The Revolution of Simone de Beauvoir

Philosophy seldom revolved around the field today known under the name of gender studies, but the concepts from which the idea of gender is built are as old as thinking itself. The first musings on the cosmos (Diels 1960: 105), an ordered whole characterised by harmony and proportion, were based on the division of opposites. Pythagoreans were said to have determined the ten principles (Aristotle 1991a, 11 [986a23–986b3]) classified into two columns of cognates: limited/unlimited, odd/even, single/plural, right/left, male/female, resting/moving, straight/curved, light/darkness, good/bad, square/oblong. First principles are constitutive for the functioning of the cosmos: nature is ordered (physei) and the social world of norms is legislated (nomoi) in line with them.

Thus, from the very beginning of philosophical thinking, the male/female couple was given a particular position in thought itself. In that couple, the female was one half of the dyad which, although in abso-lute terms necessary for order and harmony, represented the ‘dark side’. For the Greeks, this was confirmed not only by the nexus of badness and femaleness, but also by the link between the female and disconcerting indeterminacy (plurality, the absence of limit, purposeless movement without rest). Aristotle developed this distribution of being further, by allocating form and matter oppositionally: ‘The body is from the female […] the soul is from the male’ (Aristotle 1991b, 45 [738b]). The female provides the material, the male fashions it; the male is characterised by activity, the female by passivity, its ontological function being a mere reception of form; the male is distinguished by the capacity to produce, to create something new out of itself, the female by non-productivity, incapacity, sluggishness. Both sides are necessary, for without them there would be no life, but in the order of things their positions are unequal, reflecting the asymmetry of form and matter, soul and body. On the basis of this, it is also possible to think and justify the ‘natural’ configuration of the political community, because it is supposed to reflect the harmonious configuration of the cosmos: ‘for the soul rules the body with the rule of a master, whereas understanding rules desire with the rule of the statesman or with the rule of the king […] Moreover, the relation of male to female is that of natural superior to natural inferior, and that of ruler to ruled’ (Aristotle 1991c, 8 [1254b5–15]).