The Greek language happily possesses more than a few words and phrases that announce a subtle difference in the diction of its thought: the mere existence of the word “kalos” for instance, which describes what is somehow united both as beautiful and as good, gives the careful first-time reader the feeling of having discovered another linguistic country. But the words we translate as “political” from politikos, or “city” from polis, or “regime” from politeia, are peculiarly difficult to parse; the reach of our English words seem all too dully limited, with all their current associations of abstract power relations, rule of law, nation states as the proper building block of human society, and of politics as usual divorced from questions of custom, locality, and religious practice. But learning to hear “politics” as a Greek word offers to reunite these, and to show the sinews of the whole: politics in the ancient sense means every kind of human association and relation, gathered up into one locale, of which the city is the public face and the grounding surety. Heard as such, it is but justice for Aristotle to name the human being as that which is by nature the animal who is political, and announce the telos of the city as not merely living but living well.1
And so politics, the political art, becomes in Greek the study of all these relations, customs as well as written law, “culture” not exhausted by obsessions religious or secular; not only the bare question of constitution but the underlying problem of regime, that is, what groups or individuals the city is oriented toward promoting the wealth, security, and honor of, whether it be the few wealthy or the numerous poor. As such, ancient political philosophy is preoccupied with the presence of the elements of race, class, slavery, and sex in any given community, and with the way the whole is woven out of them all: this is why the woman question falls under the head of politics in the first place. We reach toward this meaning when we want to describe ourselves as social animals, but the irony is that this word posits a realm of the social that abstractly lies outside of the way regime gives shape to our actions.
This sort of widened understanding of politics makes more explicable the still impossibly narrow claim that all philosophy is primarily political, or even that Socrates’ philosophy is such, in that it adds more subjects of interest than merely who oppresses whom. But it remains a limited view of Socrates’ work in particular, since whether an erotic or thumotic or even a death-seeking vision of philosophy is at issue, the question is always where the moment of departure from the merely human is; at what point we attempt to leave behind the teeming crowd of merely human animals and seek by ourselves in our grasp of the forms by the hand, to be as deathless as possible, living a life on earth that resembles the residents of the Isles of the Blessed. The beauty of Plato’s writing is that in the Republic in particular, we are invited to witness the hair-raising political ramifications of such an escape—yet nevertheless leave with its promise ringing in our ears.
In what follows, I will argue that what Socrates gets wrong about the community he proposes for his guardians of the city is not from insufficient respect for female human nature, but rather from too little care for the political as such, in his great wish to rewrite the city as a breeding ground for future philosophers. In his plans for women, tempted by his desire to secure them as valuable students, Socrates commits the error of primarily considering the genos in the light of their very real individual talents alone, and his plans to replace the private household with a magistracy of nursing, among other things, are a comically insufficient patch-up to what he interrupts in human life. Although Aristotle himself as statesman chooses to retain the customary position of women, despite his recognition of its insufficiencies, his objections to Republic V in the Politics are nevertheless of particular help here. His more thorough attention to all the elements needed in a city stand as counterweight to what Plato chose to publish as Socrates’ airy plans—the crucial point being that even Aristotle’s objections are not based on nature but politics. The comedy of Socrates’ actions is a useful study for the lawgiver, because it shows the problems of attempting to right any one political injustice without considering its unjust effects on another portion of the community. Socrates’ forgivable but ultimately erroneous plans show the very limitations of what even the best laws can do for the human community. I will argue that much of what is customarily said to be natural in women is in fact political—that is, political in the ancient sense; and it is promulgated as natural because of our need to maintain the noble story that we are political animals who can be thoroughly satisfied by the political. Plato satirizes the limitations of the human community, the better to point us to the satisfactions of philosophy.
Aristotle has many objections to Socrates’ Book V plans in his Politics, but only one for the laws of the First Wave. To Socrates’ plans to model the partnership of men and women on the partnership of hunting dogs, where the female rests for the space of pregnancy and nursing only to take up the work again, he makes this brief and rather testy remark: “but animals have no oikonomy! (1264b5)” In Greek, the house is the oikos; care for the space where human beings inevitably rest their head at night is the nomos of the house, that is, its oikonomos, the custom and rule of the household. The irony that our English word, “economy,” with its bare regard for the movement of funds without regard for the good of anything but the funds themselves, is derived from oikonomy, should not be lost on us. For Aristotle, the oikos is a fundamental building block of civic life: not our 20th-century fiction of the nuclear family, but a smaller group within the city, where those with natural ties have the precedence and rule, and have direct mastery over those few who as slaves, complete much of the labor of the household, such as cooking, cleaning, etc.2 Aristotle’s arrangements, which will hardly strike us as just, nevertheless provide a plan for every necessary element required in the places everyone, with a family or not, ends up living—unlike the nuclear family, that deeply bourgeois myth, which somehow manages all the labor together or is dependent on the labor of those happily distant, where without slaves, the house-labor ultimately devolves on the female—with the inherent tension that such tasks are nevertheless still thoughtlessly conceived to be mindless.3
Socrates has different plans: the ties to our relations, even the uncle and the cousin, distort our allegiance away from the city (462b), and his idea is that all natural ties will remain secret, while everyone will consider everyone else, depending on their age, as mother and father, uncle and cousin, son and daughter. “All the tasks” will be shared out, in this blanket phrase; there will be no individual households but all will do all and share all in common, such that no one is able to say “my own” (462a–d). It is this aspect, no less than his specific plans for women, that have so angered readers, most of whom come to the text with some attachment to private property; and Socrates’ plans certainly have their troubles. Socrates tips his hand by not making any specific provision for household tasks, which like the question of rule, cause dissension when choices are made about who will do them, albeit in the opposite direction. This is why myths cluster thickly around why the person doing them is appropriate for the task: it merely depends on the nomos whether the story is about slaves, or about women, or about the poor, or about the foreigner. By making no specific provision for these tasks, Socrates shows his forgetfulness of an essential aspect of political life, and one that the lawgiver specifically can’t forget: doing away with households will not do away with household cares.4
But Socrates has picked his initial example of hunting hounds well: a pack of roving dogs do not cook their food, and all chase after the prey together. It makes the answer to the woman question simple. To anyone who, like Glaucon, has ever trained or bred dogs for a task, it would be a waste not to hunt with the female dogs as well. As I mentioned in chapter 3, while Xenophon counsels care with pregnant dogs, lest in their love of work (φιλοπονία) they harm themselves or their puppies, it is nevertheless not even a question whether the females would work at the same tasks as the males.5 Considered in terms of animals, while the tasks of bearing and rearing puppies require a generous section of the life of the female, there’s no essential reason that the one task could not be taken up before or after the other. Likewise, while Socrates’ hounds are hardly to be lap dogs, his image nevertheless casts the female genos as capable of domestication, a valuable rhetorical addition.
