299

THE SAME AND THE DIFFERENT: PLURALISM AND THE THEORY OF WOMEN’S STUDIES

Andrew Kaplan

English Department Francis W. Parker School

Questions of gender, race, and class in American education raise issues of fundamental social policy as well as curricular design. While we have come to see education as a fundamental birthright, we are not at all clear about the nature and extent of that education. If separate is not equal, then how can we begin to establish the integrity of an education that all Americans ought to expect? On the other hand, even those who favor the establishment of a “national curriculum” have difficulty with the rich diversity of American culture. If multiculturalism is the basic fact of American identity, then how can American education celebrate that diversity as a source of strength and coherence? Dogmatic answers for all our educational prob- lems have the advantage of initial clarity, but they suffer from superficiality. In what ways and to what end are we the same as Americans? In what ways and to what end are we different? Understanding sameness and difference can help us raise questions that are as fundamental as they are complex. Instead of dogmatic and simplistic answers, we need to restore to American public life a respect for lively and intelligent debate of educational issues, a respect for teachers as transforming intellectuals. In the words of Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Giroux, ”Teachers need to provide models of leadership that offer the promise of reforming schools as part of the wider revitalization of public life.”’ But how do we learn to talk with each other and respect our differences in the development of such a debate unless we already agree in some basic way about the nature and conduct of that debate?

We need to delineate important issues as well as learn how to talk meaningfully with each other. While the discovery of difference enriches the fabric of our social life, advocates of radical disjuncture and discontinuity turn self-defeating when they claim that no significant communication is possible across the differences. Ours is not the first age in which women and men have thrown up their hands in despair at ever settling disputes among so many different beliefs. One counsel of despair is to hold that all opinions are equally valuable, which turns the fact of plurality into the hopeless mush of relativism, where “no agreed principles are evident which may render any form of life impermissible.“z We have only to remember what Ivan Karamazov made out of a universe in which “everything is permitted.” Another retreat from the difficulties of communication reduces all problems of the same and

1. Stanley Aronowitz and Henry Girow, Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism IMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 19911, 109. 2. Zygmunt Bauman, “Strangers: The Social Construction of Universality and Particularity,” Telos 28 (1988-1989): 40.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Summer 1992 /Volume 42 / Number 3 0 1992 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois

300 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y SUMMER 1992 1 VOLUME 42 NUMBER 3

the different to issues of power and domination, denying the possibility of a common language because all language exploits some on behalf of others? Although oppres- sion continues to play a large part in our collective life, language has the power to liberate as well as to dominate. Limiting the power of language to exploitation bankrupts the prospect of change, paralyzes any development of common enterprise, and ultimately denies the value of education as an agency of transformation and renewal.

While the nature of difference has led some to despair that meaningful commu- nication is possible, others have come to view difference as an invitation to create new connections on new terms:

There is no reason to assume that dialogue across differences involves either eliminating those differences or imposing one group’s views on others; dialogue that leads to understanding, cooperation, and accommodation can sustain differences within a broader compact of toleration and respect. Thus what we need is not an antimodern denial of community, but a postmodem grounding of community on more flexible and less homogeneous assumptions.‘

Nicholas C. Burbules and Suzanne Rice have argued for the development of “com- municative virtues” that will assure a rational, tolerant ground for educational dialogue. They argue that dialogue may range from complete agreement to absolute difference, but that in any case the attempt to understand, even when it leads to misunderstanding, always advances the communicative Their argument reestablishes the virtues of the humanist tradition, but beyond the endorsement of certain attitudes or dispositions, communication and community require the more philosophically rigorous search for methods of inquiry that will help us verify what we understand of the same or the different and discourse effectively about that understanding. From the acknowledgement of plurality, the social fact that there are other minds, we need to shift our attention to pluralism, the philosophic awareness that truth may be adequately conceived and presented in a variety of modes.6

If we take the fact of plural identities and perspectives seriously as a philosophi- cal problem, we can begin to see how pluralism as a philosophic principle helps us negotiate difference and recognize sameness, creatingnew opportunities for dialogue and effective action. Beyond acknowledging the existence of divergent approaches and opinions, philosophic pluralism provides a systematic rigor for the discussion of difference. Philosophic pluralism uncovers suggestive inconsistencies and produc- tive ambiguities in the connection of statements and their respective principles with statements and principles from a wider range of subjects. These connections draw

3. Maria C. Lugones andElizabeth V. Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for ‘The Women’s Voice,”’ Women’s Studies International Forum 6, no. 6 11983): 575. 4. Nicholas C. Burbules and Suzanne Rice, ”Dialogue Across Differences: Continuing the Conversation,” Harvard Educational Review 61, no. 4 (November 1Y91): 402 [italics in original], 5. Burbules and Rice, ”Dialogue Across Differences,” 409. 6. Walter Watson, “Types of Pluralism,” The Monist 73 11990): 350.

