The conversation of the Republic is full of humor, liveliness, grand dispositions, spirited objections, and cavalier dismissals, but after the dramatics of Book I, there’s no head-to-head argumentation of the same ferocity—until the First Wave. In the middle of the argument, Socrates announces that Glaucon is contradicting himself, and that some sort of miraculous rescue must be sought, if the argument is going to continue. Considering that the evening’s conversation is one of the more friendly discussions in the Platonic corpus, it’s quite a dramatic moment: Socrates lets Glaucon stew in a very public and pointed way. Now, many readers have dissected the logic of the section; for a particularly thorough version, I point the reader to Elena Duvergès Blair’s work.1 I will note that for readers in various traditions over time, who do not share any particular agreement on the nature of argument as such, it has nevertheless not been particularly controversial to say that the logic of Socrates’ argument for the possibility for and goodness of women to take up the profession for which they are suited, arguing not from justice or from skill but from nature, is sound.2 Indeed, the reader finds Socrates at his most Aristotelian, insisting that they be precise about the ways in which they speak of similarity and difference—the very distinctions Socrates often devilishly conflates in order to commit dialectical murder. It’s the very soundness of the passage that tends to force those looking for dramatic significance to turn to Socrates’ examples, which are indeed amusing and often just plain strange, such as the implicit comparison of the difference between the sexes to the difference between a man with hair and a man without it, not to mention the notorious question of common naked exercise.
But what really gives life to the passage is Glaucon’s reaction to each argument, example, and exhortation, which displays his strong reluctance to the idea that women share a nature with men. The drama or plot, if you will, of the section is how Socrates and Glaucon get to the moment of contradiction, why Glaucon admits his ignorance, and how Socrates gets the argument to continue. What prompts Glaucon to this instance of mulishness, and why does Socrates make such a big deal out of it? What saves the argument and allows it to continue? My interpretation will hinge on Glaucon’s initial caveat that they “take the women as weaker and men as stronger” (451e): though ignored at first by Socrates, this phrase becomes the ground on which the education and rule of female guardians is built, and it is the miraculous rescue to the argument which Socrates says is required. By adopting this caveat of Glaucon’s into his argument, Socrates manages to secure rule and education for women despite Glaucon’s serious hesitation; the action of his argument remains the same. But his dramatization of Glaucon’s reluctance provides a valuable service to the reader, for it puts on display even a decently generous man’s reluctance to admit that women could share in the same tasks as the men. Plato’s writing is not only an argument that women should share the rule with men, but a witness to the difficulty in getting someone to agree to it.
THE CENTRAL APORIA
The argument of the First Wave goes like this: Socrates first lays out his plan for what the commonality between the male and female guardians should be: just as hunting dogs are used for all tasks, male and female alike, so also should the male and female guardians share in all the tasks together. But if they do this, then the women will have to have the same education as the men. Noticing Glaucon’s hesitation (“On the basis of what you say, it’s likely,” 452a6), Socrates sets up the strongest objection in order to do away with it: if education is common, then male and female guardians will have to exercise together without clothes. Socrates notes while this did not used to be Greek practice, customs change; Glaucon is struck, and listens readily to Socrates’ exhortations to ignore the wits. Socrates then announces there will be a debate, to which both wits and serious folk are invited: does female human nature (fÚsij ἡ ἀnqrwp…nh ἡ θήλεια, 453a) have all, some, or nothing in common with the male? Socrates then has a disputatious or eristical opponent lead Glaucon through the next steps: female human nature is completely different, but “how are you not contradicting yourself” seeing that, if everyone is to mind their own business in accordance with their nature, there’s no way men and women could have the same education. This contradiction is the official indictment of their argument (453e). “What apology can you make for this, you wondrous man?” Socrates asks (453c); Glaucon says it is not easy to find one on the spur of the moment; Socrates says they will simply have to hope for a dolphin or some other “difficult to procure” (ἄπορον) savior (453d). This aporia and the necessity of an aporetic savior is the dramatic center of the argument; the arithmetical one comes a little later, when Socrates notes they’ve been chasing the argument the wrong way, too “manfully and eristically” (454b5) by names alone, without dialectical distinctions. Socrates then says that the sameness and difference they are considering is fitness for profession or pursuit (ἐπιτηδεύματα, also “training,” “habit”), he asserts that men are better than women at every pursuit and every capacity, to which Glaucon, though remarking that “many women are better than many men at many things (455d),” agrees firmly. Essentially, because men excel at every pursuit, there’s no pursuit special to women by nature; and so there must be no difference in nature between the sexes, other than men’s superiority. Once this is done, the argument quickly concludes: some women are athletic, musical, philosophic, and spirited, if as a genos they are weaker; there’s nothing better for the best city than the best men and women, which is produced by the best education; since the measure is both possible and best, Socrates lays it down as a law (457b). After this, all is smooth sailing; even though Glaucon remarks that the Third Wave, the proposal of philosopher-kings, will provoke strong and even violent reaction from those who hear of it, Glaucon himself is eager to hear more details.
In the First Wave, Socrates insists that the man who laughs at women exercising naked for the sake of the best “knows not at what he laughs or what he does (457b)”; but in the passage, it is Glaucon himself whose foibles are on display; indeed, Glaucon is on the spot as accused criminal, as the language of apology and indictment shows. Glaucon was laughing before the argument began, blithely promising not to be a hard-hearted, distrustful, or ill-willed interlocutor (450d); yet once the First Wave starts, his polite but shocked sudden caesuras, and the cartwheels Socrates turns in response, manifest conversational stubbornness enough. Twice elsewhere Glaucon finds himself in a dialectically similar difficulty, as when he can’t name the nature that unites gentleness and fierceness in the initial discussion of the rulers as guardian hounds (375e), or when he fails to notice that spirit is distinct from desire in the discussion of the tripartite soul (439e); but both of these times Socrates was quite gentle with him. Now, Glaucon is a notably gallant interlocutor: gracious, thoughtful, willing to concede a point; all ears whenever the subject of beauty comes up (402a, 476c, 540c); he himself announces his willingness to answer more harmoniously (ἐμμελέστερόν) than another (474a). But in the First Wave, Glaucon—though still gracious in his embarrassment (“but I shall beg you, and I do beg you, to interpret the argument on our behalf” at 453c)—is a stubborn interlocutor enough. Indeed, in his distress at his own aporia, Glaucon speaks of the subject in question as one “not easy to digest” (453d). To be sure, it’s a sign of Glaucon’s good nature that he doesn’t resent how hard Socrates is pushing him: at first, Glaucon adopts the weak subterfuge that it’s not easy to come up with an answer on the spur of the moment (453c); all too weak, since that’s the accepted risk of any conversation with Socrates. Socrates later makes him pay, noting that their now discredited opponent might say it was difficult to answer on the spot, which Glaucon answers, as if with gritted teeth, “he would say that” (455a). It’s a real question why Socrates is going to all this trouble; he is the reason why the argument is drawn out at such length, the reason why he interrupts himself to give a lesson on dialectic; it’s Socrates who places this controversial hurdle between himself and his argument for philosopher-kings. In the center of the First Wave, Socrates makes it unclear what, if anything, will come next in the argument; whether they will have to stop the whole evening’s work and go home.
