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 1^st and 2^nd wave feminism and 3^rd 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.