Interview: Dr. Arlene Saxonhouse on Women in Plato's Republic | The New Thinkery Ep. 55

Welcome back to the new Thinkery, I'm David Barren with me as always says Greg McBrayer. How are you Greg? I'm doing great. I'm doing great.

I'm doing great. I'm doing great. So that's nice that you you gussied up for our guests. It was only appropriate.

Yeah. So how many inches was your beard at full strength? They took about six inches off. I think you took six inches off.

Yeah, I think so. Under estimate. It was like 15 inches. I was.

Was this at your wife's? No, no, she really wanted me to keep it. I doubt that correct. No, I'm serious.

You liked it. That's good. That's good. And Alex how are you?

Doing well. There's no difference between you and a woman right now, as far as I can tell, you can call here and something like that. I messed up a year ago, but you got it. You visiting family in Greenwich?

Yeah, yeah, back in Connecticut, relaxing. My wife is swimming by the pool with a beer, sending me beer selfies. And meanwhile, I am having, you know, intellectual intoxication with our wonderful guest tonight. Yeah, and so who is our guest?

Professor Arlene Saxon, how's teaching at the University of Michigan? I think David, you're gonna jump into a bio here. Yeah, I'll jump into it. She's the Caroline Robbins, collegiate professor emerita of political science and women's studies and a former chair of the Department of Political Science over at the University of Michigan.

She's published widely in the areas of classical and early political thought and women in the history of political thought. She's received fellowships from the National Downton for the Humanities, was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award at the University of Michigan in 98, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. That's been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. All institutions that will have nothing to do with us, so we're very grateful that Professor Saxon how's this joint?

She continues to do research on gender in the political thought of Plato Aristotle and the ancient playwrights. Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Saxon. Happy to be here. Thank you for asking me.

Of course, of course. And today we're gonna discuss with Professor Saxon, books five and eight of the Republic. And as our guide will be two articles, Arlene wrote one in the American Political Science Review called, Democracy, Equality on A Day, A Radical View from book, A Day of Political and the Other is called The Philosopher and the Female in the Political Thought of Plato, Polish and Political Theory. So yeah.

Well, years for that Greg, Greg, the year. Sure. Yeah, the book age article was from 1998 and the philosopher and female in Plato was 1976. Thank you.

I'm gonna go. I think you're here wonderfully. I noticed that there was in the earlier article there were suggestions pushing forward to the one from 20 years later. And then likewise in the one 20 years later, there was a really nice connection.

So they pair well despite it. I can imagine agreeing with anything I've said or thought in 20 years. Mostly because they're always bad, but it was remarkable. Early before we get into the sort of the media of the show today, I was wondering, we usually have guests talk a little bit about their own intellectual biography, where they studied with whom they studied, who are some of their major intellectual influences.

What was your first taste of philosophy or the classics, anything you wanna share with us on that front? Yeah, most people assume I went to the University of Chicago. I didn't. I was an undergraduate Oberlin and I had wanted to be an art history major, but in order to be an art history major, you had to do the studio art and I couldn't draw.

And so I decided to do something else. And I ended up designing to major in classics and in part just because it was an interesting, I mean, the literature attracted me. And then when I was ready to go to graduate school, my husband was a graduate student at Yale. And so I needed to get into, go to Yale, but I didn't get into the classics department at Yale.

And I was told the reason for that was that I needed to work more on my languages. So I spent a year working on my languages and while I was doing that, I'm planning on going on in classics. And while I was doing that, I took a course with Martin Kendrick, who was a student of Leo Strauss's and actually translated the first edition, in the first edition of Strauss's on tourney. His translation is the translation that appears in that, his translation of, I was in a fund as a one that appears in that edition.

And again, I guess another side note is, my husband was an undergraduate at Yale also. And he took, he was in a class, Alan Bloom was teaching at the, at Yale for a year. And he and my husband didn't not get along at all. And so it was, the suggestion was made that I, when I had to write a paper for my classics courses, that I read the essays on the scientific study of politics.

And I have to say that the essay by Strauss on Aristotle and that just blew me away. It just was kind of a fascinating way of, of thinking about politics and the difference. The Apple and Apple. Right, that's the law, right?

I mean, with the infamous thing that they fit a law room. Yeah, yeah. They don't know their fiddling, so they can be excused. Fiddling, right.

And so anyway, I realized I was probably interested in political theory in some fashion. And so I took this course with Martin Kendrick and, you know, it was a political, the history of political thought. And he assigned two books that had a major impact on me. And one was Jacob Klein's commentary on Plato's Mino and Collinwood's autobiography.

And those basically changed the whole way. I thought about reading the classical texts. And so I kind of thought about changing my field. I went to Kendrick and said, in which I do with my life, he looked a little bit shocked when I said that.

And he decided to apply to the political science department in the state of the class department. And that was the beginning. So a little bit. Collinwood just really, is that Collinwood autobiography worth reading still?

Or is it just? Yeah, I mean, the impact it had on me was that the, there's a wonderful passage in it that I actually quote in my book on myth makers. And that is where he walks by the Elbyr Memorial in London and is always struck by how ugly it is. And then he says to himself, yes, but when they built it and when it was built, they thought it was beautiful.

So I'm imposing, I mean, this kind of gets into what was really important about it. I'm imposing my views on this, you know, artifact. And I need to stand back and try and ask the questions or view it from the perspective of the person who built it. And that to me was an invocation to try and ask the questions, not that I had, but the questions of the texts were, were leading me to, or that was motivating the authors of the text.

So that's why I thought, you know, what must be impacted it had on me. I'm tempted to ask what happened between your husband and Ellen Bloom, but I'll just assume it had something to do with Mick Jagger, right? No doubt. I think it's different personalities.

I'm a positive reflection on your husband. Right. Yeah. Right.

Maybe we can have Alex. No, I had one question. Yeah, please go on. Maybe this better saved for the end.

I was interested in me right now what's in Vogue are a lot of these, like, critical, I mean, it's been for the past few decades, and critical readings, whether it's race or gender of XYZ text. But you were doing this early on, and from a different approach, obviously, because you engaged with the text and didn't denigrate it from the outset. So how did you just get interested in, say, the topic of your first book? Is it just always always there in a latent manner or?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I mentioned how to show up in the, you know, or matured intellectually in the 70s. And that was the first, you know, second wave feminism period. And I mean, this gets into, in a sense, the impact that the call was autobiography had on me, because what people were looking at, I mean, let me go back and this gets to one of the questions I was thinking that I would address is sort of feminism's impact on the, you know, sort of, academic academia. And it was just kind of search for, you know, where could you find women?

