Heidegger on Obtaining a Free Relationship With Feminism
I was dreaming when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray
In The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger proceeds in his questioning of technology by establishing that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” Instead, in his belief, to understand technology, one must seek to find that which pervades all of technology but is not technological in itself. As such, the essence of technology itself is not able to come into apprehension by questioning technology directly as it appears to us in its structure, form, or final cause.
In the following, I will attempt to answer the question concerning feminism, that is the question itself of What is Feminism? Before proceeding to engage in this process of questioning concerning feminism, I must establish that the question of Feminism is a question for which it is necessary to engage in questioning at all. Given to us from the ways in which we use the word "feminism” and study “feminist” movements, Feminism is of two essences: firstly, it is a means by which we advance women’s equality and secondly; it is an academic discipline that pertains to women. However, if one wants to develop an apprehension of what it is to be a feminist, that of what it is to be in relationship with Feminism, they must go further than simply studying the movements and texts considered to be feminist or constitutive of feminism. Rather, Feminism is a collection of frameworks: it is the means by which one comes to understand and act on their experience of being in the world; a method that ought to be intentionally developed and used to ensure one is best able to engage in the world.
As it began, early feminist works could be considered to be a form of Poesis, the Ancient Greek word for art, to which Heidegger ascribes the meaning of Bringing Forth upon. At the time, while there had been early feminist movements, there was not a framework with which one could relate such that that relationship could be referred to as Feminism itself. As Simone de Beauvoir states, “woman makes no claim for herself as subject because she lacks the concrete means, because she senses the necessary link connecting her to man without posting its reciprocity, and because she often derives satisfaction from her role as Other.” While Simone de Beauvoir claims there is no essential woman - i.e. that woman’s place in the Subject-Object dialectic is not predetermined by her essential character - she did not claim that there was no need for women to develop an understanding of themselves as a class from their experience. Instead, as evident by the rest of her work, she wanted to understand the causes by which one came to be a woman; to un-abstract and bring-forth-from the phenomenal a concrete conception. Based on this approach to Feminism as Bringing Forward of which de Beauvoir established, others engaged in the process of thinking about their own experiences of being in a world that determines them to be women. For a certainly imperfect example, consider Betty Friedan’s beginning to The Feminine Mystique:
“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night. She was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question- Is this all”
In this text, there’s a certain method of revealing what it is that Friedan is describing. Instead of placing itself forward, it engages the reader in a process of bringing out from within that which they already feel and showing to them that they are not the only one who feels it. Through this practice, a tradition of feminist analysis that in itself could be used for one to understand and communicate their own experience beyond their immediate impressions was developed.
From here, by engaging in these works and attempting to work back what it is exactly that which the writer is attempting to bring forth, other theorists have gone on to analyze that which they’ve encountered into ideas that further develop the practice of building out a feminist interpretive framework. Consider the theory of Intersectionality coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw or the idea of Patriarchal Equilibrium coined by Judith Bennett. In each of these papers, their respective authors do not rely on A Priori logic to come to their conclusions, but rather they make observations or pose questions from which they draw out what it is they believe is lacking from feminist discourse. By doing this, they illuminate issues that hadn’t been revealed before, allowing both for further development of ideas and for new groups of people and their respective causes to be brought into the feminist movement.
Finally, Feminist analysis can work to bring forth new ways to conceive of how we are with each other in the world. For example, consider the work of Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. In Rich’s article, she describes a radical vision for redefining what it means to love another woman as a woman:
“If we consider the possibility that all women—from the infant suck- ling at her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk smell in her own, to two women like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory, to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women—exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see our- selves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify our- selves as lesbian or not.”
Regardless of whether one agrees with the specific points of any of these works, one can see the importance of engaging with them in developing one’s own relationship with Feminism itself. By witnessing the ways that these writers have Brought Forward From the substrate of phenomenal experience something new, we are engaging both with the works they produce and developing our own ability to engage in feminism itself. In a sense, each one of these works can be seen as containing within itself a sort of dialectical process of interpretation, and as such, provide means by which we ourselves develop a notion of the framework of interpretation that constitutes Feminism as Poesis it exists in this form.
