The article correlates symbolical as well as metaphorical of male/female with the basic notions of philosiphic discourse on modernism: Noneness, multiplicity, executivity, completeness. The female, as far as the author is concerned, comes to be a crucial metaphor in philosophical realization of our times.
IvanKuzin
From Phallocentrism to Kolpocentricity 1
The new European thought established in the philosophy of Hegel’s who believed that Absolute Spirit found its assertion in the presence of state and self-consciousness in it. Herein the dialectic formation of multiplicity had been coming to the Unity. Yet it has been the current century when the principal of multiplicity showed up in its entirety not going to go become history. Every thing /either meaning or life/ is being permeated with multiplicity and the unity disappears in its torrent keeping a hidden necessity for its own explicity. Fleshness and sensuality, excommunicated by the philosophy of Unity for their multiplicity and indefinability, are coming back as main topics. At this back ground the role and significance of the Female is increasing. ‘’Man’’ steps back off what he previously served as a molding /uniting/ principle of female multi-sensual substance. The female is ontologically a source of reproduction; it reproduces anything around having plenty of existential enjoyments and torments, having the desired and spreading it. Sensual substance considers female as its elemental force. The limitations of shapes melt down, the counter-directions of sensual flows hurl into human being tearing him into infinitesimal bits of pleasure without letting him to recover. That is the force of desire, a dark nature will, light-hearted and careless /irresponsive/, coming over man, sweeping from nowhere to nowhere. In the long run it turns out to be shapelessness. The woman’s physiology acquires the metaphorical status in multiplicity principal functioning. A motion, deprived with unity, leads to zero plurality, pithlessness and the evil infinity. The 20th century provided the multiplicity principle with space to act which has been proved by the decays of empires, colonial systems, desintegrational processes, family crisis, anarchy in science, spread of irrational ideas, in contrast with rational search for truth, and primary observance of private interests in relation to social ones etc.
The West - European civilization, defined by G. Derrida as phallocentric one, transforms into Kolpocentric. Naturally, this state of affairs sets the symbolic female as a dominant which lets the culture go off the phallocentric obsession. Now woman receives the rein to her yearning – the phallocenteredness as a unit of multiplicity. At the same time in the phallocentrical there appears a hollow of the wide-open abyss into which awareness /something reminding of thinking about existence opposed to death/ falls down. Thus, the female develops the most various ‘’bumpkin’’ features whereas the male absorbs the female ones respectively. Metaphysically speaking, woman has already got rid of man’s dictatorship having supplied herself with his might as well as she has brought the phallocenteredness to its tether.
The Female as Noneness
The zero-abysm of woman’s womb is scrutinizing, calling over and pulling us inside with irresistible phallic might. All things curdle, going into the unknown mystery of maternal womb. Woman headily evolves and vanguards the backward movement. /’’All things go to where they come from.’’/ The female ‘’century’’ closes the very history of Modernism dehisced by the molding symbol of phallus. Through the uncovered paradigm of the female we for the first time face Noneness that declares to be self-liberating. The free female entity destroys any shape by spontaneity of feeling; to the same destroyment comes the free male entity, it brings the order of things to tyranny. Through ‘’curdling’’ shapes there lies a potential way to some new shapes. The female becomes a guide of a step-by-step promotion through multiplicity to Oneness. The human call for safety implements through surviving by means of melting oneself in mother’s abysmal sensuality, that is through return to the womb of Existence, to a new birth.
The act of reproduction is centripetal in which multiplicity is heading towards its own detraction to one. In its ultimate implementation this act becomes an act of involution. ‘’As long as we are trying, in the most entire and sincere way, to conceive the molding of human personality, trying to understand those his vital approaches with which help he does his best to unite his rather contradictory / in core and outline/ decisions – as inherent dynamic parts of himself – we will be able to do so just in the case if we permanently bear in mind that every instant of this constantly moving and developing structure appears from actual social problems of species, from any stage of the species entity development and, -- regardless what kind of discipline it shifts to, -- it returns to its gender. Thus, it is ontologically impossible to imaging a person without these initial and final stages, to say nothing, of course, of how much wrong it is to discern the directive unifying principle as an isolated treated existence and individual self-motion.’’ 2. In this connection, man is a separate individual existential principle, a basic pivot upon and around which all things turn, it is a pseudo-unity; woman, on the other hand, is the principle of the common existence, a multiplicity embracing everything, an all-embracing base, a pseudo-integrity. Then a woman-feminist is the personalized commonness, while a feminist man is the generalized personality. All in all they both generate a stage in molding of human personality as such. And if during the shift from his primordial generic state, that did not rationally specify the common and the personal, there began totalization of the personal. The contemporal situation, then, seems to be the beginning of end of that totalization stage before approaching a stage of totalization of the common in its multiple appearance.
