Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical question based on the theses of an outstanding thinker.
At the National Assembly, parliamentarians are currently studying a bill that will allow trans people to change their sex marker on their birth certificate. The Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse has listed the expression of gender as a ground of discrimination, and to “mégenrer” – that is to say not to respect the pronouns and chords desired by a person – in a way repeated can now be considered a form of harassment. Across the Atlantic, the dictionary the Roberthas integrated the pronoun “iel” into its pages. These are all opportunities to return to a debate that is making more and more noise as LGBTQ + people take their place in society, that is to say the use of a non-binary language. to describe people who do not identify with either of the two traditional genders and intersex people.
For some, the use of words like “brother” disfigures the French language and infringes on freedom by forcing the use of neologisms to which the ears are not yet accustomed. We also hear that adding a third box to the forms next to the “man” and “woman” boxes is a lie, because there would only be two sexes, not one more nor one less. Replacing the words “father” and “mother” in civil status documents also provokes the indignation of people fearing that this will destroy an essential part of their citizen identity. The transgression of traditional categories would therefore only be a lie and postmodernist drift.
The Western tradition is based on a Creation story where the world begins with the separation of two opposites, light and darkness (Genesis 1, 4). European languages distinguish two opposites within humanity, man and woman, a distinction that almost all Romance languages impose, even on inanimate objects. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) can help us to fluidify these mental categories.
Our thinker is himself a creator who escapes traditional categories. His talent, to use Peter Sloterdijk’s expression, is centaur, because his work is an inimitable mixture of the languages of music, philology and philosophy. “Now science, art and philosophy grow in me simultaneously, to the point that, anyway, I will some day beget a Centaur,” he wrote to a friend in the 1870s.
Nietzsche’s Perspective
For the Nietzsche of the time of The birth of tragedy (1872), reality is an absolutely elusive becoming. What we believe to be the “real world” is only the projection of fixed categories of the human mind on the waves of becoming. In other words, there are no perfectly objective “facts”, only interpretations. The only possible “objectivity”, writes Nietzsche in the Genealogy of Morals (1887), is a sum of particular perspectives which are never neutral: “He notthere is a vision what‘in perspective, of “knowledge” than perspective; and more we let the affects speak for a thing, more we know how to vary the looks each time different on the same thing, the more our “concept” of this thing, our “objectivity” will be complete. But eliminate all will, suspend affects without exception, assuming that we can; how would it not be there castration of the intellect? Nietzsche wants to free us from limited representations of language and culture, because these representations are far too human, that is to say, false.
The metaphorical origin of concepts
In Truth and lie in the extramoral sense (1896, written in 1873), Nietzsche explains that we do not know things as they are, but only as our brain interprets them. The concept is always a transposition. Its origin is a representation constructed by the brain and not an objective reality. Why that ? Nietzsche’s response: because human consciousness is imprisoned in a body. All contact with the world comes to him through this body in the form of nervous excitations. Take the example of seeing an object. The intellect, as a creative drive, synthesizes an image from all the nervous excitations coming from the eyes. This image is then converted into sound: we then have a word that can be spoken or symbolized in writing. Language is not in direct contact with reality, it is the metaphor of a metaphor, the substitute for a substitute. “Transpose nervous excitement into an image!” First metaphor. The image in turn transformed into a sound! Second metaphor. And each time, a complete jump from one sphere to another, quite different and new. “
Let us apply the Nietzschean critique to the question of gender. The word “woman” designates a list of anatomical criteria (to which we have more common access than to chromosomes…) that we presume to be consonant and associated with culturally determined behavioral characteristics. But this is only one interpretation among an infinity of possible interpretations. Indeed, the binary model of sexes and genders is an interpretation, a partial point of view on reality, often motivated by the desire to assign each person a clear and determined role within a society. The reality, however, is much more complex than the binary model assumes. What gender is a person with XY sex chromosomes born with an atrophied vagina and testes? If we say that it is a man, we find ourselves saying that it is possible to be a man who has a vagina. If we say that it is a woman, then we must admit that we can be a woman and have a Y chromosome. If we say that it is an intersex person, we can no longer say that the sex observed at birth will be certain, because at birth, all that will be observed will be a vagina. Doctors currently use five criteria to determine the sex of a newborn baby: chromosomes, hormones, gonads, internal genitalia, and external genitalia. The five criteria are not always consonant. We speak of intersexuality when at least one criterion is in dissonance with respect to the others. The number of possible combinations is very high. The criterion “external genital organ” is particularly a source of ambiguity. At what length does a clitoris cease to be a clitoris and should it be called a penis instead? To determine criteria is to interpret, Nietzsche would probably point out. Certainly, if, each time we spoke of sex chromosomes, we had to specify all the non-traditional combinations, we would complicate the process to the point of harming the scientific production which is already difficult to advance. But it must be recognized that there are other combinations which mean that the binary only concerns the majority of cases, not all. We move away from an “objective” or “scientific” understanding when we seek to enclose “the radically fluctuating” in a system of binary and fixed categories.
Being aware that all of our concepts are human interpretations imposes a dose of epistemic modesty; Hearing about the “real” and “objective” definition of the concept of woman should make one skeptical. Refusing to say that a trans woman is a woman or that there are more than two genders is, as Nietzsche would say in his language of cultural medicine, a symptom of conceptual idolatry.
The mythology of language
Nietzsche, despite his unfortunate moments of misogyny, helps us realize that the linguistic claims of trans, intersex, and non-binary people are legitimate. In The traveler and his shadow (1879), the philosopher points out to us that words and ideas lead us to constantly represent to ourselves things as simpler than they are and that “there is, hidden in the language, a philosophical mythology which reappears at every moment, whatever precaution we take ”. The French language imposes the mythology of a world where inanimate beings have a gender and where all of humanity is divided between men and women, without the crossing from one genre to another being possible.
The contemptors of the pronoun “iel” may retort that, if we are unable to objectively determine the difference between a man and a woman, there is a risk of postmodernist drifts, that we will be made to believe that the facts biological are only social constructions, that women’s rights will be threatened. As if all of humanity could fit into two watertight conceptual compartments: man and woman. As if sexual difference were the fundamental difference, which generates everything. As if the existence of an overwhelming majority were sufficient reason to make invisible the minority which does not comply with the paradigm, of biblical origin, of the binary of sexes and genders. But reality owes us absolutely nothing. We inevitably project mental categories onto it in order to be able to think, and to give us an impression of stability, Nietzsche would undoubtedly add. Without falling into relativism, we must be aware that these mental categories have a metaphorical origin. This is why, since always, the meaning of words evolves and that neologisms appear. The introduction of a new pronoun in The Robert poses a linguistic challenge that could be of interest, if that is what the French-speaking world really wants. Because ultimately, the ultimate judge of a word’s relevance is the speakers who decide whether to use it or not.