Where, you know, where were women? How could you sort of bring the study of women into academia? And I guess what I was seeing was people were, you know, kind of, you know, looking everywhere. So Mary, if you're doing political theory, you know, there was a latch on to Mary Wellstonecraft, or you had a woman actually writing.

And that was less interesting to me than the way in which women appeared in the actual text in the way in which they surfaced. And the response in part was, I knew what books like Susan Oken's book on, I guess, women in political thought, I can't remember the actual title of it right now, which, you know, okay, we found John Stuart Mill and Plato, the only two, you know, two who weren't male chauvinist pigs. And that can seem not very interesting. And being interested in Plato, that was the kind of motivation for going into the way that I approached the text.

So yeah, it was a reaction against the way that it had been. It was starting to happen. Yeah. And then I don't mean to go ahead.

Yeah. And that's just for those who haven't read Arlene's work, I'll just, you know, to vouch. You come in with an interest with a question, but you let Plato unfold on his own terms, which is kind of rare. I think what David was referring to is the tend to impose a sort of systematic sort of critical framework onto a text.

Whereas you go in with an interest, a question that interests you and of interest of Plato, you see what Plato can teach. So I think it avoids that quality. Yeah. That's what I mean.

There's sort of, you know, kind of, you know, he talks about the equality of men and women and that appeals to feminist sensibility. But I guess my argument is that that's not what he's really interested in dealing with. Yeah, for sure. Maybe, maybe at this point, I mean, you write in your article on book eight to jump into a platonic dialogue in the point is an interpretive crime.

And so let's commit a crime. Let's jump right in to Plato's Republic book five. Oh, no, Greg, please summarize. So summarize where we've come from starting book one, don't you?

No, Alex, please. But I mean, so that we don't jump into it. No, no, no, I'm kidding. They're running a show 15 minutes ago and it says, Alex summarizes the entire republic.

It did say that. I wrote that. I can bring a dramatic label about that. I can do it.

I mean, I mean, I mean, but I think we need such a good transition right into the substance of our. Yeah, I think it is too. I don't think we need a summary. So all right.

Hey, David, you know our episode today is brought to you by the ancient language. It's to do where you've been studying, right? I have indeed. I've been in Georgia, Greek.

It's it's it's tremendous. The other day I was in Chicago, walking down the street and a bag lady bumped into me and I couldn't believe my eyes. It was Martha Nussbaum on her way to teach a Greek at the University of Chicago. And she screams something to me and I corrected her.

And so that should be a testament to just how much I'm learning. The other thing that I can report is Greg, who's our famed translator of Xenophon, right? And who's Greek is excellent. He'll sometimes send me things like he sent me a note the other day that said, David, I'd like to come to your O coast to lie with your so on.

And I normally wouldn't know what that means. But now I know that Greg wants to come to my home to to to hang out with my animals. And so I just want to thank the ancient language Institute for helping you crack that code helping you crack that code and talk to Martha Nussbaum. That's right.

Well, fortunately, we've got this new ancient language Institute and they not only ancient Greek, which clearly has been helping David and his economic and other matters, but they also teach Hebrew as well as Latin. They don't use long vocabulary lists and grammar charts. Instead, they get you speaking and reading on day one. And if you're interested in being a fellow student with David Barr, you can enroll in the fall term up until August 13th.

They're offering live online courses for our busy listeners, full schedules, flexible schedules. You heard me. And if you're not satisfied, unlike David Barr, who's happy as a pig at a trough, if you're not happy like David Barr, they will fully refund your payment after the first class. If you decide that ancient language Institute is not for you, where can we find the Malax, the ancient language Institute?

That's a happiness guarantee. Not even Aristotle has that. That's all I want. The time on, yeah.

Ancientlanguage.com. Ancientlanguage.com. Go learn some Greek. Ancientlanguage.com.

And now back to the show. So in book five, a playlist republic, which is not only about justice and they're building a city and speech to sort of see what just it would look like. Some practices that Socrates prescribes in this best city and speech become quite curious for some of the interlocutors, including, for example, the equality of men and women, which Arlene's already touched on. Something that we might call communism and the family or sexual communism and then Floster Kings.

So they're these sort of three outlandish-ish proposals he calls them the three waves. And we were going to talk about the first of these waves with Arlene, which is on the equality of men and women. And I think you're also going to touch on to extend your own done this, but feminism's effect on the study of classics in the 1970s. Tell us a little about you said, I just mean what you just said, I heard that you don't sort of, you're not persuaded necessarily by the sort of standard reading of book five that Socrates is quite serious in asserting that men and women are equal and ought to be equal in the way.

So what ways does Socrates lay out that they are equal and what ways do you think that perhaps he's not being fully clear with us? Yeah, I mean, I guess the way to think about it as classics or feminists were finding in Plato a resource for saying, okay, here we have an argument for the equality of women that Plato was really arguing as if he believes in the word. I don't know what the word was used quite as frequently as it is now the oppression of women. And that this was a way of bringing them out of the shadows out of the household and into the public realm because they were equal.

And I guess there were just too many indications throughout the whole dialogue for me to take that as a serious agenda item, let's say, for Plato that he would have been interested in that, you know, kind of releasing women from, quote, oppression. The part of this, the Aristophanes comedy, the ecclesia as who's like, is an kind of a common Aristophanes creates this world in which women come and take over the assembly, it's a topic for comedy. And there are a lot of similarities between the Republic, what happens in the Republic with Socrates proposes and what happens in Aristophanes on Ecclesia as was I. And most likely, you know, again, this is not 100% sure about the Ecclesia as is I, meaning women participating in the ecclesia was written before was performed before Plato wrote his Republic.

So it's, I say it as a reaction to the, the Republic as a reaction or kind of playing on Aristophanes. And so this is a topic that is comic and one of the things about this part of the dialogue is the frequency of the language of laughter. I mean, this, this, this part of the book five, I haven't counted one could now with the, with the computer technology, the number of times that the word for laughter or form of laughter appears and peers in this dialogue. So I guess sort of starting from other parts of the dialogue where there's constant denigration of women in one fashion or another, or the portrayal of women as objects of sexual desire that made me question, can you be really serious about this?

