X is for Xanthippe

Even if you don’t read much philosophy, you may well have heard some extracts from Plato’s work.  One of my favourites is Gyges Ring, the tale of a shepherd who picks up a ring that gives him the ability to become invisible, not just physically, but also in peoples’ memories.  It offers an ideal starting point for a discussion power and manipulations, and the extent to which choices are dominated by self-interest.  Or another, which some call The City of Pigs, provides an imagined account of how villages grew in sophistication from simple self-sufficient farming communities to places with “sofas, and tables, and other furniture; also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in each variety”.  It too was a story about self-interest and greed, an introduction to exploring needs and wants, and our desire for more.  I have used both of these many times, in seminars and in roundtable discussions.

However, the story most know concerns the men in the cave.  The set-up is ingenious, and, like many philosophers’ thought experiments, somewhat unusual.  There is a long cave, sloping down into the ground.  Near the end of the cave, and facing away from the entrance, are a number of men (no women, and we will return to women and this story later). The men are shackled so they can only look towards images on a wall at the end of the cave.  Behind them is a walkway, and behind that, a large fire.  However, given their constraints, all they can see is the shadows of people and objects moving along the walkway, and the sound of voices (not always clear).  As Plato explains, all they know of the world are sounds and those flickering images on the wall.

Now, we are asked to imagine what would happen if one of these prisoners were to escape from his confinement.  As he turned around, the sight would be bewildering.  The world he knew has been changed, as he can see the objects and people moving on the walkway, and the light (from what he would discover was a huge fire) illuminating them from behind.  It would take time for to recover from the visual shock of the light from the fire, and to accept that the images he had seen before were not the real world.  As the Plato’s story continues, the freed prisoner walks further up the cave, towards the entrance.  If the first sight he had seen was confusing, hurting his eyes and his brain, then the light shining from outside the cave would be even more painful.  Eventually, passing out through the entrance he sees the external world, and begins to understand this is the ‘real world’, and that everything he had seen in the cave had been illusory.

Plato makes good use of this story, and I really enjoy his playing on the theme of ‘seeing the light’.  We can imagine that once this man has grasped what is going on, he thinks about what he used to believe.  Plato suggests he would feel sorry for his fellow prisoners, now he understands their situation.  It’s unlikely he would want to go back to where he had been, but Plato argues that ‘having seen the light’ he might be persuaded to return, and attempt to help his fellows comprehend the reality of their situation, even though they would have every reason to reject his explanations, and probably would ignore him.  I could continue, but the point is clear:  Plato’s allegory is a way for him to explain the role of philosophers in his ideal ‘republic’:  they would be the ones able make sense of the ‘real’ world, and they would be the rulers in his republic, based on their enlightenment and insight, and, from this, their ability to rule in an ideal society.

As I have already said, this story is relatively well known, although the details are richer and more interesting than my brief summary suggests.  What can we add, apart from the fact it’s all rather masculine, with a slight flavour of homoerotic bondage!  It could lead us to ask: How about an alternative view of this story?  To do so, we might make one addition to the  usual characters in Plato’s dialogues, Xanthippe.  Xanthippe was Socrates wife, although you might have missed that fact since she is only mentioned once by Plato, in the Phaedo, on the day Socrates drank the hemlock. “We went in then and found Socrates just released from his fetters and Xanthippe—you know her—with his little son in her arms, sitting beside him. Now when Xanthippe saw us, she cried out and said the kind of thing that women always do say: “Oh Socrates, this is the last time now that your friends will speak to you or you to them.” And Socrates glanced at Crito and said, “Crito, let somebody take her home.  And some of Crito’s people took her away wailing and beating her breast.” [i]  Incidentally, Plato wasn’t there to see this, so, like all of the Phaedo, this is a second-hand account at best.

With little written about her at the time, Xanthippe is said to have been younger than Socrates, possible by 40 years.  There’s some evidence she was his second wife.  A couple of references to her suggests she was argumentative rather than complaisant, and it was claimed Socrates liked her for that reason:  Socrates is said to have revealed “he chose her precisely because of her argumentative spirit  …   I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else”. [ii]  If what we know about Xanthippe sounds like a collection of sexist nonsense made up after the time, I suspect it is, especially as some of these later reports describe her  as a ‘shrew’.   I would prefer to take the view she was young and feisty, willing to say what she thought, quite likely since she was the daughter of an Athenian aristocrat.

