Ancient Philosophy - Lecture 4 (Part One)
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Lecture 4
Plato and Feminism
In the preceding lectures we looked at the argument Plato offers in the Republic in defence of the thesis that justice is a good to the just person. In the course of that examination we noted that a discussion of what would constitute an ideally just city is used by Plato to prepare the way for the thesis that a truly just person is someone who possesses a harmoniously integrated personality that can be relied upon not to give rise to actions that contravene the basic proscriptions of our everyday conception of justice. However it also seems to be true that Plato spends more time discussing the nature of this just city than is strictly required for the purposes of his analogy between the just city and the just person. This has made it possible for an interpretative tradition to arise in which the Republic is primarily seen as a work of political philosophy rather than a work that takes issues in moral philosophy as its central focus. Given the content of the Books One and Two of the Republic and the information provided there to the reader about the questions driving forward the discussion between Socrates and his interlocutors, placing such emphasis on Plato’s political theorizing strikes me as an error of judgement. And there is perhaps an important lesson to be learned here about the way in which contemporary interests and preoccupations can influence the manner in which a philosophical text comes to be read.
The person who played the most important role in the popularisation of the Republic in Britain as opposed to the United States was the Idealist philosopher Benjamin Jowett. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries little attention had been given to Plato’s writings, and the Republic was regarded as little more than a bizarre literary oddity. In the nineteenth century, however, things changed dramatically. First, the English Utilitarians endorsed Plato as a thinker engaged in a non-dogmatic search after the truth conducted with a proper respect for the power of rational argument. Then in 1871 Jowett published the first comprehensive set of accurate and readable English translations of Plato’s extant works. Jowett allocated a central role in the Platonic corpus to the Republic as a supposed synthesis of Plato’s mature views about morality, politics, and a metaphysics emphasizing the fundamental role of mental activity in the universe. Moreover political thinking in Britain at that time had begun to emphasize issues that could be seen as related to those discussed in the Republic. In particular a universal male suffrage and the dissemination throughout society of democratic institutions had come to be seen as a real political option rather than an abandonment of society to mere mob-rule, and the democratic city-states of ancient Greece were beginning to supersede the ancient Roman Republic as an object of comparison for British and American politicians and philosophers concerned to understand the nature of their own states. Consequently Plato’s discussions of Athenian democracy in the Republic were seen as making a potentially vital contribution to nineteenth century political debate, and that, in turn, led to the political content of the Republic being increasingly treated as its most important component.
In Jowett’s hands the Republic’s political musings became a potent tool for inculcating his own preferred set of values in the minds of the male élite who would have an opportunity to study this text at university. Jowett and similar educators believed that the Republic threw into sharp relief the merits of a life of selfless devotion to the pubic good as opposed to the corrupting influence of selfish economic ambition. The idea of the Guardians was seen as an essentially meritocratic one that indicated that political rule was to be assigned to people on the basis of education, good character, and hard work, and not on the basis of birth or wealth. Similarly Plato’s insistence on a common system of public education for citizens was seen as an inspiring example to be emulated by spreading education throughout all sections of society and allocating to the state the responsibility for making this possible. And Plato’s objections to democracy and the emphasis he places on the need for those who govern to possess specialized knowledge and skills were readily integrated into the debates of that time over the potential dangers of allowing popular opinion too direct an influence over political decision-making. In essence, then, the Victorians came to adopt an interpretation of the Republic that served to maximize its relevance to their own passing preoccupations rather than an interpretation that took seriously the task of reconstructing Plato’s own understanding of the work.
Even if we do demote Plato’s account of the ideal state from the kind of exaggerated role assigned to it by Jowett and those influenced by him, it still remains the case that some of Plato’s suggestions about how such a state should be organized are of great intrinsic and historical interest. And one of the most famous and controversial of these suggestions is the proposal in Book Five of the Republic that his Guardians should include women amongst their number. Plato portrays Socrates as admitting himself that this is a proposal that is likely to incite ridicule amongst his contemporaries. Moreover it is perfectly possible to find even twentieth-century male commentators arguing that this proposal and the accompanying suggestion that the nuclear family should be eliminated amongst the Guardians in favour of the communal ownership of women and children by the men are simply so absurd that Plato must have introduced them as a check on any naïve attempt to read the Republic as a practical recipe for a functioning city-state. Equally, however, there have been people who have seen these proposals as an astonishing anticipation of modern feminist thought: one that would not be matched by anything even comparably radical until John Stuart Mill’s critique of the way society treated women in The Subjection of Women.
If we could legitimately see Plato as espousing feminist ideals despite a social background hostile to such a way of thinking, then that might encourage us to think of Plato’s philosophical methods as an unusually powerful way of freeing a person from the prejudices and presuppositions of the surrounding culture. It is significant here that Plato’s own conception of his approach to philosophy seems to place great emphasis on its supposed capacity to arrive at timeless knowledge about both metaphysical and ethical matters instead of culturally determined opinions. Given these high ambitions, it is distinctly disappointing that Plato’s devotion to philosophy and the truth doesn’t, for example, appear to generate in him any sense that slavery is a morally unacceptable social institution. It would be reassuring, therefore, to find Plato adopting in respect of women a view about their capacities and appropriate role that represents what we would take to be a major improvement on the beliefs espoused by his contemporaries.
