FEMINISM AND ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY

Adriana Cavarero
Translated by Robert Bucci

Binary Logic
Describing the birth of the universe, Plato stated in the Timaeus (Plato
1997: 1245, 42b) that, as human nature was of two kinds, the superior
race would hereafter be called man and the inferior race woman. More
precisely, according to him, woman was created when the prototype of
man, having lived an unrighteous life, passed into another, lesser life and
returned as a woman. After having defined man as zoon logon echon—a
rational animal—Aristotle affirmed in the Politics (Aristotle 1988: 19,
1260a) that, while the slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element of
logos, the female has it but that it lacks authority: that is, women lack
rationality. These are two significant examples of the various sexist and
misogynistic aspects that characterize ancient philosophy and expose it
as an expression of a patriarchal society in which the human being,
broadly understood, is modeled on the male sex only. Consequently the
female sex is characterized as a kind of being that is not fully human and
that is deficient, inferior, and for this reason subordinate.
Scholars in feminist and gender studies have long drawn attention to
the patriarchal stain of ancient culture by insisting above all, with regard
to the field of philosophy, on the positions of its two greatest
representatives, Plato and Aristotle. Having intensified during the 1990s
in important edited collections on Plato and Aristotle (Bar On 1994;
Tuana 1994; Ward 1996; Freeland 1998), numerous feminist essays
have had the merit of showing how, in the works of the two greatest
philosophers of antiquity, the conception of sexual difference—far from
being the simple and naïve reception of a sexist stereotype—intersects
with Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought in profound and complex ways,
often influencing their theoretical frameworks. As much as it is inter-
esting and curious, the mere exercise of unmasking the misogynist
prejudices that span the ancient philosophers’ work risks, in fact, being
an exercise that sets out to discover the obvious. With rare and rather
problematic exceptions, philosophy—like other forms of knowledge—
cannot but reflect and reproduce the overtly patriarchal culture of the
time. Feminist criticism has therefore taken on the particular task of
delving into the texts of the ancient philosophers in order to demonstrate
how the treatment of sexual difference and of gender stereotypes falls
back on the overall construction of
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their philosophical systems and often places them in crisis. Above all,
these systems are characterized by a binary logic—by an oppositional,
dual, and hierarchical structure— which, starting from the man–woman
dichotomy, constructs a series of oppositions: mind/body, spirit/matter,
public/private, active/passive, etc. In these the first terms, considered
positive and dominant, coincide with the masculine pole, while the
second terms, considered instead negative and subordinate, coincide
with the feminine pole.
It is not at all surprising that the patriarchal stain, easily observable in
the entire history of philosophy as in the history of culture in general,
already characterizes the thought of ancient Greece, in which philosophy
had its origin. In recent decades feminist studies of ancient philosophy
have, first and foremost, been inserted into the wider horizon of studies,
which—from diverse disciplinary perspectives—have revisited almost
the whole production of classical antiquity in light of the concepts of
sexual difference, sex and gender, sexuality and sexual desire, or sexual
orientation. From epic to tragedy, from mythology to poetry, from art to
politics, from medicine to cosmogony, reflections on these themes now
constitute a vast and fertile field of research. Exemplary in this respect is
feminist scholars’ particular and constant attention to Antigone, the
character from Greek tragedy who has never ceased to interest
philosophy, from Hegel onward (see, e.g., Söderbäck 2010). Also
notable, though, is the attention given to feminine figures from myth—
Demeter, Athena, Medea, and many others—to whom, in the 1980s, the
French historian Nicole Loraux dedicated seminal books that marked a
radical innovation in classical studies by opening the way to a different
reading of the relationship between politics and sexual identity (Loraux
1991; 1998).
The intermingling of the various disciplinary perspectives and multiple
styles of thought that re-examine classical culture through recent
categories of sexual difference and gender is a distinctive feature of
feminist interpretation of ancient philosophy, which contributes to the
originality of this field. The fact that it deals with recent categories that
are bound to the historical origins and current developments of feminist
theory constrains interpretative work to engage with at least two
methodological questions. On one level the work is to examine the
problematic nature of applying the concept of sexual difference to
ancient texts, and, even more so, of applying the current although
controversial distinction between sex and gender. On another level the
work recognizes that the fundamental starting point for a genealogical
reconstruction of the same ideas of sex and gender, if not of sexual
difference, is in classical antiquity (Sandford 2010; Holmes 2012). The
first question concerns the terminological and conceptual layout of
feminist theory, while the second evokes the theme of the origin of
philosophy that always presents itself when we speak of the Greeks.

