The Metaphysical Science of Aristotle’s Generation of Animals and Its Feminist Critics

HOW DOES LIFE BEGIN? How is it and why is it that a child comes into being? To answer these questions about life and its origins requires a system of presuppositions about a great many metaphysical matters, such as causation and its modes of operation, relations of identity and difference, and, perhaps above all, the transition from not-being to actualized existence. In his treatise, Generation of Animals (GA), Aristotle takes up the theme of the origins of animal and human life. His treatment of the subject is both empirical, offering descriptions of how the process occurs in nature, and metaphyical, pursuing the deeper how and answering questions about why it is that offspring are generated and how this phenomenon is meaningfully connected to the cosmos as a whole. In recent years, feminist critics of the history of philosophy have been severe in their condemnation of Aristotle as a chief spokesman, if not founder, of sexism in the philosophical tradition: "We have become accustomed to regarding Aristotle as the fountainhead of one long tradition of western misogyny."(1) The theory proposed in GA, which in outline reads that in generation the male parents contributes the form and the female parents contributes the matter, is adduced by some of Aristotle's critics to show that he regards females as inferior to males in the process of reproduction and that this view of female inferiority can be seen to be carried into other, if not all, areas of his philosophizing.(2) Despite Aristotle's current status as defecteuex from as feminist point of view, his treatise is worthy of renewed exposition for several reasons. First, his path to understanding how and why life begins-- his his very ability to ask how and why together--is richer and more fruitful than our modern view of reproduction, which is constructed for the most part of materialistic presuppositions. It is largely a modern materialist view of reproduction that feminism has inherited. From the start, the phenomenon Aristotle is studying is generation rather than reproduction, and the method he adopts for apprehending his expanded phenomenon is empirical-metaphysical rather than strictly mechanical or medical. Aristotle's ability to integrate metaphysical considerations with scientific ones offers modern readers a model for a rationally enlarged conception of generation.(3) In anticipation, we may say at this point that the results of his analysis show generation to be entwined with multiple dimensions of the natural world, not merely the sexual partners who are the parents of the offspring.(4) Second, one reason that the feminist critics fail to appreciate the virtues of Aristotle's metaphysical science of generation has to do with the differing aims of classical metaphysics and modern feminism. Aristotle's intentions in taking up generation are metaphysical; he asks, What is generation? and looks to see how the phenomenon accords with the principles he has laid down in the Metaphysics and the Physics. The feminist, on the other hand, asks about reproduction, Who controls it? That is, the question is one of power and the aim is political: the altering of perceived unfair power and politics, it tends to have little use for metaphysics and little patience with it. This impatience is apparent in the methodology of some feminist criticism of Aristotle, in the quoting of offensive sentences out of their context as evidence in the sexism case against him. This practice neglects the overall form and much of the content of Aristotle's treatises, and inevitably leads to misreadings of these complex and difficult texts, in particular to misconstruals of the very gender issues to which Aristotle's feminist critics wish to draw attention. Third, when reading Aristotle's offensive comments without the benefit of a knowledge of his historical context, his feminist critics generally have failed to notice the ways in which Aristotle's theory of generation has the effect of elevating the female role in generation, when compared to another view that prevailed in his day. …