And so he makes the argument that women are, you know, well, first of all, one of the things to notice in book five is the frequency of animal imagery and have another article on the animal imagery in the Republic. But if you notice, he introduces the discussion in the quality of women by talking about dogs. And you know, when you have a herd of dogs is it only the male dogs that go out and hunt and know it's both on the female dogs that go out and hunt. So why should it be any different among human beings?

And there are continuously references to animals and analogies with animals in order to make the arguments here, which I find peculiar. And then he also makes the claim, you know, their souls, if in one nature, if they share differences, I mean, okay, going back to where we do have to go back to the beginning because in founding the city, the search for the just city, he prescribes a condition that is everybody performs that task for which they are best suited by nature. And that becomes the principle that is followed throughout the dialogue in the founding of the city. And so I think that the main thing that makes the argument that women can perform the same task is men because their natures are the same.

And he does that by abstract, my major point of my article, he does that by abstracting from the body. The only way that he can talk about women and men is being the same as to abstract from their physical characteristics. And in doing so, the phrase I use is he desexes them. He ignores the fact that women actually, they are children or he doesn't ignore it, but he underplays it.

And he's constantly having to underplay the fact that they are children. And yet at the same time, there's this constant reference to the fact that women are weaker. So at the same time that he's trying to abstract from the body, he's also emphasizing the weakness of the body. So again, that struck me as really kind of undermining everything.

So I'm not seeing the arguments don't hold up completely. And so part of what I'm trying to do there then is say, okay, he's trying to make the women the equals of men, but in doing so, he keeps showing how they're inferior because of their bodies. And he takes away from them that which is their peculiar nature, their peculiar excellence. And they're getting to some trouble with feminist theorists who see this as essentialism.

But I see that as important aspect there. Say something. Yeah, one thing I thought you did very well that I think was just something I hadn't noticed, maybe because I'm so taken by the male drama to not notice the underkeys. But you go through books, everything up through book five, and you talk about how actually deeply sex women are up to that point with Kefalas, when Glaucon comes in, there's the courtesans, mistresses and wetterses, things like that.

And then you have this wonderful line where you say, and this is the desex lies, you say, in order to establish this equation of men and women, Socrates must disregard his earlier portrait, all these delusions. He must desex the female, make or void of any special erotic attraction or function. So not an object, but also not a special dignity or work or function in and of herself. I thought that was such a very neat way to put it.

And it is a marked contrast between the earlier books in book five. I guess maybe you could talk a little bit about the common roots. It seems like he's acknowledging the thing he has to deal with, and then he deals with it later. And so I guess there will go lately.

It is a very highly gendered or sexed understanding of women. Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the Sefalas just in passing, but the whole Sefalas is the first interlocutor. And immediately we have Sefalas saying, thank goodness I'm no longer driven by erotic desire. I've escaped that particular longing.

And I mean, sort of, you know, each book you have another story of the way in which women were talking about Gaijis seducing the queen. And then the, what the guardians can't be attracted to is the courtesans and so forth. So throughout we get this language of women as not only physically weaker, which comes up in the particular book five, but also in, you know, as this object of desire. But for, you know, following from that, I think there's not following from that, but in addition to that, the what precipitates discussion in book five is a casual comment that Socrates makes at the end of book four about holding women and children in common.

So there you also have not only, you know, kind of the sexual female, I mean, physically weak female, you also have the woman understood in terms of property, the language of, you know, kind of sharing its possessions, the language of possession. So they possess women and children in common. So again, there's the loss of kind of dignity for the woman. And so what I'm seeing happening in book five is we're taking all of, you know, we're, the possession still is there, which is in a sense strange because, you know, we're keeping the woman still as an object, but we're taking any, you know, the desexing means that you're removing from her what is distinctive and important, you know, important to you.

There's children. And so there's that, I think that that's, you know, what, that's what Socrates is trying to take away from the female. And then there's this sudden realization. I mean, I mean, obviously nothing is sudden because it's very carefully conscripted, but realization, oh, how do we continue the species if we desexed the female?

And so there has to be this manipulation that goes on in order to make the, you know, kind of the admission as he says, the male mounts and the female bears. And therefore we need to create erotic necessities as he puts it. And you have this very stylized way in which procreation is supposed to take place. And you know, and then the babies are taken away.

There's no nursing of the babies. And so again, the whole sort of distinctive qualities of the female are removed from the women guardians. And so this seems to me, if this is what you want from the equality of the sexism, you know, I'm not entirely satisfied with that. It's the successful argument for equality.

Early on, I'm persuaded by that. I'm deeply persuaded by that. I just sort of have a couple questions. One is I wonder to what extent, I mean, Socrates and our locators, I guess they do talk about it being funny.

I'm just wondering what's funny about this, but just let me try and defend Socrates on the equality of the sexes for just a moment, if I can. And so not a basis with republics on a little bit, maybe not playing fair. But I'm thinking about the only things that Socrates claims to know, he claims that he's learned from women. So he's learned about love from Dada and he's learned about, you know, strange enough how to give funeral orations from a spasier, right?

So paracles, churism. And so even in the symposium, right, it's an all-male affair. All the other men sort of want to get rid of women. And he sort of surplitiously, and she's probably not an actual person, but he sort of brings her back in as though a kind of subtle chastisement against these men for making an all-male affair.

And in the apology too, I guess, to bring in a third example, he says he hopes in the afterlife he'll get to speak to interesting men and women. And by the way, in contrast, Athens, where apparently there were no interesting women to talk to. But so I mean, I'm just wondering to what extent, I don't know, is there anything to the argument that men and women are equal? I mean, I grant that the physical, I grant that we're sort of psychosomatic, that we are sort of minds and bodies.

But surely other kinds of bodies are not, I mean, she has in her way, certainly philosophic types can come about in a wide variety of body types. I don't know if that makes sense. So this goes back to the kind of, you quoted me before David, I think the intellectual crime of jumping into a dialogue midstream. Each dialogue is different.

And I think that the, I worry about making broad generalizations that go across dialogues. And so I think the argument that we have in book five has to be read within the context of what's happening in the Republic. And it's very different from, I mean, there's also the atetus and the midlife imagery and so forth. So I guess my argument would be, yes, we have the atema, we have asphasia, we have the midlife, we have, you know, conversations.

