What, after all, is the reason to read Plato’s Republic, if one is interested in the Woman Question? One thing is clear: one has to be interested in the question as a living question; one cannot be convinced of the utter dreadfulness nor the unquestioned perfection of our current revolutions. Every reader of the book, across time and space, takes up this challenge: are they willing to set aside the laws of their own country, for the space it takes to consider a regime that resembles no regime under the sun, where only the rule of philosophers can put an end to human miseries? This necessary, temporary amnesia is no less a requirement to consider Socrates’ parallel proposal, that the best of the women should be educated in philosophy and war alongside the best of the men, and that the best of these will rule. And so, let me ask again: what is the role, after all, of women in the political community? There is one thing that Plato does make manifest as a certainty: there must be a women’s law, a female side to the drama of the human attempt to carve out a city worth living in, lest we forget about women and their concerns entirely. In Plato’s work, Socrates stands out as the hero or anti-hero of such questioning: but he never fails to recommend to us to seek the whole human being, to seek all the qualities that would allow our souls to bend themselves toward a life worth living, and toward the truth of what is good, beautiful, or just. In the Symposium, Socrates recommends that men consider taking on womanly practices and reimagine their lives in terms of giving private birth to beautiful works and conversations; in the Republic, he asks women to take up the practices of men, to fight for their community and to rule in all public might—to become as it were Amazonian prostitutes, employing the colorful complaint of the 4th-century author Lactantius.1 Standing in the midst of Plato’s cosmos, among all its desirable yet contradictory recommendations—should we cultivate desire or shun it? Is spiritedness the friend of reason or its enemy? Is the intellect our proper ruler or an impossibly harsh mistress?—it is impossible not to consider the possibility that a one-sided answer to any of these questions, and to the woman question itself, may well be insufficient.
In the First Wave of the Republic, Socrates sets the question for us to consider: what are the forms of sameness and difference between men and women? Is all the same between us, nothing at all, or some? When the question is put like this, it’s clear that since “none at all” or “every single thing” don’t work, “some, in some way, others not” is the only sensible answer—but that is precisely where the dialectical trouble begins. Socrates raises this question in a political context, in the context of the search and installment of the best city human beings are capable of: he is still, in the constraints of the conversation, required to speak to human nature insofar as he is considering the question of who should rule; and such a question is a restraint, and to a certain extent a profound distortion. Now, in one sense, this is nevertheless appropriate, since we are interested in the question not as isolated individuals but as people who inevitably live together, necessarily conducting our business with more than one-half of the human race, at least, should we wish the race to continue. On the other hand, to consider ourselves as merely political is to obviate the possibility of a private, inner life, of a question that is privately one’s own, to ignore the desire to leap away from this world and see the itself by itself; the very desire Plato so beautifully dramatizes even as he makes its dangers apparent.
But it is precisely among these restraints that the reader is able to learn volumes about what it would take to answer this question. Plato presents a living conversation conducted among his two elder brothers and the hero of his youth, Socrates, who draws out the strengths and weakness of each as the conversation swings from one brother’s predilections and prejudices to the other. Adeimantus’ sharp and immediate distaste for the genos of women is contrasted to Glaucon’s magnanimity and interest: yet even the more gracious, if somewhat improvident brother has his hesitations over whether to allow any similarity between the sexes. Socrates draws out Glaucon’s squeamishness, pressing him as hard as he presses any interlocutor on any subject. The passage is both a witness to the reluctance of the male genos to let women enter the public sphere, and an iconic symbol of the extremely questionable concession that will soothe such reluctance, namely, Glaucon’s response upon first hearing Socrates’ proposal for sharing all pursuits in common: men’s ultimate superiority in every pursuit. This compromise satisfies hardly a single other person in the entire history of the work’s readership, from the one extreme of those who find any public participation of women to be repugnant, to those who hardly credit Plato with any wisdom at all, for Socrates’ putting women permanently, in theory, second best. It’s by noticing the ways that the reader is inevitably drawn into a conversation with the text—as well as the potential for the work to stop the conversation altogether, by alarming the reader into tossing the book away in disgust—that the real artistry of Plato becomes manifest; and the real depth to which we are all as humans interested in the question becomes all too painfully clear.
