Gorgias

Gorgias is a long dialog that strings together three successive conversations Socrates has with Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles.  Though it is nominally about finding a suitable definition of oratory, what really holds the dialog together is its underlying distinction between appearance and reality.  More concretely, the dialog asks whether it is better to be powerful (in the conventional sense) or to be truly just.  Towards the end, the themes of oratory versus philosophy and power versus justice intersect in the same place that they still do today: politics.  Which is perhaps why the end of Gorgias reads as almost a prelude to the trial of Socrates in Apology, and his reflections on death in Phaedo.  Socrates adamantly insists on trying to improve himself and others, even when what he has to say is clearly not what they want to hear.  This exclusive focus on the justice in his soul, rather than the power to convince others in the world, is what ultimately leads to his execution.  We even get a sneak preview of the myth that concludes Phaedo, where souls are rewarded and punished in the afterlife according to the degree of their dedication to truth in this life.  Overall, the length and complexity of Gorgias, in addition to its concluding myth, make it easy to imagine that this was one of the last 'early' or 'Socratic' dialogs.

Socrates begins the conversation in classic fashion.  Gorgias is a famous orator and teacher of oratory so Socrates asks him what sort of knowledge it is that Gorgias teaches.  If oratory is a craft analogous to painting or medicine or arithmetic, what will you know how to produce once you've learned it?  Gorgias' first answer -- that oratory teaches you how to make speeches -- doesn't satisfy Socrates.  He observes that there are many crafts that operate only by means of speeches.  For example, knowing finance or astronomy consists mainly in talking with other humans about money and stars, so the definition isn't specific enough.  We need to know what kind of speaking oratory is concerned with?  Gorgias quickly cuts to the chase and claims that oratory is the most important form of speaking, and in fact the most important activity of all.  Oratory teaches you how to speak persuasively, so that many people agree with you and do what you say.  What could be more powerful than that?  Socrates again objects that this definition is still too broad.  The master of almost any intellectual craft could be described as persuading you to believe something, usually by drawing evidence from their experience or giving you other reasons to believe them.  In other words, they're able to persuade you that they're right, because they are, in fact, right; they do know something.  So what, then, does oratory know about?  

Gorgias doesn't immediately realize that he has walked into a trap.  His day job, as it were, seems to basically be what we would call a prosecuting attorney.  Insofar as it concerns convincing a jury, it appears that what oratory should know about is what's just and unjust.  This, after all, is what's supposed to be at stake in court.  But does Gorgias claim to teach not just the art of persuasion, but also that of knowing what's just and unjust?  That's a much larger claim.  And then what about oratory more broadly, outside the courts?  Gorgias claims it is the most powerful tool there is:

I maintain too that if an orator and a doctor came to any city anywhere you like and had to compete in speaking in the assembly or some other gathering over which of them should be appointed doctor, the doctor wouldn't make any showing at all, but the one who had the ability to speak would be appointed, if he so wished. And if he were to compete with any other craftsman whatever, the orator more than anyone else would persuade them that they should appoint him, for there isn't anything that the orator couldn't speak more persuasively about to a gathering than could any other craftsman whatever. That's how great the accomplishment of this craft is, and the sort of accomplishment it is! (456c)

But in this example, the wonderful orator triumphs explicitly by convincing people that he knows something that he does not, in fact, know.  To top it off, this sort of persuasion won't work amongst an audience of doctors. It relies on the fact that most folks in the audience don't know any more about the thing in question than the orator.  So oratory appears to specifically boil down to using speeches to persuade people who know nothing about the truth ... of something that the orator is also completely ignorant of.  It's literally the fact that it's a blind man leading the blind that makes it specifically oratory.  A beautiful and convincing speech by a mathematician to the effect that 2+2=4 does not qualify.  Gorgias tries to backpedal out of the problem by claiming that he just teaches the tools of persuasion part.  He can't be held responsible if a student uses this knowledge irresponsibly, to persuade people of something false or unjust.  But hold on, isn't oratory specifically concerned with what is just and unjust in the eyes of the law?  Isn't this what oratorical speeches are originally all about?  How can the art then claim to be indifferent to, or at least separable from, whether its powers are used justly?  

Enter Polus.  Polus actually already appeared earlier in the dialog, where he responded to a simple question with a laughably vacuous and flowery speech:

CHAEREPHON: Now then, since he's knowledgeable in a craft, what is it, and what would be the correct thing to call him?
POLUS: Many among men are the crafts experientially devised by experience, Chaerephon. Yes, it is experience that causes  our times to march along the way of craft, whereas inexperience causes them to march along the way of chance. Of these various crafts various men partake in various ways, the best men partaking of the best of them. Our Gorgias is indeed in this group; he partakes of the most admirable of the crafts.
SOCRATES: Polus certainly appears to have prepared himself admirably for giving speeches, Gorgias. But he's not doing what he promised Chaerephon.
GORGIAS: How exactly isn't he, Socrates?
SOCRATES: He hardly seems to me to be answering the question. (448c)

As an already confirmed orator, Polus rushes to the defense of his now maligned art.  First though, since Polus is unable to offer a better definition of it than Gorgias, he questions Socrates about how he would define oratory.  According to Socrates, oratory is a part of flattery.  He calls it just a part of flattery, because he actually has a rather elaborate four part definition of flattery that distinguishes it by the object flattered.  There are two crafts -- care of the body, and care of the soul (which latter Socrates calls politics) -- each of which has two parts.  Care of the body requires both gymnastics and medicine.  Care of the soul, or politics, requires both legislation and justice.  There's also an analogy between the body side and the soul side.  Legislation is the counterpart of gymnastics and justice is the counterpart of medicine. 

