At the beginning of the 15th century, no one in Catholic Europe was reading Plato’s Republic—because no one had a copy, let alone one in a language they could read. Though the works of Aristotle had long been a commonplace, all that was obtainable of Plato’s books, whole and entire, was an imperfect handful.1 Leonardo Bruni, in the vanguard of Italian humanists, was among the number determined to learn Greek and so mend the damage of so many years’ absence of Plato’s books in all their integrity from his tradition; he dedicated in the grand style his translation of the Phaedo to Pope Innocent VII in 1405. But Bruni refused outright to translate the Republic. In a letter to a friend he explains his reasoning: “There are many things [in it] repugnant to our customs; things which, for the sake of Plato’s honor, it would be preferable to remain silent.”2 What could have made Bruni regard Plato’s masterpiece as containing that which would damage Plato’s reputation forever?
The Republic, as everyone knows, is a remarkable book; it possesses the strange power to repel one reader, just as much as it attracts another. It draws the reader over a remarkable variety of terrain in the pursuit of Justice in itself; it is, as has been justly remarked, rather like a modern novel, not unlike Joyce’s Ulysses in its depth and breadth of subject: a self-contained aporetic argument on the question what is justice, a lengthy description of the details of several versions of the best and most just city, a plan for philosophic education and the nature of knowing and philosophy, a discussion of imperfect regimes, two separate critiques of the poets, and a remarkable closing myth of a living man’s journey to the underworld—all conducted in the space of one evening’s conversation. Among this tangle of arguments, the majority initiated by the request of Socrates’ interlocutors, who wish to hear justice praised itself by itself, many have found its discussions of the best city to be of themselves grounds enough for polemic. Yet each generation chooses its personal bête noir from among the many odd details, whether it be the strange division of profession among three tiers of differently bestowed souls, the abolition of private property among the ruling class known as the “guardians,” or the final banishment of the poets from the city. In truth, Socrates’ just city can hardly be said to be a satisfying thing to read about: while some decry the book for its communistic tendencies, others denounce it as reactionary.3 But for Bruni and for many others, it is what Socrates has to say on the woman question—namely, what the role of women in the political community should be—that is peculiarly and perennially antagonizing.
In the fifth and central book of the Republic, at the request for more detail about his plans for women and children, Socrates announces that the argument will have to start over from the beginning. He opens with three distinct proposals, known in scholarly shorthand as the Three Waves, in honor of the waves of laughter Socrates anticipates they will be met with. The first proposal or Wave is that women should join with the men of the guardian class in all their pursuits, and do everything in common with them; Socrates adds they will even exercise together, that is, exercise naked. The Second Wave is even more amusing: the guardians will be carefully bred together, ostensibly by a lottery, but in fact the lottery will be rigged by the rulers, and children will be raised by all in ignorance of their parents, with state-run nursing pens. The Third and final Wave proclaims the rule of philosophers as kings: this above all, Socrates fears, threatens to drown him in not only laughter but ill-repute. While the outlandishness of the last proposal marks it in Socrates’ words as perhaps no more than prayer, the first two run so sharply against long-standing custom, that all of Socrates’ warnings are not enough to guard against a quick and strong rejection by the vast majority of readers. When the Republic was in fact translated by the Italian humanists, its first scholars either employed interpretive acrobatics to soften the blow of Socrates’ plans for women, or simply chose to mistranslate the text—strategies, I will note, not unique to Italian humanists.4
Now, one might expect that in the 20th century, given its revolutions in customs with respect to women, that readers would be more in charity with at least some of Socrates’ proposed changes; but such is not the case. Even apart from the 20th-century’s preoccupation with injustice, power, and politics as hermeneutics, the Republic on its own engenders an intensity with respect to all questions of justice, both great and small. And so one admirable if potentially tedious plan of attack, given the numerous oddities of his laws, is to consider each detail of Socrates’ civic construction in the light of whether any given law or arrangement would be perfectly and thoroughly just. Such is no less the case for the proposals of the First and Second Waves; and the question 20th- and 21st-century scholars most frequently ask is this: has Plato done justice to women? The sense remains that, no, Plato has not, not nearly enough; the real variation in judgment arises over the extent to which the reader is willing to be magnanimous toward his imperfect efforts.5
But, as it is starting to be recognized more widely, the question as posed is not adequate to the complexity of Plato’s writing.6 To start with, it fails to call into question the nature of justice, forcing the reader to argue from a position that takes a knowledge of justice for granted, overlooking the telling phenomenon that most regimes consider their own laws superior to Socrates’. But worse, it encourages the reader to commit the awkward solecism of taking the words of Plato’s characters for Plato’s own views.7 This done, the reader is free to manufacture without guilt a straightforward answer from out of all the conversational back-and-forth to their own preoccupations, without interesting themselves in the concerns of Socrates and his interlocutors. And so Socratic pedagogy no less than Socratic irony is left behind. But worst of all, such willfully short-sighted reading makes Plato appear deeply uninteresting as a thinker, someone obviously and easily superseded by better logic or a few tweaks to his admittedly hyperbolic arguments; and so a book that is a forest of images gets reduced to a theatrical stage-flat, something hardly worth picking up on its own in a moment of reading leisure. This artificial problem becomes multiplied when the so-called words of Plato are reported, in a game of scholarly telephone, amongst all other fields with an interest in receiving a few words on Plato’s position on women and then moving on with their arguments—a situation ironically similar to the European Medievals arguing over their scraps, but much less forgivable. The loss is the more unnecessary, considering that to the unschooled reader who in all innocence picks up the work, its form immediately announces itself as a dramatic conversation; so much so that first-time readers will even confuse it for a stage-play, if rather an ambitious one.