But young dogs still require nursing or upbringing: the question is, as Glaucon puts it, what to do about “their upbringing (trofÁj) when they are still young, in the time between birth and education, which seems to be the most trying (ἐpiponwt£th, 450c).” The care implied in the Greek word trophe, which extends the metaphor of mother’s milk to cover all of the interval before the more formal paideia or education proper begins, is often used by Socrates as a way of thinking of the whole of the education of the guardians; such usage suggests the sort of care that Socrates would wish all to extend to all their education. Now, the question of what to do about births and nursing, and the marriage behind it, is what would ordinarily be understood as the substance of the woman question proper; it is Socrates who separated off this question from the question of what other tasks women might pursue. But he is aware that some plans must be made about nursing proper; indeed, he’s had a fair amount to say about certain aspects of nursing before this moment, having much to revise in this customarily female domain. His first target is the stories the nurses tell, and he demands that the nurses be persuaded to tell only the good ones, leaving out most of those now told (377c); he refers to his plans for the education of the guardians in Books II–IV as “education and nursing (445e)” or simply “nursing” (412b). But when pressed for more detail in Book V, he relates the most radical alteration of all: aside from the science-fiction-esque plans for the breeding of the best to the best, which will take place under the cover of specious lottery secretly controlled by the rulers, written into his plans for commonality is the result that no child will know its parent, and no parent their child. The idea is that all the adults will therefore nurse all the young together: but instead of individual care, Socrates institutes a sort of magistracy of nursing. He describes cavalierly the “pens” for the lactating women, to be presided over by officials both male and female, who will decide how much milk and when and from whom each baby receives it (460b–d). This is the first breaking point, at which to laugh over the pitiful plight of the herd and the herdsmen, or bemoan the sight of such an institutionalized attempt at care: the young of the guardians are in nothing better than state-run orphanages.
While the humor of the First Wave provokes debate, the absurdities of the Second Wave are not a question. The minor impracticalities boggle the mind—how will the officials know about milk?—but more importantly, our animal selves, as Aristotle points out, could hardly be deceived for long about which baby was ours: he points out that in all likelihood parents would recognize their children (1262a14). But beyond the folly of these details is the underlying fact that children require more than common nurses to form human relations: indeed, much current research about early childhood centers around the problems that arise when institutions attempt to be substitution for care from individuals.6 Aristotle is at his most witty on this point: “how much better to be the real cousin of somebody, than a son in Plato’s fashion! (1262a12).”7 Socrates is cutting out a vital swathe of what political life demands: the need that the very young have to have a family who loves them best, when they are at their most difficult to care for.
But while Socrates does offer a sketch of what nursing will look like, he simply doesn’t have much to say about it. While both the Athenian Stranger and Aristotle both have a fair number of recommendations for the care of babies, small children, and even women in pregnancy, Socrates merely remarks that appointed nurse officials will manage the troubles of weaning and sleepless nights, “and so forth” (460d); his “and so forth” is about as good as it gets. In point of fact, the question of what to do about early childhood is indeed difficult, and easily overlooked by the lawgiver, because of the ancient claim of women to this realm, who are themselves forgotten by law. Education as nursing is more on Socrates’ mind than nursing proper; indeed, Socrates is famously neglectful of his own small children, while he runs after the older children of others. We who are human require a division of labor beyond what even hunting hounds possess; the tasks do not disappear when women depart from them. Socrates takes women away from their customary spot as the rulers of nursing, and places them alongside the men in every task. Socrates at the least shows his awareness that some provision must be made for nursing; but he evinces more care for the education of women in their own right, than for that of all children.
THE LUXURY OF NURSES, AND THE MATERNAL AS POLITICAL
But what would women themselves say, to Socrates’ large-scale encroachment on the grounds of nursing and mothering? Recall that the first mention of the task of nursing in the city in speech comes as part of the long list of luxuries including tables and couches, courtesans, imitators, and hunters (373a–c). Nurses are a luxury, but to whom? The truth is that nurses are a luxury to the female genos, to women themselves—paradoxically, themselves to themselves. The hiring, or for that matter the capturing, of nurses is of long-standing origin, concomitant with human civilization; it gives leisure, that desirable state, to those who would otherwise be occupied with the nursing themselves. Its dangers are likewise familiar: consider the case of Clytemnestra and Orestes’ nurse; Clytemnestra argues that Orestes should not kill her because it is at her breast he suckled (Supp. 896); but as became clear long earlier, it is the Nurse who took care of him at night (Supp. 750), and ultimately Clytemnestra’s argument holds no weight with him (Supp. 913). Nurses are always a temptation to women who can beg, borrow, or steal them; Socrates’ myth of metals reunites the pair, when he bids the guardians to consider the earth as nurse and mother in one (Republic 414e). Socrates’ plans in Book V merely radicalize a political reality: instead of shared, paid, or enslaved nurses, officials of both sexes will take these duties, and instead of some slight contact with the original mother—a figure in another part of the house—there will be none at all, known as such. Glaucon remarks that child-bearing or child-making (παιδοποιίας) will be made easy or leisurely (ῥvστώνην) for the female guardians (460d); this is not quite right, since the labor itself would remain as difficult as ever; yet the leisure that Socrates grants is not uncommon, just the means and the telos he chooses.
