Justice in the State: Comparisons between Plato’s Republic and the West. Essay 1: Nature, and the Differences between Men and Women
The cultural debate in the
West in the present time over differences between men and women is due, in
part, to an attempt to establish a socialist state under authoritarian
rule. These are not unrelated matters. On the one hand, a
consideration of the natural capacities, activities, and pursuits of
individuals has to do with questions of biology, examination of the merits
people bring to their tasks, and observations of actual performances. On
the other hand, regulations may be placed over all this to serve the purposes
of the state or, more likely, the authoritarian aristocracy, even to the point
that people are required to advance a particular conclusion no matter what
answers one finds to biological questions, results one receives while
investigating individuals' merits, and what observations one has. What is
the relationship between cultural forces at work to reach certain conclusions
and the state's control of these conclusions?
The answer to this question has
to do with what sort of understanding one takes into the debates about the
nature of government. Is government for the people or is
it for the ideal? Is government of the people or of
the state? Is governing by the people or is it by the
aristocracy? Not only is the West experiencing a cultural revolution in
many ways and all at once, it is also experiencing a revolutionary political
challenge to democracy in favour of a more authoritarian aristocracy that has
positioned itself as a moral force in government to accomplish socialist
ideals.
This may be a new stage for the
West in its development from monarchies to democracies to socialist
aristocracies, but the questions around this development already presented
themselves to Plato in 4th c. BC Athens. With the failed experiment of
democracy already behind him, Plato wrote The Republic to explore
justice as an ideal and in an ideal state. His spokesperson in the
dialogue was his teacher, Socrates. What Socrates suggests as the ideal,
just state is an authoritarian, socialist state. In this and subsequent
essays, I would like to flush out what this involved for him and compare and
contrast how this 'dialogue' is proceeding in the West today. The
questions are of particular significance for Christians as they negotiate the
forces within a post-Christian culture and the forces of an aristocratic state
that believes justice lies ideally within a socialist government.
In The Republic, Socrates
first argues that the just state will not make distinctions between men and
women, with one exception. The proposed premise may be stated as
follows: There is an equality of men and women in all matters, in their
natural capacities and pursuits, except in their natural physical strength and
in regard to which gender bears children. Socrates' first argument
is based on observations regarding natural capacities. Men and women are
just as capable at learning, acting, governing, and so forth. For 4th c.
BC Greece, this is a radical claim. Even in democratic Athens, only male
citizens cast a vote and could hold offices. Socrates' first argument
moves from an observation that men and women are equal in their natural
capacities to an argument that they should be allowed equal pursuits or
careers. At this point in the argument, the hand of the state has not yet
been shown: Socrates is making observations about nature. To anticipate
later discussion (in The Republic as well as in these essays), we
might note that the control of education and the assignment of persons to their
jobs will be state controlled in an aristocratic, socialist state.
The following quotations from Socrates
in The Republic present his case for this first part of his
argument. In my view, his argument is essentially where feminist
arguments stood in the 20th century, democratic West and where
arguments in general stood during the post-Enlightenment Modernity of
the West, when science ruled arguments in the university and arguments based on nature
prevailed. Arguments based on natural capacities and equal
opportunity to pursue the same goals made sense in the cultural
context. Socrates says:
[453b] … ‘Can it
be denied then that there is by nature a great difference between men and
women?’ … ‘Is it not fitting, then, that a different function should be
appointed [453c] for each corresponding to this difference of nature?’ …
‘How, then, can you deny that you are mistaken and in contradiction with
yourselves when you turn around and affirm that the men and the women
ought to do the same thing, though their natures are so far apart?’ …
[5.454d] But if it appears [this is Socrates’ view] that they differ only in
just this respect that the female bears [454e] and the male begets, we
shall say that no proof has yet been produced that the woman differs from
the man for our purposes, but we shall continue to think that our guardians and
their wives ought to follow the same pursuits.” … [455d] … “Then there is
no pursuit of the administrators of a state that belongs to a woman because she
is a woman or to a man because he is a man. But the natural capacities are
distributed alike among both creatures, and women naturally share in all
pursuits and men in all— [455e] yet for all the woman is weaker than the
man.” … [456a] … “The women and the men, then, have the same nature in
respect to the guardianship of the state, save in so far as the one is weaker,
the other stronger.” … [456b][1]
Thus, a natural argument
based on observation concludes that men and women have nearly the same
capacities and can contribute equally in the same pursuits in most situations. In virtually
every way regarding capacities and pursuits, there is no difference between men
and women. On several occasions, as noted above, Socrates makes the
uncontested qualification that men and women are, of course, different in their
physical strength. He even says that this is the only way in which they
differ. However, he adds, as noted, that they also obviously differ in
regard to who bears children and who begets children.
Our interest in further essays
will be in how this starting point in Socrates' argument comes to be connected
to his vision of justice and the state. In this essay, the discussion is
purely about nature, not social or political forces. Our observation is
that Socrates found observations about nature as foundational to what he would
soon say about social engineering according to some ideal of justice.
Feminism, so far as it based its arguments in nature, could argue as Socrates
did: observe that women have the same capacities and pursue the same ends as
men--they are in these respects equal.
Accepting the authority of
conclusions based on observations of nature, one can still argue for a variety
of distinctions having to do with natural differences between men and women in
regard to their physical strength and child bearing capacities. Socrates' socialist, political interests,
however, will soon undermine these, as the West’s movement from Modernist to
Postmodernist assumptions has done. In order to press the equality of men
and women to its extreme position, Socrates will subsequently argue for a form
of socialism that undermines the family, marriage, and the parent-child
relationship. Such social constructions are severed from any natural
argument as much as possible. As in
Socrates' argument, so also in the West in the last half century, arguments for
a feminist equality have morphed into an entirely different sort of argument
that undermines arguments based on nature in the most profound ways. Postmodernity rejects foundationalism,
including arguments from nature, thus transferring arguments to humanly
constructed ‘truths’ that support the authoritarian state’s version of
justice. When, in subsequent arguments,
Socrates opens the door to this state authority, he will do so in a way that
Western culture has done in moving from feminist arguments based in nature to justice
as a moral construct under the control of the authoritarian state.
[1] Plato,
Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5
& 6, trans.Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London,
William Heinemann Ltd. 1969).
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