But Glaucon is the interlocutor on the woman question for good reason. Adeimantus has far stronger opinions on the female genos: he came out very strongly against the sexual foibles of the goddesses and gods in Book II, with a “by Zeus!” at Hera’s erotic trickery, and the binding of Aphrodite and Ares (390c). Later in Book II, Socrates gets his concurrence to ban the imitation of wives who nag their husbands (395d). In Book VIII, Adeimantus responds to Socrates’ description of the downfall of the aristocratic man at the hands of his son, by means of the many complaints of his wife, with his own addition of, “Many [complaints] indeed, and just like them”; the “them” being the genos in question (549e). It seems Socrates has touched a chord here, and the angry speech of women at their husband’s alleged misrule is something that Adeimantus particularly objects to. As I argued in chapter 1, it may be in part a concern about the sexual freedom involved in wives in common that influences him to raise the woman question again in Book V. At any rate, the mere instance of his agreeing so heartily to Socrates’ strong criticism of the relative freedom between men and women in a democracy (563b) would be enough to disqualify him from the conclusions Socrates ends up making in the First Wave. If the education and rule of women is going to be argued for at all, then it has to happen while Socrates is talking to someone other than Adeimantus.
THE WAR FOR RULERSHIP
What initially causes Glaucon’s reluctance, and what resolves it? In Socrates’ opening sally, he offers Glaucon two scenarios:
Do we suppose that the females of the guardian dogs must guard the things the males guard along with them and hunt with them, and do the rest in common; or must they watch the house as though they were rendered powerless through the bearing and rearing of the puppies, while the males toil and have all the care of the flock bestowed upon them? (451d)
As in Book II, the rulers are as hounds who guard the flock of citizens. The first option grants the female guardians a pretty large domain: they will guard together and hunt together (συμφυλάττειν and sunqhrεύειν), with the male guardians. As I pointed out in chapter 1, this is the moment where Socrates shifts from the earlier language of being in common as a thing held (koinÍ), to both sexes doing something else in common together, which opens the possibility for the partnership entailed in common guarding and hunting. Socrates gives all the positive rhetorical weight to this first option; it’s cast as the sensible one. The second option which follows is put in too extreme terms to be probable: or must they stay indoors as though they were incapacitated (¢dun£touj, powerless). Socrates appeals to the practical-minded owner of hunting dogs: no person who spends his time carefully training litter after litter of dogs for hunting would consider that as a serious option. Needless to say, both male and female dogs are customarily used for hunting, since it’s hard enough to find a good hunting dog as it is; in Xenophon’s On Hunting 7.5, he makes a list of recommended names for dogs of both sexes, including both the male and female version of “Guard,” Phulax and Phrura.3 I will note that hunting as a pursuit ought to be a striking addition to the earlier tasks of the ruling dogs; I will consider why and for what purpose Socrates makes this strange addition in chapter 3. But on a practical level, the argument has a calculated rhetorical appeal: Glaucon himself is an owner of hunting dogs, as the reader learns in the Second Wave (459a), and familiar with this aspect of the business. Socrates lays a tempting trap when he makes the male dogs in the second option bear all the burden and “work and have all the care of the flock”; who would want to bear all the burden, if you put it like that? Socrates appeals to a sense of injustice at such an unfair arrangement. Socrates makes a strong case for the first option of common guarding and common hunting for Glaucon to agree to.
But Glaucon still finds it necessary to qualify Socrates’ proposal: “‘Everything in common,’ he said, ‘except that we use the females as weaker, the males as stronger’” (koinÍ, ἔfh, p£nta: plὴn ὡj ¢sqenestšraij crèmeqa, toῖj dὲ ὡj ἰσχυροτέροις, 451e). Retreating to the language of “in common,” Glaucon strikes out independently with a big qualification to Socrates’ long, carefully set up alternatives. The vocabulary of strength and weakness Glaucon uses is quite specific: women have the less public face, while men are the fiercer. Indeed, particularly in the case of the quality of astheneia, the language is more of human beings within political life, as Adeimantus uses it to describe the weakness and poverty sneered at in better men, in contrast to the acclaim that the strong and unjust men receive (364a). Such weakness would seem to possess an element of that incapacity that Socrates dismisses; and weakness in half of the ruling class is a troubling incapacity.
But Socrates does not address Glaucon’s qualification to his opening statement. He responds with a sidestep: “Is it possible to use any animal for the same things if you don’t render it the same education?” He keeps Glaucon’s verb “to use” (χρῆσθαί), casting the guardians as things to be possessed by the argument; he keeps this locution for the next step as well. But by his conclusion, he has changed the verb to “to render” (¢podotšon), as in Simonides’ contention that we must render to each other what the other is due (331e). After this change, Socrates does not recur to “using” the guardians, but keeps “render”; this makes the assignment of education less a matter of utility and something more like justice; Socrates too now is implicitly speaking of humans.3 But though Socrates transforms Glaucon’s use of utility, he ignores Glaucon’ qualification of weaker and stronger; in turn, he abandons his initial metaphor of guarding together and hunting together as dogs. Socrates ends this first section by concluding that women must also be given music and gymnastic, without taking the argument back to specific shared pursuits; again, Glaucon, without his concerns addressed, agrees only reluctantly even to this less robust version of commonality (452a5).
As his maneuvers display, Socrates has already noticed Glaucon’s difficulties with his initial framing of the proposal; his introduction of the test case of naked exercise seems to be aimed at this hesitation. Such a test case is part of the familiar argumentative strategy, that if one can refute the strongest objection possible, then the rest is relatively easy; one also looks the more magnanimous for having introduced it oneself.4 Glaucon responds well to this strategy: he is very willing to believe in the change of customs over time (“very much so indeed,” 452e). But even with a full agreement that naked exercise could be for the good, along with the weight of his set of exhortations to be serious, to consider experience, and to look to the good as a target, Socrates doesn’t go straight from here to asking Glaucon again directly if the women should be educated and rule. Instead, he sets up the conceit of the disputatious opponent, ostensibly to keep the argumentation all aboveboard; but it also serves the purpose of bringing Glaucon’s objections out in the open. Glaucon is eager to give his full support to the opponent’s leading question “Is there any way that a woman isn’t completely different from a man with respect to nature?” answering quickly, “But in what way don’t they differ?” (453b) Socrates-as-opponent has changed the ground of the question: he gets Glaucon to agree to the complete difference between a man (ἀn»r) and a woman (gun»); while Socrates began his argument with the words that are used for the male and female of an animal species (qÁluj and ἄρσην), he now makes it perfectly clear they are talking about people. Glaucon voices his strongest sense about the difference in nature between the human sexes when he is considering them as properly human actors, animals who live in cities. Much has been made of the characterization of the guardians as animals by the three instances of thêlus and ársen in the First Wave; but it’s not until the Second Wave that the guardians become inhuman to the point of herdlike.5 Dogs, by contrast, can be trained, which is the distinction that the argument from profession turns on. Socrates makes it clear the question turns on what female human nature (fÚsij ἡ ἀnqrwp…nh ἡ q»leia) can share in common with the nature of the male genos. Do women share all, some, or nothing in common with men? Glaucon’s first reaction is to leap in with the amusingly hyperbolic equivalent of “nothing”: hyperbolic, since if that were so, we would be discussing two entirely separate species, rather than two parts of the same one. This is why the language of genos which Socrates and Glaucon often employ in this section, is such a revealing way to speak about the race of men and the race of women: should men be wholly distinct from women, each would be a separate species, rather than two sides of the animal with the logos.6 In the former case, common education would not make much sense.
Why does Glaucon want to say that men and women have completely distinct natures? Even in the third and next section, Glaucon still offers only weak agreement when he is asked once more directly if men and women share the same nature for guardianship of the city (“so it appears,” 456a), though a few lines earlier, he once again shows willingness to educate them, even more willingness than in the first section (“that’s entirely certain,” 456b). Although he was hesitant, Glaucon did initially agree that common education seemed to be made necessary (452a). Always on the lookout for hard work—he speaks of early childhood education as a particularly strenuous labor (450c), and describes the seven liberal arts as “a prodigious undertaking” (531c)—Glaucon is nevertheless willing to share out the hard work of education with women. In fact, Glaucon is more willing to share education, than to let men and women share a nature.
