In book 5 of the Republic Socrates outlines the social, political, and lifestyle policies that define the guardian class of the Kallipolis. Contrary to the Athenian conventions of his time, he argues that some women, like some men, are naturally suited to serve as warriors and rulers, and that men and women alike, therefore, should be included in the guardian class. They should all receive the same education and training, share a communal lifestyle and raise their children together, and serve alongside one another as fellow warriors and philosopher kings and queens. Commentators hoping to discern Plato's views on women in the Republic have naturally enough tended to focus on this discussion, and in particular on the fact that Socrates attributes positive psychological qualities to women and defends their participation in activities that are traditionally considered “masculine” or reserved for men by Greek cultural standards. Conversely, many commentators also draw attention to corollary remarks throughout the dialogue that condemn negative behavior as “womanish” and that criticize the character and conduct of many women.Footnote 1 This dual emphasis has left many scholars with the impression that Plato's aim is to promote or allow “manly” traits and pursuits in the guardian women, while discouraging “feminine” ones in men and women alike. That impression, in turn, has informed a wide range of otherwise divergent interpretations of Plato's position. From an early modern perspective, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes of Plato, “In his Republic … having removed private families from his regime and no longer knowing what to do with women, he found himself forced to make them men” (Reference Rousseaul762/1979, 362–63).Footnote 2 Many recent scholars offer similar assessments, whether they characterize Plato as a proto-feminist or progressive of his time, or instead as a misogynist or reactionary. On the one hand, commentators who judge Plato's views more favorably, such as Gregory Vlastos, tend to do so on the basis of his willingness to “include” women in men's spheres from which they had previously been excluded,Footnote 3 and the main challenge has been to square that interpretation with the critical comments on women and femininity that appear in the dialogue.Footnote 4 At the same time, many scholars are critical of the perceived “masculinization” of women. Penelope Murray writes, “I cannot help feeling that what is required of the female guardians is that they should simply turn themselves into men” (Reference Murray, Destrée and Herrmann2011, 176). Likewise, Arlene Saxonhouse claims that the female guardian of book 5 is “destroyed as woman” and “de-natured” (Reference Saxonhouse1976, 202), and Marina McCoy finds, “[Women] are included only insofar as they take up the activities of men and do so in a masculine way. … Women must become like men” (Reference McCoy, Bell and Naas2015, 156–57).Footnote 5 Debates about Plato's views of women, then, have largely been shaped by the idea that Plato seeks to minimize the influence of femininity in the ideal city, and to make guardian women themselves as masculine as possible.
Our first goal in this paper is to show that this assessment oversimplifies Plato's treatment of the Greek masculine/feminine dichotomy in the Republic. First, although Plato does seek to eliminate some traditionally feminine qualities from the city, he also, and arguably with even greater vehemence, seeks to expurgate a number of traditionally masculine qualities and behavior from the city as well. Furthermore, while he tries to make guardian women more like men in some respects, he also simultaneously aims to make the guardian men more like women in important ways. He does not aim to eliminate all expressions of traditional femininity from the city, then, but actually emphasizes the positive moral value of many of them. Finally, at the same time that Plato is “including” women in the traditionally masculine world of the city, he is also reimagining Greek standards of what it means to be masculine, as well as what the public or political realm looks like.Footnote 6
Our second goal is to show that Plato's project of revaluating gender roles is connected to and illuminated by the three-part theory of the soul that he introduces in the Republic (435a–441c), and in particular by his conception of the spirited part of the soul, or thumos. This connection has been underappreciated by scholars, who typically focus on the other two parts of the tripartite soul: reason or logos, which is associated with mind and the desire for truth and wisdom; and appetite, which is responsible for irrational desires connected to biological processes like nutrition and reproduction (especially hunger, thirst, and erōs). In the context of Platonic views of women, debates tend to be framed in terms of the opposition between mind/body, rational/non-rational, logos/erōs, and reason/appetite, especially given Greek cultural associations of men with the first terms in each of these binaries and women with the second.Footnote 7 On the one hand, this framework dovetails with the tendency to view Plato as trying to masculinize women. Philosophy and virtue, the idea goes, involve cultivating the “masculine” mind and reason while at the same time denying, controlling, or minimizing the influence of “feminine” bodily contingency and desire (Saxonhouse Reference Saxonhouse1976, 196; Canto Reference Canto1985, 279–81; McCoy Reference McCoy, Bell and Naas2015, 156). At the same time, however, the focus on reason and appetite is also evident even among the minority of scholars who, like us, challenge the simple masculinization/de-feminization picture. Commentators like Wendy Brown and Page DuBois draw attention to the fact that, at the same time that Plato valorizes logos and the pursuit of wisdom, he also uses feminine-coded language associated with the body and appetite to characterize that pursuit: both truth and philosophy itself are personified as women; the philosopher's love of wisdom is a form of erōs and the experience of seeing truth is ineffable (hence a-logos); he repeatedly uses metaphors of sexual intercourse, pregnancy, reproduction, and childbirth to illustrate philosophical endeavors; and virtue itself requires engagement with our embodied appetites (DuBois Reference DuBois and Tuana1994; Brown Reference Brown1988).Footnote 8 As Wender comments, “For all of Plato's railing against the appetitive or desirous … he does not and cannot jettison these parts of our being” (Reference Wender1973, 603).
Framing Plato's treatment of gender solely in terms of the reason/appetite dichotomy, however, leaves out a central factor in the Republic's characterization of the guardians’ psychology. As we will see, Plato's defines their nature largely in terms of qualities of thumos, and his educational, social, and economic proposals for them are heavily informed by consideration of their spirited desires and emotions. In Plato's tripartite psychology, the spirited part occupies an ambivalent status in both the rational/irrational and masculine/feminine binaries. Like appetite, spirit is non-rational and can exert a vicious influence in the soul when untutored and uncontrolled, but when properly trained it is the “ally of reason” and can, like the rational part, draw the individual toward virtue (and away from vicious appetites). Similarly, Plato's theory of thumos, like the Greek literary tradition and popular culture on which he draws, strongly associates spirit with emotions, virtues, behavior, and domains from both sides of the masculine/feminine dichotomy. In the Republic, we aim to show, Plato seeks to instill virtuous forms of both masculinity and femininity in the spirited part of the guardians’ souls, while discouraging vicious forms of both as well.
