epistemologists—now to be joined by their feisty feminist counterparts!—continuously
pull up planks and renegotiate the seaworthiness of the epistemological ship as it ploughs
on its continuing way through the watery darkness of the unknown. As Anderson puts it,
“Once recognized as philosophers, women could seek to rebuild the ship's planks of
mistaken belief” (1998, 12). It is with the aid of this adjusted Quinean image that
Anderson is willing to enunciate the possibility of a future creative accord between
feminist epistemology and analytic philosophy of religion.^15 For if the standpoint
approach is promising for the claims to incorporate feminist insights into the human
world, why not also apply it to divine states of affairs?
But a final, and crucial, feminist influence on Anderson also impinges on her chosen
epistemology, and here we note the distinctiveness of a French feminist voice not
discussed by Jantzen. Unlike Irigaray and Kristeva (whom Anderson will also utilize, but
rather differently from Jantzen), Michèle Le Doeuff (1989, 1990, 1991) argues
convincingly, on rather different grounds, for an expanded feminist notion of rationality,
rather than for its displacement. Her analysis of what she calls the “Héloise complex”
(1991) is particularly telling in this regard. Taking the famous medieval love story of
Abelard and Héloise as her paradigm, Le Doeuff suggests that even the few women
philosophers of the modern era who have achieved eminence have tended to shelter under
the guardianship of their male mentors (Beauvoir's relation to Sartre is a notable
instance). As Anderson puts it (1998, 50), citing Le Doeuff, “A woman's admiration for
her male mentor, which as a philosopher he genuinely needs, prevents her from seeing
the value of her own thinking. This prevents the faithful woman from scrutinizing the
rationality of her own beliefs, emotions or feelings, and desires.” Once freed from this
vicious circle of male narcissism, however, the woman philosopher is intellectually fully
equipped to develop her own authentic insights and intuitions. The rationality she took
for granted in her mentor she now sees to be narrow and deficient, but the male
“philosophical imaginary,” she also sees, was all along feeding off the unacknowledged
power of her “feminine” contribution—the “other of reason,” as Le Doeuff calls it.
However, there is a crucial difference in Le Doeuff's understanding of the philosophical
imaginary from the Lacanian parsing of the male symbolic that we have seen in both
Irigaray and Jantzen. In Le Doeuff's distinctive usage, as Anderson explains (1998, 25 n.
26), the category of the imaginary is not primarily psychoanalytic, and thus not
intrinsically male, as in Lacan's usage; rather, it bespeaks the mythological and imagistic
subtext that laps at the base of the philosophical discourse and actually sustains the power
of its argument (Le Doeuff 1989, 4–20). As such, this material is not inexorably destined
to remain as the marginalized feminine/semiotic, but in principle is capable of
transformation and conscious integration into an expanded feminist rationality. However,
as we shall shortly chart, this task of integration involves the subtle unearthing and
recasting
end p.509
of moods of “desire” and “mimesis” latent in the texts of philosophy. As such, an element
of psychoanalytic assessment, it would seem, still hangs over the enterprise; we are