Now, by the end of the 20th century, there was a rough consensus among scholars of philosophy, at least, that dialogic form was a key element in Plato’s writing, and as such ought to be taken into account by anyone who wished to interpret any given one of his books. The minor problem remained, however, that there was no consensus on just how the form was to be taken into account.8 Of course, to be sure, final consensus on such a matter is perhaps no less possible than desirable, any more than for all to approach, say, the metaphysical poets of the 17th century with precisely the same hermeneutics would be particularly rewarding. The problem for readers now, is not so much to pick one mode of approach, but to set the expectation of complexity and richness high enough for anyone who wishes to take up the interpretive task—not to mention to foster a high enough expectation on the reader’s part of complexity, such that they would allow themselves to take pleasure in witnessing the puzzle. To be fully responsive to Plato’s work, one must not only admit the standard that Plato’s Socrates insists upon, that every word of a single work play a crucial part of the whole, but also take up the practically impossible but nonetheless necessary task of entering fully into Plato’s world-building: to locate each conversation in the light of the entirety of Plato’s wide-ranging body of work, among all the conversations of Socrates and others, which contain as many fascinating commonalities as flat contradictions. This is particularly important when the subject is women, about whom many crucial hints are dropped throughout the dialogues, such as in the case of Socrates’ claim to have learned rhetoric from the courtesan Aspasia in the Menexenus, or Socrates’ likening his conversational art to that of his mother Phaenarete the midwife in the Theaetetus.9
Yet the difficulty remains, borne of the au courant faith in the power and universality of systematic accounts, how to reconcile ourselves in this day and age to the fact that Plato’s work is not a system but a cosmos, whose competing accounts ultimately place the burden and the hope of dialectic on the part of the individual reader. Of the first importance, is to finally put to rest the awkward 19th-century narrative that insists on its own interest in historical development as the hermeneutic key to an alien body of work, in favor of the dramatic timing of the life of Socrates offered by Plato himself.10 Though at first glance all this may seem all too Herculean a task, it’s a standard that few writers of Plato’s caliber would not expect as their right. Likewise, it provides a helpful reorientation to recall that Socratic Dialogue is a genre in its own right, wherein Socrates becomes written and rewritten in endless variation, not merely in the competing works of Xenophon but also in the versions Aeschines, Antisthenes, Eucleides, Aristippus, and Phaedo put forward as well.11 And although allegory, leitmotif, and symbol certainly play a role in the dialogues, allegory alone, or the sense that the drama is after all a sort of clothing or window-dressing, or even a codified version of the arguments themselves, will not be enough. Plato’s poetics are more three-dimensional than that which is on display in Everyman or Pilgrim’s Progress. It need hardly be said that attention must be paid to the logic of the arguments; but no less attention can be given to the fact that all the arguments come from the mouths of as three-dimensional characters as any writer for the stage ever produced, themselves in turn carefully placed with absolute specificity within the historical, political, and religious situations of ancient Athens and the Greek world.12
Fortunately for us, the 20th century contains the seeds if not the fruits of such wide-ranging responsiveness: an attentiveness to language beyond the abstractly logical, a willingness to recognize the limitations of one’s own historical and political position, and even an interest in the aporetic as such. Likewise it also has produced the first flowerings of a reasonably responsive tradition, begun by some few of Heidegger’s students, who, taking up his call to return to the origins of Western philosophizing, found themselves ultimately more interested in Plato and the Greeks at large, than in Heidegger’s own work.13 While Jacob Klein preferred to characterize the oddity of Plato’s work as mimetic or dramatic, Leo Strauss insisted upon Socratic rhetoric; their work gave rise to such disparate readers and writers on the Republic as Eva Brann, Seth Benardete, and Stanley Rosen; the influence of these and others of their generation in turn has produced little short of diaspora.14 And indeed, a sign of the affinity between Heidegger’s counsel, if not his deeds, is that in recent times the continental tradition on its own, apart from this lineage, has evinced much interest and subtlety in approach to reading Plato, such as in the work of John Sallis or John Russon. But the most helpful thing achieved by what has become a tradition of many layers, is that it is a tradition, with the benefits of a continued conversation with high if not uniform standards—as long as we keep in mind the danger that all philosophy shares, and that Heidegger’s life is a testament to, that when philosophers turn their eyes to the state, they risk taking up monstrosity as political wisdom, the very thing that the Republic, as I will discuss, can help us understand. We very much stand in need of an interest in Plato beyond the concerns of academic philosophy, and we need to marry our interest in sitting down to read his books with an appreciation of the complexity of his approach to the fundamental concerns of human life.
