Justice in the State: Comparisons between Plato’s Republic and the West. Essay 2: Equal Training and Natural Inequalities between Men and Women in Plato's 'Republic' and the West Today
In the previous essay on Plato's ideal state (The Republic), we saw how Socrates argues for the equality of men and women in their capacities and common pursuits. His argument proceeds on the grounds of observations about nature that his listeners do not question. Socrates says that only in the areas of physical strength and childbearing are men and women unequal. These differences, however, do not exclude women from serving as guardians of the state, including in military service. Thus, they needed to be trained in the same way as and with the men.
The
two types of training for a guardian in Plato’s Republic are gymnastics and music.
Gymnastic training is more than athletic exercise as it also trains a
person in warfare. While women are weaker,
they can still engage in this training with the men. Socrates further suggests that, just as men
trained at the gymnasia in the nude, the women do so as well and with the men. His
argument is: Equal opportunity requires coeducation,
including physical training in the nude in gymnasia, though with lighter duties
for the women. He says:
[5.456b] “Women of this kind, then, must be selected to cohabit
with men of this kind and to serve with them as guardians since they are
capable of it and akin by nature.” … [5.457a] … “The women of the guardians, then, must strip,
since they will be clothed with virtue as a garment, and must take
their part with the men in war and the other duties of civic guardianship and
have no other occupation. But in these very duties lighter tasks must be
assigned to the women than to the men [5.457b] because of their weakness as a class.…
While one could easily and effectively argue
with Socrates assumptions, what is interesting in his argument is that he moves
from observations in nature about equal capacities to arguments for equal
opportunity between men and women. Yet
his understanding of natural differences between the genders leads him to
accept unequal outcomes. Thus, he later
suggests that the weaker women would be a secondary force in warfare. In the course of the dialogue, Glaucon understands Socrates to
have maintained that women would join in military campaigns, ‘whether in the
ranks or marshalled behind to intimidate the enemy, or as reserves
in case of need’ [5.471b]. They
would play their part according to the merit that they brought to the task.
Just
how far can or should this argument of equality between men and women be
taken? In the West, the argument took
shape in three waves of ‘feminism.’ First
wave feminism began in the 1800s and had to do with the right of women to vote. Second wave feminism expanded this right to
other rights, such as the right for an equal education, employment, pay, and
service in the military. The notion of ‘rights’
is not the same as that of ‘equality,’ but once ‘rights’ were established in
the arguments, second wave feminism even came to include women’s 'right' to have
authority over the life of their unborn babies.
This wave of feminism also focussed on women as individuals apart from
any family or maternal roles. As with Socrates, building arguments solely on the basis of equality (assumed equality) removed the protection given to women in most every society and left them prey to more powerful men. With the singular argument of equality, one can hardly argue for different athletic training, different locker rooms, bathrooms, and special protection. Third wave
feminism from the 1990s and beyond applied to women the Postmodern social
agenda of deconstructing social privilege and power in the areas of race,
heterosexuality, citizenship, and religion.
The differences between 1st and 2nd wave feminism
and 3rd wave feminism are the result of moving from Modernist to
Postmodernist assumptions. The former proceeds
with scientific arguments about nature, just as Socrates attempted to do, while
the latter proceeds with social scientific arguments about identity and power. The result is men identifying as women killing the competition in women's sports and milling about in women's locker rooms.
We
can see the differences in the matters of men and women in athletic
training. Socrates had them train
together, but he recognised that equal opportunity for training did not reward
people with equal outcomes. Merit was
still a consideration: one wanted to field the best military force, not a
military force that put equality on display.
He also argued that equal capacities and purposes in training should
mean equal training in every way, and therefore training together. The logic is not sound, or at least the point
was not well argued.
The
West, however, never got to Socrates’ argument in favour of equal training in
the nude for men and women during Modernity.
Only in the period of Postmodernity did the issue arise, and it did not
arise from feminism but from transgenderism.
Feminism was concerned to protect women
from the power and inequality of men, and such a perspective meant refusing men
access to women’s spaces. Transgenderism
does not proceed from a Modernist but from a Postmodernist perspective. It is an anti-natural philosophical
view. It distinguishes biological sex
from gender and then makes gender the primary question. People are said to be able to claim their
gender, and multiple gender identities have been entertained. As Postmodernity has claimed that truth is
relative and not universal, that the social sciences and not sciences reign in
the culture, that people construct their own truth, meaning, and identity, so
also transgenderism dismisses any scientific argument of nature and lodges
itself in the make-believe world of constructed gender identities.
As Socrates pursued his vision of social justice
in the Republic beyond this point,
however, he moved from arguments about nature to social ideology. We see, then, a kind of move from Modernity
to Postmodernity in his description of the ideal state. The ‘idea’ or universal virtue of justice,
when defined apart from nature, could be moulded into a new social ideal to
guide social policies.
As Christians living in this make-believe world
of chosen identities that have nothing to do with nature, we quickly find
ourselves more in line with the Stoics than with Socrates or Plato. The Stoics grounded their entire philosophy
on ‘living according to nature’ (kata
physin). They opposed living ‘against
nature’ (para physin). They applied this distinction to sexuality,
too. Homosexuality and ‘transgenderism’
were examples of living against nature.
Paul, too, uses this standard language in Romans 1.26-27 when he speaks
of the ‘against nature’ sins of lesbianism and male homosexuality.
Socrates’ failure was to provide a more serious
consideration of the differences between men and women, but he especially
failed to understand the different contributions of men and women to one
another and to society. He quickly
skipped over these questions in his theoretical musings about the ideal
society, even though he lived in a patriarchal society. Yet his more serious errors in describing the
ideal republic will come in the next steps he takes in his argument, as he
abandons any consideration of nature and moves to social reengineering based on
ideology.
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