Socrates isn't super clear on why these two crafts are distinguished in each case.  Perhaps one is concerned with specific capacities of a (social) body and the other with its overall functioning?  At any rate, the four part definition of flattery is mostly just a way to set up an elaborate joke.  Socrates has already indicated that he thinks oratory doesn't give a damn about justice, or the truth or goodness of anything it tries to persuade people of.  It's just the ignorant convincing the ignorant.  Which leads him to this gem of an analogy:

... what cosmetics is to gymnastics, pastry baking is to medicine; or rather, like this: what cosmetics is to gymnastics, sophistry is to legislation, and what pastry baking is to medicine, oratory is to justice. (465c)

Just as oratory doesn't truly care about justice, pastry baking doesn't worry itself about health, and instead just flatters our immediate sense of taste.  And just as we saw that the master orator would prevail over the doctor in public debate, we find that the pastry chef would as well.

Pastry baking has put on the mask of medicine, and pretends to know the foods that are best for the body, so that if a pastry baker and a doctor had to compete in front of children, or in front of men just as foolish as children, to determine which of the two, the doctor or the pastry baker, had expert knowledge of good food and bad, the doctor would die of starvation. (464d)

In other words, oratory bakes cream puffs for the soul.  How do you say "LOL" in ancient Greek?  ΛOΛ

Polus doesn't really reject this definition, but challenges Socrates to account for why oratory, if it is only concerned with appearance and flattery, possesses such real world power.  Being able to convince most anyone of anything is almost like having the power of an absolute tyrant.  Isn't his type of power the greatest good we all strive after?  Isn't the tyrant the happiest of men?

At this point the dialog begins to veer into more abstract territory.  With his definition of oratory, Socrates has already introduced the idea of a distinction between the appearance of knowledge and the reality of it.  Now he begins to carry this same idea forward into distinctions between real power and its appearance and real discussion and its appearance.  Is real power just doing whatever you see fit at the moment, being able to gratify your every whim and force others to do your bidding?  Or is that just the appearance of power, and its reality lies in being able to do things that truly benefit you and are good for you?  Similarly, is a debate decided by the weight of public opinion, by what you can get most people to agree with, a real discussion, or its mere semblance?  Socrates himself isn't interested in opinions, however numerous.  He believes a real discussion proceeds, via question and answer, to demonstrate to an audience of one the inconsistencies in their own opinions.  Refutation depends on internal logical contradiction, not on appealing to what seems most plausible to the most people.  In either case, we judge appearances by their effects on the world and on other people, whereas the reality Socrates proposes is a less external, more personal property.

This appearance-reality distinction is so central that we should pause the argument here to think about its context some more.  Polus contends that the orator is powerful because he can do whatever he sees fit.  Socrates inserts a distinction here, and admits that the orator can do whatever he sees fit, but, insofar as he does things that are bad for himself, he doesn't do what he wants.  Because, of course, no one knowingly wants what is bad for them.  So Socrates claims that our idea of power isn't of something neutral.  Power is the ability to benefit ourselves in some way, to do something good for ourselves.  For Socrates, every question is a moral question of this sort.  It is always and only a question of how to live a good life.  

It's true, after all, that the matters in dispute between us are not at all insignificant ones, but pretty nearly those it's most admirable to have knowledge about, and most shameful not to. For the heart of the matter is that of recognizing or failing to recognize who is happy and who is not. (472d)

But then, how do we discover what's really good for us?  After all, cream puffs taste pretty good.  We've all wanted to be tyrant for a day.  Appearances can be awfully pleasurable.  This is where the moral question becomes philosophical.  Somehow we need to identify the good.  We sense that it's not as simple as always gratifying our immediate pleasure.  Is it something closer to the integral of pleasure over time described in Protagoras?  The terms are different here -- here Socrates argues for a distinction between pleasure and happiness, while there he collapsed the two -- but the question is the same; by definition, we want the good, we want to be happy, so how do we overcome our ignorance and recognize it?  And how can we do this in particular when there are so many rival claims about what is most important and valuable in life?  How do we find the good without some transcendent signpost or all knowing sage?  Basically, I'm rediscovering Deleuze's observations about Plato's philosophical problem.  It's a moral philosophy that tries to develop an immanent method for finding the moral good.

The argument in Gorgias plays out on this implicit backdrop.   The distinction between reality and appearance is used to investigate the question Polus raises about the power of oratory.  Does oratory have any power (to make us happy) at all if it is used for unjust purposes?  Is the tyrant or orator who has the ability to inflict injustice on others happier than those who suffer those injustices?  Socrates argues that it is worse to make others suffer injustice than it is to suffer it oneself.  Unfortunately, a lot of his justification for this contrarian opinion remains somewhat circular at this point.  Injustice, Polus agrees, is bad.  So if it produces some immediate pleasure to be a tyrant, we can be sure that this is overbalanced by some negative consequence it produces later, in this case, shame.  Doing something unjust leads to a corruption of the soul that we call shame, while suffering an injustice doesn't cause this feeling to arise.  What more, being punished for committing some injustice liberates the tyrant from this shame, which implies that being punished is a good thing (it removes a bad thing).  So an unpunished tyrant is the least happy creature on earth, followed by one who has been corrected by his comeuppance.  And whoever suffered their tyranny is happier than either.  

Socrates' surprising reversal of Polus' ideas about power and happiness convinces no one since it depends on Polus' assent to the platitude that injustice is bad.  Which brings us to the final, and longest, conversation of the dialog, the one with Callicles.  Callicles doesn't mince words, and launches into an almost Nietzschean diatribe against the very equation of justice with goodness.  In fact, he thinks that what the law deems just and unjust is directly opposed to what is naturally good and bad.  