We first provide a brief overview of thumos and its relationship to Greek conceptions of masculine and feminine and related dichotomies. (For the purposes of this paper, we use the terms “masculine” and “feminine” and their synonyms to refer to things that are gendered or “coded” as such by Greek cultural norms.) Then we show how Plato's Republic aims to eliminate vicious masculinity from the city, rework what it means to be masculine in the first place, and instill virtuous forms of femininity among the guardians. Finally, we conclude by addressing the implications of our interpretation for assessing Plato's views of women more generally. Our interpretation shows that some criticism (and, for that matter, praise) of Plato is based on oversimplifying characterizations of his position. However, we emphasize that our arguments are not intended to make of Plato any sort of feminist, and that in general they do not in themselves constitute a defense against charges of sexism or misogyny.Footnote 9
Thumos and the masculine/feminine dichotomy
Greek culture ascribed different social functions to men and women and applied distinct sets of norms and expectations concerning their virtues, emotions, psychological qualities, and behavior. In speaking of “Greek” culture, we mean in particular the Athenian culture of Plato's time, which was shaped by influences from throughout the Greek world spanning several centuries, and which was representative of many prominent trends in Greek thinking about gender more broadly. Note, however, that Greek culture was not entirely homogeneous, and there were important exceptions to the general trends we highlight (as for example in Sparta, where gender norms diverged in some important ways from those in Athens). With that caveat in mind, consider the following preliminary sketch.Footnote 10
Greek conceptions of masculinity demanded effective participation in the agonistic world of politics and warfare. The social domain of Athenian men was the public realm or polis. Men were expected to fight to defend their city against its enemies and to participate actively in the internal affairs of the city by engaging in civil debate, voting in the Assembly, serving on juries, taking part in lawsuits, holding civic offices, and generally striving to gain power, public honor, and influence over political matters.Footnote 11 Closely connected to this norm of civic engagement was a man's obligation to acquire wealth, resources, and status for his own private household or oikos. Men were supposed to participate in the affairs of the polis largely in order to compete with one another for the social and political capital that could be used to secure material assets and prestige for the oikos. In light of these social functions, men were expected to possess psychological qualities that were conducive to success in warfare and politics. Most obviously, this included courage, which was the cardinal virtue of Greek masculinity.Footnote 12 Indeed, the most popular term for “courage” among Plato and his contemporaries is andreia, which literally means “manliness” (from the Greek word for “man,” anēr), while cowardice was associated with effeminacy. Likewise, men were expected to have various masculine-coded emotions and traits related to courage, such as boldness, daring, fearlessness, assertiveness, endurance, toughness, anger, hate or enmity, savageness, aggression, and the desire for vengeance.Footnote 13 Similarly, men were expected to possess a cluster of desires that express ambition (philotimia) and competitiveness (philonikia), because such drives motivate them to pursue the glory, honor, victory, and power that signify martial and political excellence.
The social domain of Greek women, by contrast, was inside the oikos itself. Athenian women were expected serve as submissive daughters, wives, and mothers, and their social functions were defined in terms of those roles within the household.Footnote 14 Conversely, they were expected to avoid the masculine sphere of politics and warfare outside the home and were denied the rights of participation in government that were granted to male citizens.Footnote 15 Plato's contemporary Aristophanes captures this idea in his Lysistrata, where the title character describes her husband's response whenever she tries to discuss Athens’ military policies with him: “Right away he glares at me and tells me to get back to my loom … saying, ‘War will be the business of men’” (lines 519–20).Footnote 16 As this passage suggests, Greeks especially associated women with the skills of sewing and weaving, but Athenian women's domestic responsibilities extended significantly beyond that task as well. Simply put, they were charged with supervising the oikos and the people and possessions within it: bearing and raising children, taking care of the family, and watching over and managing the household's finances, food supplies, and other material assets. This function is often characterized as a form of watchful guardianship (phulattein) or safekeeping (sōzein). As Aristotle succinctly states, “The household functions of a man and of a woman are different: his business is to acquire (ktasthai) and hers is to watch over (phulattein)” (Pol. 1277b24–25). Likewise, Plato's Meno explains to Socrates:
A man's virtue consists in being able to engage in the affairs of the city and in doing so benefit his loved ones and harm his enemies. … If you want the virtue of a woman, it is not difficult to describe: she must manage the home well (tēn oikian eu oikein), safeguard (sōzousan) what is inside it, and be obedient to her husband. (Meno 71a)Footnote 17
In line with this socially assigned role, Athenian women were encouraged to have only those qualities deemed appropriate for daughters, wives, and mothers. The primary virtue of Greek femininity was sōphrosunē, which is often translated as “moderation” (as we will do in what follows), but which bore a complex range of interrelated meanings and could also encompass or be identified with traits like chastity, self-control, modesty, and a sense of shame, as well as quietness, discretion, and obedience to superiors.Footnote 18 Women were also supposed to have (and assumed innately to possess) emotional qualities that made them well-suited for motherhood and care of the family. They were expected to be soft-hearted, warm, gentle, affectionate, friendly, loving, nurturing, peaceful, cautious, and protective toward their children and other members of their household. In his Economics, for example, Xenophon's Ischomachus explains, “Knowing that he had made women's nature for, and imposed on her, the rearing of newborns, the god meted out to her a larger portion of affection (stergein) for them than to the man” (Economics 7.24).Footnote 19
The masculine/feminine dichotomy, then, corresponded to a number of other binaries in Greek culture, such as public/private, city/household, war/peace, courage/moderation, toughness/gentleness, enmity/friendship, and so on. These dichotomies, in turn, were closely connected in Greek literature with the psychological concept of thumos, the namesake for Plato's spirited part of the soul. Thumos was the most common psychological term in Homer (occurring over 700 times) and was used prolifically in poetry leading up to the fourth century. By contrast, Plato's contemporaries used the term relatively infrequently in colloquial speech, which meant that in his time it had something of an archaic or lyrical ring to it. This is significant because it means that in naming the middle part of the soul after thumos, Plato invokes the term's rich connotations in earlier literature. In particular, Plato's conception of the spirited part draws heavily on the epic and poetic tradition of using thumos to refer to the source, seat, or subject of emotions and other related psychic qualities. Therefore, in order to understand the kind of character Plato seeks in his guardian men and women—who are selected, educated, and socialized largely with the spirited part of their souls in mind—it is necessary to consider how thumos is related to conventional Greek ideas about masculinity and femininity.