For though there is a reasonable expectation, for us at the beginning of the 21st century, that to speak of Plato’s “doctrine of recollection” as (a) doctrine and (b) a doctrine of “Plato,” is to be flat-footed indeed, there is no such expectation for what Plato writes about the women’s law. Despite the fact that he has no less than two main characters turn their hands to it—the flip side of Socrates’ own thoughts being what the Athenian Stranger has to say in the Laws—there is hardly any general recognition of the seriousness and depth to which Plato takes the woman question, no common report that would remind the reader that in the case of the women’s law, Socratic irony is no less at work. Now: among the students of Leo Strauss, there are those that have attempted to understand the Republic’s laws for women in light of Socrates’ penchant for irony, at least; Allan Bloom’s version, though it is not the most respected, is perhaps the most frequently read, seeing that it lies at the back of his much-circulated translation. These accounts are the more useful, as Michael Kochin notes, because there simply aren’t that many people trying to understand what Socrates says about women in terms of the Republic as a whole.15 But the underlying trouble with Bloom’s account, which Strauss’ account shares, is the rhetorical need to demonstrate the fact that irony or drama is even at work at all in Socrates’ conversations about the most just city. And so the parts about women become steps in the argument that demonstrate the overall flaws with the pursuit of justice without consequences (a phrase which of itself ought to alarm); Socrates’ solution to the woman question has to be shown to be laughable in the sense of impossible or undesirable, so that the just city is safely found to be equally flawed. The momentum that this rhetorical need incites, the necessity to show the ultimate laughability, and only the laughability, of Socrates’ plans for women’s rule and education, narrows the question to about one half of the story, one half the irony, and less than half the readership; for such defiant insistence on the risibility of the women’s law has the further unhappy result, of casting the reputation of the seriousness of Socratic irony itself into doubt.
But we who begin with a sense of drama and irony do not require such a demonstration; rather, Socrates’ irony, announced in a fit of pique by one of the evening’s early combatants, is a constant feature not merely of the Republic, but of the whole of the life of this ever-fascinating fictional idol. At the heart of the Republic is an aporia, an open question: can human ills really be done away with, should philosophers become kings, as Socrates insists in his central and strangest of prophecies? Such a prophecy is just that: a prophecy, ironic insofar as it is the perfect paradox, attractive as it is terrifying, tempting as it is asymptotically impossible. Therefore, the question is not, whether the best city is fatally flawed—for after all, it is only thorough-going lovers of Plato who ever seriously considered putting philosophers in charge of a political community—but why Socrates allows it to possess its imperfections, indeed announces them even as he insists they will be necessary. Therefore, the question about Socrates’ attempt at the women’s law is not, whether it is imperfect; but just why is it, after all? What is the reason for all of Socrates’ hesitations and caveats that he places around the women’s law, why does he expect others to find it funny, and why does he still introduce it? Why does he go far beyond the requested elaboration of marriage and child-rearing, and insist that the women will rule and be educated alongside the men? Why does the unexpected subject of women in their own right lead to the entirely unexpected proposal of philosopher-kings? The task is not to save Plato’s reputation by softening the strangeness and the humor of Socrates’ proposals, but to understand why Plato is willing to risk his reputation by writing such things about women; his posterity stands equally at risk in the hands of those that still hold out for more perfect justice, and among those who find justice itself fatally flawed. I will note, that I take it to be a fundamental part of the interest we have, is the sense that there surely must be a stronger reason or temptation on Socrates’ part, than that which is suggested by the 19th-century German classicist Carl Nohle, that the only reason Socrates introduced the First Wave was to provide breeding partners for the men.16
We stand still very much near the beginning of a flourishing attempt to call female human nature into question; and what could be more satisfying to lovers of philosophy, than to let what surely ought to be philosophically interesting, half of the human race, be acknowledged as such? While the irony present in the fact that “the woman question” is usually a question asked about the entirety of women by someone other than a woman herself should not be lost on us, it hardly obviates the question as such—as long as it’s asked as a living question, rather than as an excuse to consider the matter closed, or as an exercise in one’s ignorance of one’s own ignorance, as in the case of Freud.17 I myself walk into these questions as one perhaps all too submerged in the world of Greek literature and philosophy. While the Greek language