Why is philosophy like childbirth?

In which contem*platonist* finally posts something about Plato

I used to be a PhD Classicist, specialising in ancient philosophy. My thesis was about reproduction in Plato and Lucretius. I was interested both in what these philosophers thought about literal reproduction—the ethics and politics of having and rearing children—and also in the ways that they used reproduction as a metaphor for other things.

I left the PhD and my thesis drafts languished in Scrivener for four years—until now! This is an edited version of part of one of my chapter drafts. I’m always open to feedback, but I’m especially interested in feedback on how this post lands to a non-specialist reader. What, if anything, interested you? Where did your brain glaze over? What seemed like academic irrelevancy? What context did you feel like you were lacking? Feel free to message or leave anonymous or onymous feedback.

In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates chats to a brilliant young student of mathematics¹. Socrates immediately launches in with one of his typical awkward philosophical questions: what (he asks the boy) is knowledge? Like many of Socrates’ victims interlocutors, Theaetetus starts by listing out types of knowledge: geometry and shoe-making (146c7-d3). But Socrates isn’t satisfied: he wants the boy to ‘describe the many knowledges with one account’ (148d6-7). At this, Theaetetus is stumped. He says,

Honestly, Socrates, I’ve tried to work this out many times […] But I can’t convince myself either that what I’m saying is sufficient, or that I’ve heard anyone else answering in the way that you demand. But, nonetheless, I can’t stop caring about it! (148e1-6)

Socrates replies by explaining Theaetetus’ experience in an unusual way:

You’re in labor, my dear Theaetetus, because you are not empty, but pregnant. (148e7-8)

Over the next several pages of the dialogue, Socrates elaborates on this odd comment. Not only is Theaetetus, a cis teenage boy, pregnant; he, Socrates, happens to be a midwife. However, while ordinary midwives help women give birth to children, Socrates helps young men give birth to philosophical ideas.

Philosophy is reproduction

What does Socrates mean? His explanation comes in two parts. First, he describes
the art of real, literal midwifery, as it was practiced in his time; second, he explains how his own philosophical activity is similar to midwifery.

First of all, (Socrates explains) midwives are post-menopausal women who are no longer of reproductive age (149b)—a custom supposed to honor Artemis, who though she is the goddess of childbirth has never given birth herself. Midwives can recognize who is pregnant and who isn’t (149c). They know how to use charms and drugs to induce or soothe contractions, helping women who have difficult births. They can also perform abortions (149c-d).

Socrates also claims that midwives are skilled matchmakers. They can tell which men and women will produce good children together. Theaetetus says that he’s never heard this about midwives, but Socrates says that it stands to reason: a farmer knows not only how to nourish plants as they grow, but also how to sow their seeds so as to make them grow well. So too, those who are experts in the birthing of children will also be experts in their conception.

Socrates then turns to his own ‘midwifery’. He says that though ordinary midwives’ skill is impressive, his own philosophical midwifery is even more important. Once a young man’s philosophical ‘children’ are born, Socrates must test them, to see if they are phantoms (εἴδωλα) or real; a task that real midwives don’t need to do (150b-c). He, like ordinary midwives, is infertile—famous for claiming to know nothing even while questioning others and revealing their ignorance. Socrates explains that though he has produced no wisdom himself, others with whom he associates do make progress, just as midwives facilitate other women’s births rather than giving birth themselves. Socrates’ interlocutors don’t learn anything from him; rather, he helps them learn things by themselves (150c-d).

However, most people do not understand Socrates’ role, so his philosophical midwifery does not always work. Some people, not understanding Socrates’ value, leave him too early and ‘miscarry’ their fetal wisdom because of bad intercourse with others; others raise their philosophical ‘children’ badly, corrupting them (150e-151a). Those who do stick with him have uncomfortable experiences, similar (Socrates says) to women in labor: they are confused and filled with aporia—confused uncertainty—night and day (151a-b).

This extended metaphor is generally known as the ‘midwife metaphor’, but really, the metaphor Socrates is a midwife is only one part of a broader metaphor: philosophy is reproduction. This broad, overarching metaphor has several interrelated parts: young men are mothers, older men are fathers, ideas are children, inspiration is sex, philosophical confusion is contractions. These aspects are just as important as Socrates is a midwife.

What is the metaphor doing?

