Chapter 1 - Beyond Gender

Summary

In Plato’s Symposium, the central insights are gleaned from a wise woman from whom Socrates learnt the single thing to which he laid claim to expertise: ta erotika. Since there is a widespread view that Plato stands at the head of a tradition of philosophical thinking in which women are eclipsed, or marginalised, this fact has been seen as significant. This chapter explores whether Diotima’s gender is significant for the philosophy of the Symposium. Gender categories are an explicit feature of this text, but Plato’s playful and provocative use of them is not just a dialectical ploy to provoke reflection on the social norms around sexuality and gender that held sway in his day; toying with them exposes the contingency of gendered categories and, ultimately, their irrelevance to the philosophical life. The wisdom of Diotima is that philosophy is beyond gender; it is, in that respect at least, inclusive.

Introduction

In the Symposium, Plato’s great work on eros (passionate love, or desire), the central insights are gleaned from a wise woman (201d5, 204d2, 207a5), from whom Socrates learnt the single thing to which he laid claim to expertise, ta erotika (Symp. 177d; Phdr. 257a; Lysis 204b; Xen. Mem. 2.6.28). Since there is a widespread view that Plato stands at the head of a tradition of philosophical thinking in which women are eclipsed, or marginalised, this fact has been seen as significant.¹ That Diotima’s gender has been the subject of such scholarly interest speaks volumes about the assumptions we make about gender and its importance; it is not clear whether and how Diotima’s gender is significant for the philosophy of the Symposium, however. Gender categories are an explicit feature of this text, but Plato’s playful and provocative use of them is not just a dialectical ploy to provoke reflection on the social norms around sexuality and gender that held sway in his day; toying with them exposes both the contingency of gendered categories and, ultimately, their irrelevance to a philosophical account of eros. It is in fact doubtful whether any of the images, or vocabulary employed by Diotima, or even Diotima’s status as a ‘woman’ itself are, properly speaking, ‘gendered’ in any straightforward way. One of Diotima’s central insights is that eros is a mediator between binary oppositions; eros is a non-binary facilitator. This explains a number of features of the supposedly gender-polarised vocabulary and imagery in this text, which fluctuates between (Plato’s) contemporary associations of the male and the female and the gender-muddled portrait of Diotima herself, fused with her ‘feminised’ Socratic counterpart. Platonic eros seems genderqueer insofar as it does not subscribe to conventional gender distinctions. One lesson learnt from Diotima is that human beings are needy, incomplete, and markedly indeterminate creatures; any determination we may ultimately find is up to the individual and the work they are prepared to do, which, ideally here, takes them beyond gender. Plato challenges the gender categories of his day in a way that serves as a timely reminder of their contingency; in doing so, he ‘de-center[s] the importance of gender’ in philosophy. From that perspective, such interest in Diotima’s gender reveals how far we are from that goal.²

The Question of Diotima’s Gender

Determining whether Diotima’s gender is significant is made difficult by the following features: (a) the difficulty of establishing whether Diotima is evidence for the thinking of any historical woman (the consensus has been negative, in which case she has little historical significance);³ (b) the fact that Socrates speaks her truth so that her presence is eclipsed, or at least mediated, by a man (in which case she is thin evidence for a vindication of the female voice);⁴ (c) the fact that Plato elsewhere attributes insights to certain ‘men and women who are learned in divine matters’ (sophoi peri ta theia pragmata, Meno, 81a–b) – which may make Diotima seem less unusual and minimise the significance of gender by making it parasitic on a relationship to the divine.⁵ It is worth noting, though, that Diotima gives arguments and proposes a philosophical theory here and does not just supply a premise for an argument as those who are learned in divine matters do in the Meno. Diotima is one of the few named female interlocutors we witness engaged in philosophical thinking. So, despite the fact that this chapter will not approach Diotima as a historical woman philosopher, the dialogue nonetheless promises to show what female figures can tell us about gender dynamics, and their significance or lack thereof, in Platonic philosophy. The question is not whether Diotima the woman philosopher existed, who she was, and what she thought – but rather what this figure, the way Plato describes her, and the arguments ascribed to her, teach us about the significance of gender in Plato’s philosophy.