Greek literature makes thumos responsible for emotions, virtues, and qualities that appear on both sides of the masculine/feminine binary. This point is correlated with the fact that thumos is often characterized in quasi-corporeal terms.Footnote 20 Most importantly for present purposes, thumos is often described using language related to the opposed physical qualities of hardness and softness. It can be hard, firm, compact, tight, and obdurate, or it can be soft, unstable, loose, flexible, and pliant, and this dichotomy corresponds with the gendered division of psychological qualities. A “hard” thumos is responsible for masculine-coded emotions and traits, and a “soft” thumos for feminine ones.Footnote 21 Social norms and moral expectations, therefore, required that men possess a spirit that is relatively harder and firmer, and women one that is softer and more yielding.
Consider a few representative examples relevant to our discussion. To begin with, in epic and poetic literature an unbending thumos is required for the manly resolve involved in vigorous martial exertion and the courageous pursuit of honor, fame, and glory. In such contexts thumos is often described approvingly using synonyms for “hard” or metaphorical language that likens it to a strong, solid metal. Determined soldiers, for example, can be described as having “iron-hearted (sidērophrōn) thumos burning with manly courage (andreia)” or a “stout” (alkimon) thumos. Footnote 22 By contrast, an unstable, supple, or liquescent spirit is associated with weakness and cowardice; the term “soft” (malakos) can mean both “cowardly” and “effeminate”; and “softness of spirit” (rhaithumia) can be used to characterize a contemptibly easygoing, feminine, or languid thumos. Indeed, any perceived excess of “soft” emotions in a man, including even a positive one like paternal love, is eligible for reproach in gendered terms:
And now, my son, give your hand to your father's touch, and fare well. Restraint forbids me from warmly embracing (aspazomai) you to excess. For it's an unwise man who shows the thumos of a woman. (Euripides, fr. 362.33–34)
While a man is expected to have some affection for his friends and loved ones, it is a sign of censurable femininity to feel or display such emotion with undue intensity.
Compare the terms in which women are criticized in Greek literature. On the one hand, they are not subject to the same kind of blame as men for cowardice or weakness, or for displaying emotions that express soft-heartedness or strong attachment to others, such as pity, grief, sorrow, longing, or love. Even where such things are admonished in women, they are attributed to the predictable flaws and excesses of their nature. Conversely, precisely because women are expected to be soft-hearted, loving, and affectionate, they are subject to criticism as women when they fail to show the appropriate warmth and tenderness to their family members. When Penelope, for example, is finally reunited with her husband Odysseus after 20 years, she is initially skeptical of his identity and aloof, for which she is scolded by their son Telemachus:
My mother—hardly a mother!—whose thumos is unbending (apēnea), why do you shrink away from my father and not sit by his side? … No other woman would harden (tetlēoti) her thumos as you do … but your heart (kradiē) is always harder (stereōterē) than stone (lithoio). (Homer, Odyssey 23.97–103).Footnote 23
By failing to welcome her husband with the spontaneous uxorial affection characteristic of a soft and womanly thumos, Penelope violates the norms of femininity: she is “hardly a mother” and acts as no other woman would on account of her hard, masculine spirit. Her emotional reconciliation with her husband takes place only after Odysseus proves his identity and Penelope's spirit is finally “softened”: her thumos is “persuaded” and her heart “melts” (23.205, 230).
Euripides’ Medea provides another illustration. Throughout the drama Medea's plot to kill her children out of revenge against her faithless husband Jason is attributed to her angry thumos and “savage” (agrion) nature (98). The Chorus argues that she would have to be “a stone or a piece of iron” to go through with her plan:
How will you summon up the boldness (thrasos) or the resolve in hand and heart (kardia) to dare (tolman) this dreadful deed? … When your children fall as suppliants at your feet, surely you will not drench your hands in their blood out of hard-hearted (tlēmon) thumos. (856–65)
When Jason finally discovers her heinous deed, he condemns her: “No Greek woman would have dared (etlē) to do this … You are a she-lion, not a woman, with a nature more savage (agrioteran) than Scylla the Tuscan monster!” (1323–43). Medea, then, is criticized on two interrelated grounds that are both attributed to her adamantine thumos. Not only does she fail to treat her children with appropriate motherly love and protection, but she also shares in masculine qualities like boldness, daring, savageness, and anger that are incompatible with the soft and gentle nature expected of women. Accordingly, the charges against her are framed in sharply gendered terms: she is no woman at all, but an unfeeling rock or a vicious beast.
In the early Greek tradition, then, masculine virtues and psychological qualities are associated with a “hard” thumos, and feminine ones with a “soft” one, and this dichotomy is closely connected with the different social expectations of men and women. In the next two sections, we discuss how Plato draws on and reworks these dichotomies for his own ethical and political purposes.
Plato's critique of vicious masculinity
In the Republic Plato's critical assessment of the traditional conception of masculinity is evident both in his characterization of contemporary Athenian society, as well as in Socrates’ positive account of the psychology, education, and lifestyle of the guardians of the Kallipolis. In both cases, moreover, Plato pays special attention to spirited psychology. As we will see, two connected points of concern emerge. First, psychological qualities that both Plato and the Greek literary tradition attribute to an overly tough and masculine thumos (like anger, envy, hostility, truculence, and hatred), as well as the behavior that follows from them (like fighting, rivalry, and revenge), are morally bad for individuals and politically ruinous for cities. And second, the popular morality that prevails in places like Athens inevitably promotes, and is intertwined with, an ideal of virility that fosters precisely such hyper-masculine traits and behavior among its citizens.
Thumos makes it first appearance in the dialogue in book 2. After determining that the city will need a dedicated class of warriors, Socrates and Glaucon consider the kind of natural character that makes people fit for such a role. According to the tripartite theory Socrates formally introduces later in book 4, spirit corresponds to the city's warrior class in the dialogue's city-soul analogy (while reason and appetite correspond to its philosopher-rulers and productive class, respectively), and the character of the warriors and rulers themselves, it turns out, is defined largely by their spirited psychology. Socrates first explores this idea by likening good guardians to good guard dogs, because both must be “courageous” and capable of “fighting well.”Footnote 24 He asks, “And will a horse, a dog, or any other animal be courageous if it isn't spirited (thumoeidēs)? Or haven't you noticed just how invincible and unbeatable spirit (thumos) is, so that its presence makes the whole soul fearless and unconquerable?” Here Socrates initially identifies a familiar positive use for manly courage and qualities associated with it. For the purposes of waging war and protecting the city against its enemies, soldiers must have a firm and savage thumos that makes them pugnacious, competitive, and resilient. However, Socrates immediately points out the dangers inherent in those same masculine traits. Spirited aggression, while useful against outsiders (allotrioi), is a destructive force within the city itself. A tough and masculine thumos is conducive to anger, rivalry, fighting, and violence, yet those very behaviors are inappropriate among citizens and incompatible with civic unity and stability. If their warriors apply the same hard-hearted asperity toward one another that they do toward enemies, Socrates worries, “they won't have to wait around for others to destroy the city, but will do it themselves first” (375b–c).
