Deslauriers, Marguerite. Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics. New York / Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022, xvi + 354 pp.

What is the philosophical significance of the biological defect (anapêria) that Aristotle appears to attribute to ‘female nature’ (tên thêlutêta phusikên) in the Generation of Animals (VI 4, 775a15-16)? Did Aristotle believe that the “natural coldness” of female bodies somehow causes the intellectual or moral deficiencies that render women unfit for the activities of political life? Can we reconcile Aristotle’s claim that women are inferior to men in body and in soul with his arguments for their value?

In Marguerite Deslauriers’ authoritative new book, these and related questions are subjected to inspired scrutiny, yielding the best and most comprehensive account of Aristotle’s theory of sexual difference to date. Her aim is to connect Aristotle’s infamous remarks about the sexes in the biological and metaphysical works to his arguments in the Politics for women’s subordinate role in the household and the state. Women are natural subjects, claims Aristotle, since their deliberative faculty is “without authority” (akuron) (Pol. I 13, 1260a14). Unlike natural slaves, women should not be ruled despotically, since they do not lack the capacity for rational deliberation altogether. Nor is their deliberative capacity immature, as that of their sons. But they lack the capacity for authoritative practical reason distinctive of freeborn men, who should rule their wives “with political and kingly rule (politikên kai basilikên <archên>,” “as intellect (nous) rules appetite (orexis)” (Pol. I 5, 1254b5-6).

Deslauriers’ inquiry is distinctive in that it asks questions that Aristotle did not ask himself, answering them on the basis of scattered remarks in the metaphysical, biological and political works. The achievement lies not only in shrewd analyses of individual passages, of which there are many, but the way in which different passages bearing on the main theme – sexual difference – are juxtaposed and brought into fruitful contact with one another throughout the book. By reading Aristotle’s natural and practical philosophy side by side, Deslauriers makes Aristotle’s account of sexual difference ‘light up’ as if she were rubbing tinder-sticks together. The result is an illuminating book that casts its light far and wide.

Deslauriers rejects attempts to interpret Aristotle’s claims in Politics I as an indictment of women’s intellects as inferior or as an attribution of weakness of will. Aristotle accepts that women are men’s equals as far as practical reason is concerned, and hence natural partners in deliberation, but maintains that they cannot make decisions (prohaireseis) on their own, Deslauriers claims. While Aristotle’s analysis of the female as a principle of generation across sexually dimorphous species likewise treats the female as inferior and subordinate to the male principle – all the while maintaining that it is better that the superior principle be separated from the inferior – there is no attempt in the Politics to trace women’s inferiority back to the coldness of female nature, nor to base women’s subordinate role in the household and state on claims about the female’s subordinate role in reproduction or the physiological deficiency in vital heat that underpins it. The question is whether Aristotle’s silence about the psycho-physical causes of women’s political subordination is merely pragmatic, reflecting his wish not to be side-tracked by biological considerations that are tangential to his inquiry in the Politics (cf. EN I 13, 1102a25-26), or whether the subordinate status of women has nothing to do with their status as female animals.

The book is divided into four chapters. In the first, Deslauriers surveys the views of early Greek philosophers and poets, who unlike Aristotle tended to take a bleak view of sexual difference: “Prior to Aristotle, most discussions of the sexes suggest that it would be better if there were no sexual generation, no females and no women” (3). Women are a plague, the cause of all evils (think Pandora). Against the rank misogyny of Hesiod, Aristotle insists that the existence of women is not an evil, but rather a valuable means to an end: the good of the household and the state. Sexual difference and division of labor promotes an end that is beneficial for both sexes. Against Plato’s endorsement of female guardians, Aristotle objects that political rule requires capabilities that are distinctively male. In the second chapter, which forms the core of the biological argument, Deslauriers examines sex in the Generation of Animals. Aristotle understands ‘male’ and ‘female’ as principles of generation, and explains these principles with reference to differing degrees of vital heat in their bodies: “The fundamental biological sexual difference[s] in viviparous animals is […] a difference in the degree of natural heat produced by the body, the correlative differences in the degree of capacity for concoction, and the differences in the fertile residues that ensue” (74). Due to the coldness of her nature, a female is not able to concoct seminal residue to the point where it can impart the species form to matter: the menstrual fluid remains imperfectly concocted, and though it is also a seminal residue, and necessary for procreation, it is the male rather than female that is responsible as efficient and formal cause for the transformation of fetal matter into an embryo. The female, then, is ‘as it were a deformity’ relative to the male. While sexual difference is a difference in the matter rather than the form (eidos) of an animal, male semen is an active power capable of actualizing sensitive and nutritive soul due to its high level of vital heat, while the colder and moister female residue has less vital heat, and a passive power to have soul produced in it. Aristotle appeals to lack of vital heat to explain the generation of a female embryo: when the semen does not completely master the seminal fluid, the result is a girl. He denies that the female can impart sensitive soul, since she would then be able to generate all by herself. Aristotle further maintains that separating the two principles of generation in male and female animals is better than having them mixed up. They both serve a purpose that Aristotle takes to be good, namely procreation.