Three features have lent urgency to the question of Diotima’s gender: the context, the topic, and the imagery used to explore eros. I take each in turn. Diotima’s ‘presence’ is situated in an all-male context (a symposium). This fact alone will not do much work because any female voice anywhere in the Platonic dialogues falls into that category (e.g., Sappho in the Phaedrus, Aspasia in the Menexenus). This need not be indicative of any deep-seated misogyny on Plato’s part; the dialogues represent the cultural contexts of his day in dramatic form. Plato recognises the importance of embedding his philosophical thinking within ‘socially articulated spaces’, dominated by men though they were. This ‘situatedness’ allows for greater scrutiny of existing prejudices around class and gender, for example, by encouraging awareness of the extent to which knowing subjects are not ‘innocent and waiting outside the violations of language and culture’.⁶ The characters, along with their social status, gender, contextual situation, and the speech practices that are tethered to those, are brought to the fore in the Symposium and elsewhere, along with the social and political implications of this foregrounding.⁷ Plato nowhere professes to speak from a position of supposed neutrality; such devices serve as reminders of the embeddedness of his thinking in a particular time and place and expose the extent to which the gender of the participants and the dominance of their voices arise from, and are perpetuated in, particular social structures, such as those that dominated at the symposium.⁸ Whether Plato endorsed the kind of structures that are in evidence at this all-male gathering of the intellectual elite is another matter altogether. Diotima has been seen as one way in which Plato destabilises the gendered hierarchy of those structures, as he was to do elsewhere by providing a wholescale reform of society underpinned by argument for the equality of the sexes.⁹

One feature that differentiates Diotima’s presence in the Symposium from other dialogues where Socrates takes a female voice (e.g., Sappho in the Phaedrus, Aspasia in the Menexenus) is that Socrates introduces Diotima after women have been explicitly excluded from the discussion by the symposiarch (Eryximachus, 176e). This is certainly a transgression of the rules of this particular symposium, as are the attempts at dialectic instead of rhetoric in discussion with Agathon (Phaedrus has to remind Socrates of the rules). Eryximachus’ move, by dismissing the flute girl, marginalises physical eros from the gathering, to focus on ‘theoretical’ eros, which suggests that within this social circle women were not considered to be part of any such discussion; anything that is noble and valuable (i.e., educative) in eros belongs to paiderastia. Socrates’ transgression does not consist just in introducing a woman (who usually did take part in male symposia, i.e., as prostitutes or flute girls) but both in giving a woman the role of a wise discussant, which was traditionally assigned to men, and in making her knowledgeable on this particular topic.¹⁰

This is the second feature that has been thought to give Diotima’s gender prominence: Diotima is responsible for insights on eros. Would it be more or less surprising if the insights of a woman had informed the topic of, say, false statements in the Sophist?¹¹ The issue is not that ‘love’ as opposed to ‘negation’ is a topic particularly suited for women – certainly not in ancient Greece, where the erotic paradigm was homoerotic.¹² The issue is that a woman schools men in a topic for which the paradigm was homoerotic, to orthos paiderastein (211b5–6). The extent to which Plato was committed to that focus is not clear, however.¹³ This is for two reasons. First, Plato’s interest in homoerotic relationships takes us to the heart of his interest in moral education; relationships of the sort discussed here, to orthos paiderastein, which took place at symposia such as this one, were a central way in which virtue was transmitted to the young. At their best, they had an educational function.¹⁴ The question, then, is whether there is evidence that Plato supposed moral education to be the preserve of men (i.e., one should not make the assumption that Plato had any deep investment in the institution of Greek pederasty for its own sake and take the significance of Diotima’s gender from there). The fact that in the Republic Philosopher Queens, along with their male counterparts, have responsibility for civic education shows at least one context where moral education is not exclusively male. This is a context in which the moral education of men as well as women is not the exclusive concern of men. It would have been less unusual to think that women might be responsible for the moral education of other women.

