Xanthippe (Socrates wife) is reviled by history as a shrew. Graves sympathizes with her, however. IN the essay, he contrasts the rational with the creative and intuitive; philosophy with poetry (and other arts). Since Graves was a poet and novelist, he naturally sides with the intuitive, while admitting that in the general course of life, intuition must be checked by reason.
Xanthippe correctly intuited that Socrates' obsession with reason would bring his family into disgrace (as it did), and decrease the status of women. Graves is perhaps old-fashioned in thinking of reason as "male" and intuition and poetry as "female", but he claims that many of the poems of Sappho were lost because of the ascendancy of rationality and reason.
IN Socrates utopian Republic, poets are banished.
At first, Christianity swung the pendulum back in the poetic (intuitive) direction. But by Augustine's time, Christianity was justified and debated from the philosophic perspective. The Church froze Her dogma,and used philosophic reason to argue for it.
The reformation limited the strangle-hold the Church held on theology and philosophy -- but the emergence of science in the
Enlightenment furthered its dominance. In the French Revolution, the mob disavowed its Catholic roots, and enthroned reason as its God.
Graves associates reason with science, philosophy, and modern, urban living. Intuition is associated with poetry, the arts, and the buccolic. What woman of quality (Graves wonders) would put up with Socrates' philandering with boys, questioning everything, and idling around the agora all day?
In addition, although reason rules in the sciences, genius and real innovation depends on creativity and inuition, however much these qualities are no longer admired in everyday life. The poetic temperment, he says, never accepts the second-rate in poetry, or friendship, or love. This temperment is our protection against insensate and (sometimes) inhumane abstact rationality.
As an added bonus, here's one of Graves poerms:
The Naked And The Nude
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.
The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman's trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.
The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometimes nude!
