Plato

Plato is presented in Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis as a figure who complicates any simple account of the philosophical tradition’s treatment of women. His thought offers both a myth that takes sexual difference for granted and an unusual proposal for women’s education and public participation. The contrast makes him less a straightforward champion or opponent than a revealing example of the limits and possibilities within ancient thought.

Plato and the Philosophical Tradition

De Beauvoir places Plato among the men whose accounts of women must be read with attention to their position as both judges and parties. Male writers repeatedly presented men’s superiority as natural or eternal, and philosophical authority helped turn that presumed superiority into an apparently justified order. Plato’s own place in this tradition is not identical to that of every thinker she discusses: he is also described as an exception to the common restriction of women’s education and civic role. His appearance in the argument therefore shows why the tradition cannot be reduced to a single, undifferentiated position.

The central problem for De Beauvoir is not merely whether a philosopher praises women or assigns them an inferior status. Claims of superiority, inferiority, and equality can each obscure the concrete social conditions being discussed. Plato’s ideas are considered within this broader warning: isolated propositions about women do not, by themselves, settle what women’s social position is or how it has been made to seem natural. The analysis instead distinguishes philosophical argument from the inherited arrangements that arguments may justify, challenge, or leave unexplained.

The Myth of the Divided Beings

In the Platonic myth De Beauvoir recounts, the original human beings included men, women, and androgynes. Each was double-faced, had four arms and four legs, and consisted of two bodies joined together. The gods later divided these beings as one might split eggs in two, leaving each half to seek its other half. The gods subsequently determined that new human beings would be created through the coupling of unlike halves.

The story gives an account of love as longing for a lost counterpart, but it does not explain the origin of sexual differentiation. The sexes are already present among the original beings before the division, and the account takes their difference as a premise rather than deriving it. De Beauvoir uses this limit to distinguish an explanation of desire from an explanation of why humanity is divided into sexes in the first place. The myth makes union meaningful while leaving the division that makes such union possible unexplained.

Difference, Reproduction, and Contingency

Plato’s story is set alongside broader questions about whether sexual differentiation is necessary to reproduction. The existence of different reproductive cells does not, by itself, require species to be divided into male and female individuals: hermaphroditic species also reproduce, through self-fertilization or cross-fertilization. Competing claims that separate sexes represent either an evolutionary advance or a primitive condition depend on contestable theories. What can be affirmed is that both reproductive arrangements exist in nature; the division of individuals into males and females is presented as contingent, not as an inevitable consequence of reproduction.

This distinction also frames De Beauvoir’s discussion of philosophical explanations. Aristotle does not supply a convincing account of why active and passive principles must belong to different kinds of individuals, while Saint Thomas calls woman inessential from a masculine point of view. Hegel gives sexuality a logical role in the individual’s relation to the species, but De Beauvoir argues that reproduction could occur without sexual differentiation, or between individuals of the same type. Sexuality may carry significance for human existence without being proved necessary by that significance. Plato’s myth belongs to this larger pattern: it gives sexual difference an evocative place in an account of love, but does not establish that the difference is necessary.

Women’s Education and Public Life

In De Beauvoir’s account of classical Greek society, women were generally confined to the household and denied a voice in public affairs. The contrast is visible in the scene from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in which a woman’s question about public matters is met with the command to be silent and return to weaving. Against this prevailing attitude, Plato proposed admitting a council of matrons to the administration of the Republic and giving girls a liberal education. De Beauvoir identifies these proposals as exceptional, and notes that they provoked Aristophanes’ mockery.

The contrast matters because Plato’s proposals challenge the customary assumption that political responsibility and education belong to men alone. Yet the evidence does not turn that challenge into a claim that he fully escaped the limits of his intellectual world. His myth presupposes the sexual difference it depicts, while his proposals open public and educational possibilities that the dominant Greek practice resisted. In De Beauvoir’s account, Plato’s significance lies in that tension: he is an exception within a culture that restricted women, and a philosopher whose explanation of love does not answer the more basic question of sexual difference.