There is a tension between what nature bestows upon the mother in child-bearing, and what human women choose to do once the child is separate from them. While animal affection is usually provided, by no means does this guarantee that the mother will likewise become the nurse, or do it well. Again, consider what Xenophon has to say about the female hunting dogs: that love of work (φιλοπονία) stands at odds with what is good for pregnancy and rearing.8 How much different from this can human women be said to be? Elizabeth Gaskell, novelist in the Victorian era and mother of four living children—hardly a poet without a stake in upholding the good of the customary—has this to say of a representative member of the female genos:
“Still, it was unsatisfactory to see how completely her thoughts were turned upon herself and her own position, and this selfishness extended even to her relations with her children, whom she considered as encumbrances, even in the very midst of her somewhat animal affection for them.”
It is unsatisfactory to witness, but it is nevertheless attested to: the animal affection is present, but is not enough to guarantee affectionate or sustained nursing, even in a human being—or perhaps especially so. Motherhood itself, the maternal, the thing that the respectable poets of the city tell us is natural and just—is a political quality; it finds its most perfect embodiment within the bounds of the city. It is a human quality; but only natural insofar as human beings are naturally political. The civic institution of hiring or enslaving nurses shows that in the political realm itself there are ways enough to avoid it. Alas, Socrates knows his audience too well: considerations of family would not insuperably stand in the way of women’s desires, whether to ignore eros or further prosecute it; women would be perfectly willing to sacrifice the claims of the household and even the satisfactions of nature, for the prosecution of their own desires, because in a strong sense, they already do. Diotima in the Symposium, with all her care for birth and begetting, speaks only rarely of the nursing of the young (207b, 209c); she reasons that the affection is strong from examples of animals, not humans, and her highest example of shared nursing is when children aren’t involved (209c).9
Consider the phrasing of Aristotle’s objection to Socrates’ hunting guardians: “And it is utterly out of place/strange (ἄτοπον), to argue from the comparison to animals, that men and women should do the same work, since animals have no share in the household.”10 While some translations render ἄτοπον as “ridiculous,” Aristotle is not appealing to the humor of Socrates’ argument: he is saying that it is irrelevant, without a place, and quite strange; animal nature strictly speaking is out of place when the human animal starts making cities. The reason for this, is that whatever nature might render possible or just, what the city needs is quite different from the merely natural; it’s out of place to consider nature when political concerns are paramount, because someone has to take care of the house, so that the human community can not only subsist but flourish. Custom has appointed women to the household, not without reason, but not, strictly speaking, with the absolute authority of nature, since it is all too apparent that some women have the nature of a doctor, an athlete, or musician (455e). For an animal, the hunt can be resumed easily enough after child-bearing and a decent interval of nursing; for a woman, custom ordains that she make the household her lifelong task, and let the house be the shelter of the young. But while the desire and ability for making children, at least, are natural enough; the desire, ability, and habit of raising them are not. If not even nursing, the task which above all others qualifies women for the household, can be said to be natural, then custom has much to conceal; as Socrates points out, plenty of men could be found who could weave and bake rather better than the women whose ordinary task it is (455c). In a crucial sense, civic life is asking that a certain injustice be done to women for the sake of its continued existence. At the very least, cities need children to continue at all, and so they need women to continue to supply this demand, their desires regardless. Babies can’t simply be universally imported; the irony is that when babies are imported they are always taken from somewhere, and from someone. Nor can animals do without animal birth, any more than they can do without early animal affection; human beings are of woman born, and the continuity of this genealogy is worth preserving, and recognizing.
But customary law asks more than that women take up the cares of the household; custom asks that the division of labor between male and female be promulgated as natural. Two tales about women’s nature are at work, the story about their innate wildness, and the one about their fitness for the hearth. One might well ask, if the customary Greek tale is that women are somehow naturally wild, and naturally inhabit a sort of private shade that in certain lights looks almost forestlike, how did they get into cities in the first place? The more so, if civic life asks them to tame their desires more than other human beings? Women’s presence in the city is delivered by a sort of Oresteian compromise: the genesis myth has a pack of them roving the earth as Furies, in search of implacable revenge for those who cross their animal affection; indeed, Aeschylus has the messenger paint them as doglike hunters (Eum. 264, 305). But Athena’s lawgiving wisdom offers them a rest from their roving, and, according to the poet, the Furies accept her offer of the hearth and become known as the Eumenides. It’s worth noting that while some polities prefer to picture women or the feminine as such as the gentle, musical, maternal side of human nature, the Greek poets retain a fine sense of pre-political wildness that the city can only partially tame, even after the Furies have come home to rest; either they are more honest, more reckless, or both. The Greek gossip about female human nature is the more satisfying as it shows there is a tension written into women’s relation to the house: Athena, who Aeschylus paints as taking the part of the male in everything, is fairly honest about the cui bono of her decision.11
Now, the women are not the only genos that the city needs to describe as naturally subordinate to their ends: the same is true, as Socrates’ myth of the metals capitalizes on, of the artisans, the serfs, the slaves, the poor. It is in the city’s interest to mythologize its divisions of labor as natural, because political life requires we arrange life according to division of labor—and backdate the difference. Marx argues that division of labor is unjust because it is unnatural: he precisely overlooks the political as such.12 Even cities, despite Aristotle’s best attempt to say otherwise, are not strictly speaking natural, not in the same way as the self-growing wholeness of the organism is; they are perhaps part of what it means to be human and not simply animal, but they require more than nature to keep them going.13 Strauss’ remark that natural right would act as dynamite for civil society is a helpful way to see the problem: to give each human being their due according to their nature rather than taking the proper goal of civic life into account, is rather such life’s destruction; in the case of the assertion of the natural right of the female genos, this dependence on civic life on certain kinds of injustice becomes all too clear.14 The irony of our own Enlightenment-born attempt to assert such natural right is that it abstracts more from women’s peculiar share in the polis than even Socrates does, because he at least has plans for babies and for marriage; while Socrates’ plans for nursing are laughable, some provision is better than no provision at all. As Irigaray notes, the Western world, among its other ills, is currently hell-bent on mass genocide—against itself: the search for one’s own wealth and fulfillment as a singular individual loses sight of one’s place in the genealogy of the human race, and when no one is giving a thought to what comes next when there are no babies, as is currently Italy’s problem, the trouble becomes all too pressing.15 When all human beings are treated as abstractly equal, the law becomes a law for those who take on the role of men only, and the question of children, no less than the genealogy of women themselves, gets left behind; again, to put it Platonically, we lack a women’s law. Now, the necessary injustice of division of labor is not an injustice to rejoice over, any more than it is an injustice to somehow, impossibly, correct by converting the world into universal hermitage. The question is, how we in our own lawgiving make sure that in our pursuit of one aspect of justice, we do not commit a worse act of injustice elsewhere—or reason ourselves out of existence. In this light, even slavery is a problem relatively easy to solve, compared to the woman question.