ANDREW KAPLAN is English Department Chair at the Francis W. Parker School, 330 Webster Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614. His primary areas of scholarship are the rhetoric of autobiography, Women’s Studies, the traditions and transformations of the liberal arts, and the iconography of the mythological tradition.

KAPLAN The Same and the Different 301

together the modes of thought that are common to otherwise disparate inquiries, helping us understand the arts and methods that establish truth. Preserving the integrity of different methods, philosophic pluralism discovers the ways in which the range of discourse helps us understand the full import of any systematic account. Instead of suggesting that difference is a hazard or obstacle to final answers, philosophic pluralism views the different modes of thought as supplementary. Together, the modes of thought exhaust the possible ways in which we may raise and resolve any significant question. Any systematic account of such a question makes one mode of thought dominant but includes the issues and concerns of the other modes in a subordinate position. Rather than reducing philosophical inquiry to dogmatic solutions, pluralism helps us take advantage of the multiple forms that satisfying solutions may take.

As a semantic device, philosophic pluralism enables us to understand the views of others on their own terms.‘ As a heuristic device, philosophic pluralism permits us to survey the similarities and differences among many views as those views participate in an exhaustive array of possible positions.8 As a focus for inquiry, philosophic pluralism develops arts of systematic connection that permit us to take full advantage of the history of current issues, discovering unexpected similarities among apparently discordant positions and helping us see the distinctive features of the present against the full background of historical significance. As an example of the workings of philosophic pluralism, I offer the following analysis of the theory of Women’s Studies. I want to contribute to the revitalization of intellectual life that Giroux has called for by examining the significance of Women’s Studies in the curriculum, suggesting that beyond the radical differences that Women’s Studies presents, there are overarching connections and even some striking similarities between current problems and the intellectual traditions of the past.

My thesis is that the great power of Women’s Studies lies in its capacity to break down the artificial barriers that so often constrain academic subjects, creating the , grounds for a new conversation that liberates and humanizes theparticipatingvoices and positions. The method of philosophic pluralism enables us to explore and take advantage of this great power by suggesting that Women’s Studes is not just a new subject to add to the existing curriculum: it is rather a theme that cuts across, connects, and reconstructs all subjects. As a theme, Women’s Studies provides profound resources for a pluralistic revaluation of the nature of character. Women’s Studies helps us understand that character is not an object or image to be shaped or reproduced according to arbitrary rules but a dynamic interaction between intelli- gence and circumstance, an interaction that is inescapably plural in nature.

7. Walter Watson has developed what he calls “archic profiles” that help us understand the ways in which authors select and employ “starting points for the constitution of meaning” from a matrix of possible starting points. See The Architectonics of Meaning: Foundations of the New Pluralism {Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 150-51.

8. See for example Richard McKeon’s discussion of freedom as a philosophic theme in “Philosophic Semantics and Philosophic Inquiry,“ in Freedom and History and Other Essays: An introduction to the Thought of Richard McKeon [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19901, 242-56.

302 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y SUMMER 1992 1 VOLUME 42 / NUMBER 3

One of the hallmarks of feminist theory has been the discovery that the personal is political. What few liberating tendencies there have been in American life over the past twenty years attest to the power of this linkage. But the extension of feminism into curriculum theory and practice requires a shift in focus, I believe. While the study of women’s past helps us understand the dynamics of oppression and exploi- tation that are central to our heritage, such study empowers women in a manner that often serves to inflame rather than include much of the entrenched (mostly male) conservativism. The dynamic of political liberation encounters the inertia of the status quo, with the result that accusations of proselytizing and indoctrination drown out concerns for gender and racial equity in the curriculum. I propose a shift in focus. A desire for liberation and self-realization encounters a desire to protect the freedom and privilege of the past. We need to discover ways in which the discourse of self and other that has revealed so much about the systematic exclusion of women can now help us understand how the inclusion of women’s discourse leads to ways of knowing, thinking, and acting that delineate opportunities for all human beings.

Beyond political concerns for representation and equity, in other words, I suggest that we consider the personal as it intersects the philosophical. In addition to political and social action, we need to consider in what ways the particular problems and paradoxes of our time reflect problems and paradoxes that human beings have always faced. While much of contemporary liberation discourse has focused on radical discontinuities, I am suggesting that we seek for new philosophic foundations by inquiring into the continuity and inclusiveness of present paradoxes and prob- lems. By saying that the personal is philosophical, I want to call attention to the ways in which the relation of knowledge to action has always been conceived as a problem of forming and reflecting upon personal character. The self is both the creator of values and the creature of values: we give value to things by desiring them, but our character grows precisely as we come to value good things. Paradoxically, each person judges the value of all things and exercises the right to that judgment as a member of some community. Our inmost being derives from self-knowledge, but we develop a sense of character only through action. Character is both the cause and the product of our actions.9

In the light of these long-standing problems and paradoxes, it comes as no surprise that the present discourse of self and other is so beset by ambiguity. Feminism and other liberation movements have opened up the personal circum- stances for growth, but we often find ourselves responding to the prospect of limitless potential with anxiety about establishing a firm or unassailable beginning point for the journey. We can identify a heritage of struggle and survival against oppression, but that heritage may also make us despair that we are lost in conformities or alienations that leave the self no definable options. One way to counter despair and discover options lies in consulting the ways that philosophy has encountered the

9. Richard McKeon, “Love, Self, and Contemporary Culture,” in East-West Studies on the Problem of the Self: Papers Presented at the Conference on Comparative Philosophy and Culture Held at the College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, April22-24,1965, ed. P. T. Rajuand Albury Castell (TheHague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 14.