But as if all this were not enough, Socrates ties the woman question to the question of philosophy’s rule: he begins his quixotic attempt to argue for the justice of the rule and education of philosophy, by arguing that women themselves ought to be educated and rule. These measures, neither anticipated or desired by the listeners present, exist alongside each other in a parallelism which Socrates invokes again and again, whether by comparing the precariousness of philosophy’s state under ordinary laws to the precariousness of women’s lives, or by imagining his three arguments as a woman slipping away in a veil—until he chose to pull all three into the light of day. Make no mistake, the Three Waves together are themselves the Female Drama. Now, to draw out this parallelism as I have done, between the common peril, common law, and common irony residing in the law raises, perhaps, the reputation of women in the book, as much as it calls into question philosophy’s rightful seat upon the throne. But such a parallelism holds much temptation, since it teases us to step outside of Socrates’ own images, and let our fancy go to work on what all this might suggest to the lively imagination. Women’s customary privacy, their customary wildness, their reputation of strong desires, all sound attractively similar to how philosophy is described elsewhere by Socrates; philosophy, for one, will not ultimately be able to do without the freedom of privacy and the direction and staying power provided by eros let to run wild, and Socrates threatens to cut off the very root of philosophic activity by his over-zealous care. Likewise, if those who live in private are tempted to regard the care for the public good as extraneous to their subsistence, then such a temptation will be shared by philosophy as well: in the wish to mark the contrast with the farm-raised philosophy of the guardians, it’s tempting to counter that true philosophers spring up like mushrooms.2 But it is nevertheless true that all humans owe a debt to the laws that raised them, however tempting it is to wish to escape either to the forest or the heavens; or to believe in one’s own self-generation.
But what Socrates himself does stress, on his own terms and repeatedly, is the common danger that both women and philosophy face, from those who would laugh at their activities “for the sake of the best” (457c). While the temptation of either sex finding the other to be laughable is a human one, the danger that such laughter presents to philosophy and to women is equally real: not the least being that such laughter contains the darker hint of violence, for both. And so, while Socrates is right to expect that his own proposals will be found amusing, the deeper problem is that laughter itself remains a pressing political problem for women and philosophy, within every regime that is not Socrates’ own. Socrates is pointedly steadfast in his willingness to let them be heard, regardless of the consequences: “I’m in for it now,” he says, “but it shall be said regardless (473c).” That the reader must first sit still while the argument details its plans for women is something of a test case for philosophy; shocked at first, the reader comes across the Third Wave in something of a state of bemused astonishment. To first allow what appears wholly other, the female, to take a share in the guarding of the city, waters the ground for the reader’s acceptance of the even more outlandish notion of philosophy’s rule.3
As Socrates contends in the First Wave, he wishes us to consider only that which helps or is beneficial (ὠφέλιμον) to be beautiful (457b); only that which would keep us from ill health.4 To the extent to which we are willing to be schooled by Socrates’ tales with respect to women and philosophy, to that extent we’ve allowed our laughter to be healed. In a sense, the work of the Republic is to bring together women and philosophy as allies, by allowing the excellence of one, to appeal to the excellence of the other. And while the book has so far been more successful in promoting the alliance between the thumos and reason, than the partnership of men and women, I would submit to the reader, that this is the fault of our readership insofar as we maintain a spirited commitment to our own side of the question.
But the problem that any discussion of women and the women’s law faces is not merely the contentiousness of the issue, but the very forgetfulness of the question. The way women fade in and out of the focus of the conversation, is the drama of Socrates’ sometime forgetfulness and sometime keen remembrance of the genos.5 Initially forgotten in the most necessary city, the absurdity of such forgetfulness is made sharp; brought in as exemplars of what is wrong with intemperate living and with eros itself, there is something of regret as they once more disappear; the absurdity of the hazy plan to share them out as common possessions foretells the need but absence of wisdom among the guardians when they only possess music and gymnastic; then there is the trainwreck-style fascination present when they become present as contenders for the rulership; Socrates’ forgetfulness of the very young in preference to the relatively freed-up lives of his lady guardians; the abrupt absence of women from what follows except as the embodiment of philosophy’s problems under all other regimes; the sharp reminder that everything previously said about the philosophic education is meant to apply to women too; the troubling forgetfulness of all other women, and indeed all other citizens, as Socrates’ plans for his budding philosophers takes center stage; the final announcement that virtue has no master from the thought of the robed maiden, alongside the pointed announcement that questions of strength and weakness are topics on which we must further deliberate (618d), in order to live the best life possible. The forgetfulness of the race of women, alongside the controversy of their presence in public, taken with their hand on the spindle of the world—not only is the question fraught, the very ability to keep it in mind is a difficulty, and yet to keep it in mind is of cosmic importance.6
Such presence and absences mimic the presence and absence of women in the dialogues, not to mention the hiddenness of their customary state: and yet though the reader must take on even more than the usual amount of detective work required to find the thread, the one unifying factor is the constant, felt concern—in the backdrop of the forgetfulness or ire or desires of his various speakers in all their individual predilections—of Plato, the author himself. It is easy enough to write a book that points out the problem of women, without offering a law specific to women, as Aristotle does; but Plato writes no less than two books which profess an interest in the women’s law, and in their education and participation in the public life of the city, not to mention writing in his Socrates’ praise of his two lady teachers; Socrates builds on an expectation of our sympathy for the plight of women under customary laws, in order to aggrandize the right of philosophy to take over. I invite the reader to consider, that Plato was well aware of the controversial nature of what he put into Socrates’ mouth in the middle of his most famous work; that he nevertheless risked the reputation of the book, not to mention his own reputation as a thinker, by this gamble, is an act of profound gallantry to the female sex: what the suffragette Julia Ward Howe calls in the midst her own rhetorical concerns, “the foremost and most sacred promise” of the book.7 The irony that many readers find an Orphic or even Nietzschean hatred of woman in Plato, is all the more short-sighted in this light. All of Plato’s books have to be recovered to the reader, in the light of Plato’s thoughtfulness and concern for the race of women; not to mention the case studies he presents us with, of characters who manifest less thoughtfulness than he. The concerns that limit us to 19th- and 20th-century narratives have to be put aside, to allow Plato’s thought to once again help us think about what constitutes the best city, and the best life, for human beings; Plato’s work, in its ability to draw in female readers and legitimize their ability to think for themselves, is the birthright of every woman on the way to thinking herself through, and of every soul in possession of gunaikeion eros.
