Science, Medicine, and Myth
Views of male and female in Aristotle
Aristotle 384-322 B.C.
(1) Relationships among intellectual disciplines: today we speak confidently of the divisions between such topics as myth, religion, philosophy, science. Is our confidence justified? History of this division in early Greece. Aristotle as one of the principal figures in the blossoming of "scientific thought"
(2) Case history in the mythology (read: traditional societal beliefs, often prejudicial) that can underlie scientific thought: Aristotle's attitudes towards women. "Woman is a deformed male." "Woman is, asa it were, an infertile male." "The female, in fact, is a female on account of an inability of a sort." But such attitudes were the social norm. What is special about Aristotle is the way he assimilates these prejudices into a scientific system, a system which is in many respects rather convincing on its own terms.
(3) If Aristotle can manipulate "facts" and "observations" to support his prejudices, what about science and social science today? What are we doing that is so fundamentally different? To what degree does it remain possible to disguise mistaken observation as "factual data", to disguise arguments based on prejudicial assumptions as "compelling logic," to extrapolate broad conclusions from a very few examples, or to base a "model of behavior" on a dubious analogy from the natural world?
Background: Presocratics: Empedocles (e.g.) "In the right boys, in the left girls." "For in the warmer part was the male portion"; and when the semen enters the woman, "those grow as women when they meet with cold" [and men when they meet with warmth". The old mythological tradition:
male = sky, light, heat, active, "generator"
female = earth, darkness, cold, passive, "that which generates within itself"
Aristotle: the mode of discourse is strikingly different. No appeal to gods (no Love and Strife), no myths (cf. Plato), no quotes from Homer and Hesiod. He relies unrelentingly on fact, logic, empirical principles. Aristotle's interest in gathering data remarkable: he and his pupils were the first to try to gather systematically biological data from observation of the natural world. [but not human corpses]
Systematic approach: Nature makes nothing in vain. From development of literary genres to the classification of biological species, Aristotle insists on his profound belief that all is fundamentally orderly, structured, balanced, and that all tended towards completion, perfection, the end (telos) which Nature intended. ["teleological"]
Aristotle: today a conservative, but in his time a radical. For instance: at a time when biological knowledge was limited to the received wisdom of rustics, he and his pupils built up an enormous collection of very detailed observations on the natural species, evidence which he then assembled into grand systematic schemes of kingdoms, families, genera, species. Hierarchical system of classification. Similarly with Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics, Rhetoric, and the study of literature and language. Very influential.
But now to the case history, women and the generation of people: A's "discovery" that semen and menses are essentially one and the same thing in two differing forms, and that while both contribute to the generation of people, the passive woman is the recipient, the one with the material that the active man actuates,the material which the man then lends the impetus (the dynamis) to begin growing into a fetus. What is this "solution" all about?
Underlying assumptions & background:
Hot = stronger = more active = superior = more complex
Cold = wearker = less active = inferior = less complex
[Evidence: empirical observation. Compare mammal with fishes, fishes with plants. Hierarchy of the plant & animal kingdom, with humans on top. Reliance on heat and its associations.]
Woman have by nature less heat than men. [empirical or mythological?]
Digestion: food and drink formed through "concoction" (=cooking down) into blood, and from blood into further concoction, further cooking down, into stuff like flesh, hair, bone, etc.
Semen = the "seed" from which an embryo forms. That there is only one "seminal fluid" in a species A. takes to be self-evident
The solution itself
Semen = fully concocted genital blood, from hot men
Menses = not quite fully concocted genital blood, from cold women
[Empirical evidence: that they are the same is shown by the example of puberty: semen appears in boys at the same time as the menstrual flow begins in women; and by old age: power to generate in men disappears just as the menstrual discharge in women disappears]
Women cannot "cook down" the blood fully: they are thus imperfect, or infertile males
Orgasmic fluids have nothing to do with it: no seminal fluid here!
[Evidence: (1) secretion flows away from the womb, (2) only some women have orgasms, (3) orgasm dependent on appearance and diet]
Male gives form, female gives material [carpenter analogy]
Rhetoric of Science deployed by Aristotle
Sense of authority by means of logical divisions, and a well-organized "scientific" argument
Appeal to "facts"
Appeal to "analogy"
Observation from the rest of the natural world
Once logic and empirical observations have been satisfied, we can be sure that the correct conclusion has been reached