speaks of human beings and indeed all animals as of two sexes, male and female, the Greek world contains as much or more variation of human experience in this regard than our own, which is no small part of its perennial interest to all ages, even outside of questions about human men, human women, and their several loves. Indeed, in the world where Tiresias is a seer, and the voice of far-away Apollo is the very present lady known as the Pythia, our own mores can seem somewhat pedestrian. Part of the appeal of Heidegger’s call to return to the Greeks has to be their help on what has become a thoroughly vexed set of questions. The scene at present is nothing less than circus-like, with some insisting on a nature so predictable and ironclad as to become unrecognizable to immediate human experience, while others announce that only when we consider Being as nothing more than Becoming, will we understand any of the particularities of our existence, our own selves remaining Cartesianly neutral under all our practices and rituals.18 This, and all the while, the poets and the moneymakers heap peculiarly incoherent cartoons of what the male or female human being ought to look like, as in the current obsession with the color pink as somehow peculiarly girlish, the metaphysical no less than historical paucity of such a notion being, I hope, immediately obvious, despite its strange popularity.
The worth of Plato in all this is not that he presents a final answer to our current questions, but that a serious consideration of his work offers a way of reframing the dialectic that is of profound service, and not the least for its acknowledgment of the political context that necessarily underlies any such questioning. Likewise, Plato’s book considers not merely women’s role in the political community, but at the same time calls into question economic and class considerations as well, not to mention the human tendency to form itself or be formed into genê, in all the calculus of such interwovenness. Nor is Plato’s work unresponsive to the possibility that body and soul find themselves at odds with respect to so-called gendered essence, as the body-swapping souls who trade one sex for another in the Myth of Er demonstrate; and I would ask the reader’s patience, with my choice to speak of women as a race or genos unto themselves, and with the adoption for the sake of argument of the strategically essential terminology of my author. Though it’s always a present temptation to become sick and tired, as Woolf records, of the very word “woman,” the word itself nevertheless is phenomenologically forgiving, and has a weight on the tongue beyond mere definition.19
But all this being said, real philosophical questioning has to take place outside of answers, and so outside of our own convictions about what the best city is, and just what the women’s law ought to be: otherwise the reader falls into the very trap Plato is so often accused of participating in, as being all too limited by his time. Now, to those with both feet firmly in the tradition of Leo Strauss in particular, much of what follows may sound almost too novel, and beside the point; and to those who object to any engagement with Strauss’ work as a matter of principle, it’s always possible that portions may seem all too tired a rehearsal of that gentleman’s maxims, despite any assurance on my part of a contrary opinion. Strauss’ sense of Platonic writing is certainly worth careful attention, yet he remains to me a piece in a broader puzzle; the woman question is particularly well suited to drawing out the strengths and weaknesses of his accounts. I will note, that among many of those influenced by Strauss and by Bloom in particular, the Republic is supposed to show the reality of female human nature as different and distinct from that of the male; at best this tendency shows up in a recognition of the oddity of the argument that Socrates takes up, that men are better at everything; at worst, it funnels the reader into praise of the very customs Socrates announces he will critique. Female human nature remains an open question for me; and the Republic is marked by Socrates’ strongly articulated insistence that no relevant natural difference obtains alongside the weakest possible examples he could have used. While the strangeness of his argument points us to a reconsideration of what, if anything, might be peculiar to the sex, the Republic as a work offers no stated argument that would help the reader with this question, for all that it sets the dialectical bar for what an adequate answer would have to address. And while other dialogues may offer tantalizing suggestions, the real problem with many of those who take up this account is that they are not particularly interested in taking up female human nature as a question to articulate, rather than as a point of order to insist upon; nor do more than a few evince much interest or concern in the fate of women and their desires themselves, outside of the bounds of conventional virtue. This is the more ironic, in that Plato’s own interest and concern with the entirety of the sex have marked his books out as of peculiar interest to women across time and space; as I will discuss, he more than most philosophers has successfully raised women’s interest in philosophy, just where the work of others has raised their peculiar ire, as in the case of Aristotle.
