From: gsmith@lauren.uucp (Gene W. Smith)
Subject: Re: Genes, Categorical Hypostatization, and You
Organization: IWR, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 92 17:44:56 GMT

In article <92267.204350HERSCH@auvm.american.edu>
HERSCH@auvm.american.edu writes:
>In article <Bv0KoE.576@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>,
ksdavis@silver.ucs.indiana.edu >(Karleenus Schwartz Davis) says:

>>Ahem.  Homosexuality is nothing new.  I doubt you'll accept my
>>sources, but try Biblical times and ancient Greece for starters.
>>That's a little more than 200 years ago.

>If by "homosexuality" you mean merely the objective facts of
>people of the same sex coupling, then you're right. If, on the
>other hand, you mean what virtually everyone nowadays does mean
>by it, you're simply wrong. Homosexuality as an identifying
>characteristic of a person, as an interior identity, as a part
>of one's essential person-hood...people mean all of this when
>they use the term "homosexual", or "homosexuality", or even "gay"
>or "queer". These dimensions are part of that terminology.

Not everyone means this by homosexuality.  It is highly unlikely (after
all!) that the people who are trying to find homosexuality in the brain
somewhere mean this.  One could parody this argument as follows:
Suppose left-handed people start a Sinister culture, and identify as
lefties.  People then use this to "prove" that left-handedness is a
cultural artifact.  This is a logical fallacy, and it is one that
critics from the humanities and sociological side seem in danger of in
some of their rejectionist critiques of this kind of work.

Moreover, I dispute the history.  Did "Il Sodoma" call himself that, and
*not* mean to identify himself as (in modern terms) a homosexual?  It was
clearly a deliberate affirmation of sexual identity.  The fact that the
*word* homosexual had not as yet been coined is a ludicrous red herring.

>And there is simply no way the *historical* evidence can be stretched
>and prodded to push that concept, construct, formulation very far
>back into the past. It did not exist before the taxonomic craze
>of 19th-century scientism, or at least not much before it.

>Neither, of course, did "heterosexuality" or, indeed, "sexuality". The
>things we mean by these terms are modern things, and to discover them
>in pre-modern persons is to read our reality into the lives of people
>who lived a different reality from ours. That is to say, it's
>ahistorical.

The distinction between the homosexual person and the heterosexual
person certainly existed in Plato's head when he wrote the Symposium,
since the myth of Aristophanes has people coming in two types--what we
would now call gay and straight.

If you carry this analysis far enough, you end up with the kind of
thinking embodied in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
the Bicameral Mind", which I take to be a reductio.  The null
hypothesis here is that people "back then" were much the same as people
now.  It is not sensible to assume they were radically different unless
and until they can be proved to be similar.

>No it isn't; it's a matter of definition. If you take the term to
>mean what virtually everyone means by it, then it is clearly a
>social construct and there's no room for much argument, once you
>actually look at a little history.

I don't agree at all that "virtually everyone" means by homosexuality
what you mean by it.  And therefore, it is very much a matter of debate.
*I* am quite happy to talk about homosexuality in Canada geese, and I think
the qualms about this are silly.  A lot of people are the same, if you will
bother to check the usage.

>Which is a very strong argument
>why other disciplines should defer to history when human society
>is involved. When they don't, you get nonsense like the search for
>a genetic basis for "sexuality".

While I am not a fan of scientism, your whole attitude shows why people
in the humanities are often regarded with suspicion if not outright 
derision by scientists.  I see no reason why the usage of the word by
neurologists should "defer" to history, especially when the reading of
history to me appears tendentious and selective.

>You misunderstand me *profoundly*. I am arguing that in the realm
>of human society, the *humanities*, not the soi-disant social sciences,
>must be granted their prerogative and listened to before science
>goes off half-cocked. History as the Queen of the Humanities --
>Clio enthroned -- is my touchstone here, not some dreary social
>science with its tattered questionairres and its insistent
>irrelevance.

Fine.  As an ex-philosophy person, I can now argue that History
must in turn defer to Philosophy, as the ultimate arbiter of conceptual
categories.  Unless some linguist comes along, and then so it goes...

>Part of understanding the hypostatization of analytical categories is
>understanding how easy it is to do. We group large areas of experience
>into a category, and then think that the category actually represents
>something immanent in the experience, when it really represents only
>our own attempt to order our understanding. 

First you insist that homosexuality in some sense *means* its
hypostatization into a homosexual identity, as something real in the
world that someone *is*, and now you give a sermon on the evils of
hypostatizing analytical categories.  Can you have it both ways?

>I think it has been clearly understood for quite a long time now that
>what we think of within our culture as "love" -- that is, "romantic
>love" -- is a fairly recent cultural expression, maybe four or five
>hundred years old.

It's been maintained.  I suspect any day now some smart young thing
will discover the obvious, namely that people back in Greco-Roman times
used to complain about the Madness of Love all the time, and write a
book with just the opposite thesis, which will then become the popular
wisdom for a generation.  It's been a long time since C. S. Lewis wrote
'The Allegory of Love', and we're about due.
-- 
     Gene Ward Smith/Brahms Gang/IWR/Ruprecht-Karls University 
               gsmith@kalliope.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
Newsgroups: alt.politics.homosexuality