This worry is subsequently reflected in his account of early education. Having determined that the ideal nature of the guardians must not be characterized by an overly savage or “masculine” thumos, Socrates now warns about the kind of nurture that can produce the same undue aggressiveness. On the one hand, Socrates insists that physical training or gymnastics is an important component of early education because it stimulates and exercises the spirited part and thereby makes a person tough and courageous. However, excessive or single-minded devotion to gymnastics is ethically harmful. It “overtightens” thumos, so that it becomes “hard” and “harsh” and the person becomes “savage” and “more courageous” (andreioteros)—literally, manlier—than they should be. As a result they “no longer make any use of persuasion, but bull their way through every situation by force and savagery like a wild animal” (410e–11e). This criticism calls to mind the ruthless spirit of Achilles after he deserts his fellow soldiers in indignation at having his “prize” Briseis taken away from him by Agamemnon. Although his beleaguered friends beg for his return, they are unable to “persuade the thumos in his breast” (Il. 9.587), and Ajax complains that Achilles’ thumos is “proud,” “unbending,” and intent on “savageness” (agrion), and he has no regard for the friendship of his own comrades (Il. 9.628–42). Similarly, just as Achilles is impervious to the pleas of his friends and hence incapable of reconciling with them on account of his calcified spirit, Plato's Socrates warns that overhardening thumos through physical and martial training produces individuals who are emotionally unfit to cooperate with one another and participate in peaceful human relationships and communities. Later Socrates surveys additional moral flaws that he attributes to an excessively competitive and aggressive spirited part: unchecked love of honor (philotimia) and love of victory (philonikia) give rise to violence, irrational anger, and the socially poisonous emotion of envy (phthonos), while stubbornness and irritability are correlated with a “swollen” and “tense” thumos (586c–d, 590a–b).Footnote 25
Socrates’ proposals for the guardians’ upbringing and the culture of the Kallipolis more generally are also designed to discourage masculine-coded spirited qualities and actions that Plato considers morally pernicious. Of special note, Socrates purges traditional poetry of content that promotes enmity, hostility, and strife among citizens. Consider two outstanding examples. First, Socrates explains, “If we want the guardians of our city to think that it's shameful to be easily provoked into hating one another, then we mustn't allow any stories about gods warring, fighting, or plotting against one another.” This includes tales of “battles” among the gods, as well as any stories of the immortals “hating their families and friends” (378b–d). Second, Plato is especially eager to condemn the Homeric depiction of Achilles, who is the paragon of both manly courage and implacable spirited rage for the Greeks. Socrates refuses to accept poetry that portrays Achilles’ brutality and arrogance toward gods and humans, including his disrespectful words to Apollo, his attempt to “fight” the river god Scamander, his gory massacre of 12 Trojan youths as a sacrifice for his fallen friend Patroclus, or his vengeful defilement of Hector's corpse, which he ruthlessly drags around behind his chariot for days (389e–91c).Footnote 26 Conflict, fighting, hatred, gratuitous acts of violence and revenge—these are all masculine-coded behaviors that emanate from an unyielding thumos, and Plato insists upon expelling them from the Kallipolis as vicious types of manliness that threaten political harmony and the virtue of its citizens.Footnote 27
The potential for spirited aggression to have destructive moral and political effects also features prominently in Plato's critical analysis of Athenian culture. As we have seen, contemporary norms required that men compete effectively in the public realm to obtain resources for their private households. For Plato, however, this ideal reflects and reinforces a value system that is toxic for individuals and cities alike. The prioritization of personal gain pits citizens against one another as competitors for limited goods, thereby promoting “manly” spirited rivalry and contention that undermine justice and civic unity. Plato's assessment becomes evident early in the dialogue through the joint speeches of Glaucon and Adeimantus. In book 2 the brothers present an extended case for Thrasymachus’ earlier claim that “justice is the advantage of the stronger.” According to their account, the unjust life is in itself happier than the just life, and everyone knows that, but people pretend to believe otherwise in order to enjoy a reputation for justice and avoid the usual penalties of injustice. Glaucon explains:
People honor justice not as good but because they are too weak to do injustice with impunity. Someone who has the power to do this, however, and is truly a man (aletheiōs andra) wouldn't make an agreement with anyone not to do injustice in order not to suffer it. … The reason for this is the desire to get more than others (pleonexia), which is what everyone's nature naturally pursues as good, though they are forced by law into the perversion of treating equality with honor. (359a–c)
For Greeks, “getting more” or pleonexia refers to the greedy and limitless pursuit of more than one's fair share of wealth, property, power, and other worldly resources at the expense of one's enemies and rivals. According to Glaucon, this desire for “more” is the deepest and most natural human motivation, which is why it is by nature just and right to take whatever one can get away with taking. Pleonexia is thus inherently opposed to human laws and “conventional” justice, which demand fairness and equality and set artificial limits on how much people can acquire and by what means they can acquire it.
The crucial feature of Glaucon's account for present purposes is that he identifies the ability to get away with injustice with masculine virtue. A “real man” is someone with the “power” to acquire resources unlawfully through deception, persuasive speech, or the use of violent force. Such men rely on their “manly courage” and “strength” (361b), while those who are unable or unwilling to commit injustice are either “weak” or “foolish” (361d). Adeimantus corroborates his brother's point, concluding, “No one is just willingly. Through unmanliness (anandria) or old age or some other weakness, people do indeed cast blame on injustice. But it's obvious that they do so only because they lack the power to do injustice” (366c–d). Their message is clear and emphatic: successful injustice in the service of pleonexia is a sign of manly strength, courage, power, and intelligence, while the inability or unwillingness to violate the law for material gain is a sign of unmanly weakness, cowardice, impotence, or irrationality.
