Mary P. Nichols: Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.
Originally published in the New York City Tribune, November 4, 1987.
In politics and scholarship, feminism contradicts itself. Identifying certain virtues and vices traditionally regarded as masculine—courage and cruelty, philosophy and empty abstraction, spiritedness and immoderation—or as feminine—patience and fearfulness, intuition and emotionalism, sensitivity and irresolution—feminists cannot decide how to judge these in any consistent way. They cannot agree among themselves whether to exalt all ‘feminine’ traits and degrade all masculine ones, or to concoct some synthesis of the old virtues and commend this to men and women equally, or to deny that masculinity and femininity have any basis at all in human nature. Indeed, many deny that human nature itself exists in any morally or politically relevant way, a strategy that would resolve the contradictions rhetorically if ever it could be made plausible.
Professor Mary P. Nichols understands these quandaries. That is to say, she rises above them. In writing on the relation of politics to learning, of the city to philosophy, she brings traditionally feminine insights to bear on the work of three ancient Greek political writers and their modern commentators. And she does more than that: This study of the poet Aristophanes and the philosophers Plato and Aristotle proceeds from an femininity thought through. Whereas feminism can never intelligently understand masculinity, and thus fails to understand femininity—remaining an ideological or merely partisan and partial view of human life—Nichols’s femininity opens her mind instead of closing it, letting her see women and men with a rare, systematic clarity.
Aristophanes’ comic drama the Clouds, Plato’s dialogue the Republic, and the second book of Aristotle’s treatise the Politics all address problems raised by the conflict between Socrates and his city, Athens, and by implication the conflict between philosophy and politics. Aristophanes represents Socrates rather as Socrates’ wife Xanthippe might have regarded him, had she possessed wit. An irresponsible stargazer suspended in a giant basket, simultaneously ignoring the needs of his body yet describing the cosmos as mere matter-in-motion; coming to earth, he serves as and elderly ringleader of scraggly homosexual youths who blithely ignore the decent requirements of family, politics, and religion. Socrates pursues freedom but finally ruins himself and all who foolishly heed his counsels. “Caught in contradiction,” Nichols writes, Aristophanes’ Socrates “is laughable.” Philosophy deserves ridicule, and ridicule checks men from victimizing themselves with philosophy.
Plato’s Socrates reverses this charge. Not philosophy but politics, the city, leads men to chase dreams into the abyss. The political rage for absolute justice causes men willfully to trample nature, including the differences between men and women, to lie to others and to themselves, and eventually to commit the worst injustices and to do so blandly, in complacent disregard for the cruel ways in which they pursue justice. In conversations with such perfervidly manly types as tyrannical Thrasymachus and militant young Glaucon, Plato’s Socrates deftly shows the danger of politics to human character.
Not the least of these dangers threatens reasoned thought, the distinctively human part of human nature. Not only does Nichols see that Socrates intends his famous description of the ‘City in Speech’ ruled by philosopher-kings as a supremely ironic construct—more comical than any Aristophanean drama—but she argues that the philosopher-kings themselves do not compare to the genuine philosopher, Socrates himself. The philosopher-kings are what we today would call ideologues; their political passions shape their thought, preventing them from actual philosophizing. Their reason controls their appetites but has no desire of its own. It is self-sufficient but closed. It can dictate but it cannot learn. The walls of the city determine its horizon. It cannot love its own, as a woman loves her children or as a moderately political man loves his country, but neither can it love what transcends family and country.
This absolutizing of politics leads to self-destructive communism. By denying the natural differences between men and women, by insisting on equality defined merely as sameness, the City in Speech “ultimately denies nature.” But nature generates men and women, human life itself. The philosopher-kings absurdly order all citizens above the age of ten years out into the country; here Nichols, perhaps influenced to much by evil acts in our own century, speaks of the inevitability of “mass murder” to achieve this unliberating exodus. Yet Plato’s Socrates retains his comic balance here as elsewhere. There is no one to enforce the proposed exile, so logic immolates the Republic‘s City in Speech as thoroughly as stage-fire does the Socratic think-tank in the Clouds.
In the Republic, logic does what ridicule does in the Clouds. It sets the limits. Thus Plato can rescue philosophy, thought guided by logic or reason, with reason itself—by the very act of philosophizing—whereas Aristophanes can only laugh, nervously, limiting philosophy by appeals to custom or ‘normality.’ Plato invites us to think about politics, and about thought, about what each can and cannot do. Justice is not so simple as politicians and ideologues believe. Plato finds it in the complex human needs both for the world as it is and for the world as it can be remade, realistically, for human life.
For Nichols’s Plato, justice finds expression not in politics but in the small circles of philosophic friends Socrates wisely rules. Socrates knows he does not know, and this knowledge of his own, and others’, ignorance dampens political fires. Nichols finds this a too-negative justice. In Aristotle’s Politics she finds not only Socratic skepticism but some prudent answers.
Against Plato, Aristotle insists that political life can incorporate some diversity, cultivate some openness. Against Aristophanes, Aristotle argues that a certain kind of philosophic thought can guide political life. Building upon the naturally-generated unit of the family, Aristotle rejects the Platonic contention that politics absolutized must yield communism, because he denies that communism is political at all. The strictly political relationship, seen in the household itself in the relationship between husband and wife, consists of ruling and being ruled, not in one-way command. On that natural basis, Aristotle’s political science aims at guiding active prudence or statesmanship, particularly lawgivers, who form “the bridge between thought and actual regimes.” “The philosopher can share in political life by advising statesmen.”
Nichols’s womanly critique of manly spiritedness does not disdain either spiritedness or men. That would be to commit the very error of spiritedness itself, by treating ‘the other’ as a target. Instead, she achieves a balance, finding her intellectual counterpart in Aristotle—just the sort of man mere feminists never appreciate, but whom intelligent women, along with their manly partners, can readily esteem.
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