Second, though in this context most speakers evidently do hold the view that such educational practices are male, the speech of Socrates-Diotima shows little investment in to orthos paiderastein as a male–male practice; this forms the context in which this discussion takes place (for reasons given above), but the content of the account of eros is not tethered to servicing this goal. The account of eros, with all of its educational aspirations, applies to all human beings (pantes anthropoi, 206c1–2), who are pregnant in both body and soul and enabled by eros in their creative endeavours as they strive to create a life worth living, be that as parents, educators, poets, lawmakers, or philosophers. The account applies to human beings regardless of gender (anthropoi 211e2, 212al, b7; thnetes, 211e3), and it is nowhere stated or implied that women are less good than men at the higher cultural pursuits described in the Highest Mysteries (209e5–12a7).¹⁵ The single line that could be so used is widely misunderstood.¹⁶ This is where Socrates describes those (presumably men) who are pregnant in body and turn to women to produce children, supposing that this will supply them with memory and eudaimonia for all time to come (208e5–6). The target is those who are pregnant in body and who suppose that producing physical offspring is sufficient for eudaimonia. This is a demand that we (all human beings) be culturally (particularly, philosophically) creative and not just biologically so. However much joy parents find in their children, Plato (along with many feminist thinkers) is surely persuasive in urging one to broaden aspirations beyond physical reproduction (leaving aside the obvious burden it brings to children to make them bearers of our eudaimonia). Nor is there anything here that tethers the female to being the beautiful ‘object’ that inspires creative work (unless one falls into the category of those who suppose that eudaimonia is had by the production of physical offspring). It is in the presence of another beautiful person (anthropon, 209b7) that one can give birth, and those who give birth to ‘wisdom and the rest of virtue’ (209b4) are also described by the inclusive ‘humans’ (anthropoi). The speech is consistent with the Republic’s proposal that ‘there is no pursuit … that belongs to women because she is a woman or to a man because he is a man’ (455d), and it is consistent with other accounts of gender-neutral virtue (e.g., Meno 73a–c).

Such a reading might bolster the significance of Diotima’s gender. If Plato’s contemporaries thought that such educational practices were the preserve of men, then there is value in showing us the ‘singularly fecund’ association between Socrates and Diotima to exemplify the inclusive tone of the speech.¹⁷ True education is revealed to be a form of reproduction, a point that suggests that the female voice needs to be incorporated – on the assumption that there is something distinctively female about this experience. From the perspective of the other symposiasts, the presence of a woman may well serve as a dialectical provocation, useful for the purposes of disrupting norms (e.g., those set by Eryximachus at 176e). So argues Halperin (1990: 129): ‘By the very fact of being a woman, Diotima signals Plato’s departure from certain aspects of the sexual ethos of his male contemporaries and thereby enables him to highlight some of the salient features of his own philosophy.’¹⁸ Whether Diotima’s gender moves beyond such provocation, what it provokes specifically, and whether it emphasises ‘salient features’ of Plato’s own philosophy – which I take, for reasons I cannot defend here, to be best (albeit not exclusively) expressed in the speech of Socrates-Diotima – are further questions. In Halperin’s view (1990: 117): ‘Diotima underscores the specifically feminine character of her purchase on the subject of erotic desire by means of the emphatically gender-polarised vocabulary and conceptual apparatus she employs in discussing it.’ This third feature, which is how the topic is treated here, has been seen as the most promising way to promote the significance of Diotima’s gender. To that I now turn.

Mixing Things up

The seemingly gender-polarised vocabulary is included in the following account of eros. It is argued that the aim of eros is to secure the good things we suppose will bring us eudaimonia (205d). Since we are mortal, and subject to flux and change (207–8), we cannot secure anything without productive work; human beings have to be productive in a way that gods do not (207c–8b). This explains the productive work (ergon) of eros, which is giving birth in the beautiful (206b8), as the distinctively mortal way to secure those good things thought to be constitutive of eudaimonia. According to Halperin, the fact that the work of eros is procreation in the beautiful (206b–c) and that the text is rife with images of pregnancy, birth pangs, and nourishing offspring ‘serves to thematize two of the most distinctive and original elements of Plato’s erotic theory’. More specifically:

In Plato’s conception (male) eros, properly understood and expressed, is not hierarchical, but reciprocal; it is not acquisitive, but creative. Plato’s model of successful erotic desire effectively incorporates and allocates to men, the positive dimension of each of these two Greek stereotypes of women, producing a new and distinctive paradigm that combines erotic responsiveness with (pro)creative aspiration.

(Halperin 1990: 130)¹⁹

In this way, ‘Diotima’s gender … is a condition of her discourse’. Evidently, here the ‘feminine’ (which Halperin makes clear refers to what is constructed by the social group or historical culture in question) is playing a central role.