While Socrates declares an end to the individual family of his guardians, he insists a universal family is still present, a community where all children are the concern of all, where even warfare is a family outing. I will note that Socrates’ plans to rearrange the guardians into one family is not without precedent or even approval—at least from women. Consider again what the abolitionist and suffragette, Julia Ward Howe, herself deeply committed to motherhood, has to say in her reaction to Republic V. She is deeply disturbed by Socrates’ plans to expose deformed babies, and for mothers to be separated from their natural children, but has no horror of the communal family Socrates proposes: she commends him for seeing that the raising of children would profit from participation from men.16 Likewise, the husband and wife James and Adela Adam, each a scholar of the Republic in their own right, as well as parents of the criminologist Lady Barbara Wootton, consider that Socrates has not abolished the family anymore than he abolishes, in their eyes, marriage.17 For an ancient example, consider the halcyon polity envisioned by Aristophanes’ Praxagora: her plan is to turn the city into one giant household (Ecclesiazusae 674), where women rule (555), all property is in common (590), and all men will be considered as fathers, since paternity will be impossible to prove (635), and the women, who want to protect the soldiers, their children, as best they can (236), will take care of the children without help from men (674, 461); even the ugly women will have sex (617).18 Now, Praxagora’s concerns, not to mention Aristophanes,’ are complex, but for my purposes it is enough to notice that children will continue to be born and cared for well, without the need for the customary family. Praxagora seems more concerned with erotic matters, while Julia Ward Howe is primarily concerned with children, but each share a disregard for the civic and political consequences of common property and children in common.19 If these examples are to be believed, it seems as though women would be willing enough to jettison the individual family, for the sake of their desires, whether it be for rule, for eros, or for the better raising of children. Socrates’ proposals in the Second Wave, accordingly, might not seem as outrageous to women as one first might imagine. The problem with the Second Wave is not that women would be destroyed in some way qua women in order to participate in the communal life Socrates describes; the problem is that the scenario is all too satisfying, perhaps, to the desires that women show up to political life with. Socrates wishes to transform the natural desire for nursing help into a nursing partnership, as simple a sort of move, as to persuade a person that it’s never just to harm one’s enemies; and perhaps an easier point of persuasion.
Attachment to children is not the same as, or automatically leads to, attachment to the customary family; nor would attachment to the private as such guarantee this either. The household is a civic institution, insofar as it stands apart from the natural animal realm; the family itself, as conceived by the city as the sanctioned living together of a male, a female, and their legitimate offspring, is in a key sense political. Simone de Beauvoir speaks approvingly of Socrates’ plans to “wrest” women “from the family,” since that favors her plans for radical freedom of the individual; the irony in her preference for such freedom is that it is necessarily only finally accomplished within the achievement of total rather than limited Revolution; this is essentially question-begging.20 She considers the political to be completely constructed and so easily rearranged into commonality: for all her Hegel she sees but one side of the human dichotomy, with no sublation in sight.21 Her not-particularly-veiled contempt for breeding rivals Socrates’ own (586a); though to be sure, alongside her send-up of nursing, Socrates’ nursing concerns look the more impressive.22 Customary civic life, with its concerns of inheritance, posterity, and extended-family loyalty and interest, proposes the limitation of human affairs into some kind of family and some kind of house as the shape to our natural desires, and there are certainly benefits to the practice. But there is an irony present in any argument that wishes to insist upon the naturalness of the family, without recognizing the political roots of such a contention, no less than in the argument that insists that because something is political there’s nothing natural about it. To understand the political nature of the family is not in any sense to dishonor it, but rather it is the beginning of the fair assessment of its human worth, and the beginning of any attempt to legislate well for it. For instance, the tendency of women to be dependent on other women for nursing simply has to be taken into account, lest we slip unwittingly back into the injustices of the Greek world, which we’d otherwise believe obviated.