The significance of this point is amplified by the dialectical function of the brothers’ speeches, which present the account of human nature, justice, and happiness to which the rest of the Republic constitutes a response. In other words, the Greek conception of masculinity is inextricably connected in Plato's mind with the worldview he seeks to combat in the dialogue. Here it is useful to pause to consider the social and political climate of Plato's age. He grew up during the height of Athenian imperialism and the decades-long Peloponnesian War that devastated his city's population and brought its empire to an end. During that time Athens was filled with competing factions that brought perpetual unrest and led to multiple bloody civil wars. Rivalries and private ambitions among political leaders had destabilizing effects on the city, and the use of political power, lawsuits, and public retaliation against one's perceived enemies within the city was ubiquitous.Footnote 28 The Republic is, among other things, Plato's attempt to diagnose, and offer an alternative to, those volatile political realities. What the speeches of Glaucon and Adeimantus show, therefore, is that Plato took pleonexia and the acquisitive ideal of manliness to be interconnected components of the prevailing ethical orientation that serves as the dialogue's foil.Footnote 29 Athenian popular morality produces a conception of “true men” that encourages them to pursue and seize whatever resources it is in their power to acquire—even when doing so conflicts with justice or the public good.Footnote 30 Outside of the Republic, we find corroboration of this assessment in Plato's portrayal of the character Callicles in the Gorgias. Callicles argues that “strong” and “powerful” men are naturally entitled to “get more” than others, and that it is right for them to use their “manly courage” and resourcefulness to do so. Indeed, he claims, it would be “shameful” for them to exercise “moderation” or restraint of their appetites and pleasures, qualities that most people praise only because of their own “weakness” and feminine “softness” (malakia). Callicles chides Socrates, moreover, for his undue devotion to philosophy, which makes a man “unmanly” (anandros) by interfering with his participation in civic life and making him powerless to protect himself, his family, and his property in civil disputes (483a–86a, 491a–92c). Importantly, moreover, despite Callicles’ own clear sense of superiority to the masses, Socrates describes him as echoing the popular views of the Athenian demos. In Plato's mind, a position like Callicles’ or Thrasymachus’ follows naturally from the values that most people hold and live by (whether they admit that they do or not).Footnote 31
Pleonexia, according to this picture, is inextricably bound up with a prevailing conception of manliness that validates and encourages internecine expressions of thumos for the sake of private pleasures and advantages for the individual and their household. Passages throughout the Republic confirm this idea,Footnote 32 but two further examples from Socrates’ account of degenerate types of cities and individuals in book 8 stand out. The first is his description of the process by which a virtuous man's son, one who shares his father's good nature, is corrupted in a badly governed city like Athens so that he becomes an honor-loving “timocrat” ruled by the spirited part of his soul. The father himself “avoids honors, ruling offices, lawsuits, and all such meddling in other people's affairs” and “is even willing to get less (ellatousthai) than others.” However, Socrates explains:
[His son] listens to his mother complaining that her husband isn't one of the rulers and that she gets less (ellatoumenēs) than other women as a result. Then she sees that he's not very concerned about money and that he doesn't fight back (machomenon) when he's insulted, whether in private or in public in the courts, but tolerates everything of that sort in a soft-spirited (rhaithumōs) way. … Angered by all this, she tells her son that his father is unmanly (anandros) and too yielding (aneimenos). … And the household servants of men like that … say similar things to the son in private. When they see the father failing to prosecute someone who owes him money or has done him injustice in some other way, they urge the son to take revenge (timōrēsetai) on all such people when he grows up and to be more of a man (anēr mallon) than his father. The boy hears and sees the same kind of things when he goes out: those in the city who do their own work are called fools and considered nobodies, while those who meddle in other people's affairs are honored and praised. (549c–50a)
Once again Socrates characterizes prevailing ideals of manliness in terms of participation in the culture of competitive pleonexia for the sake of the oikos. Among the members of his household and his peers, the father's willingness to “get less” and “do his own work” is considered (just as in Callicles’ account) a failure of virile obligation, and he is contrasted with real “men” who successfully “meddle in others’ affairs” by taking part in agonistic public life.Footnote 33 Importantly, his abhorrently flexible and “yielding” behavior is attributed to an unduly feminine or “soft thumos.” Other language Plato uses here is also telling. The term “get less” or ellatousthai is the Greek contrary of “getting more” or pleonexia, and “doing one's own work” and “meddling in others’ affairs” are exactly the phrases with which Socrates has earlier defined justice and injustice, respectively, in response to Glaucon and Adeimantus’ challenge (433a–b, 443c–44a). Plato is signaling, therefore, that the life popular opinion deems feminine and soft-spirited in a society like Athens is in fact indicative of virtue, while the so-called manly life of agonistic public engagement exemplifies exactly the kind of “meddling” behavior that Plato identifies with political injustice. This passage, then, reinforces that, for Plato, traditional norms of masculinity are at the heart of a value system that undermines justice at the personal and political levels. The public sphere in which the young man is encouraged to participate is characterized by mutual insult, fighting, duplicity, injustice, and revenge among citizens, and the effect of social pressure from his family and friends is that he chooses a life of spirited ambition rather than the quiet, just life of his father. The culture of manliness corrupts the young person's soul and fills the city itself with conflict in the name of private gain for the oikos.
The second passage is from Socrates’ description of how the son of a self-controlled oligarchic man becomes a “democratic” youth who values the freedom to pursue pleasure and satisfy his appetites above all. One of the pivotal factors in his development is the influence of associates and arguments that denigrate self-control, shame, orderliness, and moderation, which they call “unmanly cowardice” (anandria) or “slavishness,” while praising self-indulgence, violence, lawlessness, and shamelessness, which they give names like “freedom” and “manly courage” (andreia) (560c–e). This rhetoric parallels Callicles’ defense of pleonexia in characterizing traditionally positive qualities as feminine-coded vice, and traditional vices as laudable virility. It also echoes Thucydides’ account of Greek political culture during the Peloponnesian War and the civil conflicts associated with it:
The words applied to actions had to change their usual meanings. Reckless audacity came to be thought of as comradely courage (andreia), while far-sighted hesitation became well-disguised cowardice (deilia); moderation (to sophron) was a front for unmanliness (to anandron); and … wild aggression was a mark of manhood (anēr). (3.82.3–4)
Similarly, in the public speeches and debates that Thucydides records throughout the text, then Athenians (whom he describes as motivated by “private profit and private ambition,” 2.65.7) pride themselves on their manly courage and often characterize acts of imperial aggression as expressions of admirable qualities like daring, power, and spirited zeal (prothumia).Footnote 34 Conversely, speakers who advise policies of peace and caution are always in danger of being charged with womanly passivity or cowardice by their critics.Footnote 35 Socrates’ remarks on the democratic youth confirms that Plato shares Thucydides’ general evaluation of late fifth-century Greek politics. Significantly, the perverse value system that corrupts the democratic young man also features in the downfall of the constitution he resembles. Democracy is ruined by its own “insatiable appetite for freedom,” which breeds lawlessness, lack of shame, contempt for obedience, and angry indignation in response to self-control. This discussion, therefore, provides additional evidence that Plato took the acquisitive ideal of masculinity to be an essential, and politically toxic, feature of democratic and Athenian culture.