Plato scholars are pretty used to this philosophy is reproduction metaphor, but taking a step back, it’s weird. The abstract, mental pursuit of philosophy and the visceral, bodily act of childbirth seem like polar opposites. Why does Socrates try to help Theaetetus understand things about philosophy by comparing it to giving birth: something that neither of them will ever directly experience? What does it mean to say that Socrates is ‘infertile’ philosophically, and if he is, how can he help others to ‘give birth’? Why do midwives also act as matchmakers? What does it mean to be a philosophical father, or a philosophical mother? How is articulating a thought like giving birth to a child?

Across this series of posts, I’ll argue that Plato uses this odd metaphor to communicate and argue for a certain vision of philosophy.² Sexual reproduction has many aspects (sex, pregnancy, mothers, fathers, midwifery, childhood, guardianship) and many associations (to desire, pleasure, pain, attachment, and the body). Thus Plato can, with a single metaphor, explore a cluster of related aspects of philosophy: its practice, its participants, and its products.

The philosopher Elisabeth Camp has argued that metaphors can do things that more traditional argumentative structures cannot. Metaphors may communicate not only one, but several associated facets of the tenor (i.e., the object that is being described metaphorically—in this case philosophy). They can also convey the properties’ structure and interrelation in a highly sophisticated way. Thus when Romeo compares Juliet to the sun, for example,

‘Some of the features [Romeo] ascribes to Juliet are more important than others. Her being gloriously beautiful is more important, for instance, than her helping him grow emotionally… It’s also part of Romeo’s claim…that certain of the features he claims Juliet to possess are responsible for, or entail, others. For instance, Juliet is worthy of worship because she’s the prime exemplar of beauty and goodness’.³

The reproductive metaphor works similarly. We can best understand how the philosophy is reproduction metaphor works if we contrast it with other possible metaphors for philosophy, and that’s what I’ll do in other posts in this series.

The first alternate metaphor is philosophy is a productive craft. If philosophy were a craft of this kind, then an apprentice might learn it from an experienced artisan and, afterwards, be able to produce knowledge, as a weaver produces cloaks and a potter makes pots. In this situation, an ignorant teacher who had never produced the craft’s object—a potter who’d never made a single pot—would be, at best, useless. In ‘Socrates’ infertility’, I’ll argue that the reproductive metaphor offers an alternative view, under which a person who is not wise, such as Socrates, can nonetheless help others produce good thought-children. Just as a midwife’s skill does not consist in her giving birth herself, the Socratic skill is orthogonal to wisdom itself, but still valuable. In fact—as I’ll argue in ‘Attachment and empathy’—Socrates’ infertility was a positive advantage. Just as mothers are attached to their infants, so young men are attached to the arguments they have birthed; the infertile Socrates lacks such biasing attachments.

In ‘Midwives and matchmakers’, I’ll contrast philosophy is reproduction to a second metaphor, from Plato’s contemporary Xenophon: Socrates is a pimp (Xen. Symp. 3.3, 4.56ff.). And in ‘Labor or fight?’, I contrast philosophy is reproduction to a final metaphor: argument is war. Socrates’ interlocutors often experienced negative emotions: anger, numbness, shame. The reproductive metaphor encourages readers to reframe these emotions as (creative) labor pains rather than (destructive) wounds, thus in turn encouraging them to comply peacefully with philosophical midwives, rather than attacking them.

1. Most of Plato’s works are philosophical ‘dialogues’ that depict a conversation about philosophy between two or more people. Usually Socrates is a participant and the dominant speaker, but not always. Socrates was a real person, and Plato really knew him, but the real Socrates probably didn’t believe or say most of what the character Socrates says in Plato’s dialogues. Scholars differ on how Plato (the author) relates to the arguments that Socrates makes in the dialogues. Some think that Socrates is simply a mouthpiece for Plato’s own views, and Socrates’ arguments are ‘what Plato thinks’ or ‘what Plato is arguing’. Others think that Plato explicitly disagreed with the most obvious, surface-level meaning of what Socrates says, and that you need to read between the lines to really get at what Plato means (Leo Strauss is maybe the most famous in this school, whence the term ‘Straussian reading’ popularized by Tyler Cowen). My own opinion is that Plato was a skeptic, and the dialogues are his way of exploring ideas. So Socrates’ arguments are ones that Plato took seriously, but not necessarily ones that he would whole-heartedly endorse.

2. My thinking on metaphor was heavily influenced by Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

3. Elisabeth Camp, Metaphor and that certain ‘je ne sais quoi’, p. 6