Why isn’t woman a non-relational concept though? My position is that all identities are relational, in the sense that what constitutes an identity of something is the totality of its relations with other things. The way it works then, is that in the world there is a fundamental relationship of biological reproduction, and for the purpose…
Why isn’t woman a non-relational concept though? My position is that all identities are relational, in the sense that what constitutes an identity of something is the totality of its relations with other things. The way it works then, is that in the world there is a fundamental relationship of biological reproduction, and for the purposes of reproduction, humans are divided into two categories: male and female. So someone is male if he’s male for the purposes of reproduction.
Perhaps, he argues that there’s also a sociological dimension, in which we divide humans into males and females in a more complex way than in the biological dimension. That might be sometimes true practically, but logically it’s a fallacy: our sociological concept of men and women is still grounded in the biological concept of male and female. The only way you can pull one from the other is by saying that sociological human and biological human are two different things because sociology and biology are different sciences. This contains the fallacy of the primacy of consciousness: the idea that our concepts and classifications define objective reality. It also misunderstands scientific hierarchy: in no way can sociology override biology, chemistry and physics. A human always retains his animal component, and his human mind and social role can not exist without the former.
Now as for parenting, it’a good example : there’s a biological reality of parenting, and there is also a social reality of parenting which is substantially more complex than the biological. A person might not be a biological parent, but can play the social role of parenting. It can sound like it can imply us something about sexual identity. However, it is not a good analogy because of a different structure of causality. Being a biological parent does not imply that a person will (or even can) act as a social parent to his/her child, and someone can play the role of a social parent without being biological parent. Strictly speaking, there is no logical causality between the two concepts, although usually biological parents act as social parents. The difference in the case of sex is that there is a hard fact of causality: in order to be able to give birth to a child and become what we call “mother’ to someone, you need to be biologically female. We ground our social concept of “woman” in this biological realty which is for like it or not, is not changeable and resists flexibility. So the comparison with parenting is not legitimate.
Why isn’t woman a non-relational concept though? My position is that all identities are relational, in the sense that what constitutes an identity of something is the totality of its relations with other things. The way it works then, is that in the world there is a fundamental relationship of biological reproduction, and for the purposes of reproduction, humans are divided into two categories: male and female. So someone is male if he’s male for the purposes of reproduction.
Perhaps, he argues that there’s also a sociological dimension, in which we divide humans into males and females in a more complex way than in the biological dimension. That might be sometimes true practically, but logically it’s a fallacy: our sociological concept of men and women is still grounded in the biological concept of male and female. The only way you can pull one from the other is by saying that sociological human and biological human are two different things because sociology and biology are different sciences. This contains the fallacy of the primacy of consciousness: the idea that our concepts and classifications define objective reality. It also misunderstands scientific hierarchy: in no way can sociology override biology, chemistry and physics. A human always retains his animal component, and his human mind and social role can not exist without the former.
Now as for parenting, it’a good example : there’s a biological reality of parenting, and there is also a social reality of parenting which is substantially more complex than the biological. A person might not be a biological parent, but can play the social role of parenting. It can sound like it can imply us something about sexual identity. However, it is not a good analogy because of a different structure of causality. Being a biological parent does not imply that a person will (or even can) act as a social parent to his/her child, and someone can play the role of a social parent without being biological parent. Strictly speaking, there is no logical causality between the two concepts, although usually biological parents act as social parents. The difference in the case of sex is that there is a hard fact of causality: in order to be able to give birth to a child and become what we call “mother’ to someone, you need to be biologically female. We ground our social concept of “woman” in this biological realty which is for like it or not, is not changeable and resists flexibility. So the comparison with parenting is not legitimate.