However, there is another way in which Feminism can be apprehended as it relates to the means by which we are in relationship with it: that of Feminism as Gestell, a term Heidegger used to describe that which sets itself upon. Rather than something that we come to apprehend and apply to our lives by interpreting the substrate of experience, this approach to feminism sets itself upon our experience. To demonstrate this, I’ll use the example of Judith Butler’s Performative Gender Acts, in which she argues the following:
“Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.”
While this argument may seem to be a logical conclusion from the ways in which gender is embodied and conditioned, the argument seems to engage in an error of process and aim. What it is to have a gender comes in some way or another from the direct experience we have of being a human who engages with gender. As such, rather than serving as a bringing forward from, this sort of reasoning from a world in which we do not experience gender as we do now is itself a reasoning unto nothingness; even if we can comprehend that gender itself is an act of performance, nothing can be brought forward from ourselves by attempting to apprehend it. Rather than serving as a means for interpreting our relationship to the world, this form of analysis disconnects us from acting on phenomenal experiences.
As pop-feminism and the internet age has increased the rate at which new and increasingly specific feminist terms are encountered by us, it can seem as though they can take hold of our lexicon beyond the intent of their original creator. While this can allow for a new Aufheben of Bringing Forth to develop - i.e. a process by which the term can be improved as an interpretive heuristic - this can lead to the term losing its original power to Bring Forth from us all together. As Kimberlé Crenshaw describes of her experience encountering others using the term “Intersectionality”:
“Sometimes I’ve read things that say, ‘Intersectionality, blah, blah, blah,’ and then I’d wonder, ‘Oh, I wonder whose intersectionality that is,’ and then I’d see me cited, and I was like, ‘I’ve never written that. I’ve never said that. That is just not how I think about intersectionality.”
While I cannot claim to know what she specifically thinks about the use of the term “Intersectionality” now, it seems as though this process of encountering words outside of their intended context has contributed to our relationship to feminism being that of Gestell. It is the means by which feminist analysis has gone from a conceptual prometheanism that identified woman-ness as an inessential part of what it is to actually become a woman to an exercise in logical analysis and the proliferation of buzzwords.
With these things in mind, it seems as though the answer to the question of what Feminism is is itself very difficult for one individual to answer or positively grasp as a means for going forwards in life. It seems as though there are many different constitutive and irreducible notions of what Feminism is to integrate them all into one method, discipline, or cause and too rapid a set of impressions to engage on them in any meaningful way. It is easy to feel as if what it means to be a feminist is something that is too disparate for the average person in the world to be in relation with. Despite this, I still believe there is a means by which we can come to understand ourselves as feminist. If it was possible for someone to become a feminist in the proper sense in the past, it seems that now being a feminist today requires dropping the “proper" in order to become.
While I cannot in any way claim to provide a proper methodology to come to know exactly what it is to be to be a feminist or what feminism itself is, I can give you a method that I think has worked for me. First, try to read something considered to be feminist that you think you disagree with or be in the world until you find something that you do. For me, this was de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Next, just sit with it for a while, go for a walk, maybe write something down. Try to find something in your experience of reading it that you did not think it could account for. For me, I felt it didn’t account for the ways in which my desire to be a woman in the world was something I had affirmatively chosen to take in. Next, let it sit again for a bit. Once you feel the opportunity to let it pop back up again organically, think about it for some more; write a paper about it or talk to a professor in office hours. Engage back with some of the work again, reevaluate where you stand on it. Go to a party, talk to a girl, have a good time, think about how you want to be with others. This may seem as though it’s going nowhere, but my point is as follows: there is no such thing as truly or truly not being something of an identity that exists because humans have ascribed meaning to a structure. We are not essentially feminist just as we are not essentially trans or essentially woman. Rather, all of these things are constructed frameworks we engage in relations with to find meaning, and just as in any relationship, we need to take the time to develop an understanding of what it means to be a part of them to truly be free in them.