We mold the best and the most powerful among us, taking them while they're still young, like lion cubs, and with charms and incantations we subdue them into slavery, telling them that one is supposed to get no more than his fair share, and that that's what's admirable and just. But surely, if a man whose nature is equal to it arises, he will shake off, tear apart, and escape all this, he will trample underfoot our documents, our tricks and charms, and all our laws that violate nature. He, the slave, will rise up and be revealed as our master, and here the justice of nature will shine forth. (484a)

He goes on to say that Socrates is like a child for continuing to maintain those ridiculous philosophical views about how it's better to suffer injustice than dispense it.  Fatefully, he even predicts that this shit will eventually get him in trouble, and that Socrates won't even have a comeback when he is unjustly accused by someone powerful who has it in for him.  It feels so much like the day before Socrates trial that I went back to see if any of the characters in Gorgias are among the accusers (they are not mentioned). 

The next section of the dialog is taken up with Socrates dismantling Callicles' claim that it's right for the naturally more powerful, less constrained person to be better, happier, and in charge.  The argument unfolds like the layers of an onion.  First, Socrates shows that these few superior souls aren't even the most powerful.  After all, being numerically in the minority, they are easily subdued in the real world by a larger majority who agree that justice involves some measure of equality.  So by "superior", Callicles cannot mean literally more powerful.  Here we can already see the irony of Callicles' idea of 'natural' justice; if he doesn't mean naked physical power, then does he already have a somewhat 'artificial' idea in mind?  Next, Socrates investigates whether it's natural for the more intelligent to rule and command a larger share of pie.  But what exactly should they get more of?  Presumably they don't need, and shouldn't get, more food or shoes or anything that is unrelated to their superiority.  Instead, Callicles claims that it's just and right for them to get more power to rule, to lead the city, since this is what they are most qualified to do.

When faced with the political question of who should get what power and why, Socrates again takes the conversation in a more abstract direction.  It seems these questions of political power and right can only be approached by investigating what is just and good more generally.  In this case, Socrates wonders whether Callicles' superior ruler also rules, first and foremost, over himself and his own appetites. The moment parallels the point in the conversations with Gorgias and Polus where Socrates questioned what oratory was good for, and whether the tyrant was happy.  Similarly, Callicles claims that ruling is inherently good, and being ruled, even by yourself, is for the weak.  The question in all these cases is what is good in itself.  What do we want for its own sake, and not for the sake of something else?  After all, being an orator or tyrant isn't really an end in itself.  Here again, the question leads Socrates to introduce a distinction between appearance and reality -- what appears pleasurable is distinct from what is really good.

It bears noting that Socrates now seems to contradict what he said in Protagoras.  The goal of finding what's really good is the same in both cases.  But in Gorgias, pleasure and the good are treated as qualitatively distinct, where in Protagoras, the difference is not in kind but in quantity -- the good acts like the time integral of pleasures.  Here, Socrates gives two arguments to establish that pleasure and the good are qualitatively distinct.  

First, he considers pleasures and pains like hunger and thirst.  It's painful to be thirsty, but pleasurable to finally be drinking.  Once you're finished slaking, however, both the pain of thirst and the pleasure of drinking disappear at the same time as you return to equilibrium.  But good things and bad things don't stop in pairs like this.  Socrates doesn't specify which good and bad things he's referring to, but perhaps it would be something like the way your cowardice disappears when you pluck up your courage, but the courage continues to stick around afterwards.  It's as if there were two kinds of opposition possible -- opposites of degree that can cancel into neutral, like pleasure and pain, and either/or oppositions like good and bad.  At any rate, since pleasure/pain and good/bad don't behave the same way, the latter must differ qualitatively from the former.  

Second, Socrates claims that we call a man good because of something good in him.  If it's as simple as pleasure = good and pain = bad, then anyone filled with pleasure is by definition good and anyone in pain is bad.  But those we usually call 'good men' and 'bad men' alike experience both pleasure and pain at different times.  So then we've lost all ability to call a man 'good' or 'bad', since this seems like it would depend entirely on his current state of mind, at least if pleasure and the good are identical.  Again, this argument depends on a qualitative distinction between the good and the pleasurable; pleasure and pain come and go, but good and bad don't change.

Having made another distinction between appearance and reality, this time between pleasure and the good, Socrates unravels the final layer in Callicles' contention that the 'superior' people should get to do whatever they want.  Callicles obviously didn't mean that they were superior because they were stronger, but because they were more intelligent and more virtuous, more suited to rule.  And he obviously didn't mean that they just rule over others, but over themselves as well.  And he clearly didn't mean that ruling over themselves is just gratifying any pleasure, but only the good pleasures, since obviously pleasure ≠ good.  The sequence is meant to be a joke, since it's clear that Callicles meant exactly each of those things, and he has been moving the goalposts as Socrates' investigation progresses, all the while feigning annoyance that Socrates is too childish to know what 'everybody knows' Callicles really meant.  With the final layer we get to the heart of the matter and return full circle to the original question of what is oratory.  Because we've come right back to the fundamental moral dilemma -- how does the superior person know which pleasures are the good ones? 