Plato's dual concerns (a) that competitive and aggressive expressions of thumos easily become ethically and politically toxic, and (b) that Athenian pleonectic culture promotes precisely such spirited competition and aggression among citizens, converge in his positive lifestyle proposals for the guardian class. Socrates’ social and economic policies for the guardians are explicitly designed to prevent the kind of spirited aggression toward one another that characterizes the culture of “manly” acquisitiveness. The key element of Socrates’ proposals is his elimination of the private oikos, and with it men's social function of acquiring private resources and prestige for it. The guardians will not be allowed to possess their own households, nor any of the private property, food, and money that it encompasses and contains. Otherwise, Socrates explains, they will become “hostile masters” of the other citizens instead of their guardians and “allies”: “They'll spend their whole lives hating and being hated, plotting and being plotted against, more afraid of internal than of external enemies, and they'll hasten both themselves and the whole city to almost immediate ruin” (417a–b). Later Socrates extends this policy even to private families. None of the guardians is to have their own private wives (or husbands) or children.Footnote 36 If different people each had their own separate sense of what is privately theirs, it would “tear the city apart,” as “one person would drag into his own house whatever he could take away from the others, and another would drag things into a different house to a different wife and children” (464c–d). By contrast, because almost nothing will be private among the guardians, lawsuits and mutual accusations of injustice will virtually disappear among them, and “they'll avoid all the conflict that arises between people because of the possession of money, children, and families” (464d–e). Socrates concedes, however, that at least one thing will necessarily continue to belong to each individual—their own physical bodies—and the unavoidability of even that small element of privacy among them will mean that there is still some potential for minor personal insults or injuries. However, they will be encouraged to defend themselves against slander or assault and thereby to discharge any feelings of aggression that might develop before they become politically disruptive: “If someone who became angry (thumoito) vented their angry spirit (thumos) in this way, it would be less likely to lead him into more serious disputes” (465a).
The logic of these passages makes it clear that eliminating the private oikos is designed to occlude a range of emotions and behavior associated with spirited aggression and masculinity: hatred, rivalry, and public competition for private goods. Socrates’ point about venting thumos in rare trifling cases involving the body is the exception that proves the rule: it shows that the kind of aggression he wants to forestall in general is precisely the sort he had in mind when he first introduced the concept of spirit in book 2. A hard and tough thumos is conducive to the “manliness” that makes people and animals fight, and that is precisely why it is inappropriate among citizens. Perhaps more shockingly for his Greek audience, Plato even discourages violent confrontation with other cities: war is not a priority for the warriors, but a last resort. The disciplined citizens of the Kallipolis will have no need or desire to instigate wars for the sake of the material resources and power that other cities fight for (422c–23b), and even when it becomes necessary to defend itself against other cities, the guardians are to conduct themselves “moderately” and treat fellow Greeks “gently,” like natural friends temporarily gone astray, rather than as enemies (469b–71b). The most striking social, economic, and foreign policy proposals of the Republic, therefore, are largely conceived as a way of divesting the city of vicious expressions of traditional masculinity and the culture of pleonexia it supports. The guardians of the Kallipolis by design have little or no opportunity, whether at home or abroad, to participate in the agonistic rivalries and aggression that emanate from a hard-hearted thumos and typify men's behavior in places like Athens.
Plato's promotion of virtuous femininity
Plato complements his critique of vicious masculinity by promoting virtuous forms of femininity that he considers morally and politically valuable. Because an overly rigid thumos makes people violent brutes and sows hostility among citizens, Socrates insists that manly virtues, qualities, and behavior must be combined with and tempered by feminine-coded ones rooted in a “soft-hearted” thumos.Footnote 37 Once again, this begins with Socrates’ account of the psychology and education of the guardians. In the first place, the aggressive aspect of the guardians’ natural temperament must be balanced with inborn gentleness. Socrates returns to his canine analogy to explain. Dogs by nature distinguish between what is “familiar” (oikeion) to them and what is “alien” (allotrion), and although a good guard dog is hostile toward strangers, it is also instinctively gentle and friendly to those it recognizes. “When a dog sees someone it doesn't know,” he notes, “it becomes aggressive before anything bad happens to it. But when it knows someone, it warmly welcomes him, even if it has never received anything good from him” (375e–76b). It is precisely the combination of natural aggression to outsiders and gentleness to insiders that makes it a good watchdog. Likewise, effective guardians of the Kallipolis must be born with a nature that makes them not only aggressive toward the city's enemies, but also gentle and kind toward friends and fellow citizens. The language Socrates uses in his analogy is especially significant. His favorite general term for denoting the “familiar” group to which dogs and guardians show friendly warmth, oikeion, literally means “belonging to the household.” To treat someone oikeiōs—“like a family member” or “with affection”—is to treat them in a feminine way. For example, when Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, leader of a women's coup in Athens, attempts to instill peace by reconciling the city with its rival Sparta, she identifies women's gentle warmth as an irenic virtue, commanding her compatriots, “Don't handle them with a rough and tough hand, in the brutish manner our husbands used to treat us, but as women ought to, the way one would a family member: affectionately (oikeiōs)” (1116–18). Likewise, the term for “warmly welcomes” (or “warmly embraces”), aspazesthai, is the same one used in the passage from Euripides cited earlier to describe behavior that it would be censurable for a man to express toward his son because it reveals “the thumos of a woman.” In other words, the natural feelings of warmth, affection, care, and tenderness that Socrates demands of the guardians express precisely the sort of gentleness and protective love that a woman is expected to show toward the members of her oikos. The guardians of the Kallipolis must be distinguished not only by their exceptional (masculine-coded) pugnacity, but also by their exceptional (feminine-coded) capacity for cherishing others.