Let me take up this argument from another angle: does custom or law deliberately obscure nature, or does it in some sense reveal it as well? Seth Benardete considers that the trope of clothing in some sense stands for custom itself; this is part of the force of Socrates’ image in the First Wave, perhaps, when he demands that the women strip: perhaps he is asking women to discard custom itself.23 But to abandon all custom and law would leave humans as beasts, or perhaps worse than beasts, if humans are potentially the most depraved of animals; to live simply as nature leaves us may well lead to the usual fears of incest or cannibalism, which as political animals we do well to avoid.24 The law is not only a sign of our difference from the animals, it is our attempt to be so. But what about the women’s law? Does the law that says women are suited by nature to stay in the shade of private life and run the household reveal something about nature, even as it conceals? Consider this: no one would argue that the absence of all nomos, and the anarchy or bestiality following upon it was desirable; the law conceals from us the extent of our potential for such anarchy in order to make the task of living as civilized humans easier. But what does human society look like, in the absence of any law that asks the women to hold fast to the household without citizenship, with privately-oriented techne? Unlovely perhaps; comfortless, rather lacking in babies, perhaps even ultimately unsustainable; but not straightforwardly unlivable, as in the case of anarchy; it is still in some sense recognizably human. The law as such sits more easily on the shoulders of human beings than the customary woman’s law sits on the shoulders of women. This is one crucial aspect of the political problem that women’s very existence makes for the polity, that law itself has no obvious place for women; hence the aptness of Socrates’ phrase, “the women’s law”: there is no need to speak of the law of the genos of men. And after all, the wildness ascribed to female human nature by common Greek report is certainly not a secret: it is what is openly announced by the law as natural, and unfortunately for the lawgiver, is not something that clothes restrain. As I argued in chapter 7, clothes to a certain extent restrain the eros of others, but not the desires of those who themselves are clothed. But if there is an open secret that the women’s law reveals, it is that law itself can’t perfectly order human life; that the retreat from the wastes of nature into a public-oriented civic existence is not an unqualified good. Stanley Rosen speaks of nature itself as being unjust to women, in that they are divided by nature; but nature is by its nature whole; division comes from the categories of the logos that seek to cut it up.25 For example, amphibians aren’t divided in their nature, but the wholeness of their nature makes breath in two elements possible. Rather, it is the political itself, in its need for division of labor, that makes the awkward cut that places women in the household; the awkwardness of the cut is what makes Socrates’ revolutions, and the revolutions of later polities, possible at all. Natural right is not only dynamite to civil society; it is the kind of dynamite that holds a natural temptation for human beings.
THE REASON FOR SOCRATES’ DESTRUCTION OF THE POLITICAL
The problem with Socrates’ argument in the First Wave is that he appeals to nature and not politics, the nature of animals instead of the human political animal. Socrates is just barely willing to acknowledge that the female gives birth and the male mounts (454d); further than this in acknowledging natural difference he will not go. Socrates offers to take away the difficulties of nursing and raising children, and in their stead, offers rule and philosophical education, to such among the best who are capable of it; for the reasons I have detailed, there should be no surprise that his offer possesses appeal to the genos of women. Socrates’ offer displays the tension between nature and custom’s necessities, and it displays the capacity and desire of women to enter into political life in order to obtain the ostensibly highest goods political life can offer. Again, women are perfectly willing and capable of sacrificing the household for their own desires. But why does Socrates make this offer in the first place? Why is Socrates willing to destroy the household, so that women might do all tasks in common with the men? As I argued above, Socrates’ proposals for the rule and education of women are not wholly idiosyncratic, in that both the Athenian Stranger and Aristotle promote the benefits of plans for education, and in the Stranger’s case also for partial rule, for the genos. But what then is distinctive about Socrates’ solution for women? What would be worth the risk of all of this? Nothing less than Lady Philosophy herself.
What is specifically strange about Socrates’ proposal is his plan not only for the guardians to have no private family, and the rulers to breed the best to the best, but also for men and women alike to philosophize, and to rule as philosophers. What is different is that all of Socrates’ plans, for men and women alike, are ostensibly meant to be good for philosophy, and promote philosophy’s ends. As I argued in chapter 8, although all is done in the name of the best city possible, at second glance philosophy seems to have rather the better half of the bargain. In Socrates’ city, philosophers have the best the city offers, not in terms of worldly goods, but something rather better: instead of being laughed at or persecuted, philosophers would be given the highest honors, sacrificed to as to divinities (540c), and the best souls of the city would be handed over to it as students (519c, 536b).26 The graceful fiction is that the best thing for the city would be for philosophy to be given the best. Although it quickly becomes apparent in the dialogue that Socrates’ plans for philosophy turn sour, nevertheless the argument he makes in the Third Wave, in the mathematical center of the book, is the perfect act of dialogic revenge against customary nomoi and the restrictions it places on philosophy’s purview. Socrates neatly turns the evening’s events on its head: after having his arm twisted to get him to visit Cephalus’ house at all, and rather rudely turning the conversation almost immediately to the nature of justice, his masterful counterstroke is to insist that perhaps philosophy ought to rule instead; only philosophy, he now contends, will solve human evils and make the best city possible. But philosophy’s public rule doesn’t come without political consequences: Socrates distorts the human community past recognition in the service of this end.
Socrates displays no compunction as he issues order after order in the Second Wave: the family—that is, parents and children—will cause dissension, and so away with the family; he shuffles the guardians as though they were merely animal in their mating, birthing, and nursing, with no law against the incest among brothers and sisters; indeed, in some sense, brothers and sisters who mate and kiss and hunt and practice war together describes well the sort of partnership he is preparing for his guardians. Such an image radically departs from the customary in a deeply uncomfortable way; but such is Socrates’ cheerful plan for his guardians: “in the city that’s going to be managed to the ultimate degree, women are to be common, children common, all education common, and the tasks involved in both war and peace are likewise common, and those among them who have turned out best in philosophy and war are to be kings” (Book VIII, 543a).