Socrates introduces the disputatious opponent as one who will battle against himself and Glaucon; it’s in an atmosphere of war, and indeed, as over the question of whether women’s nature allows them to participate in war (435e), that Glaucon decides to enter the fray; his eristical sin is this hyperbole of difference. In a reverse, it’s in the name of dialectic, rather than the needless verbal battle of eristic, that Socrates shuts Glaucon down, pointing out they’ve been pursuing the question all too manfully (ἀνδρείως, 454b). Manliness lends itself to eristic; eristic is specifically awakened by the question of female human nature. Socrates can hardly be clearer: passion is at stake in this question, and specifically male passion, on behalf of the male sex. It’s this specific impulse that Socrates shames by drawing out Glaucon’s aporia.
Socrates marks this question out as a debate or wrangle (ἀμφιβήτησις, 452e); in the Republic, he puts it on the same footing as the wrangle over whether or not a thing can be or not be at the same time in the same respect (437a), as well as whether the good is pleasure or something different (505d); both such conversations productive of incessant back-and-forth, neither side willing to budge.7 But in the case of the woman question, why does nature become the battleground? Why does Glaucon want to be a wholly distinct sort of thing from the female genos? The elephant in the room is the question of rule: both a political rule, and then a sort of metaphysical rule or superiority, if you will.8 Socrates has introduced the female genos, in his initial description of their commonality with men, as a kind that will share in the guardianship of the city. He describes that partnership relatively tamely, confining himself in the First Wave to repeatedly stating that they will share all duties; but implicit in this all is the guardianship or governorship—since after all, that is what the guardians are supposed to be for, and is the justification for their tailored education. Later, of course, Socrates confirms that he is thinking of female rulers (τὰς ἀρκούσας, 540c); but for now he leaves this implicit in his “all.” This is the telling contrast: for imagine how contentious the argument would have been, if Socrates had led with that! Now, the question of who should rule is in and of itself one that naturally invites intense interest, even excitement; the fascination with this question underlies much of the dramatic tension in the Republic as a whole.9 Though Glaucon is willing to say definitely that the souls of male and female doctors are the same (454d), when asked if men and women share the same nature for guardianship of the city, he only offers “so it appears” (456a); rule is a more tense question than skill. Glaucon is hardly willing to share rule with some other anthropos in the first place; he’s already quite interested in the power that injustice seems to promise, as he reveals in his speech in Book II. How much the less would he wish to share rule with an entirely different genos! Glaucon later speaks contentedly of Socrates’ solution: “you speak the truth; the one genos is overpowered by the other in all by far, so to speak” (455d). The question of political rule is only satisfied by the categorical triumph of the one sex over the other.
But before the reader leaps to blame Glaucon, it must be noted that he is no rare representative of humanity in being touched by these concerns; he merits no peculiar blame for the impulse to jockey it out. In fact, if James Adam is correct that Socrates intends to identify the eristical opponent with the rest of the audience at 453e, it’s possible that signs of visible restlessness have become apparent in some of those present as Socrates presents his case for female human nature.10 But as can’t be stressed enough, the problem is mutual: the truth is that in conversations like these, one need merely consult the sex of the speaker to see which genos will obtain the mastery in speech. For an ancient example of women’s desire to claim superiority, consider the Chorus Leader’s final speech in Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria: “It’s pretty clear that we [we women] are far superior to you, and I’ve got a way to prove it. Let’s take a test to see which one is worse. We say it’s you and you say it’s us. Let’s examine the issue by pairing the names of each man and each woman one on one.”11 Such rivalry is funny because it’s true; contention in such matters is a human problem; this is no less true when a concession is rhetorically desirable. Once Glaucon has been caught out, Socrates remarks that this and many other things are why he feared to discuss the women’s law (453d); Socrates is well aware of what the question of rule and the question of what female human nature has the power to do. When Glaucon ruefully admits that speaking of these matters is not easy to digest or stomach (™ukÒlῳ, 453d), his description is apt—and admirably honest. A wondrous rescue is required; it will need to be wondrous, because opinions about male and female nature are deeply held, perhaps more so than any other common opinion about nature; and more than opinions about, for instance, the weather, they have immediate political ramifications and reflections. Even the question of the abolition of private property, though it certainly received a strong objection from Adeimantus, did not become contentious in the way that this one does. Socrates describes their predicament as like being in a great ocean; and they are indeed in the soup.
Although some readers have questioned why this early hint of dialectic, the crown of the guardian’s education, arises in the midst of this particular discussion, I would argue that the question is quite properly dialectical.12 The woman question arises in the political context, for we wish to know who should rule whom; and as everyone knows, such a conversational goal seriously distorts the way we go about answering. The question of rule then attempts to justify itself by some principle outside of political, the natural, the metaphysical, even the ethical. The only trouble is that it’s not a question of nature, strictly speaking; for we are not asking what animals do, but what political animals ought to do. A wrangle indeed! The only way to pursue it is dialectic, in which the options are the nothing in common, the everything in common, or the something (453a); but the problem is, neither the nothing nor the everything will do. As Glaucon’s hyperbole reminds us, the none is impossible; and as Socrates admits, the all is impossible because of childbirth. This lands us in the middle of a tangle where we know there must be some similarity and some difference—yet precisely in what way remains to be determined. By his invocation of the practice of dialectic, Socrates sets the measure of how to take a longer road to the truth, and this is Plato’s real dialectical contribution to what it would take to set about inquiring into the woman question in earnest.13 But Socrates himself is present in the conversation in order to obtain Glaucon’s persuasion, and for himself to reach his desired presentation of the notion of philosopher-kings. Dialectic alone will get us out of the pickle of the woman question; but Socrates instead looks to what dolphins can do.
What then is the rescuing agent? Many are tempted to consider Socrates’ example of the difference between a bald man and the hairy one as the weak basis on which the argument is allowed to continue.14 But although the example is absurd, in the chain of reasoning it’s merely an example of the sort of difference that would not be relevant for training; any trivial example would do. The more serious question asked in this transition, in the form of the relevant if to the then, which is never answered, is whether there’s any difference between men and women other than that one gives birth and the other mounts, that would be relevant for the present question of training, skill, and commonality.15 If no one can show otherwise, they will proceed. Socrates now recovers the cadence of their discussion, returning to the imaginary opponent once more: “‘Come now,’ we’ll say to him, ‘distinguish (¢pokr…nou, separate, make a distinction, 455b).’” But instead of distinguishing, Socrates denies the need for distinction except in degree:
Therefore, my friend, there is no pursuit, among those who keep a city together (διοικούντων), that is of a woman because of being a woman (gun»), or of a man because of being a man (ἀn»r); but the natures are scattered around in both the animals alike; and a woman has a share in all pursuits according to nature, and a man in all of them, but in all of them a woman is weaker than a man. (455d–e)
To this Glaucon replies, “by all means,” or “certainly (π£νυ γε)”; Glaucon has recovered his equanimity. Socrates has solved the dialectical problem not by distinguishing any careful mixture of same and other, but by denying any political otherness—and the crucial addition of what he earlier ignored, Glaucon’s initial expressed caveat to Socrates’ original plan for complete partnership. What rescues the argument is Glaucon’s principle of the relative strength of men; and again, after this moment, the argument sails on easily to its conclusion, that the guardians do all in common. Socrates knew what was needed to make the argument continue; Socrates delays a simple adoption of Glaucon’s phrase in order to display the root of Glaucon’s hesitation. Glaucon’s principle is the dolphin Socrates was looking for: in the story of Herodotus that Socrates alludes to, the singer Arion is sailing to Tarentum when the ship’s company decides to steal his money and throw him off the boat; he begs for a last performance, and when he leaps into the sea, a dolphin is there to rescue him from death (Histories, 1.23–24). Arion is saved from human strength by a friendly animal; Socrates saves Glaucon by making strength take the highest importance. Dolphins, one of the few species capable of laughter, save us from our human problems; the wrangle where all humans are invested in the promotion of their own sex, is solved not by some careful compromise, but by the final victory of one over the other.