Socrates’ program of early education reflects the same goal. Gymnastic education that hardens or tightens thumos and makes people courageous warriors must be balanced with musical education that softens or relaxes it, thereby promoting a more “feminine,” tender, and “yielding” spirit.Footnote 38 Although Socrates warns that excessive music makes spirit too soft and leads to cowardice (just as excessive gymnastics makes it too hard and leads to barbarity), he is clear that certain forms of softness are ethically valuable and imperative. To begin with, he explains that when someone is exposed to music, “right away whatever spirit (thumos) he has is softened, just as iron is tempered, and from being hard and useless, it is made useful” (410d–11e). Here the idea is that education requires malleability. An adamantine spirit makes a person impervious to the influence of others and thus incapable of moral improvement. A soft thumos, by contrast, can be shaped by parents, peers, and educators like a ductile metal, and the person's emotional disposition thereby fashioned in ways that are conducive to virtue.
Moreover, the particular qualities and habits that Socrates’ musical program aims to mold in citizens prominently include several that require a soft, relaxed, or yielding thumos. Of special note, music cultivates the virtue of moderation, which Socrates identifies as the necessary counterpoise to manly courage. Notably, when the Laws endorses a similar balance of “courageous” and “moderate” forms of education, it explicitly identifies the former as “masculine” (arrenōpos) and the latter as “feminine” (thēlugenēs) (802e). In the Republic moderation is correlated with “gentleness” and “orderliness” (410d–e), and it is on display whenever human beings interact “peacefully” or “non-violently,” or when they “yield” to one another as a result of their flexibility and openness to persuasion and teaching (399b–c). Furthermore, Socrates’ musical program is designed to promote three feminine-coded traits associated with moderation. First, his educational policies stress, arguably more than any other single emotion, the cultivation of a sense of shame. The young guardians must be habituated to experience spontaneous feelings of contempt toward disgraceful conduct and people, as well as respectful regard for the opinion of their peers and superiors, with the result that they would be ashamed to engage in morally vicious behavior themselves and hence will act with appropriate discretion and restraint.Footnote 39 Second, the young guardians and warriors must also practice quiet obedience to the city's rulers. Stories of silent submission to authority will be used to encourage them to accept their subordinate socio-political position and to defer to the superior judgment of their leaders (389d–90a). And third, contrary to the pleonectic ideal that valorizes the ruthless pursuit of one's desires, the guardians of the Kallipolis must be taught to exercise self-control and mastery over appetites for pleasure and money (390a–e). Socrates takes special note that this should include a form of chastity. They must restrain their erotic desires, never allowing lust to overcome them, and two of the most common venues for sexual gratification among Athenian men are forbidden or substantially regulated: courtesans are not permitted (404d), and pederastic relationships must be limited to the forms of physical intimacy a father would show his own son (403a–c).Footnote 40 Education of the guardians, therefore, emphasizes the inculcation of several traits that are considered defining virtues of Greek womanhood.Footnote 41 Shame, obedience, and control of appetites, moreover, are all psychological qualities and behavior that have roots in the spirited part of the soul on Plato's theory.Footnote 42
Music also aims to nurture the guardians’ inborn spirited gentleness by promoting peace, friendship, filial respect, familial love, and mutual care among them. Early education must inspire them to “honor the gods and their parents and not take their friendship with one another lightly” (386a), and its success is measured largely by the intensity of the guardians’ friendship and “care” (kēdos) for the polis and one another (412c–d).Footnote 43 The crowning proposal of Socrates’ program is the “noble lie,” which teaches that everyone in the city is born autochthonously from the earth, and that the local land itself is therefore their “mother” and all citizens “brothers” to one another (414d–15e). The social arrangements of the city, meanwhile, are designed to reinforce this myth. The corollary of Socrates’ abolition of private households and families is his proposal that the guardians all live, dwell, and dine together, and that “wives and children” be “shared” or “common” among all (416d–17a, 457c–d). Through various clandestine measures, the guardians will not know the identities of their biological offspring, but will instead consider all young people of certain ages their sons and daughters, and their children in turn will consider all relevant adults their parents. The same will be true of other familial relationships. Because biological consanguinity will be kept secret, all members of the guardians class will consider one another to be siblings, grandparents, grandchildren, and so on, depending on their relative ages (459d–61e). By contrast to other cities in which people think of some of their fellow citizens and rulers as “outsiders” (allotrioi) to their private circles and homes, every guardian will consider all others to be family or “household members” (oikeioi) (463b–c).Footnote 44 As a result, they will not only “mouth the names of family” but also “do all the things that go along with the names”: caring for one another, acting with a sense of shame, being obedient to parents and elders, protecting their young and watching over their education, and sharing one another's “pleasures and pains” or joys and sorrows (424c–d, 463c–64b, 465a–b). In other words, once again, the social arrangements of the city are designed to exploit, instill, and intensify emotions and habits that are strongly associated with women and their role of exercising protective love and care over the household and their oikeioi.