We don’t need to change the core story of the prisoners in the cave, but rather imagine that Socrates has gone home to tell Xanthippe about his parable.  The discussion leads in a different direction.  Xanthippe suggests a man, after wandering around outside in the sunshine (and ‘preening himself’), would go to home to eat the dinner his wife had prepared.  She points out that coming inside from the bright day, this man would have difficulty seeing what was going on, both literally as his eyes adjust to low illumination, and more broadly with little understanding of the family issues, household management, the education of children, etc.

Having reset the scene, Xanthippe explores friendship, and distinguishes two types, those of the market, and those of the household.  Pretty smartly, she is able to persuade Socrates that the friendships of the marketplace, out there in the sunshine, are transitory, ephemeral, while those household are lasting: “moreover it is to the place of darkness that you blessed ones, who moon about all day without an obol in your pocket, must return for the things you require”!  Socrates is forced to admit there is a ‘grain of truth’ in Xanthippe’s points.  She goes on to suggest it is in the cave where not just necessities but real friendships flourish.  Continuing, she suggests those men who go out into the sunlight are the least well equipped to deal with real life ‘in the dark’:  they can’t see what is going on, and have no understanding of what happens.  Socrates concludes “I cannot help feeling you have taken the parable in another sense from the one I intended”. Just so!  In case you are wondering, this is a brief summary of a hilarious fiction: Xanthippe’s Republic, by Roger Scruton, the first chapter of his Xanthippic Dialogues.[iii]

Once he started on his philosophical fiction, it was clear Roger Scruton couldn’t stop.  Late in this first dialogue he brings in a chilling note, as Xanthippe explains where she sees Socrates’ Republic will inevitably lead, with his philosophers becoming increasingly concerned with “the higher interests of the state”.  She suggests this will mean concern for individuals will disappear, as their focus will be on loftier abstractions, and, as a result, “In the name of the people, therefore, they may quite reasonably destroy whomsoever and howsoever many they choose”. [iv]

Gotcha!  Scruton’s book is witty, ingenious, an easy read.  But it is much more than that.  It is a cautionary tale, warning us about the dangers of giving too much control to government, and the essential importance of life without state mandated rules and regulations.  In a nice inversion of a Platonic dialogue, Scruton is on the side of his Xanthippe, and Socrates is used to represent government, rulers, and an inevitable shift from democracy to state dictatorship.  The game is given away in the last two pages of this dialogue when amusing repartee is set aside, and we’re offered a traditional conservative defence of freedom from government.  Libertarianism rules!

Another dialogue in the collection concerns Xanthippe’s Laws.  This is a confrontation between Xanthippe and Plato, in which, both cleverly and very funnily, Xanthippe takes apart many of Plato’s views about an ideal society, the ‘philosopher kings’ and more.  Plato is cast as a rather uncertain, credulous character, with an ongoing desire to write down everything he hears (from whom else did he get his dialogues?).  In this account, he keeps interrupting Xanthippe to ask if she has a spare tablet and stylus, but she doesn’t!  Pushing Plato on to explain what Socrates has been saying, she mimics Socrates use of questioning to help shape the discussion.  Xanthippe uses an example, an imagined state she calls Magnesia, with a female legislator, Aspasia.  Scruton likes having fun.  Like all good novelists, he cleaves to the truth as far as he can.  There was an ancient region of Greece, on the eastern side of the country, called Magnesia; as for Aspasia, she was the lover and partner of Pericles, and according to some sources, Pericles was a teacher of Socrates!  And today, I have to add magnesia is also a laxative, Aspasia an American spa and salon brand, food for the body, not the soul:  I’m certain Roger Scruton knew all this!!

In one part of this dialogue, Xanthippe is exploring the issue of price.  She imagines commerce going on in secret, so much so that no-one knows the price of anything. “Suppose a law is passed, to establish the price of grain.  If the price is set too low, the grain will disappear [only to re-emerge] exchanging at ever-higher prices; if the price is set too high, the grain will rot away uneaten.  But what is the correct price?  There is only one  answer:  the price that men will pay for grain, and the price that they will take for it, when free to buy and sell … nobody will know the real price of anything.” [v]  If only we had these dialogues, we wouldn’t have had to wait for Adam Smith.  Once again, Scruton is using Xanthippe as a counter to Plato, although he allows her to defend Socrates, often by explaining he hadn’t understood what she had told him!