For you see, don't you, that our discussion's about this (and what would even a man of little intelligence take more seriously than this?), about the way we're supposed to live. Is it the way you urge me toward, to engage in these manly activities, to make speeches among the people, to practice oratory, and to be active in the sort of politics you people engage in these days? Or is it the life spent in philosophy? And in what way does this latter way of life differ from the former? Perhaps it's best to distinguish them, as I just tried to do; having done that and having agreed that these are two distinct lives, it's best to examine how they differ from each other, and which of them is the one we should live. (500c)

Socrates, of course, doesn't really have an answer to this question.  Unless we consider the continual posing of the question as itself a type of meta-answer.  Having run through three semi-cooperative interlocutors, he finally launches an oratorical monologue of his own that seems to point in this direction.  The craft of philosophy, he claims, differs from the knack of oratory, just as the craft of medicine differs from the knack of pastry making, because a craft concerns itself with understanding what pleasures are truly good for us, whereas a knack just seeks to flatter the majority of people with any old pleasure it stumbles into producing.  The former seeks to cultivate only the good through some organized system, rather than merely hunting about in the dark pressing whatever dopamine buttons it finds, regardless of whether they are good or bad.  In the case of philosophy, this means producing an organized and self-controlled soul, which is a good in itself and what ultimately makes us happy.  

But the best way in which the excellence of each thing comes to be present in it, whether it's that of an artifact or of a body or a soul as well, or of any animal, is not just any old way, but is due to whatever organization, correctness, and craftsmanship is bestowed on each of them. Is that right?—Yes, I agree.—So it's due to organization that the excellence of each thing is something which is organized and has order?—Yes, I'd say so.—So it's when a certain order, the proper one for each thing, comes to be present in it that it makes each of the things there are, good?—Yes, I think so.—So also a soul which has its own order is better than a disordered one?—Necessarily so.—But surely one that has order is an orderly one?—Of course it is.—And an orderly soul is a self-controlled one?—Absolutely.—So a self-controlled soul is a good one. (507e)

You can see how Socrates is actually no longer completely satisfied with a purely meta-level definition of the good as any searching for the good, but is starting to smuggle some positive content into its definition.  The good is organized, not random.  The good has to do with understanding or knowledge, and not with guessing.  The good is controlled, not wild. The basic valances that have dominated Western philosophy for 2,500 years start to appear right here.  

With this definition of the good as self-controlled, Socrates works his way back to his earlier political questions about whether it's worse to suffer injustice or perpetrate it, and whether politicians and orators possess a craft that improves us, or merely a knack for flattering us.  Mostly this just repeats the ground he already covered with Polus.  But there is an interesting and surprising (to me at least) historical reflection on Pericles.  I always thought of Pericles as a total hero.  But when you look at him in light of Socrates' insistence that a politician should improve the souls of their citizens, teaching them what's truly good for them and inclining them towards it, his political career seems a failure.

  SOCRATES: Nothing. But tell me this as well. Are the Athenians said to have become better because of Pericles, or, quite to the contrary, are they said to have been corrupted by him? That's what I hear, anyhow, that Pericles made the Athenians idle and cowardly, chatterers and money- grubbers, since he was the first to institute wages for them.
  CALLICLES: The people you hear say this have cauliflower ears, Socrates.
  SOCRATES: Here, though, is something I'm not just hearing. I do know clearly and you do, too, that at first Pericles had a good reputation, and when they were worse, the Athenians never voted to convict him in any shameful deposition. But after he had turned them into "admirable and good" people, near the end of his life, they voted to convict Pericles of embezzlement and came close to condemning him to death, because they thought he was a wicked man, obviously.
  CALLICLES: Well? Did that make Pericles a bad man?
  SOCRATES: A man like that who cared for donkeys or horses or cattle would at least look bad if he showed these animals kicking, butting, and biting him because of their wildness, when they had been doing none of these things when he took them over. Or don't you think that any caretaker of any animal is a bad one who will show his animals to be wilder than when he took them over, when they were gentler? Do you think so or not? (515e)

I hadn't even realized that Pericles was a questionable figure, but apparently it's possible that his corruption caused the entire Peloponnesian War.  Talk about a guy who serves cream puffs to his people!  It's interesting to see this debate about what we would now call populism right at the start of democracy.  If Pericles was so admirable and good, in the sense that he made his fellow citizens better and more admirable by teaching them about what's best and most just, then why did they end up turning on him?  It's a tough charge to answer.  And it leads Socrates to explain the reason he never takes a fee for his own teachings, in contrast to the sophists.  Like the Buddhists with their idea of dana, if he truly teaches you to be good, you will find it so valuable that you will want to pay for what you received.  As for those who oppose his methodical search for what's best ... well, he pays them no mind, regardless of the consequences.

SOCRATES: I believe that I'm one of a few Athenians—so as not to say I'm the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries—to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics. This is because the speeches I make on each occasion do not aim at gratification but at what's best. They don't aim at what's most pleasant. And because I'm not willing to do those clever things you recommend, I won't know what to say in court. And the same account I applied to Polus comes back to me. For I'll be judged the way a doctor would be judged by a jury of children if a pastry chef were to bring accusations against him. (512e)

Finally, almost as if to emphasize that this is a prelude to the trial of Socrates, he tells a less elaborate version of the same myth that appears at the end of Phaedo.  Each departed soul is stripped naked in the underworld and judged according to its devotion to truth, justice, and the philosophical way.  Those tyrants who were never punished for their injustice on earth are considered incurable and tossed into Tartarus forever.  Those who were wicked but at least suffered some punishment that improved them finish taking their 'cure'.  And those spotless souls like, "that of a philosopher who has minded his own affairs and hasn't been meddlesome in the course of his life", are sent off to the Blessed Isles.   The final distinction between appearance and reality, between seeming and being, is saved for the ultimate -- the separation of body from soul, the distinction between life and death.  Death is for real.