The reading assumes two things: (a) that the female (however conceived) can be located and (b) that it is then positively deployed, appropriated, or incorporated, in the account of ‘(male) eros’. The first assumption is in fact fraught with difficulty. Consider the gender-polarised vocabulary. A translation of the crucial passage by Robert Wardy brings out the ambiguities:

Whenever the [neuter] pregnant [kuo = ‘in pres. and impf., of females, conceive; in aor. act. ekusa, causal, of males, impregnate’ (LSJ s.v.)] approaches what is beautiful,²⁰ it becomes gracious and in its enjoyment relaxes and produces [tikto = ‘of the father, beget; of the mother, bring forth’ (LSJ s.v.)] and generates [gennao = ‘causal of gignomai, mostly of the father, beget’ (LSJ s.v.)], but whenever it approaches what is ugly, it turns away and curls up and does not generate, but rather is in travail because it retains the embryo. That is why what is beautiful occasions much excitement in the pregnant and already swollen: either [taking ton echonta as subject and ‘understanding’ to kalon] because he who has beauty releases the pregnant from great pangs [wdis = ‘pangs of the birth of childbirth’ (LSJ, s.v.)]; or [taking to kalon as subject and ton echonta in one sense as object] because beauty releases him who has the embryo from great pangs; or [again taking to kalon as subject, but ton echonta in another sense as object] because beauty releases him who has great pangs from them.

(206d3–e1; translation with notes taken from Wardy [2002: 45-6])

Many of the key terms in Greek do not have a meaning that is gender specific.²¹ For example, kueo (209al, a2, bl, b5, c3) can mean ‘conceive’ in the sense that a woman conceives a child and becomes pregnant; but with a male subject, it has a causal meaning, ‘impregnate’. Tikto (209a3, b2, c3) can mean ‘bring into the world’ and ‘engender’; used with a female subject, it means ‘bear’, and with a male subject, ‘beget’. Gennao is used mostly with male subjects but can also be used with female. As Evans (2006: 14) argues: ‘It becomes clear that these words in Greek cover semantic ground the corresponding English words do not. In English, beget and conceive are thought to be conceptually different, one used solely of the male, the other solely of the female; but in Greek, each single verb covers the role that both genders play in procreation. Verbs like kueo and tikto are, in a sense, gender neutral.’ Plato did not invent this male paradigm of procreation, which was well attested in early Greek mythology and thought.²² From the perspective of a gender binary at least, the language seems muddled on the issue. The question is why that is.

Let us first note that there is no reason to take this language as metaphorical.²³ It is only if we are already assuming that pregnancy, birth, and procreation are exclusively female activities, and their salient expression is physical, that we then suppose that their application beyond the sphere of the female is metaphorical. There is no evidence that Plato made this assumption, however; on the contrary, the text is emphatic that all human beings are pregnant in body and soul – in which case ‘it is no accident that the pregnant one is expressed by a neuter participle, to kuoun, to avoid a choice between masculine and feminine gender: the grammar is not casual’.²⁴ Pregnancy is categorised by us as female, but the philosophical point (supported by, and perhaps giving philosophical expression to, the use of kuein and cognate terms more inclusively by poets and philosophers who applied such terms to males) is that physical pregnancy is but one species of a much larger phenomenon, which covers human creativity of all kinds (205b7–c3). The same point, which is grounded in clarifying genus and species correctly, is made more explicitly about eros (205d1–8): there is no ‘sublimation’ in this account of sexual eros onto eros for knowledge and so on; nor is eros for the intelligible form a metaphor. ‘The whole’ of desire for good things and happiness is eros (205d1–2): ‘But those who direct themselves to it in all sorts of other ways, in business, or in their love of physical exercise, or in philosophy are neither said to be in love nor to be lovers, while those who proceed to give themselves to just one kind of love have the name of the whole love’ (205d4–8). This is a mistake; just as it is to suppose that pregnancy comes in just the one physical, female, form.