Plato’s book places our desire to perfect the place of women in the human community in the context of this attempt’s possible failure—and equally in the context of its desirability. This is not the less true, despite the laughter and repugnance of readers across time and space at the very notion that time-honored arrangements could even be alterable. He allows us to understand our desires alongside Socrates’ own desires and prepossessions, in particular in the light of Socrates’ fierce protectiveness for the practice of philosophy. Plato’s thoughts about the woman question are deeply aporetic; and the interest and the benefit of his work, is that it helps these matters come fully into question for as many who are interested in the truth of them. Only if we attend carefully enough to the question he raises, can we hope to make a fair beginning to our current attempt to answer them.
A quick look at what’s to come and the structure of the whole: at the center of my argument is the section of the Republic known as the First Wave, the proposal that the best of the women share in all the tasks of the guardians, their education and as is later made explicit, their rule. This passage tends to be overlooked in favor of drawing out the absurdities of the marriage arrangements in the Second Wave; and many have striven to find it just as laughable as what follows it. But for each proposal, the quality of the humor involved is different; while the Second Wave reaches even slapstick, the humor of the Third involves a darker quality—since, as Glaucon notes, it will be met not only with laughter but with pitchforks (474a). The humor of the First Wave is particularly strange, since while Socrates seems rather in on the joke of the Second, to argue at length, as Socrates does, that common naked exercise for men and women is only funny because of our attachment to the customary—opens the possibility that the joke is on him.
1.While it’s usually assumed that the first two Waves form a natural pair, I argue that the First and the Third Waves exhibit the deeper similarity, in action, subject, and dramatic function: while the Second Wave is Socrates’ response to Adeimantus’ specific request, both the First and Third Waves are Socrates’ independent addition to the argument, and both concern the rule and education of a class of people not ordinarily given either, at the public expense. The precariousness of the political position of both groups under customary Greek laws, as Socrates alludes to with his image of philosophy as a maiden in distress in Book VI, will be central to my understanding of why and how Socrates attempts to ameliorate the position of both women and philosophy in Books V–VII. The factor that distinguishes Socrates’ plans for women most of all is not merely education (which Aristotle argues for) or a share in the government as citizens (which the Athenian Stranger promotes in Plato’s Laws), but that women will be trained as philosophers. I have found it particularly helpful to keep the competing plans for women that these other two lawgivers promote as background counterpoint; understanding what’s distinct about Socrates’ plan is extremely helpful for understanding just what is problematic about it.
2.Next, I point out that the crucial sticking point for 20th-century feminist interpretations of the First Wave, the fact that women will be taken as weaker and men as stronger, is originally Glaucon’s idea. Socrates takes it up into the fabric of his argument only after forcing Glaucon explicitly into aporia from which he requires a “miraculous rescue;” nor does this detail prevent Socrates’ original plan for the education and rule of women from becoming part of the official law of the best city. Glaucon’s reactions are a revealing picture of male reluctance to women’s presence in the public sphere as potential competitors, and of what it would take to overcome this, both pedagogically and dialectically.
But though women arrive somewhat abruptly in the center of the argument in Book V, there is a complicated pattern of reference to the sex that takes place both before and after they are called out in the First Wave. The next two chapters deal with the narrative arc that is formed by the initial presence of women and their transformation into guardians. Before his accommodation to Glaucon, Socrates described the partnership of men and women as a “common hunt” (451d); in fact, there are several times that women and hunting are mentioned in the same breath in the evening’s conversation.
3.First I discuss the nature of hunting in the Republic, with reference to hunting in other dialogues such as the Lysis, the Sophist, and the Symposium; the oddity that Socrates uses what is elsewhere a metaphor for philosophy driven by eros allows me to consider the competition between thumos and eros that is part of the fabric of the work. Hunting, with its intriguing combination of both of these qualities of the soul, reminds the reader that we can neither abstract philosophy from eros entirely, nor escape from thumos even in our pursuit of truth.