But though Glaucon participates in this universally human foible, he possesses magnanimity, certainly a rare enough quality. First of all, unlike Adeimantus, he is not immune to the charms of erotic playfulness, even when the fair sex is involved, as when later in Book V he enjoins the reward of kisses for those excelling in war, be they male or female (468c)—this, even though Socrates only mentioned boys and youths (468b). Notice that he responds with the harsher principle when Socrates is being more generous in the opening description of the common hunt (451d); but later he himself is more generous where Socrates, denying women’s hegemony in weaving and baking, is more extreme (455d). Although Glaucon becomes fully comfortable only when men are safely stronger, his sense of how this plays out is pretty liberal; not everyone is willing to contend that many women excel many men in not some but many things, as he does at 455d—the word “many” repeated three times. Glaucon agrees readily to the notion that some women are musical and others not, some medical, some athletic, some spirited and some not (455e–566a); he even agrees solidly at 456a (“these things are also the case”) that some women are philosophic, while others hate it (misÒsofoj). Glaucon is youthful, spirited, and erotic; and he is capable of manly generosity, even when hard pressed.
By contrast, the extreme version of this kind of scaling between men and women displays an amusingly hyperbolic harshness. As Virginia Woolf draws the character, the attacked professor in question opines that, on the whole, the strongest woman undergraduate is inferior to the weakest male undergraduate.16 Some readers of the Republic take Woolf’s version to be essentially equivalent to Glaucon’s version, and that the difference in degree of strength described would be enough to leave all women to fall short in ability.17 Now, a difference in degree could make this situation obtain, albeit that the women would have to fall short by a large enough amount; but if the amount is relatively small, then there’s no inconsistency between the universal principle of greater strength on the one hand, and the common sight of stronger women. Most importantly for Socrates’ plans for the conversation, Glaucon himself believes he is being consistent; adequately generous in accordance with his observations, but still reserving the highest place for the best of the men.18 In this combination of disparate opinions, Glaucon presents an interesting combination of liberality and protectionism, one that is perhaps more common among humanity, than views more consistent, and thus extreme.
THE SKILLS OF WEAVING AND BAKING
But the examples Socrates uses to prove the superiority of the male sex are suspicious. Again, the language of human beings, not animals, is at work here:
Do you know of anything cared for (μελετώμενον) by human beings, in which the genos of men (ἄνδρων) does not fare better in all these things than the genos of women (γυναικῶν)? Or shall we make a big speech of it, talking about weaving and the doctoring of bread for sacrifices and of boiled things, in which it clearly seems the genos is womanish (γυναικεῖον), and where being the worse is most ridiculous of all? (455c)
Among all the things that Socrates could have chosen to assert men’s potential superior capacity, he could hardly have picked more awkward examples.19 The narrow version of cooking he describes is a thankless task, requiring much watching of the pot and little skill; such tasks offer hardly much room to triumph in. In weaving there is rather more at stake; it rises to the level of artistry and even beauty—Socrates names it as one of the tasks that is full of good grace (401a)—and is, of course, a task not only customarily assigned to women, but also supposed to be representative of their special excellence. Xenophon’s Socrates mentions the weaving of cloaks as one of the most important tasks of a wife in the Oikonomikos; in Cretan law a woman who was being divorced was entitled to at least half the share of the woven things she had made while married.20 On the religious order, Athena, of course, is the patroness of weaving, and is known to be touchy about those claiming superiority in the art. Athena is the recipient of particularly beautifully woven peplos at the Panathenaia, Athens’ most important religious festival; this task employed certain priestesses and maidens, and took months.21 It’s the figures on this sacred peplos that Socrates wishes to redraw in his taming of the city’s fevers in Book II (378c); around the time of the Bendidea, the robe’s weaving might be well in earnest.22 The word Socrates uses here for weaving, ὑφαντικήν, in verb form can also mean “to contrive,” “plan,” or “invent”; Athena possesses this quality paradigmatically.23 As I will discuss in chapter 6, Plato’s Athenian Stranger ascribes this contrivance or cunning to the genos of women as a whole; though indeed he waffles on the point whether it is from custom or nature.24 Socrates usurps not only the customary household excellence of women, but also that which they were accused of being naturally excellent at as well—at the expense of the jealously guarded purview of the goddess of wisdom.
The trouble with this argument is that Socrates ultimately aims to contend that women don’t differ in their nature from men, but he does it by using the examples that most of all are supposed to represent that difference in nature; to speak to women’s weakness he picks the weakest examples on offer. Easier examples of men’s superior strength would be to claim that they’re better at war, or at lifting heavy objects; but this is precisely what he does not do. Socrates says that the skills of weaving and cooking are where women’s being the worse is most ridiculous of all (455d): this is Socrates’ only use of the adjective katagšlastoj, ridiculous or absurd, in the whole Wave, as opposed to the less forceful and more commonly used forms of γελάω/γέλοιος, laughable or funny; the “kata” adds a sense of greater force or derision. This distinction is often made by Plato’s characters: in the Theaetetus: the Thracian girl finds Thales’ tendency to fall into wells an occasion for mockery and himself laughable (ἀποσκῶyαι, 174a; γέλωτα, 174c), while the many find the philosopher’s disdain for ancestry absurd (καταγελᾶται, 175b); the laughter which the many has for the philosopher is harsher than that of the “gracefully witty” Thracian (174c). Likewise, Aristophanes in the Symposium remarks that when making his speech in praise of eros, he’s not worried about saying something merely laughable (γελοῖα), since that is in the jurisdiction of his muse, but rather that he might say something ridiculous (καταγέλαστα, 189b). Socrates makes use of the stronger term several times in the Republic: in Book X, he announces that the fate of the unjust man is in the end to be absurd (613d); in Book VII, he fears that the philosopher returning to the cave will be found ridiculous (518b). The notion that men beat women at weaving and baking is the funniest claim in the section; more funny, please note, than that women should exercise naked with the men merely (γελοιότατον, 452a). It’s not only hilarious that men would be better at women at weaving, it’s absurd.
But the final absurdity to Socrates’ adoption of Glaucon’s principle is that it excludes the possibility that women would excel men at child-making (pαιδοpοιία).25 Paul Shorey, in his translation of the Republic, cites a passage here from George Eliot’s Adam Bede, where an old bachelor professes similar opinions to Socrates: “I tell you there isn’t a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all but what a man can do better than women, unless it’s bearing children, and they do that in a poor makeshift way.”26 This unmarried one is stating the claim more honestly than the married man Socrates; the joke is that this is where the hubris of wishing to triumph completely over the sex would lead. Socrates is wiser than this, at least for now, though he will have to deal with child-bearing eventually; it’s not something any lawgiver can afford to ignore, though it’s questionable whether there’s much to be done. Socrates will, however, introduce in his second proposal in Book V laws that circumscribe both child-bearing and child-rearing as much as possible; these laws share the humor represented here; in fact they are on the whole much more amusing. Men as well as women officiate over a common breastfeeding pen, both sexes alike put in charge of who is producing enough milk and who isn’t—a hilarious scenario, as well as a highly impractical one.27 This species of impracticality, however, is as likely to happen as old bachelors being much better at giving birth; perhaps more so, as current customs reflect.28 In any case, once Socrates adopts Glaucon’s principle, he is forced into an untenable position, one that bodes ill for his further lawgiving. To be sure, since child-making is not a skill, Socrates’ argument still stands as read; but it remains as a gaping hole in the argument, part of the absurdity that follows when a human being is abstractly designated by profession alone.