But this creates a puzzle: how can the female be natural, necessary, but also defective? Without the female, there would be no reproduction: the female principle is hypothetically necessary for an end that is good. Still, the generation of individual female offspring is not the best outcome, since female animals are less perfect than males. Deslauriers explains the coherence of Aristotle’s position with appeal to the need for animals capable of producing residue. Females produce menstrual fluid which is needed for reproduction. This means the goal has been achieved. It is just that males attain this goal better than females, since their residue (semen) is more refined than that of females (menstrual fluid). Relative to males, then, females are deficient, but relative to the goal of reproduction, females are sufficiently hot to fulfil their role. Indeed, had all animals produced perfected residue, sexual reproduction would have been impossible. It is therefore good for the higher-end goal of sexual reproduction that females are imperfect relative to males. Every sexually dimorphous species must have limited success in producing male offspring to attain its higher-order goal.

The attainment of higher order ends thus explains why animals of the same species differ in their ability to perfect a function that is characteristic of their species. Within species, Aristotle allows one part to exist for the sake of the good of the whole; by being part of the whole they also attain the human telos as far as they are able. By introducing a bar for success that females pass (concocting fertile residue), but introducing a higher achievement distinctive of males, Aristotle does not end up in a muddle by treating females as both in accord with and contrary to nature. Free women may be deficient, but only relative to free men. To put it in modern terms, Ken is better than Barbie, but Barbie is just fine the way she is!

Still, we may wonder whether reproductive role has any bearing on the capacity for political decision-making – and whether Aristotle supposes that it does. Long-haired and bald cobblers differ, but no one thinks that men with long hair are more suited for the cobbling life than their bald peers (Rep. V 454c). Why think that the capacity for concocting residue to perfection makes one more suited for politics? Deslauriers argues that biological differences do underpin Aristotle’s justification for subjecting women to rule by men in the Politics, even if the argument for that conclusion needs to be reconstructed from scattered evidence. The deliberative faculty in women is “without authority” (akuron, I 13, 1260a14), and women are natural subjects, because their cold blood makes them naturally inferior to free males in their capacity for rule. The claim, then, is that cold blood causes a psychological deficiency.

To defend this claim, Deslauriers in the third chapter examines Aristotle’s conception of rule in the household and state. Just like a state, a household is composed of different parts, and “wherever things are constituted from a number of parts – continuous or divided – and one common whole results, the ruler and the ruled are discernible in every case” (Pol. I 5, 1254a29-31). But whereas citizens in a state take turns occupying the roles given their approximate equality in excellence, there is no turn-taking between women and men in the household or in the state: women’s virtue consists in obeying, men’s in commanding. How should we understand this difference? On Deslauriers’ analysis, Aristotle thinks women have the very same virtues as men, but they lack the executive aspect of phronêsis that issues in decision (prohairesis). She takes EN I 13 and Pol. III 4 to suggest that

the relation between male and female is like the relation between two forms of virtue (intellectual and moral) within a single individual: as practical reason is to the moral virtues, so men are to women. Construed in this way, a man and his wife, as the first social unity, form a single agent. (169)

On Deslauriers’ reconstruction, though women cannot have phronêsis “at least in its complete or perfect form,” women can “borrow” phronêsis from their husbands and thereby act on true beliefs (169). Taking her cue from Aristotle’s description of constitutional rule in Pol. III 4, 1277a24, Deslauriers observes that under this political arrangement, Aristotle holds that the difference in virtue between rulers and the ruled when these are “similar in stock and free” is that the ruled need not have phronêsis, although they should have all the other virtues:

So if citizens under constitutional rule do not have phronêsis but do have the other virtues, we should expect that women ruled ‘constitutionally’ by men should similarly have the other virtues. And Aristotle says just this […] in Politics I 13, when he argues that natural subjects do have virtue, although it is not the same in kind as the virtue of natural rulers. (184)

Deslauriers’ analysis seems to restrict the difference between male and female virtues to scope: women’s virtues are a proper subset of male virtues. This leaves the difference in kind unexplained. Deslauriers identifies the defect in women in their executive practical reason rather than in the deliberation that leads up to it. She thinks women can possess sunêsis, the excellence involved in deliberation that consists in good judgment, and as such she can advise her husband about practical affairs. But if the defect of women does not concern their desires (which would render women congenitally akratic), nor their thought and deliberation as such, then it is hard to see where exactly women fall short. A decision is caused by desire and goal-directed thought (EN VI 2) so there seems to be little space left to explain the shortfall.