Now, if it is the case both that the language is muddled (from the perspective of a gender binary at least) and that this is not a metaphorical usage of terms that apply properly and exclusively to women, then we cannot make assumption (a) that the ‘female’ can be located; nor then can we suppose, as (b) urges upon us, that Plato is ‘appropriating’ or ‘exploiting’ the female for his own ‘purely masculine philosophical and reproductive process’²⁵ or that he ‘effectively incorporates and allocates to men, the positive dimension of each of these two Greek stereotypes of women’.²⁶ There is nothing distinctly female about procreation, or its accompanying reciprocity and nurture, at all. That, I submit, is the philosophical point exemplified by the ambiguous language. Those who insist that this is no more than male ‘appropriation’, or ‘eclipsing’, of the distinctively female reveal themselves either to be stuck in a retrograde essentialism (if this is a biological claim) or to be entrenched in a gender binary (even if socially and historically constructed) that Plato is evidently at pains to resist.

Beyond Binary Thinking

The picture is both more confusing and more promising. Consider Diotima herself. Though introduced as a woman (201d2), her portrayal is muddled by the fact that she exemplifies characteristics of eros that were previously associated with a male character. To appreciate this, we need to turn to the story of Eros’ parentage, which describes the nature of eros (203b1–4a7). According to this story, the gods held a feast to celebrate the birth of Aphrodite. Penia (who becomes Eros’ mother) is needy and lacking, uninvited to this feast and associated with the mortal. Being aware of this state, she seeks out the resourceful and divine Poros to fulfil her lack. As a result of this union, Eros was conceived. Though some of this story seems to exploit relatively conventional gender-associations, even here there is disruption: the apparently resourceless Penia schemes, showing the resourcefulness associated with Poros, to make up her lack with an active seduction, while Poros, drunk on nectar, passively sleeps while being taken advantage of by Penia. Such scheming, as it is inherited by Eros in the story, is owed to the father, Poros, and his ‘resource’. This mixed parentage enables Eros to be ‘a schemer after the beautiful and the good, courageous, impetuous and intense, a clever hunter, always weaving new devices, both passionate for wisdom and resourceful, philosophising throughout his life, a clever magician, sorcerer and sophist’ (203d4–8). The central point, though, is that Diotima is described in terms of Eros’ father Poros and Socrates in terms of Eros’ mother Penia. Socrates sought out Diotima because he was aware of his need (207c1), just as the experience of need motivated Penia to find her Poros in the story; Diotima is presented as ‘wise’ (201d) and sophistes (208c1), like Poros (203d6–7, d4), and her Mantinean origins suggests a relationship to the divine, which is the preserve of Poros, invited to dine with the gods. Diotima, in other words, embodies the euporetic aspect of eros, which is figured in the story, at least, as coming from the father, even though he falls short of any straightforwardly gendered characteristics by failing to perform the assigned attributes, which are exemplified better by Penia’s ‘resource’ and ‘scheming’. If Diotima is a ‘woman’, and aligned with Poros, it is simply not clear what associations this brings.²⁷

The story, which gives us the tools to appreciate the characteristics of Socrates and Diotima, takes us to the heart of Diotima’s concern with the notion of the metaxu, from which it takes its lead (202e–3a) and to which it returns immediately after the tale is told (204a–b6). Consider the very first thing that Socrates learnt from Diotima, which was a lesson in how to move beyond binary thinking. Socrates, much like Agathon, had assumed that eros is beautiful and good. Diotima refutes this view, on the grounds that eros desires what it lacks, either now or in the future. Since eros desires what is beautiful and good, eros cannot be beautiful nor good (199d–201c). Socrates then wonders whether this commits him to supposing that eros is the opposite of these things. Once he has grasped the difference between contraries and contradictories, he sees that something can be not beautiful and good, without being ugly and base. Binary thinking is evidently not helpful when understanding the phenomenon of eros. What follows is an elaboration of this point with an account of eros as intermediate (metaxu) between opposites (201e8–2b5) – for example, beautiful and ugly, good and base, knowledge and ignorance, divine and mortal, which culminates in an account of eros as an intermediary daimon (202e5–3a8), and which is then given further expression in the story of Poros and Penia. Once the story is completed, Diotima returns to her central point about the metaxu with the example of those who philosophise (204b1–b5), explaining that it is due to the characteristics inherited from Poros and Penia that Eros is in this intermediate state (b6–7). Elaborating the metaxu structures this entire section.²⁸

