Marilyn Frye: Requirement

Marilyn Frye is feminist philosopher and professor. Explore interesting quotes on requirement.

Marilyn Frye: 16 quotes8 likes

“Cages. Consider a birdcage. If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and be unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.”

"Oppression", in Politics Of Reality – Essays In Feminist Theory (1983)

“The forces of men’s material and perceptual violence mold Woman to dependence upon Man, in every meaning of 'dependence': contingent upon; conditional upon; necessitated by; defined in terms of; incomplete or unreal without; requiring the support or assistance of; being a subordinate part of; being an appurtenance to.”

Marilyn Frye book The Politics of Reality

Source: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), p. 77

“Western philosophy and science have for the most part been committed to the Simplicity Theory of Truth: the simplest theory that accounts for the data is the true theory. (Theories are simplest which postulate the fewest entities, require the fewest hypotheses, generate predictions by the fewest calculations, etc.) ...If someone believes that the world is made for him to have dominion over and he is made to exploit it, he must believe that he and the world are so made that he can, at least in principle, achieve and maintain dominion over everything. But you can’t put things to use if you don’t know how they work. So he must believe that he can, at least in principle, understand everything. If the world exists for man, it must be usably intelligible, which means it must be simple enough for him to understand. A usable universe is an intelligible universe is a simple universe. ...And so it goes with the philosophy and the science of The Arrogant Eye.”

Marilyn Frye book The Politics of Reality

Source: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), p. 71

“Efficient exploitation of “human resources” requires that the structures that refer the others’ actions to the exploiter’s ends must extend beneath the victim’s skin. The exploiter has to bring about the partial disintegration and re(mis)integration of the others’ matter, parts and properties so that as organized systems the exploited are oriented to some degree by habits, skills, schedules, values and tastes to the exploiter’s ends rather than, as they would otherwise be, to ends of their own. In particular, the manipulations which adapt the exploited to a niche in another’s economy must accomplish a great reduction of the victim’s intolerance of coercion.”

Marilyn Frye book The Politics of Reality

Source: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), p. 60

“Efficient exploitation requires that those exploited be relatively mobile, self-animating and self-maintaining—the more so as the work in question requires greater intelligence, attention or ingenuity. But it also requires that they not be free enough, strong enough or willful enough to resist, escape or significantly misfit the situation of exploitation.”

Marilyn Frye book The Politics of Reality

Source: The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (1983), p. 59