Feminine & Masculine Ways of Knowing – A Deep Imbalance

The following post is inspired by Safron Rossi’s interview on her book about Carl Jung’s views and influence on modern astrology. In the interview, she says:

“One way to approach this point (Jung’s unique contribution) is why is Jung’s work significant in the field of psychology. And for me, I would say that it has to do with the way he attempted to meld together the wisdom of the past with modern psychological understanding and methods of treatment.

The Jung psychology is one that grows organically from traditional understandings, particularly in the realms of spirituality, religion, mythology, and comparative symbolism. And in an era where psychology was becoming increasingly behavioural and rationalistic, Jung insisted on the importance of a spiritual life because that has been the core of the human experience from time immemorial. Why all of a sudden would the spiritual life really not be so important? It’s a really big question.”

What she mentions is central to the argument of my PhD. Suddenly, in the 19th century, at the time of the industrial revolution, the tacit experience and understanding of living became not so important, or rather, not so reliable as a way of knowing. The belief that emotions are clouding the (rational) mind and that the machine was more reliable than humans because it had no messy emotions became the mainstream ideology.

But tacit knowing (i.e. the qualitative knowing that results from embodied experience and which can also be called intuitive knowing) is a fundamentally feminine way of knowing. Instead with the Industrial Revolution, it has been replaced with faith in masculine ways of knowing, so called scientific, but in fact, “mechanistic” more than “scientific”.

As Mikhail Polanyi argues in his books Personal Knowledge (1958) and The Tacit Dimension (1966), tacit knowing is fully part of science. What I call the statistical mindset is a reductionist, mechanistic way of knowing that solely has faith in mechanistic, explicit and importantly, measurable knowledge.

Here, Rossi says that Carl Jung gave (feminine) tacit knowing a place in modern psychology at a time (the time of the industrial revolution) when disciplines such as psychology and sociology were overwhelmed by the statistical mindset that values measurability above all. Examples of this in the field of psychology is the behavioural school, in sociology, Auguste Comte and positivism.

In Europe, the 19th century was the century when women were believed to be too irrational to make important decisions (like voting for example) and it was also the century when purely statistical, measurable pseudo sciences (e.g., the dark science of eugenics) were born; it was the time when the factory line became the model for everything, mass production, but also the health system, the economy, psychology, education etc…

It is important to realise that the rationalisation of the social sciences was not in and of itself a “bad” thing. In a way, it was also a way to bring some degree of rigour to the field, and more importantly, to experiment with what can and cannot be measured. Walter Benjamin talked about the Phantasmagoria of an age, i.e., the set of belief system that underlies the development of thought during that period of time. Measuring, fragmenting the whole into parts, analysis, control over the environment were all part of the phantasmagoria of the Industrial Revolution and the Modern Age. All disciplines went through this prism (including Design, I may do a post on this later). Jung melded WISDOM into MODERN PSYCHOLOGY, which was very unusual at the time.

Statistical knowledge is predictive knowledge. We use statistics to know something that will happen in the future, like the likelihood of a weather event to happen, or market movements, or usage of public transport etc… It is the best knowledge we have to OPTIMISE, when the values of EFFICIENCY and convenience are primordial (like in urban or business planning for example). It is founded on the masculine principle trait of linear logic (if A and B, then C), and on the equally masculine principle trait of goal orientation (Jung’s definition of masculinity: know what you want and how to go and get it).

This is not in and of itself bad or good, there is no value judgement here. Again, it is not a matter of superiority (which is a masculine concept, i.e., fragmenting and analysing by setting up hierarchies), but of BALANCE. Today, we live in a world (more specifically, the geographies at the centre of power) where feminine ways of knowing, which emphasise regeneration, intuitive insights, collaboration, inter-dependencies and relationality are not trusted and are suppressed, often in the name of science.

Living systems function on the principles of feminine ways of knowing. But it is not really science itself that smothers feminine ways of knowing, it’s the reductionist mechanistic mindset (and the values of efficiency and optimisation) which is applied to areas of life and of living experience where it has nothing to contribute.

As I argue in the PhD, while digital technologies are indeed revolutionary in terms of the MEDIUM they created (algorithmic social platforms), from the point of view of the belief system that underlies them, they in fact perpetuate an outdated mindset (described above) which serves the values of efficiency and optimisation with a disregard for life.