Accessible Philosophy

Although part of Regan Penaluna’s book How To Think Like A Woman is a memoir about how she was systematically excluded from the academic philosophy world, the good news is that her outsider status led her to write a book on philosophy, in accessible, non-academic language. It explains the thinking of four women philosophers from the British Enlightenment era, at least three of whom were also excluded in their time, and all but forgotten. Penaluna will do more with this book—rather than publishing in academic journals—to inspire a love of philosophy in women, young and old, perhaps even guys like me. I wish I’d had a philosophy professor like Penaluna back in college. I might’ve remained a philosophy major instead of jumping over to the English department.

Penaluna weaves at least three threads through How To Think Like A Woman. The first is her feeling of being excluded from the closed world of academic philosophy, through her undergrad studies on to getting her PhD. The second is her personal life at this time, of meeting, falling in love with a fellow lover of wisdom, marrying him, and her growing doubts about him, herself, and marriage in general. The third follows her exploration of the four women philosophers: Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft. They all end up helping Penaluna navigate her questions and doubts about her life, which is exactly what philosophy is supposed to do.

Penaluna first establishes the basic biography of her younger years, with her interest in religion, and experience meeting older women who were strong independent thinkers, all leading to her interest in studying philosophy in college. She gives a brief overview of famous male philosophers and their attitudes towards women. Which are not good. The only surprise is her thumbs up for Nietzsche, though I agree with her that his writings on women are more on the ironic, if sardonic, side.

After that, each chapter of How To Think Like A Woman starts with an autobiographical roadblock Penaluna faces in her academic and/or personal life, leading to how one of the four philosophers went through the same thing, and how they dealt with that problem which can, or sometimes can’t, be applied to her own life. She sounds most like Montaigne, who she’s very familiar with. Like Montaigne, she she’s exploring and pondering, while also offering herself as a role model—she’s not just studying philosophy, she’s living it.

For example, Mary Astell is an independent young woman whose family is down on its luck. She decides to move to London and make a living as a writer-philosopher. With some patronage, Astell does make a decent living. Her first ideas revolve around how all people could and should study philosophy to be good people and live good lives. Not uncommon back then for men to think that, and for men to want to do that. But women were expected to just get married. That or become nuns, and as Penaluna points out, nunneries were more scarce with the Protestant Reformation going on in England at this time.

What resonates with Penaluna even more is Astell’s argument that young women need a place of their own, isolated from men, so that they won’t feel any shame or discouragement, or even harassment. “[H]er core message was rare: educate women so they can pursue personal happiness and contribute to society.” 

Part of the problem, as Astell saw it, was women didn’t view themselves as reasonable creatures or in need of rigorous training. Instead, they preferred to spend their time doing frivolous things, like reading romances and plays. This bothered her. ‘How can she be furnished with any solid Principles whose very Instructors are Froth and emptiness?’ And as for women who cared too much about French fashion, she recommended they learn to appreciate French philosophy as well. Critical judgements like these were common for Astell, but she was not a snob. She was hard on women because she believed them worth more than a life devoted to beauty practices. “To Imagine that out Souls were given us only for the service of our Bodies, and that the best improvement we can make of these, is to attract the eyes of men. We value them too much, and our selves too little, if we place any part of our worth in their Opinion...’

...To follow the commands of someone else was to be not truly free. A person must earn her own path to salvation. But Astell argued that women lived as if they were only matter in motion, as if they were just ‘Machins’ devoid of mind.

One can see how Astell’s arguments here could be used as a form of class consciousness, and apply to men as well: How many men and women nowadays don’t view themselves as reasonable creatures (that is, who use reason/logic) and how many men and women “spend their time doing frivolous things”

Astell tried out her ideas by—again with the patronage of a rich widow—starting a school for young women. It didn’t work out, but did later influence Virginia Woolf’s idea of a woman needing a “room of one’s own.” Penaluna has a room of her own, mostly, but likes the idea of a school (in this case a graduate school) where women could study, freely, without having to worry about pleasing men, and where Penaluna could find a female mentor to help her navigate her own writing and thinking.

With divorce rates in the U.S up to around 60 percent, from women who don’t study philosophy, I figured that Penaluna’s narrative thread about her marriage wouldn’t end well. Wollstonecraft was famous in her time (and still now) for her A Vindication of the Rights of Women, though she may be more well known as the mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. With Vindication, no woman in her right mind is going to think marriage is a good idea. 

Penaluna quotes Wollstonecraft in her book:

Men have too much occupied the thoughts of women; and this association has so entangled love with all their motives of action; and, to harp a little on an old string, having been solely employed either to prepare themselves to excite love, or actually putting their lessons in practice, they cannot live without love.

Wollstonecraft couldn’t, and didn’t want to. She liked sex, liked men, and liked sex with men. She got married, though more to avoid scandal than anything. Thinking like a woman, thus, for Penaluna and all these women philosophers, is double-layered: to explore a love of wisdom, to live a good life, women first—and continually—must first think about how and why men/society/the system prevent women from thinking for themselves, and by themselves.

Regan Penaluna joins a small group of philosophers who’ve taken their knowledge to the masses in recent decades: Slavoj Žižek; Marcus Willaschek (whose book on Kant I recently reviewed for Splice Today); and especially Sarah Bakewell, whose two books How To Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer and At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails are filled with wit and wisdom. Penaluna goes a bit further by adding more of her personal life into the mix, which to her is the only way to write (and think) about philosophy. This is how philosophy should be written about: accessible and understandable to everyone.