4.In the sequel, I use my findings about hunting to think through the connection between women and the hunt. Women, in customary Greek polities, were considered to have over-wild passions and thus were not tamable as citizens; the evening’s conversation takes place during the festival of just such a woman, the Thracian hunting goddess Bendis. Socrates, while initially alluding to the untamedness of women’s desire, changes his position in Book V when he argues that women can possess Socratic areté and thus be tamed. But his initial image of a hunting partnership shows the way in which he intends this taming to work: women are tamed as those who pursue philosophy, a philosophy though warlike nevertheless not without its desire for truth; and so the guardians remain in an important sense only partially tame. Rather than being a minor appendage to the argument, only necessary for breeding, women and their desires—rather than the desires of others for them—help make sense of the turn to philosophy in Book V.
The next group of arguments considers the lines of religious and political custom that are tripped by Socrates’ proposal of common naked exercise, and his corresponding insistence that women will nevertheless be clothed in virtue.
5.I first consider the question of the humor of this proposal in the light of just what would be customary for women at the time; rather than introducing something wholly unheard of, Socrates lifts from the laws of other polities as well as religious practice in order to form his own pedagogic practices. This provides the occasion to discuss the shifting sense of the role Greek women played in the life of the city among Greek scholars across time and space; despite the Enlightenment-borne sense that lack of public political standing is no place at all, women were thoroughly written into the life of the city in a profoundly interesting way, for all their private status. The desire to find women’s departure from custom amusing is a perennial one, but reveals more about the one laughing, than the one being laughed at.
6.This being accomplished, I go deeper into the patterns of life available to Greek women, not merely the virtuous wives and daughters, but the priestesses and prostitutes as well, a subject of interest to anyone concerned with a phenomenological self-understanding of women themselves. Although the available life-world is rich, it nevertheless is politically insufficient: being wholly private allows women to ignore or even manipulate the public things of the city, and this is just the problem that Socrates is explicitly trying to fix.
7.The last step of this trio is to see the calculated appeal in Socrates’ image of robes of virtue, which offers to solve the pressing concerns of women under customary law, of which the problem of men’s hubris or rape looms as large as a lack of recognition of excellence and public acknowledgement of power; it allows women to be present in the public space while protected from the gaze of men by their own excellence. Ultimately, Socrates’s plans present a sort of challenge: if and only if men are willing to regard the virtue of women as placing them above reproach and out of danger even when they are naked, only then can men and women can be partners in harmony. Socrates has constructed a women’s law that is not without appeal for women themselves; as a consideration of the history of readership shows, many women across time and space have found Socrates’ call to take up virtue in the soul and philosophy itself, to be strongly appealing, the 20th-century’s antipathy being the exception rather than the rule.
8.Next comes an interlude wherein I consider the nature of the philosophizing in the Republic, the sort that Socrates wishes to put in charge of the state. This philosophizing, with its insistence on pure being, complete truth, and sight of the Good itself, is born out of Socrates’ desire to make philosophy look respectable in the eyes of public opinion, and his real anger at the desperate position of philosophy under customary laws. Socrates’ proposal of philosophers who act as kings is the perfect revenge of the man who was suborned into the evening’s discussion; his action shows the desirability of perfect knowledge of what is good for humans ruling the state, even as it shows the temptation of lovers of philosophy to consider themselves as most eminently qualified to rule. To love truth is, in a real sense, to wish for it to have the victory; despite Socrates’ insistence that philosophers are only qualified because they do not want worldly power, the practice of philosophy itself possesses tyrannical desire enough—and a sign of this hubris is Socrates’ willingness to destroy the fabric of ordinary human life in his attempt to give the best of the citizens fully over to the practice. In an important sense, Socrates’ proposal and its aftermath show us the limits of political philosophy, and the temptation it holds to become ideology, even as he founds the discipline.20
9.Once the limits and the appeal of the central proposal are on the table, the problems with the First and Second Waves can be properly considered. There are two sides to the question that Socrates’ strange plans dramatize: the problem of women’s own desires alongside the desires that others have for them, and the problems that follow the restructuring of women’s customary role as guardians of the household and biological role as mothers within the polis. To consider the problems of the household, I discuss Aristotle’s criticism of the Republic’s plans for women. Aristotle’s objection is not to Socrates’ claims about women’s natural abilities, but to what doing justice to those abilities does to arrangements for child-rearing and taking care of the private lives of the family, which Socrates’ plans jeopardize to an absurd extreme—his guardians are put as infants in what amounts to state-run orphanages. Socrates is willing to destroy the family and remove parents from children, precisely because he gets carried away with his plans for philosophy to have the best of everything in the best city—which includes the best female students, unencumbered by traditional familial and civic responsibilities. Such a move points to the necessary but often unobserved link between granting women full citizenship and the concomitant need for restructuring the family and the household, with all its attendant problems. Third-wave feminism struggles with this balance without always recognizing the depth of the political problem; Plato’s thought makes a crucial contribution to this discussion.