KAPLAN The Same and the Different 303

problems of self-knowledge and action in the past. Without compromising our sense of uniqueness in the present, consulting the past may reveal some ways of construct- ing a dialogue between self and other, between those included and those excluded, between the same and the different.

Our contemporary discussions of relations between human beings feature many more voices than in ancient times, but we face a similar question about the possibility of speaking, listening, and searching for the truth. How is it possible to participate in heated exchanges about vital matters and at the same time to judge the truth of the many positions propounded? At the ancient dinner at Agathon's house in Plato's Symposium, there were many great speakers, and even the drunken Alcibiades was eloquent in his extremity. Our current speakers are no less gifted, and often no less intemperate. We again find ourselves in circumstances that require some reflection on the method and purpose of conversation. The circumstances I am pointing to are the considerations of the same and the different. Just as the Sophists would have enjoined all dialogue by striving to compete rather than to contribute, so our current debates contain sparkling but discordant views that appear irreconcilable with all others. Of course, our modern dialogue is not managed by Plato, and there is no Socrates to suggest an inclusive basis for all our inquiries. In fact, we would reject as artificial any such inclusive basis. We need instead to find ways of negotiating our differences without sacrificing the uniqueness of our circumstances and the distinct approaches and assumptions that mark current disputes. As with earlier considerations of the same and the different, we need to reflect on the possibility of truthful communication with others as a problem of love.

In the long history of discussions of love, we might regard the broad differences in starting points and emphases as conditions promoting disagreement or as condi- tions promoting inclusive dialogue.1° While many of the ancient Greeks were concerned with love as an attraction between things (whether objects or persons), the medieval concern with God's love for human beings focused many discussions on charitas rather than eros. In the modem dispensation, discussions of love are concerned with the connection of one human being with another, focusing on what the Greeks would have called philia. While Hellenistic and later writers introduced the idea of set speeches and elaborate festive dinners to the original drinking party," the modern concern is not so much to eat together as to live together. In a semantic age such as our own, the best way to promote a capacity for living together is to

10. I am suggesting here the broad outline of a history of the symposium as it has figured in the design of collective discourse about commonproblems. The generalizations I offer in this paragraph do not substitute for a much more careful articulation of the subtleties and nuances of the symposium as an element in the history of ideas, but here I am only trying to suggest the inclusive problems that a symposium addresses. If the examples seem too insubstantially argued, I can only defend them as provocative illustrations. Unfortunately, Iknow of no scholarly study of the symposium to support the contentions I am making here. The beginnings of such a history may be found in Sympotica: A Symposium on The Symposion, ed. Oswyn Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); see also Oswyn Murray, "The Symposion in History," in Tria Cordu: Scritti in onore didrnuldo Momigliano, ed. Emilio Gabba (Como: Edizioni New Press, 1983), 257- 72.

11. Lise Bek, "Questions Conviviales: The Idea of the Triclinium and the Staging of Convivial Ceremony from Rome to Byzantium," Analecta Romana 12 (1983): 81-107.

304 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y SUMMER 1992 / VOLUME 42 1 NUMBER 3

understand first and foremost what others have said and done. When we talk about love, we should be keenly aware of the ways in which men and women have talked about love in our own age as well as in the past. Part of our ability to live together is our capacity to understand and live with difference. Yet the modern symposium, like all others that have preceded it, must determine whether those differences are mutually exclusive or mutually reinforcing. If fundamental disagreements resolve difference into mutually exclusive beginning points, we cannot bridge the gaps between principled positions.I2 If, on the other hand, fundamental disagreements resolve difference into mutually reinforcing attempts to address common issues, then we need to find ways to comprehend that mutual reinforcement, ways that will preserve the inherent differences rather than overlook or diminish them. We need, as I will argue, a philosophic pluralism to uncover and make full use of the same and the different in contemporary discourse.

