Irigaray and Plato – Unlikely Bedfellows

ABSTRACT

Luce Irigaray has devoted considerable energy to wrestling with some key figures in twentieth-century phenomenology. Since the topic for this special issue is the relationship between phenomenology and ancient philosophy, I plan in the following to look at Irigaray’s reading of Plato, given the centrality of carnality, sexuation and embodiment, not just to her own project, but the manner in which she invokes the same notions as part of her critique of Plato along with a number of twentieth-century phenomenologists.

KEYWORDS:

• Irigaray
• Plato
• phenomenology
• Socrates
• Eros

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous referees and to the editors for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 14–15.

2 Anne van Leeuwen offers a succinct summary of Irigaray’s views in this regard:

thinking is reduced to the status of monologue: the thinking or speaking the same way, in the same language to the other of the same … To understand language dia-logically would require the existence of two beings, two kinds of logic, two ways of thinking, two ways of speaking and listening that could not be subsumed within one unifying, synoptic whole. Yet it is precisely these conditions of genuine dialogue that this univocal interpretation of identity cannot support.

The mono-logical model of thinking and Being, this mono-logical phenomenological ontology is decisive, according to Irigaray, for the elision of carnality from the history of Western metaphysics. Van Leeuwen, “Sexuate Difference, Ontological Difference: Between Irigaray and Heidegger”, 119–20.

3 The inspiration for this characterization is derived from some of Stanley Rosen’s provocative insights and interpretations of Socrates in his book on Plato’s Symposium. See Rosen, Plato’s Symposium.

4 Dominic Scott’s recent study of Plato’s Meno makes a compelling case for this type of interpretive approach. See Scott, Plato’s Meno.

5 I am inclined to agree with Jacob Klein’s salutary warning on this issue. See a discussion of this along with Klein’s view in footnote 21 below.

6 Adriana Cavarero’s fascinating interpretation of Plato’s Symposium is relevant here. Despite the richness of Cavarero’s interpretation in other regards, her approach to Plato remains somewhat flatfooted in that she simply conflates Socrates’ recounting of Diotima’s apparent advocacy for Platonic idealism with Plato’s own views in this regard. So, on the one hand, Plato is credited with wanting somehow to retrieve the maternal – she describes his position as “transitional, since it does not emphasize the figure of woman as castrated male, and almost suggests the opposite, namely a sort of ‘womb envy’ which manifests itself in the masculine mimesis of maternity”. Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, 103. Nevertheless, Cavarero’s account lacks the subtlety and nuance of Irigaray’s approach in one important regard. Irigaray notices that Diotima appears to betray the early promise of her account and reverts instead to a rather anaemic idealism. Irigaray further notes that this is a version of Diotima’s teaching recounted by an older Socrates who may well be misrepresenting her words. And, as I argue in this paper, we simply must take some of the other dramatic and rhetorical features of the dialogue into account. As a youth, Socrates failed to understand Diotima’s teaching. As an older man, he states confidently that he is “certain” of that which he failed to grasp as a younger man – a rather bizarre proclamation from someone who normally professes his philosophical ignorance. Finally, the account of erotics he unfolds appears to dovetail with the views of the unerotic philosopher which we find again in Phaedo.

7 To borrow a compelling characterization of an aspect of the dialogues from Scott – this is where we might see Plato as putting the historical Socrates “on trial”. See Scott. Plato’s Meno.

8 Wendy Brown’s interesting interpretation of Socrates and Plato intersects with my own views in places. However, for the most part, her characterization of Socrates as an interlocutor is at odds with my own. Brown underlines what she takes to be the “effeminate” nature of Socrates as interlocutor in the dialogues where I would argue that by and large we find Socrates to be abrasive and, as Rosen opines, “cruel”. See Brown “‘Supposing Truth Were a Woman … ’: Plato’s Subversion of Masculine Discourse”, 594–616.

9 Granted, one could argue that it is Diotima herself who is guilty of this exsanguination of Eros. Cavarero sees Diotima as a mouthpiece for Plato’s idealism and thus recapitulates the orthodox approach to Plato in this regard. Irigaray leaves the door open for some of the moves I make in this paper, however, by underlining the fact that this is the account reported by Socrates which doesn’t quite chime with the more promising version of the account attributed to Diotima earlier on in the dialogue.