Epilogue: A return to the question of Socratic irony concludes the whole, wherein I discuss the appeal no less than the problems of Socrates’ plans for women. His prophecy, as a political measure, offers neither a final solution to the problem of philosophy in civic life, nor to that of women in the polity. But it does offer the reader a way of thinking through the questions involved, even as it inspires them to consider taking up excellence and philosophy for themselves. While the temptation of citizens is to find women no less laughable than the practice of philosophy, reading Plato’s book is one of our best hopes for schooling ourselves out of either absurdity. And so I commend the reader to consider this particular book, as something that will lead them back to their own reading of the Republic. While the reader may find plenty to quarrel with among the specifics of my own reading, as is inevitable and even desirable, my hope is to enlarge the sense of what Platonic dialogue is and does when it turns to the Woman Question.
1.See James Hankins, “Plato in the Middle Ages” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. J. Strayer, vol. IX (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1987), 694–704. Hankins lists what was available in Latin in Europe, beyond a sort of disseminated Neo-Platonic ethos, as two partial versions of the Timaeus, and some testimonia found in Cicero, in St. Augustine, and in other works of Latin philosophy; Henricus Aristippus in the 12th century made translations of the Phaedo and Meno, but they were “nearly unintelligible” and hard to come by; William of Moerbeke in the later 13th century made a partial translation of the Parmenides including Proclus’ commentary on it, and this completes the list (Plato in the Italian Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4, 43). Hankins theorizes that the relatively slow dissemination of Plato in Europe ultimately made his work the more beloved, by giving readers time to slowly adapt to his heterodoxies; he notes that though the medieval Byzantines possessed all of Plato’s works, his philosophy never became widely influential, and argues that the very availability of Plato, and so an immediate knowledge of all his quirks as an author, made him harder for them to accept (“Plato in the Middle Ages,” 3, 14–16). By contrast, Abraham Melamed notes that the late medieval Jewish translators of Averroes’ very strong support of Socrates’ plans for women in his commentary on the Republic, made no textual alterations of his position at all (“Maimonides on Women: Formless Matter or Potential Prophet?” in Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism, eds. Alfred L. Ivry, Elliot R. Wolfsun, and Allan Arkush (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), 116).
2.See Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 66, 126–139, 49. For an overview of the history of scholarship of the Republic since 1870, see Natalie Bluestone Harris, Women and the Ideal Society: Plato’s Republic and Modern Myths of Gender (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 23–73.
3.See Melissa Lane’s discussion of this phenomenon in Plato’s Progeny: How Plato and Socrates Still Captivate the Modern Mind (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), 109–119. Claudia Baracchi has a particularly fine sense of how the Republic’s presence and absence sits embedded in the history of the reading and thinking world (Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 1–2).
4.Natalie Bluestone Harris provides a stunning overview of not only cross-grained interpretation, but willful mistranslation of Socrates’ thoughts on the woman question from 1870 to 1987 in Women and the Ideal Society, 23–73. Elena Duvergès Blair records a phenomenon with scholarship on the Laws that I find analogous, where some scholars find women a frequent topic of discussion in the work, while others dismiss the references to women as minor, tangential, and infrequent (Plato’s Dialectic on Woman (London: Routledge, 2012), 175, 161, 179, cited in the text as PDW); the mere possibility of such strong disagreement on what is after all an issue easily resolved by reference to the text is telling.
5.Often cited are: Gregory Vlastos, “Is Plato a Feminist?” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Nancy Tuana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 11–24; Julia Annas, “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” Philosophy 51 (1976): 307–21; and Natalie Harris Bluestone’s discussion in Women and the Ideal Society, 75–154. Elizabeth V. Spelman speaks of “the sad irony in the description of Plato as the first feminist philosopher” in “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher Queens” (Feminist Interpretations of Plato), 88. Susan Okin’s still popular Women in Western Political Thought, reprinted in 2013, is likewise patronizing even in its attempts to praise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 15–72. These essays usually form the basis of investigation into other dialogues, as seen in Cynthia Freeman’s discussion of the Timaeus, even as she tries to incorporate character and dialogue form into her reading (“Schemes and Scenes in Reading the Timaeus,” in Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, Lilli Alanen and Charlotte Witt, eds. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002), 33–50).