But that those are in context of very, very different dialogues that have very different agendas. And part of what I'm seeing in the Republic in the way and what happens in book five has to be understood in terms of maybe this is what I should lead into. Why does he do this in book five and the implications of making this perverting women in this way? It has, as far as I see the larger agenda of what does it say about philosophy and what is he doing to the philosopher?

And that's where the my analogy between the female and the philosopher surfaces. So that helps a lot. I want to ask a question right on this point. I just wanted to say more about that, Erlin.

So I have a quote here from your paper where you say, while the philosophic process is portrayed as resembling the sexual experience of women from being desired to giving birth, philosophy itself in the Republic is also portrayed as a woman with the erotic qualities of the sexual female. So I was just wondering if you want to speak a little bit more about how philosophy is like a woman or if that's if that's a summary of what you just said. Yeah. You don't need to pay attention to that weird Nietzsche stuff that Greg is always trying to put out.

I did. I saw that. Can I add because I was going to ask on the same. I had one more quote that I think was really interesting.

It seems like you portray the city as a realm of convention. You identify two natural species, women and the philosopher and you stay the following. In the process of becoming politicized, the female and the philosopher are removed from their natural environment. So I'd also be interested to see how the distinction between convention and nature plays on the distinction between male and female and philosopher and city.

Okay. So those are a number of questions. I probably should have written them down. Let me deal with yours out.

Alex first. So the, I mean, I think part of what I suggested in the article is that the both the philosopher and the female are private. The adios, I mean, the word adios and Greek being private or distinctive. They're separate and distinct from what is the political community.

So I see that as an important connection between the two. And that the what in part that means is that both of them are separate from the city of philosopher and the sense that he has to extract himself from the opinions of the city and not be governed by what the city values and move beyond that. And the female in the sense that she's removed from the activities of the city in terms of the in terms of being within the household, stuck within the household, or restrained within the household. So both of them have this opposition, I think, to the city and what the city focuses on.

The other thing, and this is more of a stretch is the opposition that I see between life and death and understanding the city. I mean, what are they preparing for in Socrates and Calipolis and Socrates, the city for war? I mean, this is the training of the warriors of the auxiliaries is for war. And there's again, I know how they postpone the discussion of the philosopher so that they can have a big discussion about war and how war is going to be practiced.

Again, thinking about Aristophanes and Elisisis, the female opposition to war because of the concern with life and birth and war is relating to death or the, I bring up the funeral oration and paraclys claim that sort of the full expression of the citizen is to die for Athens. There's also, if we think about, you know, moving on to book six and the, to the vision of the good, I mean, that's all support trade is an opposition between kind of sunshine, light, life, growth, birth and the cave, which represents the lowest line of the, of the lowest segment of the line, which represents death. I mean, the cave is clearly, you know, the shadows in the world wall capture the imagery of the cave. So this also gets, I think, Greg, to maybe your question in terms of the ascent to the, I mean, I guess, will be sent to the, to the good is also portrayed very much as a process of birth and the suffer, the philosopher suffers the word is explicitly labor pains when he, you know, when he grasps the form of the good.

But the other question was women as portrayed as philosopher, the, the, the, the similes that dominate book book six, the beginning of book six are all kind of philosophy as a woman who's, you know, kind of not treated very well. And, you know, the con when you get the image of the office who pretend to, you know, take control and the poor daughter of a poor man, you know, being the, you know, likes a philosopher. So that's, you know, I think part of where we get a, you know, the transition from what goes on in book five to a very explicit analogy of the female in philosophy. So do you think this is a good time to transition to the second, to the second piece for today?

Yes. Or did you want to say more quickly? No, I'm fine. Okay.

Okay. And, um, it says a kind of interlude. I was, uh, I spent some time looking at your bibliography and thinking about your sources. And I was struck by, uh, especially, uh, the piece we just read, but also your piece I was earlier in time, which we're going to discuss now, which was published in 76 and political theory, how few of your citations are really any of them, um, touched on the, the subject of women, uh, in the Republic, women in Plato.

And so it needs to, your work was groundbreaking in disrespect. And I was, I think, so I was just curious how it was received. So when this goes live in APSR, did you get, I mean, so that's, you know, the criminal of crime and political sciences are publishing is concerned, did you get pushed back at all? Like, what was the reception of when this went live?

Uh, in my correct and say, since there were just no citations really on the subject, I thought that you were doing highly original work. And sometimes it's not kind to the people are kind to the originators. Um, okay. The women, the women in Plato was in political theory.

So that wasn't, um, in the APSR. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Yeah.

So, but it was, so in part, I was reacting, I mean, again, I was reacting to some of them. It wasn't a whole lot of scholarship. Yeah. Um, and what scholarship there was, was, I thought very weak, there was a one article in a classics journal.

I can't remember whether I actually cited it. I probably do. Um, you know, they just was, you know, a wonderful Plato, you know, uh, writes about, you know, women as being equal. And then Susan Oakens book on, um, I can't remember.

Women in Western political thought. Western political thought, um, whether, um, and so that came up, I think, before my piece. And so I think, you know, people saw the two of us as being an opposite, opposite camps. And, um, yeah, I mean, uh, you know, I think I remember one, um, I wasn't in the session, but it was an APSA session.

And I think Susan was giving a presentation and Nan Kohane, um, you know, sort of raised her hand and said that what about, you know, Saxon houses piece. And so it was seen as the sort of the two, two sides of that coin. But yeah, there wasn't, you know, um, there was very little written about women, uh, spaces to be a woman in political theory and sympathetic, if not a self identifying Strauss and we're just a sympathetic, those are like two, two marks against you. So we're not marks against you.

So I did, I did, there was another paper that I did on the Gordius and I presented it early on in the, um, at an APSA meeting, an APSA, a political science association meeting. And I referred throughout the philosopher's she, uh, in this, uh, in my presentation. And someone was an Englishman came up to me afterwards and said, how can you be a Strauss scene and feminist at the same time? What was your answer?

I was flabbergasted. I was speechless, perhaps, is the way to put it. Yeah, I don't want to tip up before I forget. Maybe at the end of the conversation, Arlene, if you could, um, recommend, uh, similar, uh, pieces or books on women in political philosophy or woman question in the history of political thought, my old professor, Andrea Roddess, Andrew has her nice collection of the pie is sex.