10 Symposium, Parmenides, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Critias and the Laws are all worth recalling here.

11 See footnote 21 for further discussion of this.

12 For an interesting discussion of Socrates’ views on art and poetry, see the introduction to Stanley Rosen’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. Rosen, Plato’s Republic: A Study.

13 Again, it is worth noting that these are characterizations which are at odds with the depiction of Socrates offered by Brown in the article cited above.

14 Rosen, Plato’s Symposium, xvii.

15 Irigaray. An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 26.

16 Rosen, Plato’s Symposium, xx.

17 See Plato, Republic, 540e3–541a6.

18 We don’t have the space to develop this line of thought further by looking at Irigaray’s highly original and provocative interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. However, and without doing justice to the originality and richness of Irigaray’s interpretation, I would argue that once one distinguishes again between Plato and the character of Socrates in Plato’s Republic, the same interpretive strategy we have been pursuing in this paper can be applied to Irigaray’s criticisms of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman.

19 We find further references to the importance of correct opinions in both Meno and the Republic. To complicate matters further, Socrates, who at times concedes the efficacy of correct opinions, continually reverts to his insistence on absolute knowledge and exact definitions in the same dialogues.

20 Socrates begins to speak of “life” and “generation” and insists that life can only have come from death – it must have originated in its opposite state. We don’t have the time or space to examine this argument in depth here. Suffice it to say that it is a rather unconvincing argument at best.

21 Shaun O’Dwyer challenges Irigaray’s criticisms of Plato in a 2006 article in Hypatia. (See O’Dwyer, “The Unacknowledged Socrates in the Works of Luce Irigaray”, 28–44.) However, his views in terms of the shortcomings of Irigaray’s interpretations don’t really converge with my own interpretation at all since O’Dwyer wants to argue that Irigaray’s criticisms of Socrates should instead be seen as applying to Plato’s mature, metaphysically loaded thought where the earlier “Socratic” dialogues remain immune from Irigaray’s criticisms. The argument here is motivated by a more or less unquestioned subscription to the orthodox reading of the dialogues as tracking the intellectual development of Plato from the “early” Socratic dialogues, where Plato imitates the philosophical method of his teacher, to the “later” dialogues where Plato presents his own views. O’Dwyer concedes at one point that it is not uncontroversial to try and distinguish between Socratic and Platonic thought on the basis of the dialogues in the way that he does. However, in the end, on the basis of a rather reductive reading of a passage from Aristotle, he takes it as given that the difference between Platonic and Socratic thought can be construed in precisely the manner that he has already presumed to be true. In distinguishing between the Socrates of the “early” dialogues and the Socrates of the “Platonic” dialogues commentators (including O’Dwyer) tend to inadvertently block the continuity between dialogues that are artificially segregated into “early”, “middle” and “late” periods. Moreover, failing to highlight that continuity and the way that some of the early dialogues lead to certain kinds of developments in later dialogues blocks some crucial interpretive possibilities. The Socratic insistence on precise definitions and certainty is something that we can see the same character probe in more depth in other dialogues. The middle dialogues can then be fruitfully read as teasing out the implications of Socrates’ thought and indeed subverting it. In that way, Symposium, Phaedo and Meno can be read as critiques of the idealism which Socrates’ early insistence on precise, universal definitions leads to. Otherwise we do Plato something of a gross injustice in that we subject his dialogues to rather literal interpretations and assume that Plato himself simply had not experienced the kind idealistic epiphany in the early dialogues that some commentators believe he had undergone by the time of his mature period. With respect to the chronological question, that is, the question as to whether or not the designations “early”, “middle”, “late” signify a corresponding “development” in Plato’s thought, I am inclined toward the view of commentators who have called into question the philosophical significance of this system of demarcation. Jacob Klein, in his famous commentary on Plato’s Meno, urges us not “to become obsessed by the view that the chronology of the Platonic dialogues implies a ‘development’ in Plato’s own thinking and that an insight into this development contributes in a significant way to the understanding of the dialogues themselves;” Klein, A Commentary on Plato’s Meno, 9.

22 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 24

23 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 25

24 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 27.

25 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 31.

26 Rosen. Plato’s Symposium, xviii.

27 Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 32.