Plato’s Guardians are introduced into the discussion as the military protectors of his ideal city. However Plato is insistent that these military protectors need to have a disposition that prevents them from coming to oppress and mistreat the state’s other citizens. Moreover the association that Plato sees between military power and enforceable authority means that the Guardians need to be trained and brought up to be not just good soldiers but good organizers and rulers of the city. Ultimately, then, it emerges that the Guardian class will include people who predominantly remain at the level of being soldiers (the so-called auxiliaries) and a smaller cadre of people who will progress to exercising ultimate political authority. And in a move that would have struck most of his contemporaries as completely absurd, Plato goes out of his way to argue that women should be included in the ranks of the Guardians and receive the same training and education as male Guardians.
This is undoubtedly a novel and dramatic proposal in the context of traditional Athenian society. Women played no part in the political life of Athens at Plato’s time, and respectable Athenian women were generally married off in their early teens to men twice their age and subsequently led lives virtually confined to their husband’s house, supervising the kitchen, nursing children, and spinning or weaving cloth. Is it illuminating, however, to think of it as an expression of feminist thinking?
One problem with a feminist reading of the Republic is the fact that Socrates does not seem to have any interesting in making new opportunities available to women belonging to the producer class in his city. Woman are to be selected for membership of the Guardian class on the basis of aptitude and ability, but there seems to be no suggestion that there should be any change to traditional sex-roles within other sections of society. Similarly, the nuclear or private family is to be abolished in the case of the Guardians, but Socrates seems perfectly content for it to continue to be the principal unit of social organization for everyone else. Thus there seems to be a strong case for supposing that Plato primarily sees the proposal that women should serve as Guardians as addressing a problem of scarce human resources. Given the special range of psychological and moral characteristics required of his Guardians, in particular their capacity to be fierce towards the city’s enemies but gentle and well-disposed towards their fellow citizens, he regards it as crucial that everyone who can adequately play that role becomes a Guardian. However in other areas of life there is no shortage of potential male talent, and hence the standard division of labour between the sexes will suffice for the effective functioning of the city.
What, though, should we say about the nature of Socrates’ reply to the allegation that enrolling women as Guardians contravenes the crucial principle on which the ideal sate is constructed – namely, the principle that each person is to do his or her own work, according to his or her nature? Does Socrates’ response to this allegation provide the materials for the vindication of a feminist reordering of society even if Plato himself fails to appreciate fully the implications of his own position?
Socrates concedes that it is plainly the case that there are some differences in the nature of men and women, and he is also perfectly happy to reaffirm the principle that different natures should do different things. However he argues that it does not follow that any particular function F should be reserved exclusively for men unless it can be shown that men and women have natures that are different in terms of affecting the capacity to perform that function successfully. Socrates maintains that the only difference between all men and all women is that men impregnate and women give birth (Republic 454d-e). So once we have recognized that this difference is, of itself, irrelevant to the question of what social roles the two sexes should play, we cannot say that any particular woman is unfitted to carry out function F merely because she is a woman. All other true generalizations about the respective aptitudes and abilities of men and women are simply claims about most men and most women, and no statement about most men and women enables us to infer anything with certainty about any particular man or woman. Thus a rationally-ordered society will arrange things so that the social roles allocated to people are allocated on the basis of their individual capacities rather than on the basis of whether they happen to be men or women.
We seem, then, to have come across here an implicit commitment on Plato’s behalf to what would be described today as formal equality of opportunity between the sexes. What doesn’t seem to be the case, however, is that Plato displays any inclination to commit himself to the view that women have a right to be treated in this way. Instead of arguing that a rationally-ordered society would operate like this because it would otherwise be mistakenly disregarding women’s rights, Plato seems clearly to be arguing that a rationally-ordered society would operate like this, at least in areas where suitably talented people are in scarce supply, because it would otherwise be operating in a harmfully inefficient manner.
It might be thought, then, that this lack of regard for women’s rights is sufficient in itself to disqualify Plato from being any kind of feminist. However this is almost certainly too hasty an inference. It would be entirely legitimate to question the feminist credentials of someone who attaches importance to issues of rights but doesn’t see women as having a right to make their own choices about their occupation and way of life. However it is worth bearing in mind that Plato doesn’t even have a word for ‘rights’, and it seems plain that when Plato is sketching out his ideal city, he is far more concerned with ensuring that its social arrangements maximize the overall outcome for society rather than ensuring that they guarantee any particular distribution of benefits and costs to individuals. So if Plato doesn’t think of men as having rights not possessed by women, does his lack of concern with women’s rights really count all that heavily against the propriety of classifying him as a feminist? And it is worth bearing in mind here that Plato’s lack of interest in the desires and aspirations of women doesn’t necessarily convict him of indifference to the welfare of individual women. Plato holds that even when we are concerned with the flourishing of a particular individual rather than the state as a whole, the objectively best situation for that individual may have very little to do with what that person actually wants or enjoys doing. Today we would tend to think of ignoring a person’s wants and inclinations as an attack on his or her well-being. Plato, in contrast, has a robustly objectivist view of human flourishing that can readily make room for the possibility that people may systematically fail to recognize what is truly best for them.
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