Protagoras

In this dialog, Socrates finally comes eyeball to eyeball with the man in the black pajamas;  Protagoras is a worthy fucking adversary. The contrast between Euthymedus and Protagoras could not be clearer.  In both dialogs, Socrates publicly debates a self-described sophist.  And both are conducted as contests of verbal athleticism ('eristics', the Greeks called it, which turns out to be a literal reference to wrestling).  But Euthydemus and Dionysodorus have no positive content to offer us, whereas Protagoras is depicted here as having some really interesting points to make.  The question of the proper style of philosophical debate comes up again in Protagoras, and both dialogs share an underlying skepticism that we even know what virtue is, much less whether someone can teach it.  In other words, both dialogs concur that we cannot simply treat Socrates as the authority on wisdom.  Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, though, are clearly not-wise, whereas the line between Socrates and sophist is blurred to indistinction in the case of Protagoras.  Perhaps the two together illustrate a deeply Socratic point; we may not know what wisdom is, but we certainly know its opposite -- ignorance.

A lot of the literary aspect of this dialog is incorporated directly into the conversation between Socrates and Protagoras.  Protagoras tells a long mythical story about how virtue was distributed to humanity, and Socrates spends many pages analysing a poem by Simonides.  Perhaps for this reason, the frame story aspect is minimized.  Socrates recounts to a friend how yesterday he debated the famous sophist Protagoras.  It all started when ... his buddy Hippocrates showed up before dawn to breathlessly announce the eminently wise visitor had arrived in Athens after a long absence.   Hippocrates insists that Socrates help him become Protagoras' student.  Socrates is happy to help, but questions Hippocrates about what exactly he hopes to learn from the visitor.  Protagoras is a sophist, perhaps the first sophist.  He hangs his shingle out there in the marketplace of ideas, charging you a fee to teach you wisdom.  But what exactly is wisdom, and what does it do for you?  How do you know if Protagoras has it, and how do you know when he's successfully transmitted it to you?  Naturally, Hippocrates can't answer any of these questions, so they march off to see Protagoras and question him directly.  The rest of the dialog describes the resulting conversation.

And what a free-wheeling epic it was.  The conversation begins simply enough, with Socrates asking Protogoras to describe what exactly he teaches.  Protagoras has a straightforward answer to this.

    What I teach is sound deliberation, both in domestic matters—how best to manage one's household, and in public affairs—how to realize one's maximum potential for success in political debate and action."
   "Am I following what you are saying?" I asked. "You appear to be talking about the art of citizenship, and to be promising to make men good citizens."
  "This is exactly what I claim, Socrates." (319a) 

Though the answer is straightforward, it's also a bit vague and all encompassing.  All we really know is that it is both a public and a private virtue that Protagoras teaches.  It sounds like an ancient Greek version of self-help -- 10 habits of highly effective toga-wearers.  Socrates says this is a fine goal, but doesn't see how anything so important can be taught.  He objects that there don't really seem to be any 'expert citizens' who have some particular skill to offer other citizens, like a carpenter or shomaker would.  In fact, when it comes to matters of politics, everyone is able to offer their opinion for public debate, without any prior training.  To top it off, even famously wise and virtuous and successful men like Pericles often have deadbeat sons.  If these men can't teach virtue even to their own children, it simply must not be teachable at all.

Protagoras then unleashes a marvelous prepared speech that answers Socrates point by point.  Somewhat bizarrely though, it opens with a myth about how humans were absent the day the gods passed out natural abilities.  Lions got claws and wildebeests got nimbleness and so on, but humans didn't get shit.  So Prometheus went and stole fire and other technical arts from Hephaestus, and gave them to us.  While that kept us alive, every time we tried to get together and live in larger groups we fucked it up, because politics was not one of these technical arts.  Seeing how badly off we were, Zeus took pity on us and also gave us a sense of justice and shame, which are the qualities we need to live together in a city.  And since you can't have a large group get along without everyone in it having a sense of justice and shame, he doled these out to everyone equally, unlike either the animal abilities or the technical arts, which are unevenly distributed, with some having more skills than others.  

The point of this two stage myth about the invention of justice (or piety or wisdom or temperance or virtue -- Protagoras runs these all together as the 'civic' virtues) is to establish that while everyone has some sense of justice, it is not really a god-given natural ability.  Which means it must be taught, but that everyone can, and should, learn it.  This is unlike the technical arts, which require only a few specialists scattered through the population.  Moving away from the myth, Protagoras goes on to argue that our conviction that injustice must be punished implicitly acknowledges this same fact -- if you couldn't teach justice, then we wouldn't fault people for not learning it any more than we punish them for being short or not knowing how to make shoes.  In fact, we spend lots of time trying to teach our children justice, "straightening [them] out with threats and blows as if [they] were a twisted, bent piece of wood"(325e).  And if the sons of the most virtuous men turn out to be relative wastrels, this doesn't prove that virtue cannot be taught, it simply proves that it's not hereditary and hard to predict who will learn it best.  Protagoras compares the situation to learning one's native tongue.  Everyone can be taught, but some learn better, and some can teach faster.  Naturally, Protagoras himself is an example of the latter, and if you'll just initial here ... and ... here ... we'll get you registered!  

It feels like Protagoras has pulled way out ahead with his compelling monologue  Socrates claims to be duly impressed, but immediately starts pulling it apart.  He notices that Protagoras started off talking about justice in particular, but then shifted to talking about wisdom and virtue more generally.  So, are these the same thing?  Or is justice just one part of virtue?  Protagoras claims that all the virtuous qualities are distinct, but are all parts of virtue as a whole.  Socrates proceeds in his usual short question and answer format to completely unravel this idea, by demonstrating that (protagoras believes) folly is the opposite of both temperance and wisdom.  Since different things can't have the same opposite, then it seems these two parts of virtue are actually identical.  Score one for Socrates.