At this point in the First Wave, men’s triumph is complete, with no alloy: women must relinquish their superiority at weaving and baking and anything else, in order to be introduced into the city as rulers and learners. In chapter 1 I argued that Socrates draws women out of customary privacy into the public life of the city; when Socrates recasts the question of what he must prove to be able to continue the argument, he says they must show that there is no pursuit relevant to the housekeeping (διοίκησιν) of a city that is private (ἴδιον) to a woman (455b). With his adoption of Glaucon’s principle, Socrates puts the private realm of women directly in line for elimination.
All this puts women in a very strange metaphysical position, no less strange than their resulting political one; it demotes them even as it raises them. Their situation is not that of women whose goodness is finally acknowledged as justice might demand; rather, they have been given the status of lesser men, people who possess all the qualities of men but in a lesser degree. This is not a comfortable rearrangement: it creates a continuum of natures that puts everyone on a kind of number line of degree of strength—individual human men will possess, as if by divine accident, all the qualities that will serve to conquer any given skill.29 It seems that Glaucon’s spirited desire to rule considers itself superior even in realms where public, spirited virtues may not be applicable; and being very young, Glaucon’s musicality, as well as his spiritedness, might suggest to him that he is the whole human being, rather than its male counterpart. Although many readers consider the First Wave to set up the “equality of the sexes,” on this analysis, Socrates has done anything but that.30 In a democracy, Socrates later notes, there is freedom and isonomia, equality of law, women with men and men with women (563b); here, rather, Socrates has set up a partnership based on common work and competition for excellence—with the saving grace that men will triumph in the end.
Now, many take the absurdity of Socrates’ examples to point to the notion that there is, after all, some natural difference between the sexes, one that would, presumably, make a difference after all in pursuit and profession. But while Socrates’ amusing examples certainly point to the possibility of such, to leap ahead to this conclusion is to go about the division in a rather over-bold fashion—to practice what is, after all, the hallmark not of dialectic but of eristic. While weaving and child-making open the door for further distinction-making, they do not on their own offer much help in sussing out whatever difference they point to; as I pointed out in the previous chapter, this dialogue simply does not give the reader much help in this regard, since the claim here is that there’s no relevant difference at all. Likewise, it’s worth noting that a rhetorical appeal to difference, in turn, can become another way to seek victory of one over the other sex; each sex happily considering their own qualities, safely isolated from the other, as privately triumphant. Weaving is certainly a pointed reference, but do we really want to take up baking as the hallmark of feminine triumph? Furthermore, in the earlier, thumos-driven books, Socrates argues at length that the male guardians must be both gentle and fierce (375e), gracefully musical and athletic (401a–e, 411b–c); likewise in the First Wave, he insists that some women are athletic, spirited, musical, and philosophical (456a)—the full range of human qualities is present in women and demanded as united in the guardian soul. This is, of course, one of the reasons why to qualify for the position is so difficult, considering that the soul must be balanced in this way. Now, reader take note: Socrates never makes any connection between gentleness and musicality as female qualities, because, as I will argue in the next chapter, women were customarily regarded as something quite other than gentle or tame; Socrates’ appeal to the womanish (γυναiκεῖον) invokes something quite different from musicality or gentleness—but rather a legendary fierceness. Indeed, in the earlier books, the accusation is that the female sex is rather too moved by eros (395e). Nor is it fair to say that the body has been abstracted from or “desexed”: the bodies are to be exercising, and it’s fundamental to Socrates’ plans that the best are to mate with the best; female athleticism with the right training is not an abstraction from the female body, but its perfection.31 One of the beauties of the education in the Republic is that the body is always given its due, though it can be temporarily escaped; even with all their philosophizing, the guardians still have their gymnastic, and the body as helper (540a, 498b). One might say instead that they are de-gendered, for their qualitative role has become universal and one.
Socrates’ rhetorical problem in the First Wave is that admitting some difference, whether in quality, embodiment, or what Aristotle calls oikeia pathe, would mean that there was something men qua men could not fully share, and thus could not be best in.32 The annihilation of difference provides the ground for a more complete besting of women than even customary law allows. The irony is that to have men triumph qua men if not qua male threatens Socrates’ insistence elsewhere that there simply must be a balance between music and gymnastic, softness and strength in the soul (548c); and indeed, that the musical is to be in ascendance (591d). To tilt the argument toward men’s thumotic triumph is to give maleness a rhetorical victory, despite the absence of a metaphysical one. Crucially, Socrates is always tempting us with the vision of the whole human being, a very specific kind of androgyny of the soul, not expressed as final categorical fiat but constantly reimagined in different ways (think of the strange monster/lion/human soul at 588c); the soul looks for the perfect balance as a tuning between elements, not as a hash of ambiguity, but by a balance of two achieved by a third, in all the specificity of an organic human body.33 To be the whole human being in this way is indeed tempting; Glaucon’s behavior suggests that the path to such wholeness is fraught.
Glaucon’s human need to remain strongest in the public sphere distorts dialectic’s power to discern the truth: and Socrates’ acceptance of his argument, in the end, does more to display this truth, than to give the reader any final word on human nature. Indeed, even the example of bald men and hairy men reflects this potential for distortion no less. The anxiety surrounding men who lack hair is a constant theme in the Republic: it’s present in the attention Socrates pays to the old men in the palaestra, who are so ugly to look at naked; Glaucon finds them disturbing to behold (452b). Likewise, Socrates describes the improper suitor of philosophy as like “a short bald blacksmith” (495e). Such anxiety reflects the anxiety of the audience: why would men without hair appear as a separate, lesser genos than the fully hairy, unless our peculiarly human anxiety to remain impossibly young and beautiful had got the better of us? I noted above that Glaucon’s other dialectical struggles, to see that spirit unites the qualities of gentleness and fierceness, and to distinguish between spirit and desire, likewise presented him as full of difficulties when it comes to making fine distinction about human nature, whether noticing difference or finding common ground between opposites. Elsewhere, Socrates provides the crucial missing link; but here, he takes up Glaucon’s own faulty reasoning—and follows it out to its absurd conclusion.
But the biggest weakness in Socrates’ adoption of Glaucon’s principle, however, or perhaps its strongest irony, is that women as weaker men is a compromise that few can stomach, except for Glaucon. Few if any readers of the Republic believe justice has been done to nature with the compromise of relative strength and its many exceptions. It doesn’t satisfy Woolf’s professor, who would deny that any particular woman could do better than any particular man at anything; likewise those who agree with him are forced to turn to irony to transform Glaucon’s magnanimous version into something stronger. On the other hand, feminist readers of the Republic consider the principle of relative strength to be reason enough to disqualify Plato from their friendship. This is true even though the nomos, in America at least, is still influenced by Second Wave liberal feminism, which differs from Socrates in that it often requires that women be equally strong men—and often stronger.34 Nor do Third-wave feminists, who set out to have a more subtle grasp of these matters, or for that matter, feminists interested in sexual difference, frequently find much to interest them in the Republic; they prefer the erotic dialogues of Symposium and Phaedrus, if only to find a more pleasant place to quarrel.35 In fact, Socrates’ compromise satisfies only his interlocutor and his own need to keep the argument going. Upon examination, it lays the seeds for dialectical revolution in all its readers, no matter what sort of cherished opinions they come with to the text.