All of this is underscored by some terminological considerations. As we saw earlier, Greek authors in Plato's time regularly use specific, almost quasi-technical language to distinguish between men's and women's roles with respect to the household. The masculine function of gaining resources for the oikos is described as “acquiring,” ktasthai (or in the popular mind, “getting more,” pleonektein), and the feminine work of caring for and protecting family members and resources within the home is standardly characterized using two key terms: phulattein, which means “to guard” or “watch over,” and sōzein, which means to “preserve,” “keep safe,” or “safeguard.” Significantly, Plato selects exactly these terms to designate the guardian class and its defining virtues and activities. Most obviously, phulattein is the very word Plato uses to name the guardians: they are called phulakes, and their job is to phulattein. In addition, Socrates identifies the masculine virtue of courage itself as a form of sōzein. More specifically, it is the psychological “preservation”—or what we might think of as a kind of resilient “retention”—of correct belief or knowledge. At the civic level, the warrior class is uniquely responsible for the virtue of andreia, which Socrates defines as the “safeguarding of the belief that has been instilled by the law through education,” and “not abandoning it because of pains, pleasures, desires, or fears” (429a–d). Likewise, at the individual level, the virtue of courage is identified with the psychic function of thumos in the tripartite soul. The person is courageous “when the spirited part safeguards, through pleasures and pains, the declarations of reason about what is to be feared and what is not” (442b–c). In other words, individuals share in courage when thumos keeps their lawful and rational beliefs “safe and sound,” so to speak, by protecting them against the influence of their vicious appetites, which threaten to make people change their minds about moral matters and consequently act badly. On this view, courage as feminine sōzein turns out to bear conspicuous family resemblance to the virtue of moderation understood as self-control. And indeed, Socrates even illustrates his conception of courage by likening it to the process of dyeing wool. Just as an effective dye ensures that colors stay fast against soaps and cleansers, courage ensures that virtuous judgments remain intact in a person's soul and are acted on even when exposed to the “detergents” of irrational impulse (429d–30b).Footnote 45 Socrates, then, not only defines andreia—manliness itself—using a common term for the domestic activity of “safeguarding,” but even invokes a textile metaphor that calls to mind the feminine-coded tasks of producing and laundering clothing.Footnote 46
Conclusion: Plato's views in context
According to a long history of interpretation, Plato's treatment of women in the Republic operates on two relatively straightforward principles: eradicate femininity from the city as much as possible and make guardian women more like men. From a psychological perspective, moreover, debate about his position has been shaped by emphasis on the dichotomy of erōs/logos or appetite/reason. We have shown that these approaches are incomplete and sometimes misleading, however, for several reasons. First of all, focusing exclusively on the appetitive and rational aspects of human nature omits the spirited part of the soul, which plays a central role in Plato's treatment of guardian psychology and the gender norms implicated in popular ethics and politics. Secondly, Plato does not want to get rid of all conventionally feminine traits, but only a subset of them that he considers vices. Indeed, Plato actually places positive ethical value on many qualities associated with femininity and a tender thumos—like moderation, shame, and deep affection for one's oikeioi—and he is eager to instill those qualities in guardian men as well as women. Third, while Plato does want to discourage certain traits associated with femininity that he considers vicious, he is no less keen to eliminate masculine qualities and pursuits that he attributes to a savage thumos and finds morally and politically toxic. In fact, he is even more insistent on combatting vicious ideals of manliness because he takes them to be salient and defining features of the pleonectic worldview he challenges in the Republic. Finally, at the same time that Plato includes women in traditionally masculine spheres, activities, and virtues, he is also reworking what those spheres and activities are and what it means to have those virtues in the first place. The life of a warrior is no longer defined by the slaying of enemies on the battlefield, but first and foremost by loving watchfulness over one's fellow citizens.Footnote 47 The virtue of courage or “manliness,” likewise, no longer requires the ruthless pursuit of resources and honor in war or politics, but rather the safeguarding of lawful belief out of obedience to rulers and reason. A “tough” thumos, likewise, is no longer used primarily for fighting off external enemies, but rather for combatting the internal enemy of irrational desire in order to achieve something very much like the feminine virtue of moderation or self-control. The nature of the traditionally masculine activity of political participation itself, meanwhile, is fundamentally altered as the city is transformed into a public oikos: the work of both women and men guardians alike is ultimately to be done, in an important sense, within the household. In short, relative to his contemporary norms, Plato does not merely seek to masculinize women in the Kallipolis, but also to feminize men. Or, more accurately, he challenges traditional Greek conceptions of masculine and feminine and their associated domains and blurs the boundaries between them by instilling an androgynous psychology and way of life in the guardians that he thinks is conducive to human virtue.
None of this, it should be emphasized, entails that Plato is any sort of unqualified feminist, proto-feminist, or opponent of sexism and inequality. Although our arguments show that some prominent lines of criticism oversimplify Plato's position, important issues remain that caution against characterizing him as a champion of women or nascent feminist ideals. In the first place, we concur with the majority of scholars that it would be anachronistic and misleading to apply the term “feminist” itself to Plato. As many commentators have pointed out, Plato's revolutionary proposals are not motivated by any concern for women's rights (he has no interest in or concept of “rights” for anyone), nor does he place any positive value on things like liberation, freedom of choice, or bodily autonomy in any meaningful modern sense.Footnote 48 On the contrary, Plato is concerned only with creating “just” cities that allow exceptional individuals, men and women alike, to achieve their full potential for human virtue and wisdom,Footnote 49 and his conception of justice is compatible with, or rather requires, significant deception of citizens and limitations on their personal freedoms.Footnote 50 The phrase “exceptional individuals” is also crucial. Plato's Kallipolis is a rigorously socially stratified society, and his reformist ideas for women apply, at least explicitly, only to the guardian class of warriors and rulers.Footnote 51 As Julia Annas puts it, “The ideal state might contain many discontented potters’ wives wanting to be potters” (Annas Reference Annas1976, 315).Footnote 52 Indeed, although there are hints in the Republic that Plato believes women in the producer class should be able to work as craftspeople according to their talents and desires,Footnote 53 it is certainly not his priority to insist upon that. Plato is nobody's egalitarian, and his concern is primarily for the elite. Finally, feminist scholars have criticized Plato on several counts that simply fall outside the scope of this paper to address and are not necessarily affected by our arguments.Footnote 54 Our own considered view, then, is that Plato holds women and femininity (as Greeks understood it) in higher esteem—and is much more critical of men and masculinity—than most of his contemporaries and peers,Footnote 55 and in ways that scholars have generally underappreciated, but that is certainly compatible with the presence of sexism and ideas fundamentally at odds with feminist principles in his work.Footnote 56 Nothing we have said, in other words, settles the question of how to assess Plato's views of women. It only shows that for those interested in doing the assessing, there is more to take into account than has ordinarily been considered.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to audiences at the Wayne State University Plato Workshop and the University of Victoria and to two anonymous referees for their very helpful feedback.
Kirsty Ironside is a PhD candidate at Wayne State University. She is interested in feminist history of philosophy, and her dissertation focuses on the intersections between ancient Greek views on women's biology and epistemology on the one hand and modern feminist perspectives on issues like pornography and epistemic injustice on the other.
Josh Wilburn is a Professor at Wayne State University. His background is in ancient Greek theories of psychology and emotion, and he is the author of The political soul: Plato on Thumos, spirited motivation, and the city. His current research focuses on early Greek views of gender and ethnography, as well as the history of race and racism more broadly.
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