Socrates is quite clear: he plans to gut the customary arrangements in order to give his guardians the education and life that will prepare them to rule as philosophers, because, for the sake of argument, the argument has shown these things to be best. Not only does Socrates’ spirited defense of true erotic philosophy display the tendency of philosophy to overstep itself, but also likewise do his enactments in the Second Wave. If Socrates’ overall project, before Book V, was to present the best regime as natural, as the perfection of human nature at the hands of philosophical tinkering, the Waves are where he lets a crack or division show; this is where it becomes apparent that doing justice to nature can’t guarantee the best regime; but Socrates lets this crack show because he no longer is as concerned about the regime as a whole, as he is about the philosopher-kings.27
Not only is this tendency dramatized by the Second Wave, it is also represented by the First: that women should be educated in philosophy is good for philosophy, if not necessarily for the city. Socrates argues in the First Wave that there’s nothing better for the best city than the best men and women; but the same is true, or more true, for the practice of philosophy. In the city in speech, not only does philosophy not have to steal the sons away, it will likewise be supplied with daughters. What could be better for philosophy, than that the best of the souls be given over to it from birth? Again, in the Second Wave, Socrates’ dismissive treatment of the guardians is his active joke against their animal selves, as his cruel send-up of the perfidies of lover’s compliments displays (474d); but in the First Wave he spends quite a while arguing in defense not only of women’s capacity, but also that no one should laugh at them (452a–e, 457a–b). He even shortens their child-bearing years to a twenty-year period between the ages of twenty and forty (Republic 460e); Aristotle counsels a much wider period, from eighteen to fifty (Politics VII.16, 1335a6–30); the Athenian Stranger allows for women as young as sixteen to marry (Laws, 785b). Again, Socrates cares more for women themselves than for arrangements for children.
Although Leo Strauss argues that it is justice without regard for consequences that governs Socrates’ actions in the First Wave, I would contend that it is first and foremost Socrates’ work on behalf of philosophy.28 Socrates’ arguments in the First Wave are never from justice; in fact, the word is mentioned only twice in Book V at all, right before the introduction of the Third Wave as part of a brief recap, only to fall away from the discussion again.29 Instead, Socrates argues explicitly from nature, and how to turn nature toward what would be the best, aristos, for the philosopher-kings. He doesn’t even end up arguing for “equality” of the sexes, but rather allows Glaucon’s principle that the women will be taken as weaker to save the argument, and in the final analysis still secures the best of the women for the guardian class. If Socrates were attempting to do justice to women, to the whole genos of females, he would have assigned education to all women regardless of class, according to the capacity of each, just as he argues for the presence of female doctor and musician souls; and he may well have left out Glaucon’s caveats. Instead, Socrates is interested only in the best, such as could be taught philosophy. Likewise, he does not restructure the family of every single member of the polity: only for the guardians. In an important sense, the whole political problem of leaving the women unregulated in the city at large has not been solved by Socrates, since the vast majority of women and their eros are left to live customary, lawless, private lives.30 Finally, if giving women rule and/or education were simply the conclusion of the logic of pure justice, then one wouldn’t expect Aristotle or the Athenian Stranger to speak for it, for each of these lawgivers is interested in not only justice but its consequences as well. In the Three Waves of the Republic, Socrates bowdlerizes the civic life of his guardians, for the sake of philosophy; his willingness to put philosophy in charge of the city is both a sign of heroism and his fatal flaw. Socrates claims that there will be no end of miseries until philosophy rules, and in one sense he is correct; in another, he has his finger on only one aspect of the question. This is the paradox: the city needs the rule of wisdom, but philosophy in its love of truth is willing to distort the political out of existence; yet nevertheless we require a love of truth in order to uncover and articulate the political. The Republic dramatizes our need for political philosophy, even as it counsels us not to trust it as final authority. Socrates’ saving grace is that unlike de Beauvoir, who is ultimately interested in freedom, he is at least aiming at the Good.
WHAT REMAINS FOR WOMEN’S NATURE
Here at a time where there is finally interest in asking questions about maleness and femaleness, men and women, maternal and paternal, as living questions, rather than succumb to the political need to take them as political fiat, there is much possibility for inquiry—as long as one does not simply fiat them out of existence, for equally political reasons. We have to think harder about the way we articulate these questions. To ask whether women have a different nature from men, distinct, articulate, is to ask the question wrong: it’s asking a political question only barely cloaked by the insistence that we ask it in terms of nature alone, or that politics alone is paramount to the inquiry. It pretends that nature alone would somehow settle a political question, or vice versa. Worst of all, it makes an artificial separation between our political selves and our natural selves. But I want to make clear that such a question, or rather our locus of concern around men and women, the male and the female, is not answered, once and for all, by noting that it is, in the ancient sense of the word, political.31 Plato is rather more open than Aristotle about the ways in which human beings either fall short, or reach beyond, their political origin. But one of the lessons of the book, even as we are taught to desire the philosophical life, is to show the impossibility of escaping the political altogether, and to point the reader back to the care of the whole; a call which Aristotle also attempts to take up, though not without his own set of myths. And so, to say that the maternal, the familial, even female human nature as such, are political notions is not to undercut them, but to give them their proper pride of place; while acknowledging that it is both true and not entirely true that the political is the limit of our nature. Kierkegaard notes that it is the pride of the Christian nomos, that has made what he calls sex differences more marked than in other polities (his counter-examples are pagan); Kierkegaard considers this conscious division of labor to be the pride of civilization, a way to make nature more whole.32 This suggests not merely our dependence on such myths, but their attraction; as well as the possibility that they might articulate something true about what a human being wishes to be, in their pursuit of excellence. But there are better and worse attempts to articulate women’s difference as origin myth of political balance, and quite a number of them are laughably unsatisfying; I’ve discussed the weakness of several over the course of these essays, whether it’s the deeply bourgeois notion of the nuclear family which abstracts from labor in an impossible way, or the Victorian insistence that women be excellent without possibility of rule in either religious or governing worlds, or even the un-Grecian notion that women care more for one’s own than men do. The weaker the myth, the easier route to revolution.