Although the words Glaucon uses to describe men’s strength and women’s weakness (sqšnoj and ἰscurÒj) are fairly nuanced, in his response to Socrates’ declaration of men’s superiority, the words he uses reveal much of his underlying logic: “As you say, it’s true that the one class is dominated in virtually everything, as you say, by the other” (455d). The verb translated as “dominate” is the verb kratšw, which means to overpower by physical force, to take something by storm, to take it openly in all might.36 For Glaucon, physical strength is what allows men to triumph in an obvious, open way. Socrates’ own language is by contrast neutral: the phrase he uses for comparison is merely διαφερόντως ἔχει, fare differently, and so by ironic circumlocution, they are pre-eminent. That Glaucon would consider this kind of strength as an inescapable and ruling criterion for skill (tšcnη), the intellectual virtue in question, is a classic mistake.37 I noted above that although Socrates insists women will participate in war, Glaucon hesitates over this too; Glaucon’s preference for physical strength in battle is perhaps one source of this reluctance.38 Glaucon is never given the chance to respond directly to the question of warfare in the First Wave; it’s always lumped in with something else more palatable.
Many readers of the Republic are puzzled by Socrates’ insistence on women’s participation in war, which Aristotle notes is central to his proposal (Politics II.6, 1264b38); it’s worth noting that the Athenian Stranger is very eloquent on the folly of not training women for warfare; he specifically recommends that women train with the heavy arms of the hoplite.39 Socrates argues for women’s participation in war both before and after the introduction of Glaucon’s principle; at the least, it seems that Socrates doesn’t need to alter women’s participation in war, despite the fluctuation in the notions of strength. Indeed, as seen in the contrast between Athena and Ares, the notion that brute strength is not simply primary in war was a notion written into Greek nomos.40 To Glaucon, at any rate, to have kratos is what makes the one sex stronger than the other; to have kratos is to have the victory, and thus be qualified to rule. This is consistent with his fascination for the power (dÚnamij) of the real man, in his speech in praise of injustice in Book II.41 This preference could also play a role in his difficulty which I discussed above, that he saw fierceness and gentleness as irreconcilable qualities (376a); it’s a common mistake to consider these qualities as the presence or absence of the kratos version of strength.42 If this is a pattern in his character, then it makes sense why he would conclude that women are weaker simply, because physical strength triumphs over every characteristic; this kind of strength is all the difference one need claim. This is why he can believe that men simply are stronger and better at all technai, however obviously absurd the examples; for Glaucon, strength as kratos decides the contest of technai; again, a youthful mistake forgivable as youthful, as long as one eventually learns the difference.43
In the last few paragraphs of the First Wave, Socrates makes a comment that shows he possesses a more subtle notion of the nature of weakness: “but the lighter parts of these tasks,” he says, “must be given to the women rather than the men, because of the weakness of the sex” (457a). “Lighter” as most translate it here, is ἐlafrÒj; its first-order meaning is, lightness in weight. Socrates himself, however, uses it to describe the delicacy and fineness of movement that the philosophic dogs in Book II must have, in addition to the strength of iskuros, if they will guard the city well.44 If we take Socrates’ connection in Book V between weakness (here ἀσθένειαν, so, lack of public countenance) and nimbleness to be correct, he would be saying nothing that would not make sense to our less kratos-informed sense of the qualities of women—except he would be paying a compliment, rather than being comfortably patronizing, as Glaucon must hear it. This kind of weakness is a strength, but of a different order than what is encompassed by kratos. Weakness is acknowledged to be strong by Socrates and Glaucon when no one’s strength is being challenged; Socrates includes it as a weakness to subversively acknowledge the strength-in-weakness in women that he just outlawed. In this way, he is putting a specifically different quality of women to work in his guardians, without publicly saying so.45 This lightness, a quality which in Book II helps the pursuit of what the guardians catch sight of, is also an allusion to the hunting that Socrates laid down for his men and women at the beginning of the argument, the very thing he had to abandon in the face of Glaucon’s principle. The reference to elaphros is a quiet way of describing the partnership of men and women in the same way as Socrates did before. Socrates also takes care to have the last word on strength and weakness in the Myth of Er: ἀσθένεια and ἰscύj, if not quite iskuros, are two of the things that he recommends we reconsider at greater length, so that we are better capable of distinguishing the worthwhile life from the worthless (618d); the cross-reference is clear: better dialectic would do a better job of distinguishing these matters, and this is what Socrates recommends to his audience.
If Socrates had been talking to someone other than Glaucon, would this aspect of Kallipolis’ constitution be different? Does Socrates have to essentially contract his plans for Glaucon’s sake, or is he still following his basic outline? Let’s consider the different scenarios. Socrates shows he is aware of some sort of difference between men and women, and the difference such difference is said to make in terms of skill: could he publicly assert difference and still have all the constitutional measures he wants? It would certainly have been easy in one respect to have the women mind their own business and run the households, an alternative that holds a certain political stability; it’s also a possibility to assert difference and still share out some of the rule, as in the case of the Athenian Stranger. Now, Socrates speaks against the customarily private realm of women, insofar as he speaks against private property and private households; indeed, he wishes to deny, at least for the guardians, that such prosecution of to idion, that which is one’s own, has any political goods for rulers. As many have recognized, it is part of Socrates’ plan for the guardians to make them as much like one whole organism as possible, as little as possible to be able to say “my own” (462a–d). This is possible when, among other things, he eliminates any private ownness from the guardians’ life, whether by naked exercising, barrack housing, or the absence of knowledge of parentage. On the other hand, Socrates is known for claiming that the virtue of a man and a woman is the same, that both the management of the household and the city require the same things, justice and moderation, and that indeed, insofar as a woman is strong (ἰσχυρός), she does not differ from a man insofar as he is strong (Meno 72d–73c). While Socrates does speak disparagingly of both the womanish and the over-boldness of over-manliness, he is no friend to difference in the formal sense. In any case, it’s worth noting that if he still secretly agreed with Glaucon, and considered that men were ultimately the stronger, he might as well have just agreed with Glaucon in the first place. Crucially, Socrates makes no mention of difference in weakness or strength when he gives a recapitulation of his best polity to his interlocutors in the Timaeus (18c).46
Glaucon’s logos is still a fairly appropriate alternative for Kallipolis; in denying the harder case of difference, it easily denies to idion, and secures commonality, which goes along with that part of Socrates’ aims. But, if what I’ve been saying about Glaucon’s logos is true, there was something that Socrates was going to say about the commonality of men and women in the common hunt—but he deferred it. If Glaucon’s principle does work decently well in Kallipolis, there’s not a reason to start the idea of a longer road, and allude to the common hunt. It’s not impossible, for instance, that Socrates might have abandoned a situation where men and women share the rule as beings all in the same category without hierarchy of degree, as equally capable—and still public—human beings. Certainly Glaucon’s desire to rule is the more dramatically displayed as it stands. Moreover, the dramatic breakdown and rescue does put the desire to be best on the table, and, as I argued earlier, in a way that makes readers still on the hunt for further justice want still more. The truth is, few humans are truly satisfied with equality, in whatever guise; most are in the same position as Glaucon: they’d take superiority if they could. This version of the story shows more about the war between the sexes than if Socrates had been able to carry out his plans without intervention. Socrates’ solution, by combining his plans for a radically public life with Glaucon’s desire to be safely stronger, provides an effective way for the argument to continue, one which is nevertheless revealing of the tensions involved.
1.PDW, 94–131.
2.Blair notes that the logical consistency of the passage was never seriously in doubt until this brief spate of time beginning in 1970, which uses the strategy of observing the weakness of the examples rather than argument (PDW, 94); she correctly notices, as I’ll later discuss, that the argument does not appeal to justice for the shift in women’s role (PDW, 95). See Drew Hyland’s discussion of the soundness of the logic in “Plato’s Three Waves and the Question of Utopia” Interpretation 18 (1990): 91–109. While Sandford and Annas quarrel with the lack of argument for the principle that women are weaker (Sandford, Plato and Sex, 4; Annas, “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” 4), I’ll note that this Glauconian interpolation is the very thing my interpretation accounts for.