The notion of the metaxu requires unpacking. It could mean that eros is a combination of opposite qualities, or it could mean that eros oscillates between opposite qualities, such that a desiring agent is never properly determined by either.²⁹ In the story of Poros and Penia, the suggestion is that Eros is intermediate in a dynamic sense, which is to say that he fluctuates between a variety of opposite characteristics; eros mediates between opposites (201e8–2b5). For example, from his mother Eros has need as his constant companion, but in virtue of his father Eros is a resourceful schemer after the beautiful and the good. Eros’ nature is neither that of a mortal nor an immortal; rather he lives and flourishes whenever he finds resources but then dies again because those resources are always slipping away from him (203e4–5), though he has the ability to ‘come back to life again’ (203e3). From this description, it seems that Eros at least temporarily manifests the properties of the one parent, then that of the other, and so on. The story of Eros is evidently designed to explicate human eros, and it suggests that eros is a dynamic experience. This coheres well with the description of mortal life in a constant state of flux and change (207b5–8c5). According to this, moral beings are indeterminate creatures, unlike the gods who have a fixed identity that persists through time (208a8). Described as the best helper for human nature (212b4–5), eros is the engine, or energy of self-constitution, which assists in the task of self-determination. This occurs through creative effort, which is geared towards reproducing the value seen in the world and to capturing it in a life of one’s own, as a parent, poet, legislator, or philosopher, depending on how one conceives of value and the creative efforts one deploys to secure it. This explains the emphasis on stability and fixity at the apex of the ascent (211a1–b7). We are seeking a creative environment – a beauty – which inspires an act of self-creation that speaks not only to our aspiration for the good but for stable determination in a world of flux. This is the world in which eros not only operates but brings to our attention in the experience of desire, as we sense that lack and neediness, coupled with a forceful urge to overcome it.

Viewed against the backdrop of the notion of the metaxu, the interaction between Socrates and Diotima not only exemplifies the interaction between Poros and Penia but the complexity of eros’ nature in the delivery of this speech. Any collapse of gendered polarities into a more fluid picture is very much to the point. The upshot is not that desiring agents exhibit a kind of psychic hermaphroditism in the experience of desire but rather that they dynamically fluctuate between any perceived binary, including that between genders.³⁰ Socrates is both the ‘beautiful’ student who allows Diotima to ‘give birth’ to wisdom (the speech of which Socrates is the recipient), and Socrates, in turn, due to encountering this ‘beautiful’ wisdom gives birth to wisdom of his own (dialectical enquiries of which Diotima’s theory gives the inspiration). Are these gendered? Not any more than they were earlier, where attention to the language suggests it is decidedly genderqueer (e.g., 206d–e). The lesson from Diotima is that eros is a non-binary facilitator and we create ourselves anew as desiring beings who are ‘self-determining and fully participate in the development of’ whatever self-determination we suppose will deliver eudaimonia.³¹ Though the discussion of the metaxu is general enough to accommodate gender binaries, notice that they are not explicitly included in this list of beautiful and ugly, good and base, knowledge and ignorance. Perhaps gender categories exist, just as knowledge and ignorance, or beauty and ugliness, but if so, how they are conceived remains an open question. Or it could be the case that they are not included in this list precisely because, unlike the good and the bad, or the mortal and the divine, gendered characteristics are not objective or relevant opposites. Or they might be objective (like ‘tall, short’) but not relevant, which is the important criterion here (cf. the Republic 5. 455d–e). Whatever the answer to that question, eros’ relationship to (real or perceived) binaries is surely clear; desiring agents will never be determined by them. The genderqueer vocabulary and portrayal of Socrates and Diotima works beautifully to illustrate that point.