When Richard McKeon surveyed the various approaches to the theme of love, he concluded that we needlessly frustrate ourselves when we try to find ultimate resolutions and final answers. McKeon characterized our distinctive modern con- cern with love as a search for community bonds and cultural values. He felt that "all the past constructions of love have been adapted to the problems of a society transformed by science and technol~gy."'~

McKeon showed how our modem efforts to preserve information, to popularize even the most obscure theories, and to coordinate discoveries in diverse fields create new dangers of annihilation and new opportunities for cooperative action. This transformation takes on the language and methods of previous discussions: love is desire, whether for a person or for the good things of life; love is a struggle between antagonistic, elemental forces in our nature; or love is fundamentally of two kinds, one lawless, the other divine. Our social concerns with living together sometimes make philia a battleground rather than a party, arguing as we do that a certain way of loving or a certain aspect of love is essential (or quintessential):

This modem symposium, like many ancient symposia, might lead to a brawl, even without benefit of wine, if our problem required the resolution of the differences of these conceptions of loves. The question is not which is fundamental - subconscious drive, individual desire, community bond, or transcendent attraction - for they can all be explained on theories of sexual love or religious inspiration, of fundamental urges or social influences.'"

Each of the different fundamental conceptions of love has been a beginning point for the systematic discussion of love; each of these conceptions can explain all the

12. The finality of disagreement characterizes the skeptical view of philosophy, which denies the existence of any oneness behind or beyond inveterate differences. Even a pluralistic view of systematic philosophy, as so many closed systems of thought, rejects significant communication between systems. This is a kind of glubal pluralism that Amelie Rorty finds helpful only in asserting its exclusive ability to map differences. See Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, "Varieties of Pluralism in a Polyphonic Society," Review of Metaphysics 44 [September 1990): 4-5. While Rorty names McKeon as one such pluralist, I try to show in this article that McKeon's view of philosophic disagreement leads to "significant communication" in the presentation and elaboration of themes. 13. Richard McKeon, "Love and Philosophical Analysis," in Thought, Action, and Passion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 19541, 48. 14. Ibid., 50.

KAPLAN The Same and the Different 305

others. Rather than reducing love to one conception, McKeon argued that each conception is true and that what we need, therefore, is a method for understanding the differences and oppositions of the present as well as the past.

The method by which we come to understand differences on their own terms is philosophic pluralism. Rather than being a doctrine, philosophic pluralism recog- nizes the multiple ways in which positions derive from stated or unstated principles. Instead of searching for the grounds of ultimate agreement among philosophic positions in some underlying truth or eclectic combination, pluralism recognizes the disagreement as fundamental. All beliefs and even all facts ultimately rest on fundamental assertions or beginnings. If we pursue the nature of those foundations far enough, that is, if we make them philosophic, we discover that these beginning points are irreducibly many, not one. Systematic beginnings or principles are only refutable outside of their own systems. A beginning or principle holds philosophic priority over all statements or assumptions, but there is more than one such priority.

Rather than seeking for the errors in other formulations, however, the pluralist searches for the ways in which a different approach or method might be true: as Walter Watson says, the pluralist searches for the ways in which different principles are reciprocally prior.15 If philosophic disagreement is ineluctable, our principal task is to distinguish between two broad categories or modes of conflict and dispute: we need to discriminate the meaningful from the meaningless. As Wayne Booth has pointed out, the assumption that conflicts have meaning necessarily entails a pluralistic view, for without even the most "common-sense, untheoretical plural- ism, " communication would be impossible:

I could not publish (or speak aloud) even the simplest statement about a poem without rejecting utter skepticism and, along with it, the kind of dogmatic monism that sees a simple single statement as self-evident and self-sufficient. To write -or at least to publish -is to grant the necessity of exchange, and to begin an exchange is to acknowledge [though most authors may balance this acknowledgement against the faint hope that the whole world will shout a simple "yes") the insufficiency and impermancnce of any one view.I6

As an educator contemplating the most vexed issues of difference, gender, class, and race, I find the method of pluralism best suited to the modern question that has transformed all earlier concerns with love: How do we learn to live together as human beings? Rather than despairing that there is no single answer to this question that will satisfy everyone, the pluralist finds that there are satisfactory, compelling, and inclusive answers that have been elucidated in the past, answers that provide important beginning points for present study. We are not the first to discover the problems of human relations, and we need to find the ways in which past discussions

15. "The philosophers of antiquity brought all of the archic elements [i.e., philosophic principles] into awareness, and the philosophers of the modern period, reflecting self-consciously on these elements, have endeavored to account for all of them within their own philosophies. But agreement even on the mode of taking into account all other principles has proved elusive, and it was this fact from which the present work began. This work attempts to further the developing self-consciousness of the modern period with respect to philosophic principles by making explicit their nature and reciprocal priority," Watson, Architectonics, 167. 16. Wayne Booth, Critical Understanding: The Power and Limits of Pluralism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19791, 197.

306 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y SUMMER 1992 VOLUME 42 NUMBER 3

might assist us in understanding ourselves and our circumstances more thoughtfully and thoroughly. Although there are ways in which our present situation is unique, pluralism provides the opportunity to talk with each other and with our sharedpast. The imaginative ability to connect things and discourses across time, place, and circumstance can make our present problems that much more coherent. Pluralism argues for the possibility of communication among even the most radically different attitudes and views; in this way, pluralism seeks to restore and extend the concerns of pragmatic philosophy.”

