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"If, as John Stuart Mill suggested, we tend to accept whatever is as natural, this is just as true in the realm of academic investigation as it is in our social arrangements. In the former, too, "natural" assumptions must be questioned and the mythic basis of much so-called fact brought to light...
It is the engaged feminist intellect (like John Stuart Mill's) that can pierce through the cultural-ideological limitations of the time and its specific "professionalism" to reveal biases and inadequacies not merely in dealing with the question of women, but in the very way of formulating the crucial questions of the discipline as a whole. Thus, the so-called woman question, far from being a minor, peripheral, and laughably provincial sub-issue grafted on to a serious, established discipline, can become a catalyst, an intellectual instrument, probing basic and "natural' assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning, and in turn providing links with paradigms established by radical approaches in other fields. Even a simple question like "Why have there been no great women artists?" can, if answered adequately, create a sort of chain reaction, expanding not merely to encompass the accepted assumptions of the single field, but outward to embrace history and the social sciences, or even psychology and literature, and thereby, from the outset, can challenge the assumption, that the traditional divisions of intellectual inquiry are still adequate to deal with the meaningful questions of our time, rather than the merely convenient or self-generated ones. Let us, for example, examine the implications of that perennial question (one can, of course, substitute almost any field of human endeavor, with appropriate changes in phrasing): "Well, if women really are equal to men, why have there never been any great women artists (or composers, or mathematicians, or philosophers, or so few of the same)? "Why have there been no great women artists?" The question tolls reproachfully in the background of most discussions of the so-called woman problem. But like so many other so-called questions involved in the feminist "controversy," it falsifies the nature of the issue at the same time that it insidiously supplies its own answer: "There have been no great women artists because women are incapable of greatness." The assumptions behind such a question are varied in range and sophistication, running anywhere from "scientifically proven" demonstrations of the inability of human beings with wombs rather than penises to create anything significant, to relatively open-minded wonderment that women, despite so many years of near-equality--and after all, a lot of men have had their disadvantages too-have still not achieved anything of exceptional significance in the visual arts. The feminist's first reaction is to swallow the bait, hook, line and sinker, and to attempt to answer the question as it is put: that is, to dig up examples of worthy or insufficiently appreciated women artists throughout history; to rehabilitate rather modest, if interesting and productive careers; to "rediscover" forgotten flower painters or David followers and make out a case for them; to demonstrate that Berthe Morisot was really less dependent upon Manet than one had been led to think-in other words, to engage in the normal activity of the specialist scholar who makes a case for the importance of his very own neglected or minor master. Such attempts, whether undertaken from a feminist point of view, like the ambitious article on women artists which appeared in the 1858 Westminster Review, or more recent scholarly studies on such artists as Angelica Kauffmann and Artemisia Gentileschi, are certainly worth the effort, both in adding to our knowledge of women's achievement and of art history generally. But they do nothing to question the assumptions lying behind the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" On the contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative implications... While the "woman problem" as such may be a pseudo-issue, the misconceptions involved in the question "Why have there been no great women artists?" points to major areas of intellectual obfuscation beyond the specific political and ideological issues involved in the subjection of women. Basic to the question are many naive, distorted, uncritical assumptions about the making of art in general, as well as the making of great art. These assumptions, conscious or unconscious, link such unlikely superstars as Michelangelo and van Gogh, Raphael and Jackson Pollock under the rubric of "Great"--an honorific--attested to by the number of scholarly monographs devoted to the artist in question--and the Great Artist is, of course, conceived of as one who has "Genius"; Genius, in turn, is thought of as an atemporal and mysterious power somehow embedded in the person of the Great Artist. Such ideas are related to unquestioned, often unconscious, meta-historical premises that make Hippolyte Taine's race-milieu-moment formulation of the dimensions of historical thought seem a model of sophistication. But these assumptions are intrinsic to a great deal of art-historical writing. It is no accident that the crucial question of the conditions generally productive of great art has so rarely been investigated, or that attempts to investigate such general problems have, until fairly recently, been dismissed as unscholarly, too broad, or the province of some other discipline, like sociology." Linda Nochlin, Why have there been no great women artists? "...the question is not to be taken at face value, but instead interrogated its assumptions...creativity is fostered through institutional and educational support, not a mysterious germ of genius or talent...reformulate the question in regard to another demographic: the aristocracy. She [Nochlin] argues that like women, aristocrats have not historically become great artists because the demands and expectations of their social position have 'made total devotion to professional art production out of the question.' Se argues that 'art making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and in the nature and quality of the work of art itself, occur in a social situation,' specifying a range of institutions and expectations including 'art academies, systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator, artist as he-man or social outcast.' For women, then, she sets out...: The fault lies not in the stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education - education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals." Catherine Grant, "Introduction," Why have there been no great women artists? by Linda Nochlin
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The central task of ethics is to ask: what is it for a human life to go well? The answer, I believe, is that living well means meeting the challenge set by three things: your capacities, the circumstances into which you were born, and the projects you yourself decide are important. Making a life, my friend the philosopher and legal scholar Ronald Dworkin once wrote, is "a performance that demands skill," and "is the most comprehensive and important challenge we face." But because each of us comes equipped with different talents and is born into different circumstances, and because people choose their own projects, each of us faces his or her own challenge, one that is, in the end, unique. So there is no sensible answer to the question of whether one person meets her challenge better than another...there is no comparative measure, no single scale of human worth. As a result, a system of selection for jobs and educational opportunities cannot be designed by considering who is most worthy of those opportunities, because,..., there isn't a single scale of merit on which to rank them. Indeed, because each of us faces a distinct challenge, what matters in the end is not how we rank against others at all. We do not need to find something we are best at; what is important is simply that we do our best. Each of us...has his own measure...to have a character is to be a "person whose desires and impulses are his own-are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture...'" And if you have a character, if you have your own measure, the most important stands you have to meet are distinctively yours.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies That Bind, pp. 177-8 Whitehead famously remarked, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." However, it might be more fitting to say that it has assembled an army of foot soldiers, waging battle on Plato's behalf against the Ionian natural philosophy.
