Modernity recodifies Plato’s form-change hierarchy as a hard-soft gendered division

Evidence

The Lockean division between the ‘hard’, rational sphere of scientific corpuscularism and the ‘soft’ sphere of relationship, feeling and dependency now replaces the older Platonic division between the shining realm of eternal forms and the corrupt ‘realm of changes’ as the site of philosophical privilege. Gender ideals are now defined in relation to this social and intellectual division of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ spheres. In the ‘primary’ public masculinist world of corpuscular contract, of hardnosed reason, hard science, hard politics and hard currency, instrumental efficiency reigns and particles must fend for themselves to survive hard evolutionary and social competition. The contrasting ‘soft’ exclusions include ethics (flabby sentimentality), beauty and meaningfulness (speculation), as well as the ideals of the private sphere, the home and the feminine, of altruism, values, emotionality, relationship and care. The private sphere receives legitimacy to the extent that it can be contained and instrumentalised, made to serve the primary ‘public’ and rational order. — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 446

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Merchant’s feminisation of nature/devaluation of the feminine; core for the Eco-Justice dualism thread and the pair-reading with Death of Nature. — connects to: A single reason-over-nature dualism structures every domain of Plato’s philosophy — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 312; Contemporary beauty norms reproduce a Platonic dualism of body as lack to be mastered — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 306; Plato’s subordination targets the feminine as a category, not actual women — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 297 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Shows how the reason/nature dualism is re-instantiated as a gendered hard/soft social division — a key definitional move for the ecofeminist critique.