Pluralism emphasizes the basis of all inquiry in some consciously-fashioned hermeneutic. Far from advocating an apparently endless discourse, pluralists are able to show us in what ways issues can be imagined, stated, and resolved. Instead of a weak relativism that simply acknowledges different opinions, pluralism accepts the challenge of radical difference as a measure of the demands of communication. Rather than trying to explain away differences on the basis of some otherwise unnoticed common ground or as yet uncomprehended englobing reality, the various pluralisms search far the possibilities of establishing meaningful conversation among diverse voices. There is no impatience here for a final truth that will once and for all settle matters; there is instead a recognition that the nature of human inquiry is inescapably various. There are no final answers, because any answer depends on the nature of the question, and it is precisely in the asking of questions and the framing of problems that inquiry is unavoidably multiple.

The study of connections yields insights into thought, action, and process. Such connections relate the same and the different in a discursive order or structure that makes sense of the variations and transformations of themes. The ability to make these connections is a discipline of the mind that permits the widest possible scope in statingproblems: even though subject matters may change, disciplined coherency enables us to inquire into abidmg themes.18 Disciplined coherency liberates or frees us to contemplate and imagine: we can trace the consequences of any given assumption, and we can connect ideas and place them in sequences. The ability to deal with themes in this philosophic sense is no less than a liberal art, a trait of character that education strives to produce and a habit of mind that produces the substance of study.

The general program of philosophic pluralism and the specific liberal art of disciplined coherency provide unusual but as yet unrealized opportunities for the study of the same and the different. I am specifically concerned with the problems of gender in this article, but the general program of philosophic pluralism also applies to other areas in which the recognition of difference leads to the design of educational means and sequences. No single formulation or solution will satisfy the historical

17. Richard Bernstein traces the concern to respect and negotiate fundamental differences to the abiding concern of pragmatic philosophy in general and John Dewey in particular. Bernstein advocates a return to Dewey’s pluralist notion of reconstruction in philosophy as the most helpful response to the current fragmentation that otherwise threatens community life in his “Varieties of Pluralism,” Current Issues in Education vol. 5, ed. Chris Eisele (Normal, Ill.: John Dewey Society, 19851, 8. 18. Richard McKeon, “Character and the Arts and Disciplines,” Ethics 78, no. 2 (January 1948): 119-22.

KAPLAN The Same and the Different 307

circumstances, social needs, and intellectual aspirations that make the awareness of difference so difficult to understand. On the other hand, each attempt to formulate the issues of difference makes the understanding of fundamental sameness that much more difficult. What we need is a way of discussing the same and the different in the broadest possible manner, a method that will help us make connections even when we confront the most divisive and emotionally charged subjects. Pluralism provides such a method through the art of disciplined coherency, an art that presents the ways in which a theme may be stated, varied, and transformed. If no single formulation or solution is sufficient, we must not lose sight of the successes that have occurred both now and in the past. The value of apluralistic approach lies in its capacity to establish a systematic and comprehensive statement of a problem, a statement made in full consciousness of the multiple alternatives that are possible. Pluralism serves to counter one of the most damaging limitations of thought: the tyranny of the present. Rather than viewing the past history of a problem as a succession of errors, the pluralist searches the past for clues and indications of how arguments have been constructed from principled positions to uncover significant truths and modes of thought that might still be of use in present formulations and discussions.

One of the most troubling issues in feminist criticism concerns the uses of the past: How can feminists employ the discursive resources of a patriarchal past without submitting to its sexist assumptions? One literary critic put the issue most succinctly as a dilemma: “The dilemma appears to be that we cannot do with traditions and cannot do without them.”19 While any appropriation of the dominant white male intellectual tradition creates problems for feminism, wholesale rejection of the past is disingenuous at best. We must make use of as much as we can; the question is how knowledgeable we are of the past and how knowingly we make our appropriations.

If we assume that all discourse about sex and gender concerns the same subject, then we hope to probe the ambiguities and arrive at some objective or universal definition that transcends or corrects the various approaches of the [often benighted] past. If we assume that the study of only certain subjects has the power to liberate us from past oppressions, then we construe an exclusivity that eviscerates further conversation. I suggest that we should avoid the rigidity and reductiveness of either assumption about Women’s Studies, and that we consider the issue in a different way. There is, I argue, no subject involved in this discourse about sex and gender; hence, the ambiguity and incompatibility of statements become conditions of our understandmg the range of issues and problems. Women’s Studies should consider themes, not subjects, and seek continuity by connecting different uses of facts and different applications of principles. Instead of suggesting how to include Women’s Studies in the present scheme of academic subjects [and such a suggestion, especially by a man, would be both arrogant and gratuitous), I want to suggest the greater opportunity of Women’s Studies to include all academic subjects in an open-ended

19. Ellen Messer-Davidow, “The Philosophical Bases of Feminist Literary Criticisms,” New Literary History 19, no. 1 (Autumn 1987): 65.

