XII IAPh Symposium
International Association of Women Philosophers
Rome, august 31– september 3 2006
http://host.uniroma3.it/dipartimenti/filosofia/Iaph/english/schedule.htm
Jyl Gentzler
Department of Pbilosophy
Amherst College - USA
Mail: jgentzler@arnherst.edu
In Defense of the Philosopher-Mom
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates suggests that the citizens of his ideal state should be brought up
to believe that human beings come in three different varieties, corresponding to three different
metals, and that they are all born from the same earth and are thus related to one another.
Such a myth is not literally true, but the citizens’ belief in its truth serves the valuable function
of simultaneously increasing each individual’s satisfaction with his station in life and his sense
of solidarity with his fellow citizens. If the citizens lacked such attitudes, Socrates suggests, it
would be impossible to bring into existence a state in which each citizen is as happy as
possible.
The use of such falsehoods has generally been condemned by modem readers; the suggestion
has seemed so outrageous that some scholars believe that Socrates’ proposal must have been
a joke. But if, in fact, the all-knowledgeable philosopher-kings are right to suggest that all
citizens will be better off if they hold this mistaken belief, then wouldn’t such a lie be justified?
Surely, one might think, having all true beliefs is not of such supreme value that it is worth
sacrificing one’s own happiness in order to achieve it.
When my daughter Liz was born fourteen years ago, I began to worry about what I would tell
her about God. This was a surprising worry for me. I had been a non-believer since I was a
teenager, and I was fully convinced that religious doctrine, like Plato’s “myth of the metals,”
was just that— a myth. Why, then, was there even a question of what I would say to her about
God? The difficulty was this. Having given birth to a child, I had now assumed an immense and
overwhelming responsibility for her welfare. It’s one thing for me to be a non-believer. I can’t
really help that, I reasoned, since the only thing that can give me a reason to believe in God
would be evidence that suggests the existence of a God. However, it’s a separate matter
whether I should try to inculcate a belief in God in my daughter. After all, I could be wrong,
I’ve been wrong before, and if others are right in their belief that the existence of God is
necessary for eternal bliss and non-belief in God is sufficient for eternal damnation, then
perhaps it would be morally wrong for me to take a chance and doom my child to eternal
damnation.
This thinking, of course, is a variation on Pascal’s famous Wager, but it is importantly different
because, for me, the question was not whether such considerations about heaven and hell give
me a reason to believe in God (they do not). Rather, the question for me was whether these
reflections give me a reason to inculcate in my daughter’s mind a belief in the existence of
God, a belief that I regarded as irrational and false. My immense responsibility for my
daughter’s welfare forced upon me a consideration of the possible immense value of religious
indoctrination. I resisted this impulse, unsure of the rationale behind my resistance, since the
logic of my variation on Pascal seemed to me (and still seems to me to be) impeccable.
I didn’t give much further thought to this question until a recent visit to Rome, when my
younger daughter Tessa, now five, forced me to reflect again on my own attitudes and
practices. “Does Tessa believe in God?” Liz asked me a few months before we left.
I hesitated, slightly unnerved by the oddness of the answer that was about to come out of
mouth. “I don’t know. I never discussed the matter with her.”
One might have thought that I could have anticipated in a country over which the Catholic
church has dominated politics for nearly two millennia, whose most beautiful buildings and
works of art are of religious significance, that within a day in Italy, Tessa might want some
answers. But the fact is, I didn’t anticipate this awkward issue, or at least, if I did, I was
quickly, easily, and perhaps complicitly distracted from the thought by
the innumerable, seemingly more important demands of my life. In fact, it was not until a
weekend trip to Florence that Tessa finally demanded that the question of the identity of Jesus
be given a straight-forward answer. Picture after picture depicted the annunciation, birth,
crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus, and Tessa was simply not going to stand for any more
pussyfooting around the question of who this guy was.
I knew what a fellow philosopher-mom would have advised me at this point: “Tell her the
truth. Tell her that all of those stories about him being the son of God are simply false.”
But I didn’t take this advice. Instead, as we went through the Uffizi, I took pleasure in relating
to her the stories represented in the pictures before her. “Doesn’t she look surprised?” I
quipped, as we looked at Simone Martini’s representation of the annunciation. “And a bit
scared, don’t you think? I would be, too, if some huge guy with wings just appeared to me and
told me that I was pregnant and that the father was God.” I quickly looked around to make
sure that I was not offending more pious connoisseurs.
“Why did they want to kill Jesus— were they in a war or something?” Tessa asked as she
peered at yet another depiction of Jesus’ crucifixion.
“No, they weren’t in a war.”
“Then why did they want to kill him?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered honestly. “I think that the Romans thought that he had too much
power, and they felt threatened.”
“Did he have a big army or something?”
“Then how did he have so much power?” Good question, to which I was sure I had no good
answer.
“Well, he just said a lot of things that made a lot of sense to people,” I offered. In order to
give her an idea of the kind of thing that Jesus might say, I added,” . . . like that poor people
are just as important as rich people.”
I could tell that I wasn’t making much sense. Why, Tessa no doubt wondered, would anyone
want to kill you for saying something so obvious?
“So why did people think that Jesus was a god?”
I hesitated. Liz intervened: “He performed a lot of miracles.”
“Miracles?”
“Magic. Like Harry Potter.”
This caught Tessa’s attention. “Oh! What did he do?”
“Well, this is just what some people believe,” I began. Liz and I then related to her the stories
of the fishes and the loaves, and of Jesus’ walking on water.
“What else did he do?” Tessa demanded.
“Tessa, I really don’t remember. It’s been a long time since I thought about it.”
‘Well, I believe he was a god,” she asserted with conviction.
“You do?” I stammered, desperately wondering how all of my evasions could have added up to
a compelling proof of the truth of Christianity.
“Yes,” she said simply.
As is suggested by the theme proposed for the XIP” IAPh Symposium, such ordinary
experiences in our everyday lives can serve as the starting point for political reflection.
Although I am not a philosopher-king, I am a philosopher-mom, and the responsibility that I
have for the welfare of my children is exactly the same as Plato imagined political leaders had
for the welfare of ordinary citizens. There are all sorts of occasions on which I will go to great
lengths to protect my children against dangers that are not at all likely, simply because, I
think, it is j’ responsibility to make sure that my children are safe. And yet, in the case of their
religious beliefs, it might reasonably seem that I ignored that responsibility with both of my
daughters— both in ignoring the possible, but extremely unlikely, eternal damnation of my
older daughter, and in ignoring my responsibility to my younger daughter to make sure that
she doesn’t go through life organizing her activities and projects around a false conviction.
I will argue that my hesitations and seemingly irrational rejections of the apparently obvious
implications of my own reasoning reveal my struggle to get the balance exactly right between
meeting my responsibility to protect the welfare of my children (who are unequal to me both in
their knowledge and in their power in the world) and my duty to give them the information and
the emotional and intellectual strength that they will need in order to make responsible
decisions for themselves. I will also argue that such duties are precisely the duties of those to
whom we grant political power, and that neither Platonic authoritarianism nor Western
liberalism offers us the theoretical resources to recognize these duties.