Terminology and the Question of Origin

Feminist interpretations of ancient philosophy are affected by the
various vicissitudes that, in the feminism of the last decades, have seen
the term gender placed side by side, sometimes polemically and at other
times in a conciliatory fashion, with that of sexual difference. Prevalent
in the English-speaking world, the category of gender alludes to a
culturally and socially constructed representation of female and of male,
a representation that is distinct from the biological category of sex.
Having spread throughout international feminism together especially
with the texts of the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, sexual difference
is instead employed as a critical concept that calls on the
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intersecting web of symbolic and material structures in order to re-think
the feminine radically and free it from the logic of the patriarchal order.
In general, with the term “patriarchal,” the language of feminist theory
refers to a cultural system, a discursive register, a regime of truth—more
simply, a vision of the world—structured by a binary logic. That logic
defines the human being by modeling it on a single masculine subject,
reserving a subordinate role for women, who, not being men, are thus
imperfect or inferior humans. Along with the term “patriarchal,” which
alludes to the power of fathers, feminist criticism in recent decades has
elaborated other terms that express the same concept or approach it in
greater depth. These include “androcentric” (centered on man),
“phallologocentric” (centered on the phallus and on the logos), and
“phallogocentric” (a simplification of the preceding term that underlines
the identity, almost the inseparable fusion, between the phallus and the
logos). Because philosophy, at least since the pre-Socratic thinkers
Parmenides and Heraclitus, has been a reflection on logos—whose
fundamentally untranslatable meaning ranges from “speech” to
“language,” from “thought” to “reason”—many feminist interpreters
tend to privilege the term “phallogocentric” in order to denounce the
masculine stain of the philosophical tradition. This allows us to pass to
the second question mentioned above, that of the historical origin of
philosophy.
As the Western tradition understands it, philosophy was born in the
Greek world during the seventh century bc, and was established, as a
form of knowledge with its own precise disciplinary charter, under Plato
and Aristotle. In particular, it is Plato who used the term philosophia
(love of wisdom) in a technical sense and who underlined the superiority
of this new method for reaching knowledge of truth compared to other
discursive or performative registers such as epic, poetry, rhetoric, and
tragedy. Proudly declaring its innovative character, philosophy is
constructed polemically and antagonistically ever since its historical
origin with Plato. All the terminological baggage that comes from
Plato’s writings and that passes to the philosophical tradition—primarily
idea, theory, epistemology, and so forth—is inserted into a system of
discourse that proclaims itself to be different, more powerful, and more
valid—as well as the only exact, true, and correct system—in
comparison to the other discursive regimes that dominate the culture of
the time. It is a battle of logos in the name of a superior logos, a
philosophical logos that reflects upon itself in order to discover its
universal truth and, more precisely, the method by which to reach that
truth. It is worth noting that the term “method” is a Greek word that
means the way, the path (odos), through (metà) which discourse must
proceed in order to know truth. The famous myth of the cave, at the
beginning of Book VII of Plato’s Republic, describes this path. It
recounts how the philosopher must turn his back on the Athens of his
time—which is depicted as a dark cave where rhetoricians, Sophists,
poets, and artists manipulate public attention with their deceptive
discourses. The philosopher must turn his back on this in order to adopt
the method that leads to the incontrovertible clarity of the philosophical
discourse on ideas, and—no less important, as the second part of the
myth narrates—to assume the order of ideas as the model for designing
the optimal city, kallipolis, to be governed by the philosophers who are
its “guardians.” From a feminist perspective, the theme of the guardians
of the kallipolis is particularly interesting because, in a well-known
passage in the Republic (Plato 1997: 1078–1079, 450c–451e), it results
in stirring up a sort of enigma. In this passage, Plato makes a proposal
that seems to retract the thesis of the inferiority of women that he
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in the entirety of his work: surprisingly, through the mouth of Socrates,
he declares in fact that there is no reason not to admit women into the
role of the city’s guardians. A question can therefore be posed: Was
Plato a feminist?