Plato's Dialectic on Woman

Equal, Therefore Inferior

Elena Blair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415526913
• eBook ISBN: 9781136299469
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

With the birth of the feminist movement classicists, philosophers, educational experts, and psychologists, all challenged by the question of whether or not Plato was a feminist, began to examine Plato's dialogues in search of his conception of woman. The possibility arose of a new focus affecting the view of texts written more than two thousand years in the past. And yet, in spite of the recent surge of interest on woman in Plato, no comprehensive work identifying his position on the subject has yet appeared.

This book considers not only the totality of Plato's texts on woman and the feminine, but also their place within both his philosophy and the historical context in which it developed. But this book is not merely a textual study situating the subject of woman philosophically and historically; it also uncovers the implications hidden in the texts and the relationships that follow from them. It draws an image of the Platonic woman as rich and full as the textual and historical information allows, offering new and sometimes unexpected results beyond the topic of woman, illuminating aspects of Plato's work that are of relevance to Platonic studies in general.

Part I

The Dramatic/Rhetorical Texts

1 Dramatic/Rhetorical Views of Woman

The task now is to show just why Plato's references to women either in a dramatic or rhetorical way cannot be used to indicate his view of what woman is. To do this, as I mentioned in the preceding chapter, I will examine passages in which woman is referred to (I) in analogies, similes, metaphors, myths or examples, where her presence contributes rhetorically to philosophical arguments on other topics, (II) in drawing characters, witnessing certain men's current attitudes and prejudices about women, or (III) in portraying woman's place in Athenian life or the Greek culture in general. As W. Brown has noted,¹ these appearances of women assist or develop arguments by introducing an image, a myth, or an allegory which evokes the interlocutor's experience of the world.

Let me reiterate that although Plato may well have shared many of the attitudes portrayed in these dramatic/rhetorical instances referring to woman, (a) his personal attitudes are in large measure irrelevant to his philosophical thought; it is reason and evidence that govern his reflection, not personal inclination. But more importantly, (b) in most of these cases we cannot even guess how he personally felt, because of the nature of dramatic narrative or the techniques of rhetorical persuasion.

The first category listed above, Plato's skill in depicting women while discussing other philosophical topics, is by far the most important, and the one most likely to mislead investigators. Being clear here will also sharpen our capacity to identify the texts where he reflects philosophically on woman herself.

I. WOMAN WITHIN PHILOSOPHICAL
ARGUMENTS ON OTHER TOPICS

A peculiar passage of mysterious quality and philosophical importance—which illustrates clearly the need to separate the two classes of texts—appears in Timaeus— notion of “receptacle,” as “nurse of becoming,” and especially “mother,” or “space.”

After discussing the design and final causes of the cosmos, when moving into physics and physiology, Timaeus discovers the need to add a baffling and obscure third element to the intelligible model and the sensible copy that he had used until then. He calls it the “receptacle” (υποδοχήν) of all coming into existence, a kind of wet-nurse (οἷον τιθήνην) (49a), and begins to distinguish the three elements as (1) becoming, (2) the place in which it becomes, and (3) the Demiurge, which he compares, respectively, to offspring, mother, and father (50d).

The “receptacle” is revealed in an impressive text differentiating it from Empedocles' four material elements:

and so, we should not in fact speak of the mother and receptacle … as either earth or air or fire or water, or anything made up of them, or even [the] components out of which these [elements] come to be; rather … speaking of it as some invisible and characterless manifestation (ἀνόρατονεἶδόςτικαὶἄμορφον) which receives everything, and shares in intelligibility in a way that is very puzzling and hard to fathom (51ab).

This is also different from Anaximander's ἄπειρον, an indefinite substrate which becomes earth or something definite, because Plato's “space” receives its determination. It is an ever-existing and neutral place, a substratum in which all material transformations occur, barely an object of belief, apprehensible by a kind of perverse reasoning or waking dream, without the aid of sensation. It provides room for the eternal ideas and qualities of things to enter and impress themselves:

The nurse of becoming, once it is made liquid or fiery or receives the characteristics (μορφὰς) of earth or air, and once it submits to all the other influences that follow these, allows itself to be seen in all sorts of ways (52de).

While the elements fleetingly transform themselves, the “receptacle” never departs from its own nature and, existing in itself, provides the space (χώρα) for all generation.

The passage is so appealing, and the idea of the mother as the arcane place where things are born has so much power, that the reader investigating woman in Plato hears something profound and enigmatic about her which (since it contradicts other Platonic texts, particularly texts equating the two sexes, as in Republic 455e–456a), makes the charge of inconsistency unavoidable.

G. Lloyd,² for one, not realizing the text's rhetorical function (which we will see shortly), finds gender differentiation in Timaeus' mind-matter dualism, assuming that by comparing the roles of limiting form to the father and of indefinite matter to the mother, Plato implicitly excluded the feminine from the nature of knowledge, since knowledge transcends matter.³ The notion has also had a powerful attraction for feminists such as E. Bianchi,⁴ who tries to show Plato's “receptacle” “as offering a fecund and generative philosophical terrain in which a feminist rethinking of corporeality, spatiality, figurality, temporality, and life may take (its) place” within a critique of ancient metaphysics. Plato's notion of “receptacle” has had a great impact on contemporary philosophy,⁵ partly because those who practice it are apt not to be familiar with Aristotle's notions of act and potency which clarifies it, even when they try to relate receptacle with Aristotelianism, as L. Irigaray does.⁶

But let us examine what Plato is doing. Here he is introducing an entirely new and quite obscure metaphysical principle: the “receptacle” or space. Aristotle⁷ identifies it with his prime matter,⁸ though F. M. Cornford⁹ finds no justification for calling the “receptacle” “matter,” a term not used by Plato, since it is that “in which” things appear; but he does not recognize that Aristotle understands prime matter as pure potency (capacity to receive a form¹⁰) following the theory of potency and act mentioned above.¹¹

Plato uses the metaphor of the mother to illuminate this all-receiving notion. Since a metaphor's function is to clarify and enlighten a less-known concept using a better-known one,¹² this itself is enough to show that it would not be consistent with the purpose of Plato here to use the notion of mother to introduce, at the same time and by means of the same term, both the difficult metaphysico-cosmological notion of “recepta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The State of the Question
• Prologue The Feminine Presence in the Dialogues—A Methodological Consideration
• Part I The Dramatic/Rhetorical Texts
• Part II The Philosophical Texts
• Part III Plato's Philosophy of Woman
• Appendix to the Text: Greek Words on Women and the Feminine
• Bibliography
• Index of Ancient and Medieval Names
• Index of Modern and Contemporary Sources
• Index of General Concepts
• Index of Terms and Concepts Relevant to Specific Dialogues