And I think you're in that. Um, are you in that? No, I don't think so. No.

Okay. Uh, but that's one that I recall, but I think that there are other unsung heroes. So maybe we can make our guests feel bad. No, but I just couldn't remember.

It's been that book came out 15 years ago. Um, so, um, so maybe at the end, you could, you could recommend some reading for folks. Oh, we'd be grateful. Yeah.

We're just waiting about advanced warnings. So we said, we, we said we were going to move on, but I have to read one more line because it raised a big question mark for me. I want to hear you spell this out because you seem to be uncertain of what you were claiming and I want to hear what you think on this. Um, this is from the very last pages.

You say, male needs female in order to preserve the species or in more particular terms to give the city sons female needs, male in order to fulfill her nature as the bearer of children. The philosopher needs the city, the organized political unit for without the city, the philosopher would have no place to practice. Though the relationship is more tenuous, the city needs the philosopher as well. You seem to sort of pause a little bit, a little bit uncertain of, do you think the city really needs the philosopher or?

Yeah, here I'm going to the apology. The, you know, obviously that's what I'm thinking about. And, you know, the, the, um, the sleeping horse who needs the gadfly. And in that sense, you know, least awkward.

Maybe that's where my kind of tentativeness comes in because yes, in a sense, it needs it because otherwise it does sleep. But one of the things that not having the philosophers a gadfly is a city can sleep and doesn't need to worry about. Yeah. So it seems like men and women can kind of know that they need each other, but the philosopher certainly thinks the city needs the philosophers.

Not sure. But I'm not sure the city needs the philosopher and we have the execution of Socrates. So perhaps that's the answer to that. I'll try and bridge us.

You sent us two articles that we want to talk about. And I think I see how these are connected. And so here's my sort of understanding. So first we want to talk about women in book five of the Republican.

And the next thing we want to talk about was, um, I guess loosely Plato's or Socrates's so all theory of the forms and how that's related to equality and democracy. And so I suppose that the, the connection that I see is that, well, let's see if I can do this right. So Democrats, we Americans in the 21st century are inclined to be very, very egalitarian. And so therefore to not take forms seriously.

And does this bear on the question of woman or women? Is that, is that as we see it? So that democracy is from Socrates's point of view, a democracy might not be comfortable thinking through the differences between men and women. Is that where you wanted to go with this?

Okay. So please, yeah. If I did that too neatly, please feel free to the problem. No, no, absolutely.

No, the reason that I wanted to, I thought of, you know, pairing these two articles is that I wanted to suggest that in the same way that I try to do in the, in the first article, the consideration of women and political thought shouldn't be limited to simply, you know, kind of, you know, what's their, you know, should they be equal? Should they be brought into the political sphere and so forth? But they raise much more for the, it rate the question of women, let's say, raises much deeper philosophical questions. And so the original piece, the, the 1976 piece raises the question about philosophy and the nature of philosophy and what its relationship to the city is.

And really later piece, I think, you know, follows from that because it raises the question of how do we think about equality, whether we're talking about women or whether we're talking about slaves or whether we're talking about ultimately animals. And so the, I mean, we should say a little bit about book eight, which is this book about the different regimes and, you know, five different regimes that that Socrates elaborates on. And I do make a point there. I mean, me traditionally and I even have done this and talk about the decline of regimes.

He never talks about the decline. He talks about the different forms. And so form seems to be a kind of continuous, the language of form is, is persists throughout the book. And what he does is when he talks about democracy, he talks basically about the absence of any form for anything, everything is fluid.

You can be anything. There's nothing that puts you in a particular category. You know, the people can be, you know, sometimes they can be, they can perform all sorts of different tasks. And then it violates all the principles of one job, one person or one nature, one job.

And there's a, you know, kind of emphasis on the fluidity. And part of what I think is, you know, so when we talk about democratic equality, it tends to move away from imposing forms or particular identities on people so that everybody can be considered, considered equal. So I see that as a kind of just movement to be just the opposite of what, what Calibolas is. And it starts out very nicely.

You know, it's freedom. We have freedom of speech. We have freedom of movement. There's no hierarchy.

Everything is very, very sweet. It ends up with cannibalism and tyranny. And so I see that as the kind of transition there. And then I guess what I tried, well, not I guess what I tried to do following that is connect that to the consequences of Machiavelli's trans, you know, how Machiavelli transformed political thought in terms of a kind of, there is no nature that defines who, you know, that determines what we are and that we become the controllers.

Yeah. You have a mind in here. I quite like you said, the freedom we, so you implicate. That's an argument, which is nice.

The freedom we had Socrates in book eight associate with democratic regimes entails the rejection of tyrannizing A day. And I think instead of 80 or forms, this is the Greek word for forms, we could even just use the word nature, right? Nature is seen as tyrannically limits us. We don't want to be limited.

I think you could draw the role of sex differences in there. Also just the nature of thought that thought might, your freedom might entail recognizing you have a natural end and that's what you should pursue against other inclinations. But it struck me. Yeah, this is a wonderful formula.

And I think Tamakivelli who talks about not as matter having, you know, things having intrinsic form and matter that are, you know, they risk to understand understanding, but imposing forms on matter, bacon, right? Trying to manipulate nature so that you can impose new forms and create new natures out of sort of fundamental stuff. It seems like that plays into a fundamental democratic inclination is what you're arguing, right? That there's a sort of democratic you can have whatever you want, you can make it the whole whatever you want, you can make it suit your desires, nature be damned, right?

So I'd be interested to see you spell that out a little bit more because that's a very powerful connection. I never thought about the connection between the critique of democracy and Machiavelli, but it seems like a real one. Yeah. So I think you're summary a little bit, I'm a little bit leery of using the word nature for any day just because Socrates uses that so specifically within the context of the of the dialogue.

So I would before thinking about it more deeply, I just would want to stick with the language of the forms for talking about what happens. And yeah, no, I mean, I think that that when he talks about what is the characteristic of democracy, the key phrase that he uses is license, the license to do and to be, you know, whatever we want to be. And he talks about it as being beautiful. I mean, that's the other kind of striking element.

