Aspasia and Socrates: A Debate Interrupted by Time
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The Debate of Socrates and Aspasia.
MONSIAU, Nicolas-André. Le débat de Socrate et Aspasie, século XIX. Óleo sobre tela. Museu Nacional de Versalhes, França. Disponível em: https://images.openai.com/thumbnails/f5f8a08c271d39132e70fec984fc6ace.jpeg.
The neoclassical painter Nicolas-André Monsiau's Le débat de Socrate et Aspasie, painted in the nineteenth century and now on display at the National Museum of Versailles, takes us back to fifth-century BCE Athens. We enter as witnesses to a rare philosophical scene, rather than as observers of the polis in the manner ordinarily taught by professors of history, political science, or philosophy. A woman, Aspasia of Miletus, debates Socrates, the emblem of Western reason par excellence. The painting suspends history. On one side stands a man who left no written work, yet whose memory became foundational to the philosophical tradition. On the other stands a woman who also left no texts and whom history hesitated between silencing and defaming. And between the two is a moment: the debate.
The image itself is a provocation. In the language proper to art, it gives the lie to the centuries-long exclusion of women from places of learning. Yes, if we pay attention to their works, we see that Plato and Sophocles did not take the position that would come to dominate the West. Ancient Greece was deeply sexist. Yet if we look, we can find places where there is some room to breathe. Aspasia, lover and interlocutor of Pericles, teacher of rhetoric, foreigner in Athens, and target of moral attacks, appears here as a thinker on equal terms with Socrates, rather than as the shadow of a great man. She looks, she speaks, she argues. She is a voice in her own right, beyond any decorative role or place as a muse. Monsiau's painting is more than an exercise in historical reconstruction. It is an anachronistic critique and, like every well-aimed anachronistic critique, it strikes us in the present. Why are there no women in the first pages of philosophy? Why did the Academy, both Plato's and the one we inherited from it, develop as a male space, and why does this persist?
Although Plato defends intellectual equality between men and women in A República (Politeia) and proposes that women guardians receive the same philosophical education as men, the Academy he founded seems to have counted few women among its members. It is hardly surprising that Aspasia remained a peripheral figure, remembered by Xenophon and Plato only as a character in dialogue or for her supposed beauty and shrewdness. We know the names of two or three women who studied at the Academy in the founder's day. But the structure of Greek paideia systematically excluded women from the public logos. In Monsiau's painting, imagination undoes that exclusion. The debate is under way, the place of learning is reconfigured, and the woman is present and belongs there. This pictorial gesture has ethical and political resonance. Perhaps unwittingly, the image anticipates the contemporary debate on women's place in philosophy, in spaces of symbolic power, and in academic institutions. When we see Aspasia debating Socrates, we are compelled to ask how many others were silenced before they could speak. How many “Aspasias” were buried by the tradition we ironically inherited from a man who wrote nothing?
The lesson of this beautiful painting concerns the present. Aspasia's presence on the canvas obliges us to reconsider the canon and break with the idea of a philosophy made exclusively by and for men. The exclusion of women from philosophy and from the Academy itself (after the period of its founding) is a product of history, rather than nature or necessity. Like any historical construction, it can and should be undone. Ultimately, Monsiau's painting poses a counterfactual. What if this scene had been commonplace at the Academy? What if women had never been relegated to the domestic, the private, and the nonphilosophical? The painting invites us to imagine a different history of philosophy, in which the debate between Socrates and Aspasia was the beginning of a tradition, rather than an exception. Socrates died some fourteen or fifteen years before the Academy was founded. Surely he would have smiled and delighted in the conversation.