At this point the main argument of the dialog is interrupted in an interesting way.  Protagoras is frustrated by Socrates' style of debating with only short questions and answers.  He prefers to unspool a whole fully elaborated theory before giving his opponent a chance to respond.  Which of these is the proper way of conducting philosophy?  The intellectual wrestling match going on here doesn't have a clear set of rules to it.  Both competitors would like to tilt the odds in their favor by insisting on debating in their style.  How should we decide on the very rules of a fair game?  I think this is actually a very deep Platonic question that you can see recurring both within the dialogs and across them.  It's an offshoot of the fundamental idea that we don't really know what wisdom is.  In which case, we also don't know who has it, and we don't even know how to go about finding out who has it.  Lots of people claim to be experts in wisdom and virtue, but it doesn't seem to be a skill like others that allows us to construct a hierarchy of mastery with which to compare them.  This open contest of rivals, which leaves even the rules of the contest up for debate, seems to be fundamental to the Greek way of thinking.  Or at least so Donald Kagan is claiming; certainly we can see it in Plato.  And very much in line with Kagan's discussion of the importance of the polis, of a community, for the Greeks, the dilemma in this case is resolved by a discussion amongst the audience.  The crowd gathered to hear Socrates and Protagoras debate themselves get involved in defining the rules, and urge the two to compromise so that the contest can continue.

I therefore implore and counsel you, Protagoras and Socrates, to be reconciled and to compromise, under our arbitration, as it were, on some middle course. You, Socrates, must not insist on that precise, excessively brief form of discussion if it does not suit Protagoras, but rather allow free rein to the speeches, so that they might communicate to us more impressively and elegantly. And you, Protagoras, must not let out full sail in the wind and leave the land behind to disappear into the Sea of Rhetoric. Both of you must steer a middle course. So that's what you shall do, and take my advice and choose a referee or moderator or supervisor who will monitor for you the length of your speeches. (337e)

It's a very interesting meta-level moment that is intimately tied to the underlying philosophical content.  In practice, the compromise ends up being that the discussion will proceed by questions and answers, but Protagoras will start off asking the questions this time, rather than Socrates.  

Unexpectedly, Protagoras begins asking questions about contradictions in one of Simonides' poems.   It's a bit of stretch, but this is sort of related to the question of virtue since Simonides at one point says that it's hard to be good, but then later seems to take issues with a proverb from Pittacus that appears to say exactly the same thing.  So Socrates, is being good hard or easy?  It's not really clear to me why Protagoras asks his question this way, unless it's just to wrongfoot Socrates.  It's equally unclear why Socrates, who favors a rapid back and forth dialog, spends pages and pages analysing the poem, only to produce an interpretation of it that seems reasonably obvious from just a quick reading.  Simonides is saying that it is indeed hard for a man to be good for even a moment, but it's impossible for him to be good forever.  

In the final scene of the dialog we return to Socrates asking the questions, and he reiterates the question of whether virtue is one thing, or whether it is composed of parts like temperance, wisdom, justice, courage, etc ...  Protagoras is willing to grant that most of these are close synonyms, but courage, he claims, is very different from the rest.  Whereupon Socrates constructs a very roundabout argument to show him that he actually cannot distinguish courage from wisdom.  We've actually already seen the basic structure of this argument at the end of Laches -- a fool who has no concept of the danger is not courageous, which shows that we think courage depends intimately on, or maybe even reduces to, the knowledge of what to fear.  

This time though, the argument is way more developed.  In a sense, it constitutes the main philosophical content of the dialog, which, like with a lot of these, is packed into the final few pages.  Socrates approaches the specific case of courage through the more general framework of what we would call willpower.  We often say that someone knew that it was a bad idea to X (gamble, run away in battle, pork their neighbor's wife, whatever) but that they did it anyway because they were "overwhelmed by pleasure or fear".  However, if good and bad are really just different names for pleasure and pain, what can this possibly mean?  If something is bad for us, it will be, on balance, painful for us.  Vice versa, what's painful for us we call bad.  The "on balance" qualifier is important because of course there are many things that are pleasant now but have painful consequences later.  To label something as pleasurable or painful we will need a system for measuring and integrating all the pleasures and pains that actions produce over time.  Today we would call it "temporal discounting", which you can see carries a hidden assumption that it's always best to get it now.  Once we've done this measuring though, we will know whether an action is net pleasurable or net painful, that is, whether it is good or bad.  Since it's obvious that people don't deliberately and knowingly cause themselves pain, then someone who, "overcome by (present) pleasure", does something that will (later) produce greater pain, ie. does something net bad, then the failure isn't one of willpower, but simply of knowledge.  Either they were ignorant of the painful consequences, or they discounted them improperly.  The remedy for the situation isn't to try and teach someone courage or willpower, but to teach them how to measure.  That is, people only do bad things because they are ignorant.  In which case cowardice is really just ignorance, and courage really just wisdom, contradicting Protagoras' contention that courage was just a part of wisdom, and different from it in kind.

There are probably a million ways to take apart this argument, which has stretched down through the ages in Western philosophy.  I'm not going to pursue these, but I think it's worth noting the main underpinning here -- good and bad defined immanently.  It's good for us or bad for us not in some abstract moral sense, but in some concrete immanent ethical sense.  Good and bad are nothing but the names for a particular agent's thriving and not thriving, for their increase and decrease in power (ability to act) as Spinoza or Nietzsche of Deleuze would say.    This turns out to be curiously close to what people thought Protagoras was saying with his famous, "man is the measure of all things".  Why it here appears in the mouth of Socrates is beyond me.  