But Plato’s concern does not manifest itself outside of our willingness to ask questions, and to consider the reasons why women pose such a problem to the lawgiver in the first place. The ire, the laughter, and perhaps especially the forgetfulness make it hard to consider: it is not that women practicing excellence in public for the sake of the best is laughable; nor indeed the notion of women philosophizing; nor even that some rearrangement of household cares is required when women take up pursuits in the city. Perhaps the argument that women are somehow divided in their natures, half citizen and half child-bearer to the state, and so without final reconciliation as citizens or learners, comes the closest to noticing the shape of the trouble—but to say this is to miss the problem inherent in the division of labor, and lets a civic burden threaten the wholeness of women’s own souls, which after all, as souls, can’t help but to be whole.8 As Plato’s book makes comically manifest, the division of labor itself, which is the foundation of cities as we know them, even when made into a thorough-going meritocracy, is an injustice to human beings, not only because to prosecute the idea fully, the rulers have to go against the desire of the individual human beings and assign them on capacity alone; but because it abstracts from a whole human being in the attempt to cast all of us as primarily represented by our profession, that is, by the way the city is benefitted. The existence of human women confounds the lawgiver’s attempts to articulate and order the various professions and interests within the city, because it’s simply more obvious in the case of women that to make this division absolute, to pin one human being to one single profession or place within the city, is in an important sense artificial. Consider Marx’s ire at what he calls the “natural division of labor in the family” in The German Ideology: he is particularly irascible at this human pattern because it’s the one division of labor no regime can do away with.9 We are no less dependent on the time and care of women, spent in gestation no less than in early nursing cares, of which food is the least of the worries, than we are to the person who takes up carpentry, or to the plumber. A sign of this, is that to shove these tasks over to the so-called third world, whether by airlifting away their babies, or getting them to do our nursing for us, is merely the latest absurdity this fundamental necessity has drawn out, and its most unnecessary injustice.
But the truth is, while the division of labor is in an important sense a falsification, nevertheless some kind of divvying up the tasks is nevertheless desirable for any state that wishes for excellence in its productions. None of us, unless we became hermits, could live by our own labor alone; and the need for some division is no less true of excellence in the household, that is, in the place all of us who rest at night under shelter reside. All civic myths, the American dream included, are an attempt to justify the division of labor, whether it be to justify the poverty of the poor, to enshrine another race as other, or to explain away the intellect of women. Socrates’ myth of the metals is an elegant pastiche of this need, even as it announces the weakness and ultimate failure of even this most perfect meritocracy. Now, the customary solution with respect to women is to keep them as the guardians of private life alone; but make no mistake, the reason why Plato wrote no less than two separate books that address this, is that the drawbacks of this particular solution manifest themselves at every turn, and demand, to the eye that doesn’t refuse to overlook them, some different alternative. Of course, our current solution, to have no women’s law at all, but merely a law for the abstract individual that naturally defaults to treating all citizens as men, and so inevitably commits what Irigaray warns is inevitably mass genocide of the nation state, perpetrated on itself, is not so manifestly perfection, such that the inevitable nostalgia of some for previous woman-custom, however much it misses the point, remains inexplicable.10 Would that there were a marriage number, a mystical arithmetic that would calculate all the marriages for us, that would take the burden off of the variability of our desires, and the selfishness of our estimations! That Plato writes two separate answers to the woman question, suggests that neither can we afford to have philosophy rule, nor can we afford not to have her rule, in such questions.