308 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y SUMMER 1992 1 VOLUME 42 1 NUMBER 3

conversation about the same and the different. Such a conversation can be open- ended in the sense that it is a cooperative enterprise that educators share with their students. As the desired outcome of education, character will no longer be confined to a reductive model that teachers give to the student; instead, character will concern the development of responsibility to the variable particulars of human life, a development toward which both teachers and students labor in mutual but not identical ways. Liberated from the narrow confines of traditional models, character in all its profound variety will seek adjustments and harmonies in the light of new respect and understanding for the intellectual virtues that permit us to develop responsibility. The varieties as well as the systematic interconnections of character will help us to understand each other and our common humanity in new ways.

Ellen Messer-Davidow’s recent attempt to adumbrate the principles of feminist criticism deplores “ traditional methods of reasoning’, for failing to analyze systems of thought. She considers definitive subjectsas the entities that wemust differentiate and universalize in order to comprehend systems. Messer-Davidow constructs a view of feminist criticism as a perspective among other perspectives, characterizing feminism as a subject, a method, and an epistemology.20 Much as I applaud the philosophic inquiry Messer-Davidow wants to advance, the basis in subject matter overlooks the fact that perspectives are not only congruous, they are incongruous. We may disagree about the same things, and then try to resolve the ambiguities. But we may also disagree about different things: in that case, even if we use the same words there is no ambiguity and linguistic devices alone are insufficient to state the issues, much less resolve them. Finally, as some French feminist writers have argued, there is no feminine subject to serve as the focus for inquiry. If “woman” is the subject of feminism, then the exclusionary prejudices that ground feminism under- cut feminist goals to extend representation to those unheard and unseen. Judith Butler applies the teachings of several French writers to the task of liberating feminism from a presumptive subject. Butler’s program brings us once again to the need for pluralism:

the insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of “women” are constructed.21

The art of disciplined coherency presents themes rather than subjects, permit- ting us to negotiate the “concrete array” of difference without compromising what Butler calls the multiple intersections of discourse. Instead of presuming that Women’s Studies should address this or that subject, Ipropose that we study the ways in which the themes of sex and gender have appeared throughout the long history of intellectual traditions available to us. I propose that we start with the experience of teaching young people rather than with literary texts, because I hope to provide an alternative basis for the discussion of difference. I find such an alternative in the common purpose that unites all the varieties of critical approaches: educators st:ive

20. Messer-Davidow, “Philosophical Bases,” 88-90. 21. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990), 14.

KAF-LAN The Same and the Different 309

to train students who will be able to make connections in the most imaginative and robust ways. If literature is to provide the kinds of sustaining power and enrichment that help us lead valuable lives, educators must be keenly aware of the ways in which literary study contributes to the formation of character. Instead of starting with the imagined characters of fiction, then, I propose to start with the ways in which the study of literature contributes to the formation of character.

Instead of making marginal additions or alternatives to present study, Women’s Studies can assist in the more profound reorganization of the ways we think, read, act, and educate. Women‘s Studies contributes to the whole of education when it broadens its base from the concern to teach women about their heritage as women; the greater educational value of Women’s Studies is not in its exclusivity but in its critique of the assumptions that have so constricted our cultural, intellectual, and moral traditions. Although1 find some value in the separate study of specific (ethnic, immigrant, sexual, or religious) differences, the greater educational task is to find ways to integrate the disparate strands into intelligible wholes. Awareness of difference is certainly important, but lest that awareness calcify into an unnegotiable border of isolation, the curriculum must find ways to integrate the awareness of difference without compromising it.

The question of what to take out of the curriculum and what to put in requires that we ask about presences and absences in a more expansive way than many educators are used to asking. The curriculum must respond not only to the traditional subjects but to the connections that an emerging generation of students needs to make. The subjects of education must be more than the province of the several departments if our students are going to hear the voices and see the faces of the characters from whom they will draw their own strength and direction. Instead of being anxious to include all that a student needs to know, educators must assist and guide the process that helps students make responsible decisions about what they will study and what they will leave out. Ultimately, the answer to the question of what to put in and what to leave out requires that we shift our focus from the decision of educators about externalmodels to a new view of character as the internal and therefore ambiguous relation between reason and action that is at once the foundation and the outcome of education.