Unless we think that the whole goal of the dialog is to blur the distinction between the two, as if the separate wrestlers were locked into a single form through their grappling.  And perhaps that blurring is exactly the point.  Because the punch line of the dialog is that Socrates, in showing that Protagoras was wrong about virtue having parts, has managed to refute his own earlier position that it can be taught.  How could it not be something teachable if the essence of wisdom is just the knowledge of measuring or discounting pleasures and pains?

"It seems to me that our discussion has turned on us, and if it had a voice of its own, it would say, mockingly, 'Socrates and Protagoras, how ridiculous you are, both of you. Socrates, you said earlier that virtue cannot be taught, but now you are arguing the very opposite and have attempted to show that everything is knowledge—justice, temperance, courage—in which case, virtue would appear to be eminently teachable. On the other hand, if virtue is anything other than knowledge, as Protagoras has been trying to say, then it would clearly be unteachable. But, if it turns out to be wholly knowledge, as you now urge, Socrates, it would be very surprising indeed if virtue could not be taught. Now, Protagoras maintained at first that it could be taught, but now he thinks the opposite, urging that hardly any of the virtues turn out to be knowledge. On that view, virtue could hardly be taught at all.'(361b)

Socrates' greatest irony is that he always sets out going step by step to clarify things, and always end up confusing himself and everyone else.

Euthydemus

This is an odd dialogue that doesn't fit the typical 'Socratic' pattern.  Not least because Socrates doesn't really do much talking in it.  It begins in the frame story mode with Socrates recounting to his friend Crito a conversation he had yesterday with Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, two men from Chios who claim that they can teach anyone wisdom and virtue in just a few days.  Once we enter the recollection though, where Socrates and his companions ask them to demonstrate their remarkable method, E&D do most of the talking, since they are cast in the mode of (alleged) instructors.  So Socrates ends up opposite his customary side -- forced to answer questions rather than ask them.  There are a couple of important exceptions to this inversion though, which we'll come to in a moment.

As you might expect from their ginsu knife type advertisement of total consciousness, the instant virtue and wisdom that E&D teach are just too good to be true.  They are the archetypical sophists whose wisdom amounts to nothing more than a series of word games.  Demonstrating their teaching method means wrestling Socrates et. al. in a string of meaningless verbal gymnastics.  The pair, like good cop/bad cop partners, always manage to simultaneously affirm and refute whatever is in question, including their own statements.  It's like arguing with that clever but incredibly annoying guy you knew in freshman civ class who was just out to score points with the snappiest comeback.  So yeah, probably me.  There's not much point in going through any of their "arguments" because I think it's pretty clear that they are meant as jokes.  I quote one passage here just to give you a flavor for how silly they are; silly enough to be lost in translation.

   You know then, he said, what the proper business of each craftsman is? For instance, you know whose business it is to work metal?
   Yes, I do—the blacksmith's.
   Well then, what about making pots?
   The potter's.
   And again, to slaughter and skin, and to boil and roast the pieces after cutting them up?
   The cook's, I said.
   Now if a man does the proper business, he said, he will do rightly? Very much so.
   And the proper business in the case of the cook is, as you say, to cut up and skin?27 You did agree to that didn't you?
   Yes, I did, I said, but forgive me.
  Then it is clear, he said, that if someone kills the cook and cuts him up, and then boils him and roasts him, he will be doing the proper business. And if anyone hammers the blacksmith himself, and puts the potter on the wheel, he will also be doing the proper business.
[27. The Greek here is ambiguous between "it's proper for a cook to cut up and skin" and "it's proper to cut up and skin a cook." This English must be heard as having the same two readings.] (301d)

 

Socrates doesn't intervene much as E&D proceed, instead letting his companions answer most questions.  While these folks sometimes get annoyed by the vacuousness of the jokes, Socrates generously treats them as harmless play.  But he does attempt to keep the farce on track.  Since he asked E&D to demonstrate their wisdom specifically by showing everyone how they would encourage a new student to take up the pursuit of wisdom to begin with, he twice steers them back to this theme.  Each time he good-naturedly suggests that they have just been pulling everyone's leg with their arguments so far and should stop teasing.  Then he lays out a short argument of his own, by way of giving an example of how he, though certainly not a professional wise man like EorD, would go about interesting someone in the study of virtue and wisdom.  

The first time, he establishes, in classic Socratic fashion, that nothing is truly good in itself except for knowledge of the good; all the other good things like health or wealth we might want to possess are of no use to us if we don't have the good sense and wisdom to use them properly for our benefit.  In his second interruption, he discovers that most knowledge can help us make something (money or medicine or shoes) but is itself silent on the best use and overall value of those things it teaches us to make.  Wisdom, though, must be a kind of knowledge that combines knowing how best to use something with the ability to make it.

And the same is true of the generals, he said. Whenever they capture some city, or a camp, they hand it over to the statesmen— for they themselves have no idea of how to use the things they have captured—just in the same way, I imagine, that quail hunters hand theirs over to quail keepers. So, he said, if we are in need of that art which will itself know how to use what it acquires through making or capturing, and if it is an art of this sort which will make us happy, then, he said, we must look for some other art besides that of generalship. (290d)  

In keeping with the pattern we've seen, once we reach this circularity in a definition -- a knowledge that knows the value of itself -- the conversation falls apart.  Here, Socrates can't figure out which knowledge would fit the bill.  After debunking the above idea that the general possesses this knowledge, he wonders whether it isn't the statesman he's looking for.   But Socrates' first interjection has already undermined the idea that even the statesman can simultaneously teach men not merely what is good, but how to use what is good wisely and for their own benefit.