3.In the literature, this use of the verb “χράομαι,” that humans be used as animals, is a common argument for the dehumanizing way Socrates treats the guardians at this point (see Saxonhouse, “Comedy in Callipolis,” 898); but Socrates moves away from this language quickly.
4.Drew Hyland notes that this is the only time Socrates uses this respectable argumentative strategy in the Republic (“Plato’s Waves,” 94).
5.Aristotle begins his discussion in Metaphysics X of the precise difference between women and men using “γυναῖκα and ἀνδρές,” but moves to “θῆλυς and ἄρσην” (X.9). Just like Socrates, Aristotle employs animal terms for sex to discuss the nature of the human animal; the difference being, that Aristotle speaks entirely out of political context, and so it is relatively easy for him to argue for species coherence.
6.Stella Sandford is right to point out that something other than the modern notion of “sex” as the bare bodily attribute of difference is work at this passage (Plato and Sex, 11–40); I share her sense of the troubling artificiality of the specifically modern notion of the “sex/gender” distinction, not to mention the worth of the project of using the Greeks to uncover the oddities of modernity in general (Ibid., 1–10). I’ll note that my occasional usage of the 18th-century phrase “the sex” is a way of speaking of genos in English. Sandford’s contention, however, that what genos implies in ordinary Greek usage is “different in every respect” does not seem quite right (Ibid., 30); rather, a sense of marked opposition is present, but as similar in being opposed sorts of groups fighting on the same battlefield; united in this tendency to warfare by being anthropoi both sides alike, as is witness to in Socrates’ insistence that the ills of the human genos will not cease without philosophy (473c). This is why even the eristical opponent describes the difference as “very great” (πάμπολυ) instead of “completely.” Glaucon’s naïve response (“but in what way do they not differ?”) is part of his peculiarly poor sense of difference as such.
7.Socrates points out, however, that the contents of the Second Wave are hardly a wrangle, if they are possible and good (457d); while he thinks it’s easier to prove the possibility and goodness of the First Wave, it remains more of a wrangle.
8.This quality of jockeying is what Virginia Woolf attempts to describe in A Room of One’s Own as some “protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself” (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929), 35.
9.Page speaks of this question as that which clouds the judgment in “The Unnamed Fifth: Republic 369d,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 21, no. 1 (1993): 13.
10.James Adam, The Republic of Plato, vol. I, ed. James Adam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 285).
11.Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria, in Aristophanes III, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Henderson, Loeb Classical Library 179 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), lines 799–804. Although de Beauvoir considers there to be no essential reason for such warfare, it’s increasingly harder to continue to maintain, in the decades intervening since she wrote, a hope for any real alleviation of this human desire for such (Second Sex, 754).
12.Rosen notes that it’s odd for dialectic to arrive in the First Wave, rather than in the company of the forms; he notes that Socrates does not use diaresis here but something like inductive reasoning (PRS, 176–7).
13.This is what Irigaray misses in Plato but also what she is trying to get at, when she contends that Western civilization has never yet adequately given thought or articulation to sexual difference, and that we must begin, even as a kind of salvation (The Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 5–19). There’s an irony present in her acceptance of the Enlightenment inheritance of reading Plato as a unified theory or treatise, that allows her to miss this aporia as stated.
14.Strauss, CM, 117; Bloom, IE, 382–3; Rosen, PRS, 181; Saxonhouse, “The Philosopher and the Female,” 71.
15.Karl Marx speaks of bearing and mounting as the first division of labor; because he is against division of labor in general, his contempt for even these basic distinctions between male and female is amusingly consistent (German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 159). Some commentators find Socrates’ description of these differences to both be a reference to sexual position (Saxonhouse, “Philosopher and the Female,” 896), though only the second verb justifies this.
16.A Room of One’s Own, 37.
17.Bloom is also less magnanimous than Glaucon, remarking it is “highly improbable that any women will even be considered for membership in the higher classes” (IE, 383); Benardete says “that [women] are on the whole weaker than men should entail that in a sex-blind test for admission into the city, most would not pass” (SSS, 113); see also David Levy’s recent affirmation of such mathematics (Eros and Socratic Political Philosophy, 17).
18.Rosen has a better gloss of Glaucon’s sense of how these two principles work together: “the point is not the perfect equality of men and women but the capacity of women to compete with men for any job at all” (PRS, 180).
19.Saxonhouse probably pushes this argument the furthest; she contends that “equality” is achieved in the argument by a reduction of human beings to animals (“Comedy in Callipolis,” 896); though at this point, the argument is from skill, which animals do not archetypically possess. But pressing her point further: she claims that “Socrates in part captures the humor of the notion [of equality] by making men look to the animal kingdom for the model of sexual equality”; she ridicules the notion that the situation Socrates describes is anything other than a notion wholly “alien to Greek thought” (896). She does allow that people look slightly more “equal” when considered as animals, but only in the respect that, since animals are fundamentally bestial, humans are debased by the comparison into equally bestial creatures (898); she indicates her predilection for strong natural difference between the sexes, describing Socrates’ action in the First Wave as unjust because of this (888). Her argument seems to be something like, so little is equality a real possibility for humans that Socrates dramatizes this by appealing to a realm with even less equality (898). But this assumes that the animal realm is a Hobbesian nightmare—it anthropomorphizes the animal kingdom, essentially. Such natural differences, should indeed they come from nature, would be more apparent, not less, if the guardians were really being treated as merely animals by Socrates. Furthermore, were the notion that aptitudes were scattered across the sexes so wholly alien to Greek thought, Glaucon, already starving for honor in this twist of the conversation, would certainly have rejected it; but as I have pointed out, he responds with surprising generosity.
20.Xenophon Oikonomikos vii.35–6; Lewis, The Athenian Woman, 75.
21.Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, 141, 232. See also Hector’s suggestion that the Trojans propitiate Athena with a πέπλος at Iliad VI.269–79. Shorey suggests the conection between Socrates’ peplos and Athena’s (Republic I, 198).
22.The Bendideia is in early June, and the Panathenaia in July/August; the Panathenaia arrives not too long after the Bendidea; see Zdravko Planinc, Homer Through Plato: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 28. See also Dillon, GW, 58.
23.As Burkert reasons, Athena’s many spheres of influence are united by a sort of civilizing force, dependent on “the just division of roles among women, craftsmen, and warriors” (Greek Religion, 141).
24.For custom, see Laws, 781c; for nature, 781a.
25.Strauss points out that this claim of superior strength in everything leaves out child-bearing (CM, 116). Saxonhouse argues from this, rather than from weaving or other arts, that Socrates has ignored women’s nature or φύσις, and thus their excellence or ἀρετή; for her, childbirth is central to her understanding of femininity as a poetic trope (“The Philosopher and the Female,” 71).
26.George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Zodiac Press, 1952), 229. The quotation is from the 21st chapter.
27.A modern example of this kind of attempt can be seen in the early 20th century, when male doctors attempted to “perfect” nursing by introducing such practices as scouring the nipples with sandpaper before the birth of the child: see the work of midwife Ina May Gaskin, Ina May’s Guide to Breastfeeding (New York: Random House, 2011), 258–76.
28.The documentary The Business of Being Born describes this phenomenon well; in the early 20th century, male doctors attempted to get the practice of female midwives banned (dir. Abby Epstein (Burbank, California): New Line Home Entertainment, 2008). The idea is that doctors, with their modern intelligence, improve and triumph over feminine instinct and private custom. Again, the joke is not merely that it’s ridiculous to do this, but also that plenty of people are actually tempted so to do.
29.Bloom, for instance, would claim the best soul possesses both masculine and feminine qualities (IE, 384); but he seems fairly certain that men would possess both best (IE, 383). For the interpretation that Socrates re-writes women as men, see Saxenhouse, “Philosopher and Female,” 83.