But Socrates’ own myths ask all humans to stretch out toward the whole human being. And so, in a discussion of Plato’s thought on the woman question, it’s appropriate to leave the question in its dialectical stage, with a sense of all the tensions involved in the asking of the question. Difference, even beyond the political, demands to be articulated; a sign of this is the endless debate, between members of the opposite sex, usually on behalf of their own genos, as to which is the better. In all future questions, it is well to acknowledge our debt to the political, no less than its power to distort the account, even as it provides something of the accounts’ proper telos; and no less is required an acknowledgement of the human being’s desire for rule, if not always for mastery. I would point the reader toward the cultivation of a phenomenology of the body as one crucial step, as a way to avoid the customary solecisms that have plagued this tangled nest of concerns, in order to help articulate the difference between genê without beginning from political assertion of essential Being, which often culminates in a religious articulation as in the case of the Pythagoreans’ Table of Opposites; or the equally political assertion of Becoming at any metaphysical cost.33
One last coda: as Socrates narrates the Myth of Er, his last word to the dialogue as a whole, each soul stands by itself, without a city, in the underworld. Er witnesses the choice of each soul of their next life; he describes the choice of each soul as a pitiful, wonderful, and laughable to see (620a). Socrates represents several souls as willing to choose the life of animals: Agamemnon picks the life of an eagle; it’s striking that even the shepherd of the people is willing to leave civic matters behind entirely. Orpheus, out of “hatred of the genos of women (γυναικείου),” chooses to be a swan rather than be born of a woman. Orpheus’ choice, as he was known to be a lover of the sex, but met his end at their hands, is perhaps understandable; he seems to consider that there is a crucial difference between being born of an egg produced by a female swan, and being born of a human woman; his hatred of the female is limited to the peculiarly human female, and her parts, not to mention his fabled attachment to eggs in general. Furthermore, two souls choose to change the sex of their bodies: Epeius, who built the Trojan Horse, chooses to become a skilled woman, a woman of artful craft (τεχνικῆς γυναικὸς); while Atalanta, follower of Artemis and the infamous lady runner, “having caught sight of the great honors of the athletic man, was unable to pass them by and took them” (620b). All of these are tantalizing details, left unarticulated in logos by Socrates but reached toward in his final myth. His myth reiterates some of what he specifically argued in the First Wave, where all souls male and female alike call out to some profession, some men to handcraft and some women to athleticism. Yet here he indicates that sexed body is apart from the soul and its desires—even as one body or the other allows its desires to be fully articulated. I would suggest that the soul stretches out toward Being; and our articulation of ourselves as of a sex is one way to attempt to hold fast to ourselves that is not unhelpful, even as it is in a sense partial. But Socrates’ final moral in the Myth of Er, however, is quite clear: the one who lives “in an orderly polity, participating in virtue by habit, without the help of philosophy” (619c) is out of luck; only the life chosen with the help of philosophy will satisfy. Sex, Socrates seems to imply, is all very well; but the good life demands we take up philosophy and its questions above all.
1.Politics I.2; see also III.9. This underlying sense of all the elements present in the whole is not the invention of political philosophers, but their linguistic and lived inheritance.
2.Politics I.7, 1255b30ff.
3.Slavery, I will note, as the Modern Slavery Research Project documents, is still very much an ugly part of the foundation of the economic success of the so-called first world. See http://www.modernslaveryresearch.org/. Also, I will note that Plato is more alive than Aristotle is to the tension written into the fact that some women belong to both the genos of women and the genos of the enslaved, and the concomitant problems that arise from this intersection, both for the woman herself and those making use of her enchained labor, especially as nurses; it’s worth noting that Socrates prefers for himself the virtues of nurses and courtesans, than those of the putatively-honored wife, and he reshapes the excellence of his female guardians accordingly. There is much pressing work still to be done on intersectional issues in ancient political thought, once these differences are noticed.
4.For a look at the problems surrounding housework and keep in the current age, and a defense of its philosophic importance as activity to be reclaimed for oneself, see Mary Townsend, “Housework,” The Hedgehog Review 18, no.1 (Spring 2016): 115–125.
5.Xenophon, On Hunting vii.2.
6.Early neglect in an institution, without a primary caregiver, hinders brain development, as seen, for instance, in Romanian orphanages. See John Hamilton, “Orphans’ Lonely Beginnings Reveal How Parents Shape a Child’s Brain,” NPR, February 24, 2014, accessed April 15, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/02/20/280237833/orphans-lonely-beginnings-reveal-how-parents-shape-a-childs-brain.
7.In Jowett’s elegant recapitulation of this phrase (Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Modern Library: New York, 1943), 84).
8.On Hunting VII.4. Xenophon counsels that the puppies should not be given to a foster mother, since the milk, breath, and affection of their own mother do them good.
9.One can add to this evidence, the troubling reality of the willingness of certain women to kill their children, as in the case of Medea, since after all it is they who gave them life; likewise, Antigone argues for the priority of the brother, since after all, she could always have more children if necessary (Ant. 904–20).
10.Politics 1264b4. Aristotle also uses this word in the Ethics to describe the possibility that one might have a brutish desire and yet restrain oneself, as in the desire to eat a baby, or a “strange aphrodisiac pleasure” (Nic Eth. VII.5, 1149a15); for Aristotle, these brutish states are indeed strange or extraordinary but not particularly funny.
11.Aeschylus, Eumenides, 734. I’m indebted to Clare Coffey for the formulation of, to whom the good.
12.German Ideology (in The Marx-Engels Reader, 159–60).
13.Aristotle’s arguments for the city as natural in Politics I.2 are markedly different from his writings on nature properly speaking; see Michael Davis, The Politics of Philosophy: A Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 15–32.
14.Natural Right, 153.
15.Luce Irigaray, JTN, 12. For the crisis in Italy, which sits at the extreme end of a European trend, see Manuela Mesco, “More Italian Women Are Choosing Not to Have Children,” The Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2014, accessed July 5, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303949704579457662674779306.