But Plato’s Republic is not a roadmap back to a more customary nomos; the book is more unsettling than this. The question of women is a stumbling block no less to the political theoretician, than to the lawgiver. In an important sense, it seems to me that there is no properly theoretic solution to the woman question. Regarded as an either/or, it fails either way: to ignore the practical problem of children and their raising, is no less a problem than to ignore the desires and excellences of women, and the lawgiver ignores either one at everyone’s peril; indeed, it’s the kind of question that peculiarly stands in need of the true statesman’s art, bent to the specifics of a particular community. Likewise, looking beyond the strategic essentialism of my formulation, the question of woman represents the problem of any soul who finds itself strangely cut apart or distorted by the myths we put together to help us think through our need for the division of labor, the myths that surround the civic place of any particular genos. The danger of the human community is that it would break apart humans in order to form its own wholeness; and any justice that considers itself as righteous, without acknowledging this comedic and tragic root of the city, is bound to turn ugly. In all this, it’s well said that any lawgiver ought to look to the Good in their decisions; and while the political community certainly requires the willingness of any human being to question the goodness of their desires, to railroad over the desires and the intellect of women or any genos is—not—good, or desirable. The beauty of ancient political philosophy is that it begs us to see ourselves as fundamentally interwoven with the lives of everyone in our community, even while it acknowledges our desire to see ourselves out of it. Likewise, Plato acknowledges our wish to be the whole human being, with all the qualities named as male and female that would grant us the excellence we desire, despite the inevitability of any individual’s failure. Socrates’ irony allows us to see this tension between the love of philosophy which rescues us from the world, and the demands of the world even philosophers can never escape from, no less than the tension inherent in placing women in the human community; it teaches us to desire the just city, even as we witness the failure of the attempt to find a final solution.
Socrates’ speeches are not a trifling code or a key to all mysteries; they are not simply satirical or simply exhilarating, though they are both. The irony of Socrates is a question in itself; and fortitude, no less than courage, is required to proceed. For unlike mere display or even exegesis, such irony burns and shapes the person listening to it: as Kierkegaard, thinking of Socrates, remarks, irony seeks “not so much to remain in hiding itself, as to get others to disclose themselves.”11 To allow such irony to set us to work on this always fundamental and currently all-too-pressing human question, of articulating the something in the middle, in between the absolutely same and the absolutely different, announces itself as a philosophical task not without danger, perhaps most of all for the one doing the talking. But to let Plato’s book do its work, we have to read it; and allow our reactions to be as much our study, as the reactions of Socrates’ scripted interlocutors. And so I commend the reader to the Woman Question as seen in Plato’s Republic: the dialectical delicacy with which we the reader are willing take it up, will be the measure of our lawgiving success—and our best hope, the willingness to which we as individuals wish to follow the laws of the best regime and no other, whatever regime we happen to inhabit.
1.Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 150; the quotation is from the third book of Lactantius’ Divine Institutes.
2.Pace Michael Davis, “On the Spirit of Ideas,” 24.
3.I’m indebted to Charlotte Thomas’ talk on Book V which gave rise to this thought: “The City-Soul Analogy in Republic, Book 5” (paper presented at the annual meeting of Association for Core Texts and Courses, Plymouth, MA, April 9–12, 2015).
4.The tendency is to presume that Socrates’ phrase, “what’s beneficial is beautiful and what’s harmful is ugly” (457b), prefers the useful or the merely utilitarian to the beautiful, and to criticize it accordingly (Strauss, CM, 116). But the pair “beneficial and harmful” rests on a medicinal metaphor in the Greek, and speaks to the overall tropes of health and sickness, healing and poisoning, and while the useful is a political good, the beneficial is a natural one. Socrates contrasts the beneficial to the merely useful, when speaking of the Good at 505a and again at 518b; the beneficial is the cause of flourishing which is more than mere success (379b). Bread is what keeps us alive, but it is also beneficial (559b). As Rosen remarks, Plato doesn’t want us to master nature, he wants to heal us from it (PRS, 7, 355). This phrase, then, doesn’t subordinate the beautiful to the good, as Benardete has it (SSS, 115), so much as it subordinates the beautiful to the healthy, which, one might say, splits the difference between the beautiful and the good. Socrates proposes a happy land where beauty is always conducive to health, as in Socrates’ proposal of mutual kissing for the victors in war (468b).
5.Adela Adam remarks that it is “easy to see that his intellectual convictions outrun his instincts” (Moral and Political, 126).
6.Claudia Baracchi connects the representation of Necessity as a woman to a sort of cosmic displacement of the “patrilineal logic of the discourse of the good to the matrilineal imagery brought forth in the ending myth” (Myth, Life, and War, 193); this would be a fitting ending to the female drama of the whole that Bendis begins.
7.Julia Ward Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement, 89. Likewise, A. Adam: “For this declaration women in all ages and countries owe an immense debt of gratitude to Plato” (Moral and Political, 127).
8.Contra Rosen, PRS, 178.
9.Marx and Engels Reader, 159.
10.Irigaray, JTN, 12.
11.Concept of Irony, 251.