Women have long been present in the curriculum, but it is only recently that feminists have called attention to the absence of character in so many women’s roles in fiction, and the educational influence of such representations on the real lives of women. We make a mistake, however, i f we treat this absence as a lack of specific subjects. It is rather a thematic problem, one dependent on introducing a variety of connections and presentations. Treated thematically, the presence of women must extend not only to what we read but to how we read it and to what kind of questions we begin to ask of our reading. Not only do we need to read, for example, Willa Cather’s One of Ours, to see how a great woman author dealt with World War I,22 we also need to read Ernest Hemingway and other male authors as they present relations

22. Willa Cather, One of Ours (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922).

310 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y SUMMER 1992 1 VOLUME 42 NUMBER 3

among characters. If we notice, to take a different kind of example, the ways in which women have been denied subjectivity in much of literature, wemust treat that denial as part of the theme. Not only must we learn to read agalnst the text, we must also learn to scrutinize judgments of what are great texts for their ideological connec- tions. Tracing these connections among what we read, how we read, and why we value the things we read, Annette Kolodny argues that feminists “must acknowledge ourselves as pluralists” in order to establish what I call themes without ”the arrogance of claiming that our work is either exhaustive or definitive.” Only pluralism, she argues, can liberate all of us from the restrictions and blind spots of our different assumptions.w

Discourse about themes rather than subjects will permit us to break down the obstacles fundamentally in restructuring the curriculum. The hegemony of subject orientation in academic departments has made it difficult for interdisciplinary work to be more than the coordination of experts. Women’s Studies creates intertllscipli- nary work out of problems and situations that arise from inherent connections rather than separations. In the place of dogmatic assertion and the upholding of traditional standards as ends in themselves, Women’s Studies asks us to enlarge our horizons, to give voice to the unspoken, and to provide the broadest possible access to knowledge, because knowledge is power.

Every school needs courses that ask students to examine and challenge the ways we think about sexual difference. Existing apart from the rest of the curriculum, however, such courses perform only part of their usefulness: the study of difference in any one area is also an opportunity for changing the curricular direction of education in other subjects as well. This opportunity offers the prospect of develop- ing an educational program that involves teachers and students in a radical exami- nation of the connections between the texts we read and the lives we lead. What does such a radical examination look like, and (since I teach at this level) is it appropriate to secondary education?

In an article writtennearly ten years ago, Myra Jehlen provideda closelyreasoned and powerful investigation of feminist criticism in which she proposed to universal- ize the topics and themes of Women’s Studies by inaugurating “a method of radical ~omparativism.”~~ She suggested that Women’s Studies had become the victim of its own success, providing a secure but separate enclave that lacked the organic connection “to force a basic reconsideration of all research”:

The problem is that the issues and problems women define from the inside as global, men treat from the outside as insular. Thus, besides the exfoliation of reports on the state of women everywhere and a certain piety on the subject of pronouns, there is little indication of feminist impact on the universe of male discourse.25

Jehlen went on to distinguish moral from aesthetic judgments, but then asked, What happens when our appreciation of a work of art is at odds with our political or social

23. Annette Kolodny, “Dancing Through the Minefield Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism,” Feminist Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 19-20.

24. Myra Jehlen, ”Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” Signs 6, no. 4 (Summer 1981 J: 585.

25. Ibid., 576.

KAPLAN The Same and the Different 31 1

awareness? We can no more divorce ourselves from own moral assumptions than we can give up the broader cultural and political consequences of any critical activity. Jehlen asks that the ideology of feminism serve the broader purpose of analyzing the dominant culture in its entirety rather than merely considering the tradition of difference and submission. She employs the method of comparative study in order to uncover, inquire into, and use the energy of the emerging contradictions between men’s writing and women’s writing, between the representations of men and the representations of women, and between the method of ideological inquiry and the substance of artistic works.

Jehlen’s program for literary study is highly sophisticated, assuming a broad background and a strong historical sense as well as demanding keen political and psychological analysis. While few secondary students have the intellectual disci- pline, much less the personal maturity, to attempt such literary study in the way that Jehlen proposes, secondary education can provide the intellectual foundations for “radical comparativism” by asking teachers and students to begin the study of difference in the tenth or eleventh grade, at just the point where the differences between young men and young women become most pronounced, most confusing, and most compelling. Instead of an occasional “special” course or a later survey course that would ”correct” the balance of earlier work, it makes more sense to challenge male intellectual hegemony as early and as often as possible. We still ask young women to spend most of their time studying men, without thinking about the implications of such an activity, much less the alternatives to it. While secondary students embody the predilections and prejudices of the broader culture in ways that are beyond any school’s control, the literature classroom is a laboratory in which it is possible to project and analyze feelings about created characters and the creation of character. The challenge implied here for the reading list, pedagogy, schedule of assignments, and tone of literature courses is all-encompassing. We can begin with any aspect of that challenge, but the full measure of the difference that Women’s Studies can make will not be felt until we have transformed the present curriculum in its entirety.

Among the issues that Elaine Showalter has raised about Jehlen’s program, Showalter questioned whether this is the proper time for such a study:

I see comparativism as the final stage of a sustained, comprehensive, and woman-centered inquiry, which will appear when we have gone considerably further toward establishing a firm sense of women’s literary history than we now

I agree with Showalter that women’s literary history is an uncompleted task, and I appreciate the potential of woman-centered inquiry to advance further the empow- erment and entitlement that women must have. My concern as an educator is that the urgent demands of character formation in my students cannot wait until that history is written to provide the development of multiple perspectives on the problems of becoming a person in our society. I want to train students who will be able, among other things, to help write the literary history that Showalter wants to complete.