30.Strauss, CM, 127; Benardete, SSS, 115; and Saxonhouse, “Comedy in Callipolis,” 896.
31.For the notion of “desexed” see Rosen, PRS, 186; Nichols, review of Women in Political Thought, 246–7; Saxonhouse, “Philosopher and Female,” 75; and McCoy, “City of Sows,” 157; in chapter 9 I discuss the question of child-bearing at length. Mary Nichols describes this dialectic as abstracting from the body (Socrates and the Political Community, 106), which in turn treats the body as without telos and endlessly manipulable, which would indeed be a problem; but Socrates hasn’t precisely abstracted from the body. Instead, he returns the body to the pre-political as a basis for denying the rhetorical strength of nature, ironically enough. Nichols’ attempt to describe what goods a telos based on difference might have is heroine-esque; but her account is caught by the notion that the female loves its own more, rather than according to its kind (104), and so remains trapped in questions of degree; for more on this, see chapter 6.
32.Rosen considers women to be “divided in their own nature,” and asks us to consider that it may be an injustice against them to have been born women at all (PRS, 178). It seems that he still considers women to be essentially men, but with one superadded problem. He also contends that the Republic as a whole is a “masculine daydream” (PRS, 186); Nichols makes similar claims: she finds that “the Republic attacks the womanly,” and that “the city of the Republic is stripped of any element peculiar to women”; the Symposium by contrast is the feminine dialogue (review of Women in Western Political Thought, by Susan Okin, Political Science Reviewer 13 (1987): 246–7). For oikeia pathe (“residential emotions”?), see Metaphysics X.9, 1058b22.
33.This is the sort of competition between twoness that, to give the lady her due, Camille Paglia speaks to the need for; though to be sure, Socrates’ version is less fancifully Nietzschean—and recognizes the presence and need for the governing third. Paglia speaks to the problem of androgyny without internal tension and balance in Sexual Personae (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 489. Julia Kristeva’s notion that the self finds self-knowledge and maturity in the choice of one sex over all, and her critique of the aimlessness of the androgyne is intriguing (Tales of Love (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 71), though I’ll note that the aimlessness she describes does not seem descriptive of the ethos of, for instance, David Bowie, androgyne without parallel. Socrates is not suggesting we attempt to be the whole human being by insisting we really are both; but that even within being quite definitely male or female, we seek the full range of human qualities. Stella Sandford’s work is particularly helpful here: she argues that it’s precisely because the Greek language lacked the modern sex/gender distinction, that Socrates is able to argue that an individual human being could possess a balance of all human qualities (Plato and Sex, 21).
34.There is a tendency to regard any natural difference other than the one Socrates names as “natural inequality,” a revealing phrase which equates difference with political “inequity”; see Julia Annas, “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” 316; and Natalie Harris Bluestone, Women and the Ideal Society, 9. Writer bell hooks is eloquent on the narrowness of this vision of equality with men on the part of Second Wave white liberal middle-class feminism (by which is meant, powerful men, rather than the large number of men without the respect, wealth, and security of the ruling class), and the underlying desire for power or “class privilege” that this demand for equality represents (Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1984), 18–19, 68–9). In Alain Badiou’s odd and occasionally interesting mash-up of the Republic, he rewrites the First Wave without the notion of men’s relative strength, instead having his Socrates affirm women’s relative strength or “resiliency” at the behest of an additional female interlocutor, though he leaves out Glaucon’s initial hesitation (Plato’s Republic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 157).
35.For instance, consider Kristeva, Tales of Love, 57–100; and Luce Irigaray, “Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s Speech,” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, 181–96; also Nancy Tuana and William Cowling, “The Presence and Absence of the Feminine in Plato’s Philosophy,” ibid., 243–69. Likewise David Halperin’s popular essay, “Why is Diotima a Woman,” in 100 Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), 118–211. Irigaray spends time with the Republic in Speculum of the Other Woman, though she remains much farther from the text than in her reading of Diotima’s speech; while she provides the text of the First Wave, she focuses on the imagery of Book VII’s cave and the images of knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 243–365.
36.This is the same kind of strength that Thrasymachus considers to be the best part of justice; his definition at 338c1 reads “τὸ δίκαιον οὐκ ἄλλο ἢ τὸ τοῦ κρείτονος συμφέρον”; justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.
37.Strength and skill each have their proponents, and are represented as perennial opponents: the story of Ares and Hephaestus in Republic 390c is an example of skill beating strength; Hera’s grudging retreat from Zeus in Iliad I.560–583 is an example of strength giving serious pause to skill or craft. I will note, that Socrates’ reference to “bodies suited to their task” is usefully paired with Aristotle’s contention that animals with a finer or softer sense of touch are the more intelligent (De Anima II.9).
38.Glaucon also shows reluctance to admit women into the front lines in Socrates’ longer exposition of common warfare in the Second (471d); the question of possibility distracts him and Socrates from settling it directly.
39.Laws 805a; for heavy arms, see 794d; the Stranger makes his case in part from the fact that he knows of women who excel at horseback, the bow, and other arms, in the vicinity of the Black Sea (804e). Stephen Berg remarks that Socrates does not mean us to take seriously his contention that women should participate in war (“The ‘Woman Drama,’” 60); but it seems that Socrates’ insistence on this point is shared even by his more prudent law-giving counterpart, with rather better reason. See Kochin’s point about the difference between aggressive war and protective war, GR, 71.
40.Strauss considers strength a difference “most relative to fighting” (CM, 118) but he later observes that the guardians, in being characterized by philosophy and war, are akin to Athena, the virgin goddess who was not born from a womb, and thus not part of the cycle of civic domesticity (CM, 112). Burkert explains that while Ares is the god of war properly speaking, he represents a rougher, more force-driven approach, while Athena “cultivates the war-dance, tactics, and discipline” (141). As the Athenian Stranger implies by his ready faith in women who cultivate the bow (804e), it’s not difficult to notice that the arts for which Paris is derided as unmanly, are easily enough practiced by women; the point is, Greek warfare already contains the need for several sorts of arts.
41.“someone with the power to do [injustice] and who was a man in truth,” 359b.
42.Consider Anne Eliot’s difficulty when she attempts to argue against “the too common idea of spirit and gentleness being incompatible with one another” (Jane Austen, Persuasion, Modern Library Edition (New York: Random House, 1995), 124). Glaucon agrees that strength is necessary for the rulers, but with a “by Zeus!” says it won’t be easy to keep such men from harming the citizens. There seems the possibility that gentleness has the potential to undermine strength for him; Socrates leaves out gentleness in his final description of the nature required, saying only that they need to be fast, strong, and spirited.
43.Rosen (PRS, 182) and Hyland (93) stress that the principle is only about physical strength, while Bloom (IE, 383) and Benardete (SSS, 113) see it as a metaphor for the mind as well.
44.375a5. These are the only two instances of it in the Republic. It also appears at Phaedrus 256b, to describe the light and winged state of the soul who, with the help of philosophy, lives well on earth and has wings after death.
45.While Benardete remarks that “woman comes too late” into the Republic (SSS, 114), that the quality of ἐλαφρός is already present in Book II suggests otherwise.
46.Socrates’ language of attunement at Timaeus 18c is a striking but quite different way of speaking to the balance of forces. I will note, that any attempt to parse what Plato’s character Timaeus has to say on the nature of the woman question simply has to be understood in light of his character as an astronomer who has made a study of “the nature of the whole” (27a). This is the crucial first step that many, despite valiant efforts to understand the dialogues as a corpus, fail, as in the heroic but ultimately too rigidly analytical attempt of Elena Blair (PDW, 132–51). An opening question has to be something like, why is Timaeus admired by Socrates, yet ends up producing a very different account of women’s nature? See Zuckert, 14, 422.