We usually think of Socrates as, you know, what's beautiful is Calypolis, the book of book five. And now suddenly he's talking about it being beautiful, albeit beautiful for women and children. So again, you have that connection there. But yeah, I think that the what I see there is in his understanding of what democracy is.

Obviously it has nothing to do with the institutions of democracy. They were characteristic of happens in the fifth century, but it has to do with the theoretical assumption of a fundamental equality. And the question of how do we limit where's the limit of who's equal? And he seems to be saying as far as I'm reading it, he seems to be saying, once we establish a principle of equality, we, you know, we don't have a guide to set those limits to set those boundaries.

And therefore we can set any boundaries we want. And that I think becomes an immaculate and project. Yeah, and you had mentioned the animals business, which I like, sort of even how animals become equal almost in a way. Yeah.

And I just want to pardon me for dumbing things down just a moment, but like the emphasis on democracy being opposed to the Plato's forms. I mean, in a way, this makes common sense that democracy is informal, right? I mean, this make like I'm wearing a t-shirt and blue shirt. It's important rather than informal.

Unformed, yeah, very good. Yes. So I mean, in a way, this just makes so much sense. What I was impressed by in your article was I guess I'd always sort of thought about this from a moral point of view, but it makes sense why good Democrats wouldn't want to make distinctions among different kinds of forums because then things don't meet that form.

So therefore we have to make judgments, which means we're going to egalitarian. But what was really neat is how you touched on the epistemological aspect of it. That we can't, we didn't want to think in these terms. And I was wondering if you thought, I don't know, maybe this isn't fair, but is it a kind of moral harness that we're sort of strapping onto our epistemology so that it's our morality that is guiding how we can see the world or is it together around?

I don't know. In any event, I'll just quote your chapter, your article here again on this point because I thought it was very good. Democracy is portrayed in the book, it is the regime in which we do not make that first step in which access to the highest forms of knowledge is denied to us because of the inability or unwillingness to engage in distinctions. And I guess I was really latching onto that unwillingness to make distinctions in regimes.

Yeah. I mean, I think that that is the because of the commitment to equality as Socrates says about democracy, because of that commitment, we do run into this problem of how do we make these distinctions? And are they legitimate in a regime that emphasizes equality? And yes, I mean, you've really, really hit on kind of what my concern is, which is I don't make more restrictions if we consider all equal.

I think of the, you know, my frustration with students at some points where what I was referred to as the whatever problem, you know, the sense that you could just say whatever, whatever is okay. And that's an effort to avoid actually imposing some sort of form on whatever it is that you're actually talking about. I frequently encounter that with students. I mean, the last year in my current job, and my teaching experience, I've had trouble getting students to take more questions.

I actually found some of the passages that we discussed today very helpful in that regard, like his treatment of women, the assembly of women that you mentioned by yourself. And then the way that Machiavelli, as you mentioned, talks about animal nature versus human, the students can still be shocked, but it's not easy. Even then, even after being shocked, they might retreat back to their whatever. That'd be a good title for an article, whatever.

It would have to be zero words correct. Whatever, Alex. You'd have to have the handquills and it goes along with the... The shrug.

You could probably do an emoji these days. You could do an emoji article. Yeah, I find the critique of democracy, they actually is something they actually believe. So it's actually good because it gets involved.

So one thing I want to... And this is kind of a tangent, but it jumped out to me. I know you've written on Thucydides, and I've been sort of interested myself in the connection between Thucydides and the Republic. And I wish more classicists were trained in political theory and political theorists had a background in classics because you bring, I think, to the text in these wonderful moments, sometimes just in the footnotes, your broader learning.

I'd be interested to... If you have any comments, I know you didn't prepare this necessarily, but if you have any thoughts on situating the Republic as a kind of Athenian creature, not to say that it's strictly determined by it, but in what way it's dealing with Athens. Because I think obviously the critique of democracy is related to this. Glaucomon's resistance to the equality of women, his insistence later in the Republic, oh yeah, but you get to sleep with whoever you want, any kiss whoever you want, right?

His constant return to the sort of sexual interest that got him, that got him started away from the sort of so-called city of pigs. I'd just be interested to hear what you think about that because it seems to be a sort of minor theme within these two articles. Yeah, I mean, I think the kind of explicit references to the... Again, this is in the beginning of the book six and then obviously the boat imagery to what it's like with the assembly and the young people hearing the echoing of the praise of the people and the wild beast that needs to be tamed by...

That needs to be that is tamed by the... This office who knows how to speak to the wild beast. I mean, there's certainly that criticism of the mass and the criticism of kind of not the explicit institutions, but the suggestion that how were decisions made by the many and they made on the basis of Doxia and the basis of opinion. I mean, I think that certainly is underlying that.

I think the... I'm not sure. I guess I see more of a... If I'm thinking about the dialogues that I'm most familiar with, the ones that I've worked on, I would say that the gorgias and the protagonists, for instance, are more engaged with Athens as a city and an active city as an actor than explicitly the Republic.

Again, if we think about how the dialogue, actually, the first word of the dialogue, which I've learned to pay lots of attention to, is down I went from the into the pyreas, I mean that he has left Athens. Athens is up there far away. And what exactly is the significance of leading Athens? There's somebody I'm plucking up, that big well, Geoffrey big well, who was written a book on the topography of the Republic in which he traces what that walk down from Athens would have entailed.

And it's a leading of the city, it's a leading of the symbols of the city for the pyreas. So I think maybe we could argue, and I'm not 100% sure I would want to do that yet, that reading the Republic is really his way of saying, okay, let's think about politics abstracting from Athens, leaving it behind. And again, also we think about how the way he introduces the YSE go down is to see a new festival. So it's not a festival that's traditional in Athens.

And he also says, the authorations were pretty good in their performance of the celebration of the new goddess. So again, it's again, breaking away from Athens and thinking, what can we think about if we break away from Athens? So I'm not sure whether that's a full answer or adequate answer, but it's the first. No, I think that's very clear.

I mean, when you think of where Athens kind of creeps into the argument, gloncos demand for luxuries, the consideration of whether to have a citizen soldiers or standing army, it's always acknowledging Athens and leaving it behind. Even in a book for when I demand to sit around actually discussion of men and women when it first comes up, I demand just toys with the idea of an empire being better than having this sort of small, starting like city and the Athenian empire, as sensibly as set aside. And there's a new, I think it's quite a good formulation. Thank you.