Deslauriers is prepared to allow that women can make decisions in the home, which suggests that the deficit concerns the nature of the domain in which they are active rather than their capacities as such. If women can make domestic decisions, why cannot they also make political decisions? The capacity for decision making is associated with establishing ends for those over which one rules (185). This claim introduces a further problem for Deslauriers’ account: Aristotle seems to hold that “virtue makes the end good” (EN VI 12, 1144a9; 13, 1145a5-7), whereas phronêsis finds the acts that are means to the end. And so Deslauriers’ ascription of character virtue to women is hard to reconcile with EN VI 12-13’s insistence that virtue sets our ends. It is alsso hard to reconcile with Aristotle’s definition of character virtue as a state that makes decisions (a hexis prohairetikê, EN 1106b36; EE 1227b9-10). Given Aristotle’s definition of virtue in general, women cannot have any of the character virtues Aristotle discusses in his ethics. Furthermore, Aristotle maintains that virtue is a hexis prohairetikê because it has phronêsis as a necessary part. If women must ‘borrow’ the rational principle from men, there are no female virtues per se, only relational virtues realized by the couple when wives obey the commands of their wise husbands. One could counter that there is a type of phronêsis that women could possess, namely wisdom and executive excellence in running a household, and that this type of phronêsis, limited in scope though it may be, is discussed by Aristotle in EN VI 8. But again, severing this type of phronêsis from the political kind is not straightforward. First, it belongs to the master, not his subjects, and second, to be a prudent housemaster and to be a prudent citizen are two sides of the same coin, and not separable except in being, according to EN VI 8, 1141b23-4. Whatever deliberative excellence women can acquire, it is not a virtue that Aristotle identifies in EN VI 8. Aristotle’s commitment to the unity of virtue – you can have one only if you have them all – is a major obstacle for Deslauriers’ analysis. Perhaps the Politics is simply out of synch with the EN on this point, but if so, it seems we lack a way to make precise sense of the Politics’ claims.

In the fourth and final chapter, Delauriers develops an argument that unites the biological and political account of sexual difference. The missing link, claims Deslauriers, is thumos: effective decision-making has an affective side that women lack due to the coldness of their nature. Aristotle explicitly associates ruling with thumos at Pol. VII 7 1328a5-7, where he claims that both the ruling principle and (political) freedom stem from thumos: thumos is an expert at ruling, and is indomitable (244; also 247). Deslauriers interprets the claim to mean that “thumos is necessary for rule because it is makes one decisive and action-oriented” (246). It further establishes bonds of affection between male citizens that are critical for political participation, bonds that women cannot forge since they are confined to the household and because their natures are not sufficiently “hot” to produce the required affective reaction to honor and dishonor, the external goods at stake in public life. As a result of their coldness, women suffer from a “deficit of decisiveness or forcefulness” (247). Deslauriers allows that women can deliberate about architectonic ends (255), namely “living well in general,” which is the ultimate end of political science. But since women cannot command free men due to the lack of thumos, they cannot rule. If Deslauriers is right about this, we should expect Aristotle to permit women to counsel but not govern men in assemblies and lawcourts. Aristotle makes no concessions in this direction. His view, I fear, is not that women can counsel men in politics, but that they lack the wisdom to judge the affairs of the state. Their inability to take wise decisions is not just an executive deficit, due to deficient spirit, but also a lack of nous. Here, I suspect, Aristotle is simply generalizing from what were to him the observable facts: women lack experience in warfare and in the affairs of the state. Since they lack experience, they cannot form correct judgments, and since they cannot form correct judgments, they cannot make wise decisions. Aristotle’s empiricism, then, suggests that women have no place in politics. His general method, which moves from observation of social phenomena to explanations of underlying principles, simply leads him astray – social scientists must do better.

Marguerite Deslauriers has written an excellent book that sets a new standard for scholarship. If I have any objection to her argument, it is that I wish Aristotle’s arguments were as thoughtful as Deslauriers makes them out to be. Had Aristotle had Deslauriers by his side, I suspect he would have been far more alert to the challenges facing his account and in a much better position to meet them.^[1]