26. Elaine Showalter, “Comments on Jehlen’s ‘Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,”’ Signs 8, no. 1 11982): 163.

312 E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y SUMMER 1992 VOLUME 42 / NUMBER 3

The profound transformations that I seek need more than ideology as their foundation. While I see no point in setting aside courses on morality to make people aware of ethical problems and choices, I ardently support the effort to make all education moral. In so doing, 1 want education to open up the static sense of character, and to liberate character from the confining concerns of a limited and limiting set of traits. To be truly moral, education must liberate character by providing young women and men the opportunities to create themselves in the community of cultures. Schools have always been the place for reproducing the traditions that bind a culture; if schools in American society are to fulfill their democratic mission, they must also become agencies of change. Schools have long perpetuated the structures that suppress women’s individuality. Now, these institu- tions must become active in the struggle for girls to invent and judge their own subjectivities:

For women, who are so often excluded from the public sphere, the question of whether resistance can lead to change if it is only expressed in individual critique or private opposition is a very real one. And this leads back to the schools. Can schools become a possible ”public sphere” for the encouragement of resistance and the building of a critical counter-hegemony for girlsP7

At the same time, the school must face an equally grave challenge as it encourages boys to reinvent and humanize male subjectivity. The school must provide adoles- cents with the means and the opportunities to resist the expectations and demands of sexist society.

So long as the political program of feminism supplied the foundation for Women’s Stules, the resulting educational programs could redress past grievances and fulminate against oppression, but only in isolation from the rest of the curricu- lum. As the paradoxes and instabilities of feminist criticism become the substance of theoretical concerns at the most advanced stages of the intellectual enterprise, secondary education should be experimenting with the opportunities that Women’s Studies have so far provided: the loosened categories of academic work, the study of problems and issues that cut across the older boundaries of subject matters, the restructuring of the canon, and the challenges to traditional methods of research. Secondary education can participate in this broader intellectual reorganization by providing new approaches and themes that will assist the formation of character. The context for this reorganization is the awareness that character is more than a predicted or prescribed product: character is the formation of disciplines and states of mind that liberate the individual to choose freely.28 This concept of character is therefore plural in nature, a pluralism that orients the duty of education to assist in

27. Kathleen Weiler, Women Teaching for Change: Gender, Class, and Power (South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Gamey, 1988), 54.

28. In a forthcoming book I employ just such an active and self-determining sense of character. Education for Character distinguishes the intellectual virtues from the moralvirtues, arguing that only the former can be taught. I discuss the intellectual virtues as practices that recall and transform the traditions of the liberal arts, and I overcome the ancient rift between words and things by developing disciplines of character that can be employed across a variety of subjects. Chapter 7 describes a course in Gender and Literature that specifies the training and practice of the intellectual virtue of engagement or connectedness, the discipline of character that I referred to earlier in this article as “coherency.”

KAPLAN The Same and the Different 313

the creation of individuals who at their best will transcend and transform the process of education itself, creating new men and new women.

Pluralism has much to offer in this transformation: a broad philosophic aware- ness of systematic difference, a profound respect for the integrity of mutually exclusive approaches and conclusions to problems, a semantic methodology that exhibits ranges of difference, and a logical context for the discussion of change. Pluralism offers feminism instrumentalities of philosophic inclusiveness and ways of connecting the changes in the curriculum sought by Women’s Studies with the changes that are occurring due to other forces.2y Rather than calling for all feminists to agree, setting up artificial and exclusive tests of ideological purity and trying to manage literary and other studies according to doctrine, pluralism provides devices that dignify the awareness of difference, helping us to discriminate suggestive inconsistencies from pointless arguments. Pluralism helps us to understand the sources and consequences of the ”illusion of superiority” [in persons, texts, interpre- tations, or actions) that Women’s Studies asks us to abandon. Pluralism hastens the abandonment of unwarranted privilege for our own truth by empowering us to understand the truth as other minds construct it?* Most of all, pluralism suggests a kind of humility about change that may make the changes themselves more inviting to the less-committed and even to the obstinately opposed. Pluralism makes us aware that we need more than one approach or course to sustain the dynamics of change, and it provides the capacity to engage multiple and conflicting approaches in pursuit of common goals.

29. I have written elsewhere about the present transformation of the liberal arts on theoretical and practical grounds. I examined the ways in which a course in the history of science provides opportunities to break down the artificial barriers between science and the humanities in “GALILEO: An Experiment in Interdmiplinary Education,” Curriculum Inquiry 18, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 255-87. While I would reject the claim that Women’s Studies represents by itself the direction for the new liberal arts, I see Women’s Studies as an agency for change because it asks us to consider the liberal arts as fields as well as methods, thus helping to break down the exclusive concern of education with subject matters. I have written about the claim of Women’s Studies to be the new liberal arts in “The New Disciplines of Liberal Education,” Curriculum Inquiry22, no. 1 [Spring 19921: 47-65.

30. Watson, “Types of Pluralism,” 357.