Arlene, I have a question about the forms and a remark you're making, your article on book eight. So I'll just first for listeners at home, I'll describe what I think a form is. This might be helpful. See, I thought we weren't supposed to believe in those, Greg.

Well, it depends on what we mean by that. But this will get to a part of an argument between Alex and me as well for it. So I take forms to be the character of a class of being distinguished from the characteristics of other classes of being. So I realize that sounds not very helpful.

A chair is different from a rock is different from a piece of wood is different from a cow. Right? But then sometimes these distinctions get kind of hairy. So as I bring it back to what we're talking about a moment ago, woman, man, right?

So these categories of beings are sometimes controversial. In fact, I would say even someone once I gave it seem uncontroversial, a rock cow would in certain circumstances that could be controversial for certain people. If we have a specific rock that might hold religious importance or someone or a cow being something to anyone, this is the question I have. So you say forms are the result of human assertion and efforts applied in opposition to a formless nature.

You're quoting POCOCOC here. But this gets to something that Alex and I have been disagreeing about whether or not there's this assertive component to philosophy that we're putting on forms to the world or whether or not we're just passively receiving all this data and trying to figure out a way to maybe that's still assertion. I don't know. I guess what I'm trying to say here is I think Alex agrees with you that there's this sort of aspect of philosophy that's actively dividing the world into categories of beings.

Whereas I don't see it as assertive. So maybe I'm wrong. So you have two people on the same side here. Yeah, no.

I mean, I guess let's beat him up, Arlene. Yeah. No. I think your point about the forms as kind of they become problematic.

And I think that's what I think in terms of when I think of the divided line, the big step that I see is arithmetic adding. And so how are you going to add things? Are you going to add a woman and man as human beings? Or are you only going to say woman and then you're going to separate out man and you can add them?

So what is it that you have to go through in order to make woman and man to a rather, you know, able to add them and come up with two as opposed to one and one. So I do see maybe I guess I'm agreeing with Alex. Sorry, Greg. But in terms of what we do is we make those distinctions and we in order to comprehend the world around us.

And again, part of what I'm saying is if we saw only if I saw only, you know, kind of Greg and Alex and David as three different, you know, individuals, you know, and then I would just see everyone. How would I ever function within this world? It would be impossible. I have to be able to add.

I have to be able to subtract. And so I need to impose those forms. And then the question really is where do the what distinctions do I make? Do I make it between male and female?

Do I make it between animal and human? Do I make it between mineral and animal? You did this very nicely in your paper, the addition, subtraction business. I really like that a lot.

And I for one don't accept the modern scientific distinction of whale as mammal, not as a fish. But I guess I'm doing this somewhat frivolously. But I do wonder what that means for the prospect of philosophy then if it simply isn't it just people to turning the world in different ways then like I determine it one way and you to turn another way and how do we know whose distinctions carry the day in the end? That's where we get into debates and discussion.

And that's where, you know, the debates about the equality of women, the debates about how you are, you know, there are sources of various hierarchies come in. And that's I think I mean, I do see that as a condition of where we are in the modern world. That's really good. That's fantastic.

Before we move on, we still have this has been fascinating. I've learned a lot and I really enjoyed reading articles. I'm just wondering, are you working on anything right now? Do you want the folks at home to hear about?

Yeah, I mean, I guess you asked me, are you sort of prodded me to talk about my prospero? Yeah, we'd love to hear about it. Oh, yeah, yeah, I didn't know about that. Is this on your over email?

Yeah, I didn't share everything with you, dude. Damn it, Greg. So you have an article on the Tempest before coming? Yeah, I mean, it's still in preparation.

I thought probably in terms of relating to what we've been talking about along. So I mean, you know, the Tempest has lots of resonances with the Republic and I'm intrigued by that. What really got me started on thinking about the Tempest was seeing a production of the Tempest. Actually, this was during COVID so I was on the streaming from Stratford with Martha Henry at playing prospero.

And so Martha Henry playing prospero meant you had a female prospero named prospero. And throughout the production, of course, the name has to, you know, it has to name changes and it's instead of an aster, it's mistress and so forth, or mother instead of father. And so the question for me is, and I'm not sure that I have totally resolved this yet, what difference does it make to have a female prospero? Given the relationship between prospero and his daughter Miranda and how close they are, does it matter that the prospero that you make the theme that a director decides to have a production with the female prospero?

Now, of course, there are differences between prospero and the philosopher king, but they're often seen as being aligned because of their interest in books and their interest in reading and kind of understanding nature and their failure to pay attention to what's happening politically around them. And so getting tossed out or exiled from the city. But the fact that prospero has a daughter changes, I think, the equation significantly. And then the question is, for me, does the female have a different, is the fact of having a female does that change the relationship with a daughter?

And I relate that, I want to relate that to an analysis of what happens in the Republic in terms of a family. In other words, in the philosopher and the Republic does not have a daughter, whether it's a female or a male. And so what's happening is the story of the Tempest change, the way in which we think about what happens with the absence of familial connections in the Republic. So that's the orientation of the piece, but it's not fully worked out.

I have an asking question about the Tempest if you'll indulge me. Does prospero or prospero lose his or her power upon departure of the island? I think that's the information because he or she throws the books into the ocean. Yeah.

And part of it is that he's going back into the question that I'm dealing with, is he decides he wants to go back into political society. And part of the reason that he wants to go back into political society is because he cares about Miranda. And if you add up when they left and how many years it's been since what they left, you realize that Miranda is of child care and age. And so the reason that this is going on right now apart from fortunate sense, the ship near them, it's because he needs to think about the prospect of grandchildren or the succession.

Yeah. He can't make with cigarettes. No. It's like old Greg.

You can't not, you can't not, in that Caliban, you know, has his, yeah, Caliban tries to rape her and that's, so that gives also an indication that, you know, where she is in her life cycle. And so if you read, go ahead. Sorry. I was going to get dumb jokes.

I have a real question before we go. Well, if you make Prospero female, then Miranda has to be male, right? No, the keeper is a female. Oh, they keep, I was going to say Caliban has to be a woman.

That's, that's, Caliban doesn't work. No, from metrically, metrically, or dramatically, right? So before we got to the mailbag portion and then our lightning round, we'll try and go quickly since we're slightly over time. I was wondering, Arlene, if you could recommend some interesting books by your contemporaries or people that you respect who have written well on women in the history of political thought, you know, Arlene, sac, I'm sorry, confused, Diana Shob has this nice erotic liberalism, which is on, on skews Persian letters.

