Poetic Transcendence and the Way of Woman

A single, overtly innocuous question has recently become one of the loudest signs of our times: “What is a Woman?” Nationwide clamor was triggered by the question being asked in a legal setting by a pro-life conservative senator to a pro-choice SCOTUS nominee.  The judge abstained from answering, under the pretext that she was no biologist.  To be more precise, the judge refused to define “woman.”

The clamor triggered by the senator’s question signals the polarization of America, a conflict between extreme views.  Here’s for a rough sketch of the conflict: on one side we find people claiming that womanhood is a conventionally fluid notion; on the other side we find people claiming that womanhood is simply and unequivocally defined by Nature and/or God (speaking most notably in/through the Bible).  While it does not take more than a little grain of disinterested reflection to realize that both parties are, strictly speaking, wrong, the extremes do leave the door wide open to mediation, a moderating pivot such as the one proposed here.

Is it possible to define “woman” in a non-fluid manner?  Yes.  Does it make sense to reduce “woman” to her definition, that is to use a definition to silence reflection on the meaning of womanhood?  Of course (pace Stalinists), not.  So where do we go from here?  A slightly-demanding parenthesis on “definition” is timely.  What is a definition?  Can we define definition?  What does it mean to define definition?

Such questions are no mere quibbles for sophists, but indicators of the primacy of dialogue over definitions.  Definitions are “defined”—settled—in the context of a discourse, of a dialogue.  Definitions, legal entities when taken seriously, emerge in an ethical, “oral” irreducible context.  But is this not to say that all definitions are “fluid”?  Not if dialogue has its own principles.  How are we to understand such principles?  Are they mere formal-Kantian (transcendental) structures, conceptual parameters allowing us to formulate definitions in the light of the ends (ideals) in which the human being/will projects itself when left doing so “autonomously”?  Or are the principles of dialogue to be understood Platonically in terms of a substantive world of things themselves (the res ipsae that Kant extradited as synthetic a-priori’s) as original context of experience?  The crisis of modern rationalism, or modern rationalism’s reduction to pragmatism (via neo-Kantianism or logical positivism), tips the balance in favor of Platonism. If the fundamental limits of dialogue are not defined pragmatically and hence fluidly by mere experience, but by the permanent context of experience itself, then definitions need not be fluid, even as they are not self-evidently or unequivocally arrived at.  Definitions will be, in other words, products of well-rooted art, rather than of poorly rooted science (in the Cartesian-clinical sense of the term).  To wit, when asking “what is a woman?” we will be well advised to seek an answer, not in a biochemical lab, but in dialogue with a woman, a dialogue that we may partake in by reading a good novel, rather than a tome of clinical statistics.  Now, dialogue is understood here as an art well-grounded in the fullness of reality, which is never limited to our experience of reality, even as experience entails our participation in the fulness of reality.

The proper context of definitions tells us what definitions are about, what we define for.  Properly speaking, to define is not to fit reality in a grid, to reduce the real to a formula thereof, but to orient our experience towards its proper end—the experience of a woman towards the woman herself, the experience of a cat towards the cat itself, the experience of the sky towards the sky itself, etc.  That is why scientific definitions may work for machines but not for us.  What works for us is a definition orienting, guiding our experience, keeping our experience on track, lest it become alienated from its proper subject matter (its proper referent).

When the SCOTUS nominee refused to answer the question, “what is a woman?” by deferring to the authority of expert “biologists,” she was de facto pretending that the question of womanhood is primarily a “scientific” one, one entailing the limitation of womanhood to the strictures of a grid of strict quantifications.  In short, the nominee was being a narrowminded literalist, or a pedant.  Had she not been, she would have readily realized that in defining womanhood she would and should have been providing an indication of what a woman is.  An indication, a pointer as a reasonable way of speaking of women as such, where what is reasonable is never to use a definition as means to “control” the woman, to nail her to a slot on a grid of domination.

What is a definition supposed to “do,” if not nail us to a system of demands and expectations?  The fundamental alternative is about freeing us from any such system—to show that, far from being mere “physical” determinations (no matter how fluid) individualized by our society or the Regime presiding over it, we are modes or ways of bridging the hiatus between physical determination and divine indetermination—between the contents of our experience and the context of our empirical universe; between appearances (no matter how microscopic) and Reality.