The determination eventually advocated in the ascent, where eros is envisaged to reach its telos, is markedly inclusive (anthropoi 211e2, 212al, b7; thnetes, 211e3) and beyond gender. The cultural pursuits of the Highest Mysteries are neither shaped nor determined in any significant way by gender. Diotima is not sure whether Socrates can follow them, but that is not because he is a man who has failed to grasp ‘female’ truths but because they are difficult, and it is not clear how far he has come at that point. The ‘entry criteria’ such as they are, concern whether one is willing and able to engage in the reflective activity characteristic of the ascent, which involves a turn away from the body (kataphronein, 210b5). Lest we suppose that the denigration of the body brings with it a denigration of the female,³² it should be noted that there is no association of the female with the body here: all human beings are pregnant in both body and soul (pantes anthropoi, 206c1–2), where that means, on the psychic level, that women no less than men carry ‘wisdom and the rest of virtue’ (209c). Those (presumably men) who are pregnant in body and turn to women to produce children are denigrated not for turning to women but for doing so with the sole purpose of physical reproduction in mind, supposing that this will bring them memory and eudaimonia for all time to come (208e5–6). The privileged relationships are not gendered, entered into by gendered beings, on account of their gender difference. It may be true that the disdain for the body shown in Diotima’s speech is indicative of somatophobia, as Spelman argues (1982), on the grounds that bodily identity is not indicative of who we are, but this is not (as Spelman argues) tethered to misogyny because there is no association of the female with the bodily here. As she rightly argues later, ‘it doesn’t make any difference, ultimately, whether we have a woman’s body or a man’s body’; or rather, it does not make any difference for these purposes, or for ethical evaluation more generally.³³ That is not to say that Plato was unaware of the disfiguring effects for society as a whole that existing categorisations place upon those who are physically capable of bearing children; Republic 5 is evidence to the contrary. It is to say that in this text at least, only those who are enslaved to the body have to take heed of gender difference (208e5–6). Those who suppose that eudaimonia is satisfied in physical reproduction have to adhere to a gender binary, for the simple fact that in this instance at least it is indeed the case that ‘a woman bears and a man begets’; but if we move beyond the body then we are liberated from attaching such relevance to this simple fact; it becomes as relevant as the fact that some people have hair and some are bald (Rep. 454c). The body can be played with, along with whatever gender markers others may bring to that: Socrates can ‘beautify’ himself for Agathon (174a7); he can show endurance and hardiness through his body if he chooses (220a); he can use his body to pursue or to be pursued. Do we wish to gender that behaviour? And why? There is little value attached to the body or to any of the gender markers we (or the ancient Greeks) may apply to it. Since the body continues to invite the constraints of gendered categories, this is surely all to the good. If the question is not ‘Does this text reflect female experience in the use of Diotima?’, but ‘Does Diotima assist not just the liberation of women (however conceived), but all those who question the relevance of gendered categories?’ (of which the non-binary movement is now the stellar example), then Diotima is surely an ally.³⁴

Conclusion

It is a curiosity of the age that we are being invited to reflect on whether we can identify with the authors we study. Perhaps this only seems curious from the vantage of a philosophy characterised by strangeness and provocation. If prompted to reflect as a woman (conceived by my culture and time), then I find that identifying with Plato’s dialogues is not difficult. One can find recognition of the experiences our own age continues to gender as female (birth, pregnancy, midwifery). The drive to acknowledge a care-centred component of rationality associated with feminist thinkers (Gilligan [1982]; Kittay and Meyers [1987]) is not news to any reader of Plato, for whom caring interpersonal relationships form a crucial part of his ethical outlook.³⁵ And the ‘morality of responsibility’, associated with Gilligan (1982) is foreshadowed in the ethics of the Republic, in which philosophers have responsibilities to others they would otherwise not have had because they stand in a relationship of friendship and care for those others.³⁶ Membership of a community plays a constitutive role in self-identity.³⁷ While both Plato and Gilligan value an ethics of care and responsibility to others in our communities, unlike Gilligan, Plato does not take this trait to be gendered. For those who resist attaching such weight to the gendering of these laudable characteristics, it is the provocative Plato with whom one identifies, who provides a liberating dialogical space that recognises the social markers of his time, ‘outs’ them as mere contingent playthings of the age time, shows sensitivity to the political and philosophical dangers their associations can bring, and invites us to conceive new imaginative possibilities.³⁸ Perhaps this overlooks the casual sexism that litters certain dialogues.³⁹ Arguably, this is the price we pay for the acknowledgement that Plato meets interlocutors on their own terms in these ‘situated’ dialogical spaces (Phdr. 269d–74b); this means using the language and associations of his time and place. As for philosophical commitments, more persistent are accounts of virtue as gender neutral, a gender-neutral soul, and an inclusive appeal to all human beings to take up philosophy. From that perspective, why there continues to be so much investment in Diotima’s gender is one question Plato invites us to entertain.⁴⁰