But you know, the title like that, you think it'll come in like a black plastic bag and that children can't look at it. I read it. And it's wonderful. So if you have any suggestions, I would be grateful.

Well, if we go back to when I wrote the original article, there's of course, I'm in general sting, public man and private woman. And that again was published probably around the same time that I, that my, my political theory piece came out and that was, she's much, she, the first part of it deals with the, the political theorists and the second part deals with the political, the canonical political theorists and the second part deals with basically a criticism of the feminist theorists who were, you know, kind of criticizing the, the arguments of the political theorists. So she's more, you know, she's more in line with the kind of work that, that I was doing. And the other kind of classic work in this is Carol Patons, the work called the sexual, the sexual contract.

That's really kind of a study of the degree to which the social contract assumes gender roles and, you know, does not, you know, does not talk about the human being but talks about, you know, male, you know, it's a contract between men and she makes, makes that argument. You know, quite honestly, my most, you know, most recently I haven't been working as much in this field. I've been doing more work in democratic theory. And so I'm not sure, you know, I could name some, you know, more recent works.

No, no, those two are, those two are great. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Here's one by Travis Mulroy. Was he a colleague of yours that too, Lane? Oh, he's a great, great friend of mine from two. Yeah.

This is Travis's while discussing whether there is a work particular to woman as such, Socrates occasionally uses the Greek word phalus for female, which is related to the verb, a lot zane to nurse is nursing a work naturally particular to women, which Socrates ignores. And if so, what might that reveal about his overall argument? Yeah, no, definitely he ignores it. I mean, you know, the women are sent to, or the babies are sent to again, you should notice it's a pigsty that the, that they're put into.

Yeah, the word is, is, I'm blanking on the Greek here, but the means pigsty. And wet nurses are sent to nurse the babies. So again, you know, he's minimizing as much as possible the, the, the female role of motherhood. And you know, glaucon has this, you know, great line.

David, did you just kind of have a baby? Is that what I was hearing? You did. Yes.

Yes. And so glaucon, I thought the line where glaucon says you're describing a very easy parent that should, should have resonated. Yeah. You know, the women don't have to, they're not to get up in two in the morning, four in the morning and six in the morning in order to nurse.

So yeah, he's taking that away from them. And it's, you know, something that's distinct about the female. Can I quote a line from your article on book five that I found particularly funny? Yeah, he said clearly the female is superior to the male of any species in her ability to bear children, even those women least skillfulness does do it better than any man except perhaps for Zeus.

So second only, yeah. That was great. There's another question from my old colleague, Dan Schillinger. He says, first, by the way, nice praise.

I'm looking forward to this episode. Arlene is the best. Oh, a number of people actually. Yeah, that's right.

I know people have said that. I asked for praise or questions and we mostly just got praise. Yeah. No, no, we asked him to take it all this praise.

Yeah. So here's Dan's question. He says, I'd love to hear, I guess it's not a question. I'd love to hear Arlene's thoughts on the relation of the first wave to the second wave in republic five is one required for and therefore subordinate to the other.

Yeah. No, I think they definitely lead into each other. It is interesting when book five begins, you know, and it's kind of a new beginning for the republic that repeats what goes on in book one. They hold, they kind of hold Socrates to account for not developing the quote, beginning of children.

So that's, you know, clearly behind it, but Socrates doesn't begin with the beginning of children. He begins with the equality and he sees that as the, you know, kind of the starting point for how he's going to develop this, the principles of this new city. And I do think that the equality then requires this weird creation because we have created women who have been now, you know, they're de-sexed, they're practicing naked in the, in the blessed with the men. And so we've lost the erotic and so the erotic by making them equal.

And so the erotic has to, the necessity has to be reintroduced. Otherwise we don't have a continuation. We've missed so many good opportunities and jokes on this episode. We've been so restrained that the wrestling, the coed naked wrestling, we had no time to recede our jazz.

Yeah, I know. I know you can leave the center. Yeah, she's brought, she's elevated the level of conversation here in the new synchronous. What do we know about Sam Thippy?

She's, is that's how he pronounced Socrates's wife? It's true that he was married that's been established. And is it also established that she was unattractive or is this all kind of historical? I have another piece on Centipi.

Oh, that's how you pronounce it. Sorry. But it, yeah, so he definitely had one life. He possibly had two otherwise, but that's unclear.

But Centipi does seem to have been his actual life. What do we know about Centipi? Nothing. What other people have said about Centipi, Xenophon in particular, kind of has Socrates say some things about Centipi and then much later, you know, kind of stories about what Socrates, how he talks about the one place obviously where she does exist is in the Fido right at the beginning of the Fido.

And what I find interesting about her presence there is she's with Socrates, you know, when when Fido and the others come in and she's sitting there with a child on her lap. So what's the impression we get of Socrates right away on the day when she dies is his relationship to his wife and his creative qualities. And this is a dialogue that goes off in all sorts of, you know, the soul and the separation, the soul and the body. And yet the beginning of the dialogue emphasizes is very kind of earthy connection to reproduction.

There's one small passage at the end of the Fido where it says the women of Socrates' household came back. And I've always thought in my mind that that included his wife, but maybe that's not fair. In other words, she bookends it in other words the entire Fido. And then she returns it again.

She's not mentioned by name, but. Yeah. And the game she is. Yes.

Yes. And by the way, I think she has something really sweet. Like she's like, your friends are here. There's a lot of you get to talk to them.

I think it's really quite. And that's kind of the kind of thing. They really do get to the sexes. And if you look at the way most people have read that, you know, oh, she's hysterical.

She's taken away. And, you know, one translator says, you know, you know, typical of a, you know, I think the report, you know, typical of a woman, you know, that she started crying. But, you know, she's focused. What is she focusing on?

She's focusing on the presence of people with whom he converses. Right. And important that is. Yeah.

Which means she was aware therefore. Yeah, that's exactly what it did to be. But this is very good. Thank you.

Okay. Greg, here's your time to shine. Greg, it really enjoys. Yeah.

So now we're doing what we call the lightning round questions. And I thought I could start with one of my own before Greg goes into it. You always cut into my time. Greg always says these corny questions.