Margaret Fuller

 

I mentioned Fuller the week before last, even posting a portrait of her above a list of key philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Let us say a bit more....

She did not have a long life (1810 - 1850), dying in a shipwreck on a sandbar near Fire Island, attempting to return to the US after a trip to Italy. 

Fuller was associated with the Transcendentalist movement of the day, and with its organ The Dial, which she edited 1840 - 44. She brought a distinctive tone to that periodical, described sometimes as "noisy, histrionic and sincere," in contrast to the more cerebral and somewhat ironic distanced tone one finds in Emerson's essays. 

Philosophically, she was an unabashed Platonist. This meant that there was a Reason that surpassed understanding -- understanding is something we can get WITHIN the cave, “Reason” is the faculty through which a wise person conducts the Platonic Quest to go beyond the material in search of the ideal. 

Emerson, to continue the contrast, was not a Platonic dualist. He was an idealistic monist -- in ancient Greek terms, more of a Parmenides than a Plato. And although Emerson often wrote of Plato with respect, those allusions seem to have been more poet-writing-of-poet than philosopher-of-philosopher. From Fuller, they were the latter.

Fuller is recognized as a feminist pioneer on the basis of an article for The Dial titled, “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women” (1843). How Platonic is THAT? The title alone tells the tale (alas, she changed it for the book version). The title tells us that her problem with gender role differentiation was not (as many 21st century feminists would contend) that there IS no essence of Man or of Woman and the mores of the 19th century -- or of our own -- were/are wrong because they presume[d] one. No: her problem (says her title) was that there IS an essence of Man and of Woman and those mores got it wrong. 

Platonic feminism. Fuller's legacy.  Among today's prominent feminist intellectuals, the one with the best claim to have picked up this baton is ... Germaine Greer. One might say something about the late Justice Ginsburg, too, in this connection. Perhaps another day.