Let us return to our original question: “what is a woman?” What is the way of the woman?  In what way does the woman bridge the hiatus between her physical appearance and her divine perfection?  How do we define the way of the woman?  In some respect, any definition must abstract from the real, from a living way.  How can a definition do justice to a living way, to life itself?  Obviously, every woman has an indefinite dimension that no definition can “grasp”.  Yet, is that what definitions are meant to achieve?  We all “know” what a woman is in the sense that she has her “way,” which, strictly speaking, eludes all definitions.  What “makes” a woman is not genitalia (strip those off and you still have a woman’s nature, just as a human being retains his humanity even with amputations).  A woman is her way of being, which a legal definition can and ought to point to, without expecting to reduce the moon to the finger pointing to it.  The proper definition pays homage to its subject matter and so a definition, too, has its way of being, the way of showing by focusing, by targeting, in response to a call: that which we define calls us to name it and in naming do justice to the dignity of the caller.  “Woman,” too, deserves her definition, her legal representation, her poetic face, precisely lest women be abused, reduced to what is not a woman, including any “gender-fluid entity.”

What sort of will would deny a woman a disinterested or fair legal representation?  A tyrannical one, such as the one trapped in the modern dichotomy between value-free nature (res extensa) and “legal” impositions.  But now, how are we to do justice to “Woman”?  By speaking of her in relation to her divine perfection as well as to her male counterpart.  This is where the appeal to the Bible is commendable.  Surely a woman occupies the seat of one of two complimentary sexes/genders (notably, in its adult guise) characterizing the human being, the Adam of Genesis 1.[1] What the Bible offers us is an account of “Woman”—a poetic definition, which is to say the true way of defining.  For not all ways of defining are the true way.  There are ways of defining “Woman” that point away from her uniqueness, her throne, the “seat” she occupies by nature—not within the immanentistic grid of the secular society and the “evolutionary forces” it posits to justify its own rise, but within a divine mind, which entails the transcendent perfection of Woman.  There is a radical difference between the secular context in which modern discourse seeks to grasp—and yes, control—women, and the divine context in which classical discourse lets go of women, the context in which alone women are truly unfettered.  What a good, poetic definition “does,” is not keep women away from their divine perfection, not alienate them from their seat “in the mind of God”; that is what bad or unpoetic definitions do, all the more where they are taken seriously, as laws.

By limiting reality to the empirical, the dominant pragmatic discourse of our times has alienated us—both women and men, to be sure—from our place in the context of divine perfection, or in a World (mundum/κόσμος) where all things are divinely intelligible, not, again, by being “grasped and controlled” by some authoritarian master, but by being graciously called, invited to partake fully (without the slightest hesitation) in the perfection of their context, of their caller-into-being.  How are we to respond to our original calling?  That is what we are here to figure out, piously, listening—primarily to what speaks behind the curtain of noise surrounding us, daily—in dialogue with our teachers, our parents, our ancestors, our companions, our friends and even, yes even, when the dialogue becomes a war among enemies.

Returning to our legal setting, should we expect judges judging women to be ready at any given moment to define “Woman,” that is to speak about women in a sensible way, to speak of them in bearing witness to their role in God’s mind?  But who knows God’s mind?  The good news for Christians is that good definitions do not presuppose any knowledge of God’s mind.  They merely presuppose trust in it: fides, or faith, openness to the irreducible wealth of meaning to which we—all women, included—are destined: a transcendent context, a divine order of things that does not annihilate, but confirm our specific—but also gender-relative—ways of rising into it (and back out of it, for that matter).  Law should seek to do justice to our ways, against the grain of all attempts to “relativize” them and so to alienate them, to cut them off from divine perfection.  But what binds us in all evidence to divine perfection, including our own?  Clearly our inheritance, our debt towards our predecessors and our brothers and sisters.  What makes us metaphysically significant in this life is our ethical fiber.  It behooves judges, then, to define women (and men, to be sure) in the light of our inheritance as a civilization, rather than bind them to the dictates of fashions, ideological or otherwise.

Good judges are not expected to be all knowing, but to recognize that their ignorance—our human ignorance—is not an obstacle to the art of definition, but precisely what makes good definitions at once possible and precious.

NOTE:

[1] Far from providing any exact, or final account of womanhood, the present discussion limits itself to moderating two “extremist” approaches to the question of definition as it pertains to “Woman”.  No proper definition of “Woman” renders expendable commonsense recognition of women and the challenge of maturing an intimate appreciation of (living) womanhood.

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