One of the ways of viewing philosophy is that it is the discipline aiming to gain a complete and coherent account of “everything” – a logos of the cosmos. Aristotle’s Metaphysics begins with the claim: 

All men [all people] 

by nature desire to know.

So what is it that they desire to know? They want to know what’s behind the curtain! What’s really making reality tick! What is the story behind the conventional story they tell us?

There are philosophers who strive to face this question head on, doing their utmost to come up with answers. The term “metaphysics,” though originally a librarian’s designation (meaning the book shelved after the “physics”) has taken on the seductive suggestion that, behind nature (physis) there lie the secret springs of action, still awaiting discovery.

I must say my own curiosity has not run along these lines. If there is a Big Picture, I can’t recall ever yearning to take it in. This may reflect a proper humility about my own capabilities. But I suspect that, had I earnestly longed to see The Big Picture, my body would have produced brain cells sufficient to permit an overview of the evidence. Generally speaking, we can gain the capacity to know what we think we will need to know.

What then takes the place of metaphysics in the workings of my curiosity? Certainly not any supine settling for conventional accounts of how the Big Picture works or should be understood. By now it’s getting clearer that the prospect of Big Answers keeps receding. We are still far from knowing how mind and matter interact – whether in ourselves or other species – how causes and freedom can coexist, how moral imperatives are grounded, how facts and values bear on each other, what existed before the cosmogonic Big Bang, and so on and on.

That said, my philosophic curiosity lies elsewhere. Where then? You might call it The Little Picture. For instance: what is happening between two women friends who have not met in a long time and but now get together in a café to talk about the lives they have lived? What’s the proximate context? What are the boundaries and lacunae of the bigger world they are presently mapping for each other? What’s to be feared and hoped for within that world – and why? Remember, they are women! Women have specific fears, regrets and hopes that men do not ordinarily have. 

With some, as they converse, the larger terrain will include shared landmarks. Nevertheless, in conversations between women intimates, there will always be terrain left undiscussed. What human possibilities or defeats lie over there? What world-of-desire, or vale-of-desires-forfeited, does the conversational map include – or else leave tactfully out of account? 

What did older maps of the-landscape-for-women look like? Do contemporary feminisms deal with the present terrain of troughs and heights or only work with superseded maps? Do current theories take account of actual zones of silence, or merely conceal them under formulaic abstractions?

About facts and values, the cosmogonic preconditions et cetera, I’d like to know, but am not in a breathless hurry. For me, there’s a more urgent question:

What is it about women and men

that we still haven’t figured out?