6.As both Elena Blair and Michael S. Kochin have noted; see Blair, PDW, 3; and Kochin, Gender and Rhetoric in Plato’s Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 37n1, cited in the text as GRPT. Stella Sandford also makes this observation in Plato and Sex (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 6.
7.For a consideration of such awkwardness, which has certainly been avoided by many readers before the 20th century, see the essays collected by Gerald Press, ed., Who Speaks for Plato? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). Deborah Nails provides a keen and thoughtful summary of analytic and literary approaches in Agora, Academy, and the Practice of Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 1995), 36–43. Also worth considering is Hankins’ discussion of the wide variety among the modes of interpretation of any text which were au courant in Europe when Plato started being read again there (Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 18–26).
8.See Gerald Press, “The State of the Question in the Study of Plato,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 34 (1996): 507–532; for a 2006 look-in, see Danielle Allan, “Platonic Quandaries: Recent Scholarship on Plato,” Annual Review of Political Science 9: (June 2006): 127–141; and Ivor Ludlam’s 2014 summation (Plato’s Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Being Well (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 4–8).
9.Elena Blair undertook the project of looking at all the references to women in Plato, in order to “integrate” all the dialogues into an account that is a “coherent theory” and a “coherent whole;” her attempt is a heroic one, but frustratingly alien at its core to the back-and-forth of Platonic dialectic (PDW, 9, 199). The Eleatic Stranger, the Athenian Stranger, Timaeus, and Socrates are all different people, and they all have their own views on women, just as they have their own set of metaphysical and political concerns.
10.See Catherine Zuckert’s discussion of Socratic chronology in Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–19.
11.See Charles H. Kahn’s discussion of the other Socratics in Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–35. Kahn notes that the Emperor Julian was a reader of Phaedo’s work, which was extremely popular in antiquity (Ibid., 10).
12.S. Halliwell is an eloquent voice on the need for this context in Book V in particular in his commentary (Republic: Book V (Warminster: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1993), 9); he also has a very fine sense of the living, almost cinematic quality of the drama, strongly present in the opening scenes of Book V (Ibid., 2–3).
13.For a discussion of Strauss’ Heideggerian roots, see Richard Velkley’s Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Philosophy: On Original Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 6.
14.Jacob Klein remarks: “…answers can be given in a written text by the very action it presents. That is what usually happens in Platonic dialogues and what constitutes their dramatic or mimetic quality” (A Commentary on Plato’s Meno (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 17); while Strauss has it: “The most perfect product of Socratic rhetoric is the dialogue” (On Tyranny (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 26). Seth Benardete, Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), cited in the text as SSS; Eva Brann, “The Music of the Republic” (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2011); Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), cited in the text as PRS; Allan Bloom, “Interpretive Essay,” in The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 307–436, cited in the text as IE; and Bloom’s “Response to Hall,” Political Theory 5, no. 3 (1977): 315–30. For an interesting perspective on Bloom’s visibility, see George Klosko’s expressed worries in 1986 (“The ‘Straussian’ Interpretation of Plato’s Republic” (History of Political Thought, vol. VII no. 2 1986): 275–293).
15.Michael Kochin, GRPT, 37; as Blair notes however, he never speaks directly to the question of the relation of the First Wave to the Republic (PDW, 70); rather, he spends more time with the Laws.
16.Bluestone Harris (Women and the Ideal Society, 41). After all, even education is hardly a requirement for such. This argument, interestingly, is alive and well in oral tradition. Bluestone Harris notes that Bloom appears to agree with Nohle (ibid., 49).
17.See David Halperin’s discussion of Freud in “Why is Diotima a Woman?” (100 Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love (Oxford: Routledge, 2010), 149).
18.As Stella Sandford notes, Joseph Ratzinger himself has shown up to this debate (Plato and Sex, 39–40).
19.See Johanna Hedva’s eloquent defense and reclamation of the word as describing all that which is held to be incomplete or even ill: “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine, January 2016; http://www.maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory; accessed July 1, 2015. For Woolf’s lament, see A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), 109.
20.Stanley Rosen describes this tendency of philosophy as an “internal disharmony” where it at once desires to rule and yet not to rule; I am indebted to his willingness to include the temptations and flaws of philosophy, no less than that of justice, in his account of the Republic as a whole (PRS, 166).