The Female as a Technique
Throughout his history man wanted to bring to life the legend of ‘’golden times’’ of his might, the dialectics of personality of the common in whole. Yet the molding of social existence recreates that by its logic, about which we either don’t care or are, on the contrary, not sensitive. ‘’The Man’’ used to keep ‘’the Woman’’ attached to himself like Being holds Noneness. Keeping itself in the shine of Being, Noneness now receives freedom, predicted by Nitzsche, in the desire to pin the woman down. /Perhaps that unbearable and at the same time vitally inevitable scenery drove him mad, for it was not known what a new kind of hold should have looked like so as Noneness would have been held while the thought of the superhuman had been born out of desperate disability to find the unknown./ Being plays the tuned strings of Noneness. Although from now on Noneness has been casting its challenging look, in which the ground of Being grows dim. Death let know of itself directing us to the threshold of the new beginning. The retrieval is fastened to the moment of birth – it is not perchance that the instant of birth is oft compared to the moment of death.
The 20th century in full measure allowed woman self-determination. She passed her way through years with fortitude and patience standing her ground and making war for her social status, starting from leather-clad bolshevist street manifestations and finishing with defense of her marital bed-rights by American feminists. Even at dawn of the century the female was the main topic in Russian philosophy /Vl. Solovyov, V. Rozanov, N. Berdyaev etc./ The modern philosopher J. Derrida proposes to regard the metaphysical truth as a symbol of woman, her mystery, furtiveness that being discovered stays alluring, magnetizing and guiding to her realm; even the philosophy of Nitzsche, despite his womanhaterish thoughts, he construed in light of female principle. Our disposition in the face of Noneness is not a symbolical expression of a metaphysical substance, but rather is a disposition facing hylic Noneness brought to life
by woman who appeared from her own shadow. The tangibility of Noneness is marked and being accompanied by the sense of fear and suffering. When the man is a child he is necessarily to be frightened with limitless freedom of the woman, likewise mankind has been frightened with unmanageability of the machinery it ‘’tamed’’. Moreover, the nature of the machinery, attention of thought to which was talked over by M. Heidegger, in odd and intricate and yet obviously not accidental way, united with the emancipated entity of woman. Rationality of the machinery /man’s invention/ has invaded the realm of sensuality and now sense has to adapt the machinery to itself. What M. Heidegger said in one of his interviews concerning machinery that he sees ‘’the position of human being in the world of planetary machinery not as a complicated and fatal drama, that the task of thinking is just to help man to reach the proper attitude towards the machinery’s nature within the limits of his /man’s/ abilities,’’3 applicable to the woman too as well as to the body, the cult of which is chiefly connected to the woman. In the same interview the German philosopher emphasized that ‘’it is only in that part of the world where the modern technical civilization appeared, the turning can be prepared and it cannot be undertaken by means of embracing Zen-Buddhism or some other Oriental ways to comprehend the world. To reorder one’s comprehension it will require the help of the European tradition and its new assimilation. Thinking may only transfigure with the aid of thinking possessing the same source and the same vocation.’’ 4 In this respect the metaphorical discord male-female approximates the expected ‘’Turning’’ of the tradition which would name in general the gist of what-is-going-on according to the expressed Noneness in Being.
1 Greek word Kolpos means maternal womb
2 Lukach D. More to the Ontology of Social Existence. Prolegomena. Moscow, 1991, p. 99
3 The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Modern Times. Moscow, 1991, p. 246