16.Julia Ward Howe, Julia Ward Howe and the woman suffrage movement (Boston: The Colonial Press, 1913), 75, 68, 85. Howe, who was peculiarly attached the rights and pleasures of motherhood (ibid., 70), makes a striking contrast to what is claimed by Nichols and Saxonhouse about what follows from the logic of birth. I’m indebted to Rivka Maizlish for noticing this discrepancy, and for pointing out Mrs. Howe’s remarkable text (“Julia Ward Howe Speaks on the Equality of Women in Plato’s Republic,” US Intellectual History Blog, February 26, 2014; http://s-usih.org/2014/02/julia-ward-howe-speaks-on-the-equality-of-women-in-platos-republic.html; accessed July 1, 2016).
17.See James Adam, The Republic of Plato, 292–296; and Adela Adam, Plato: Moral and Political Ideals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1913), 139–142.
18.Nor is Aristophanes alone; in Alice B. Sheldon’s short story “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” men have died out, and all children are raised in a universal crèche; genetics are used to clone new citizens, but the women produce only females; just as Praxagora envisions, war has died out completely, and the women ultimately choose to kill three stray men they come across (from Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House Publishers, 1990), 168–167).
19.Again, Kochin notes that the desire for heirs, which can only come out of a household of a man and woman (where the woman is rather closely watched) is the Greek world is particularly manly desire (GRPT, 103). Wendy Brown argues that “Plato” has missed something crucial about the nature of public political life by this over-feminization of politics in “‘Supposing Truth Were a Woman...’: Plato's Subversion of Masculine Discourse,” Political Theory 16, no. 4 (Nov., 1988): 612.
20.The Second Sex, 130. For more on what de Beauvoir misses of the political as such in her demand for transcendence, see Townsend, “Housework,” 121–22.
21.“it must be repeated again that within the human collectivity nothing is natural” (The Second Sex, 761).
22.For nursing, see The Second Sex, 559; as for child-bearing: “Those that go through pregnancy the most easily are, on the one hand, matrons totally devoted to their function as breeders” (543).
23.See Burger’s account of Benardete’s thinking on this subject: “The Hebrew Bible, we are told, has no word for nature, physis, in opposition to nomos or convention; but the clothing of man and woman, which covers over their natural nakedness, seems to represent precisely that distinction” (“Definitional Law in the Bible,” 9). Also Benardete in Herodotean Inquiries remarks: “Shame is the law’s expression of man’s ignorance by way of prohibition. The law completes man by saying no to man. The law clothes man and thus turns philosophy—man’s awareness of his own ignorance—into shame” (“Second Thoughts” (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), 216). As I noted in chapter 5, when Bloom and Berg make this argument, they seem to be saying clothes reveal not human nature but female human nature, but this can’t be right.
24.Burger: “The clothing of animal skins should be understood, perhaps, as an image of what the human being is or would be were it not for the law. While the clothing itself represents the divine law, it discloses at the same time the potential bestiality in human nature that makes the law necessary. This double meaning opens up what one might call the ultimate paradox of the law. On the one hand, it covers up and forbids us from uncovering what it has concealed; on the other hand, the law attempts to reveal something about the nature of things. The latter in the potential of the law indicated by the subtitle Benardete gave to his reading of Plato’s Laws: ‘the discovery of being’” (“Definitional Law in the Bible,” 9).
25.Rosen: “there is no education that will suppress the conflict between a woman’s body and her soul. Women are thus divided in their nature” (PRS, 178). Aristotle has it: “And it is surely strange (atopon) to cut [the soul] up in this way; for there is choice in the calculative part, and epithumia and thumos in the unreasoning part; and if the soul is divided into three, there will be desire in each” (De Anima, III.9, 432b5). To cut up the soul into professions at all is an artificial step.
26.Strauss describes this situation as: “the city that regards the proper bringing up of the philosophers as its most important task” (CM, 125). Likewise, Bloom describes Socrates’ city as a solution to the customary need of philosophers to “steal the sons of the city away” in order to recruit them to philosophy; the city in speech is the happy land where this is no longer necessary (IE, 468).
27.See Strauss, Natural Right, 139.
28.“The just city . . . holds no attraction for anyone except for such lovers of justice as are willing to destroy the family” (Strauss, CM, 127).
29.472b–c; Socrates fends off Glaucon’s request for whether the city is possible, with the claim that they only wanted a model of justice to look to, not something that could actually come into being. Elena Blair also notes that justice is missing from the discussion (PDW, 95).
30.I’d argue that Plato retains the ambiguity of what the women do in the other classes of the city, in order for the reader to better picture what would take place were Socrates’ woman-drama become universal; this is why Socrates argues for artisan women’s natures but doesn’t fill in the gap himself.
31.This artificial distinction is what distorts de Beauvoir’s attempt to give an embodied account of the female; and allows her preference for Revolution to run rampant over the political (The Second Sex, 761).
32.This is the Judge’s contention in Either/Or, as he attempts to prove the aesthetic, and not merely political, validity of marriage (Either/Or II, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 29).
33.As for example in the work of Elizabeth A. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994); and Raia Prokhovnik, Rational Woman: A Feminist Critique of Dichotomy (London: Routledge, 1999). Simone de Beauvoir, however, remains one of the best authorial voices in her consciousness of speaking from a body while giving thought to the body, despite her various aversions; likewise Edith Stein is always worth considering in Essays on Woman, trans. Freda Mary Oben (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1996). Likewise, Mari Mikkola’s contention is worth considering, that the metaphysical disjunction implied by the flawed but popular sex/gender distinction ultimately implies the absurd goal of the abolition of women, and is at the very least rhetorically limited (“Ontological Commitments, Sex and Gender” in Feminist Metaphysics, Charlotte Witt, ed. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 67–84). For Aristotle’s list of the Table of Opposites, see Metaphysics I.5; for Judith Butler’s declaration of a preference for Becoming, see Gender Trouble, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999), 43. For a hylomorphic balance between Being and Becoming, see Sarah Borden Sharkey, An Aristotelian Feminisim (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), 49–58.