Ancient Philosophy - Lecture 4 (Part Two)
A more formidable challenge to Plato’s right to be thought of as an early feminist, however, stems from his distinctly disparaging attitude towards the generality of women. Although his willingness to include women in the class of Guardians shows that Plato doesn’t regard being female as automatically disbarring a person from the highest forms of human excellence, his views on the nature of the average woman are less than complimentary. When, for example, Socrates is setting out the criteria by which we should judge whether one person is naturally well suited for something and some other person is unsuited, he concentrates on speed of learning and subsequent independent creativity (Republic 455). And it is with these criteria in mind that he asserts that the male sex is, taken as a whole, superior to the female sex at all occupations that contribute towards the administration of the state. Moreover, the overwhelming impression conveyed by this part of the Republic is that this judgement is being presented as a well-confirmed generalization based on pervasive empirical evidence.
Initially it might be thought that these views can readily be accommodated within a feminist interpretation of Plato’s position by drawing a distinction between an assessment of the average woman’s innate abilities and an assessment of the socially-conditioned abilities of the women known to Plato. If Plato could be shown to believe that as a matter of fact women are, on average, innately less talented by women by some substantial margin, then it would seem to be true that even a full-blooded commitment to equality of opportunity would not allow us to think of him as espousing a genuinely feminist position. However if it were always appropriate to think of him as holding that women are, on average, less competent than men only because of different expectations, poorer education, and lack of opportunity to acquire relevant experience, then his negative assessment of the abilities of the average woman could be presented as simply reflecting his awareness of the gap between the capacities of women under ideal conditions and their actual performance in circumstances where they are systematically disadvantaged by the rules and social conventions imposed on them by men.
The foregoing distinction between innate and socially-conditioned characteristics is undoubtedly an important one, and it does give a defender of Plato’s feminist credentials some useful manoeuvring room. However it seems unable to explain away the two following aspects of his disparaging remarks about the women of his time and society. Firstly, he frequently makes negative comments about their general abilities without appending any explicit indication that he thinks that these lesser abilities arise only from the deleterious effects of social conditioning and a mistakenly restricted education (see, for example, 395d-e, 455c, and 563b). This seems inexplicable if he were really convinced that the potential abilities of the average woman are just as good as those of the average man. Someone with that conviction and Plato’s commitment to the promotion of human excellence could only have seen the Athens of the fourth century BC as guilty of a grotesque failure to organize itself so as to maximize the possible achievements of half of its population. Consequently even if such a person were to traffic in criticisms of the abilities and attitudes of women brought up in that society, he would undoubtedly wish to remind his readers as often as possible that the deficiencies he is picking out in actual performance of women could be remedied by a change in the attitude and actions of men. In reality, however, Plato conspicuously fails to balance his negative comments with such salutary reminders. And the second problematic aspect of Plato’s disparaging remarks about women is that some seem to be explicit claims about the innate inferiority of most women to most men. In the Timaeus, for example, Plato asserts that ‘human nature being two-fold, the better sort was that which should thereafter be called man’ (42e), and supplements this by saying twice that evil and cowardly men are reborn as women as the first step downwards to rebirth as animals (42b-c and 90e - 91a).
In conclusion, then, it seems appropriate to acknowledge that Plato does differ considerably from the thought of virtually all of his contemporaries in his willingness to defend the view that the view that the differences in nature between men and women are not sufficient of themselves to justify allocating them different social roles and responsibilities. Moreover in the case of his Guardians he makes the further point that women should be selected for membership of this ruling group on the basis of what they can achieve after receiving the same education and training as men rather than on the basis of what a more restricted education has fitted them to do. However his lack of any interest in the question of what natural (i.e. non-legal) rights a person possesses means that he stands at a great distance from those forms of feminism couched in terms of acknowledging women’s rights. And when we take into account the evidence that indicates that he believes that women are, on average, innately less talented and competent than men and the fact that his proposals for enhancing the status of women in his ideal city seem to be confined solely to the Guardian class, it seems that we are ultimately led to the judgement that it would be deeply misleading to describe Plato as being any kind of feminist.
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