Xanthippic Dialogues is clever fiction, quick fire, amusing, and executed in a style Plato would have recognised immediately.  Packed with hilarious exchanges, it achieves exactly what Plato did in his dialogues, leading you through a discussion to conclusions, in this case ones Mill and Paine would have supported.  True to Plato’s style, in the dialogue she often asks, “Would you not agree?”  It is very easy to do so, and Scruton has achieved exactly what his fiction set out to achieve, to sell an ideology that free market libertarians would endorse with enthusiasm.

Who was Roger Scruton?  His first degree was in philosophy, and his PhD was in aesthetics.  Living in France in the 1960’s, he was there during 1968 student protests.  Seeing students overturn cars, smash windows and tear up cobblestones for the first time in his life, he “felt a surge of political anger”  “I suddenly realised I was on the other side. What I saw was an unruly mob of self-indulgent middle-class hooligans. When I asked my friends what they wanted, what were they trying to achieve, all I got back was this ludicrous Marxist gobbledegook.  I was disgusted by it, and thought there must be a way back to the defence of western civilization against these things. That’s when I became a conservative. I knew I wanted to conserve things rather than pull them down” [vi]  He became a truly conservative conservative.

His values have been evident in many areas of his work, and when it comes to art, he has proven to be a one-man bulldozer!  He is nothing if not elitist.  His views shine through an article he wrote on fake works and high art.  At the outset he announces, “A high culture is the self-consciousness of a society. It contains the works of art, literature, scholarship and philosophy that establish a shared frame of reference among educated people.  High culture is a precarious achievement, and endures only if it is underpinned by a sense of tradition, and by a broad endorsement of the surrounding social norms. When those things evaporate, as inevitably happens, high culture is superseded by a culture of fakes.”  The wording gives the game away:  there is high culture, and there are fakes, leaving no room for popular culture, or the culture of marginalized groups.  For him, only the culture of the intellectual elite matters, with its refined and narrow sensibilities.  I wonder what he would think of Beyoncé or Lady Gaga today, whose video music offers an accessible experience which we could compare to the time Mozart’s operas were first performed.  It wasn’t high culture then, nor should it be exclusionary today.

What makes his views all the more frustrating is that he often hits the nail on the head.  If Jeff Koons wants to manufacture balloon dogs and flowers, it isn’t art, I would agree.  It’s merely decoration, a splash of colour to make an entranceway less dull.  Yes, Žižek is a sloppy, self-promoting thinker whose loose writing is obfuscating and largely meaningless. [vii]  Yet Scruton sees art as part of privilege, a world to which you can be admitted if you can demonstrate the appropriate language and analysis. [viii]  You join a club of those who see the world ‘the right way’.  But what did Groucho Marx say? “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”  Scruton was an elitist.  Hear him on art and beauty to get the message. [ix]

Roger Scruton was an intellectual.  The story of Xanthippe is based on scholarship, the daughter of an aristocratic family, and said to have been clever and argumentative in her own right.  I doubt she would have been a libertarian, but it makes for some amusing dialogues.  Scruton portrayed her well in another way, quick to cut down those who preen themselves, mooning about, avoiding life’s realities.  Careful Roger, she’s a good practical observer that Xanthippe!

[i] Plato, Phaedo, 60

[ii] Xenophon, Symposium, 2.10.  A somewhat chauvinistic remark?

[iii] Roger Scruton, Xanthippic Dialogues, Sinclair Stephenson, 1993. This dialogue pp 11-38

[iv] Ibid, page 37

[v] Ibid, page 129

[vi] Quoted by Nicholas Wroe, Thinking for England, The Guardian 28 October,

[vii] Roger Scruton, Clown Prince of the Revolution, City Journal, 29 September 2016

[viii] Roger Scruton, The True, The Good and The Beautiful, a lecture at The Wheatley Institution, Brigham Young University, April 6, 2017.  The emphasis is mine.

[ix] https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/why-beauty-matters/

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