Homeostasis as "corrective regulation" is "stability achieved through constancy" whereas allostasis as "predictive regulation" is "stability through change." ...the goal of regulation is not primarily to "defend" all parameters but rather to continuously match them for efficient performance. Allostasis: A clock predicts a cell's individual needs, plus its responsibilities to other cells over the course of the day, and guides metabolism to meet them in a timely fashion. Homeostasis: When needs change on a faster timescale, the clock's predictions may err and require prompt correction by feedback. Allostasis "predicts"; homeostasis "corrects." The key goal of physiological regulation is not rigid constancy, rather, it is flexible variation that anticipates the organism's needs and promptly meets them. The model clarifies why the brain should be in charge: it is simply more efficient to predict a need and satisfy it rather than to wait for an error and correct it. For this model of "predictive regulation" to challenge homeostasis it would need a name...we called it allostasis--meaning "stability through change." Whereas homeostasis tends to define "health" as a list of "appropriate" lab values and "disease" as "inappropriate" values, allostasis defines health as the capacity for adaptive variation and disease as a shrinkage or compression of that capacity. Therapeutically, homeostasis emphasizes drugs to clamp down on pesky glucose, blood lipids, and so on. These drugs tend to reduce the capacity for adaptive variation, whereas allostasis emphasizes the opposite, interventions that enhance the capacity for adaptive variation. The allostasis model defines health as the capacity to respond optimally to fluctuations in demand. The homeostasis model uses pharmacotherapy whereas the allostasis model uses system therapy. Pharmacotherapy typically tries to correct a specific parameter....System therapy tries to change the prediction. The goal is to reduce demand for long enough for the system to "believe" the new prediction and readapt. As responses drift back toward the initial mean, response range is maintained. Circuits that share the same receptors as the target circuit may also benefit. This is a "side effect" of system therapy--and it is a good one. The main elements of allostasis: i. Values are not constant but vary according to need (temperature varies diurnally, with stochastic pulses, with infection, and with exercise). ii. Needs are prioritized for urgency and opportunity (cooling vs. feeding), but flexibly, to be reprioritized as conditions change. iii. Control extends beyond the immediate need to coordinate trade-offs for future needs (cool now vs. conserve water and salt for what may come). iv. Each system serves multiple needs (kidney and its regulatory hormones serve fluid/osmotic balance but also serve thermoregulation). v. Control uses behavior to conserve resources (seek shade vs. sweating). vi. Learning improves prediction (don't eat in the heat; take a jacket to the mountains). vii. Anticipation prevents errors (seek water vs. rise in osmolarity). Peter Sterling, What is Health? MIT 2020 "...Every landscape bears the traces of this continuous and cumulative labour, generation after generation contributing to the whole. So doing, humanity itself has been transformed by what the French historian Jules Michelet called 'the decisive shaping of self by self, or (as Karl Marx put it) 'the production of people by people.'" (p.9)
"The stage on which humanity's endless dramas are played out partly determines their story-line and explains their nature. The cast will alter, but the set remains broadly the same." (p. 11) Regarding collective psychology: "Far more than the accidents or the historical and social circumstances of a period, it [collective psychology, awareness, mental equipment] derives from the distant past, from ancient beliefs, fears and anxieties which are almost unconscious - an immense contamination whose germs are lost to memory but transmitted from generation to generation." (p. 22) Ferdinand Braudel, A History of Civilizations |
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