Hume was, just like van den Enden is a minor figure compared to Spinoza. Yet on matters of race and gender, we now think Beattie and van den Enden were more right than their more influential interlocutors.

My view on philosophy is that it is, or ought to be, melioristic—I believe that philosophy is in the business, even very indirectly in its most obscure speculations, in helping us toward self-improvement by critical reflection on our invisible “philosophical plumbing” (as Mary Midgley calls it).

It's hard to put into question everything you inherited, and not even Kant or Spinoza, who were both builders of impressive philosophical frameworks, managed to do so. However, in the continued conversation that philosophy presents over the centuries, we can still improve, think and consider. No philosophical view, no matter how impressive or water-tight—presents a final view that is beyond criticism. This, I find a heartening view. If we go with this, it's less of a problem whether you can excise the racism out of Kant's philosophy or the misogyny out of Spinoza’s political philosophy, because these works do not present the final word.

Indeed, by resisting this and looking how these views are integral (as Lu-Adler argues) we are in a better position to interrogate past philosophical views that influenced ours, and hence, in this genealogical spirit, to continue to formulate philosophical views that we hope ameliorate our lives.