SOCRATES: And Clinias and I of course agreed that nothing is good except some sort of knowledge.
CRITO: Yes, you said that.
SOCRATES: Then the other results which a person might attribute to the statesman's art—and these, of course, would be numerous, as for instance, making the citizens rich and free and not disturbed by faction—all these appeared to be neither good nor evil; but this art had to make them wise and to provide them with a share of knowledge if it was to be the one that benefited them and made them happy. (292b)

So in the end, as always, Socrates has shown us that nothing can be more important or more valuable than wisdom, but also that we have no idea what wisdom is.  Everytime we go looking for philosophical wisdom, knowledge of what is really valuable in life, we come back knowing about some particular thing that may or may not be valuable, but without any ultimate theory of what makes that thing valuable for us, and under what conditions.

Both of Socrates' interruptions are more or less ignored by the sophists, who continue to put a straight face on their verbal jousting long past the point where it has become ridiculous.  Eventually, when Socrates and company begin imitating the wordplay "arguments" of E&D, the whole works acquires a vaudeville atmosphere.  I think the fact that these are meant to be comic characters is unmissable.  In other words, I think the text makes clear that we are not supposed to seriously evaluate the content of what these guys are saying.

Which sets up a bit of a problem for the interpretation of the end of the dialog.  Because after Socrates finishes recounting the increasingly comic conversation to Crito, he praises E&D to the sky.

Even I myself was so affected by it as to declare that I had never in my life seen such wise men; and I was so absolutely captivated by their wisdom that I began to praise and extol them and said, O happy pair, what miraculous endowment you possess to have brought such a thing to perfection in so short a time! Among the many other fine things which belong to your arguments, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, there is one which is the most magnificent of all, that you care nothing for the many, or in fact, for men of consequence or reputation, but only for persons of your own sort. And I am convinced that there are very few men like you who would appreciate these arguments, but that the majority understand them so little that I feel sure they would be more ashamed to refute others with arguments of this sort than to be refuted by them. (303c)

Now, if this isn't socratic irony, I'll eat my shorts.  At the same time though, Socrates doesn't just denounce these guys as impostors, either to their face during the conversation, nor to his friend when he relates it privately the next day.  In fact, he even seems to semi-seriously ask the latter's opinion.  Of course Crito says that they sound like idiots.  And he says he spoke with another friend who was also present at the same conversation and concluded the Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are deadbeats, so to speak.  But Socrates dismisses Crito's friend as merely jealous and won't even agree with Crito that they are useless.

So the mystery is why Socrates is showing E&D such patience and goodwill when they seem to be making a mockery of the philosophy he considers so important?  We see a clear contrast between his own example and the way they proceed.  The text sets them up as laughing stocks.  Socrates' praise drips with irony.  So what does Plato want to tell us by not letting Socrates simply unload on these two?  

One thing I'm pretty sure it's not meant to tell us is what the editor claims it is.

Do Socrates, and Plato, agree? It seems not—that at least is the implication of Socrates' praise, no doubt ironically overdrawn, and of his refusal to join in the denunciation. True philosophy, and real devotion to it, require an interest in logic and argument for its own sake, whether or not it is used correctly or yields valid support for true conclusions. Even the misuse of reason has its gripping appeal to one who would model his life on the proper use of it. Socrates is himself no 'eristic'—his approach to Clinias is fostering, not refutatory, and his firm interest throughout is in the truth, not mere verbal victory. But he (or Plato) refuses to reject, dismiss, and denounce the arguments of the eristics, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, as 'of no value whatsoever', as 'worthless' and 'ridiculous'. They have their own power, as all uses of reason do, and must be respectfully examined and analyzed—even while one does not accept their conclusions.

It stretches credulity to claim that Plato wants to show us that the men in the black pajamas are a worthy fucking adversary in the contest for the title "philosopher".  These guys are not showing an "interest in logic and argument for its own sake"; they're just nihilists.  Their logic is a joke and they reach no conclusions we might accept or reject at all.  Yet John M. Cooper is onto something here when he says that these foolish arguments have a certain power.  

I think what Plato is trying to show us is that even these fools can have the power to prompt us to think for ourselves, and that in the pursuit of philosophy, this is the only power that counts.  This is not because any of their arguments deserve consideration, but simply because they clearly illustrate to us that in philosophy, many who hang out a shingle are charlatans.  We cannot operate on trust in expertise.  We are stuck figuring out who is a good teacher for ourselves.  The action of the dialog reveals that telling the difference between these sophists and the real philosopher can't depend on whether they sound like they know what they're talking about or on what we think of the conclusions they reach.  Socrates paints himself as a bumbling novice and reaches no conclusions.  E&D claim to be professionals yet also lead us nowhere.  The point is actually that only you can judge expertise in philosophy, though you can only do this by pursuing for yourself the question of what is valuable.  You must become a philosopher.   And you can, instantaneously, by starting to pursue these questions!   Socrates makes this clear in the final lines of the dialog, where a flummoxed Crito still wants to know how to solve the initial problem and encourage his son to study wisdom.

   CRITO: ... whenever I take a look at any of those persons who set up to educate men, I am amazed; and every last one of them strikes me as utterly grotesque, to speak frankly between ourselves. So the result is that I cannot see how I am to persuade the boy to take up philosophy.
   SOCRATES: My dear Crito, don't you realize that in every pursuit most of the practitioners are paltry and of no account whereas the serious men are few and beyond price? For instance, doesn't gymnastics strike you as a fine thing? And money making and rhetoric and the art of the general?
   CRITO: Yes, of course they do.
   SOCRATES: Well then, in each of these cases don't you notice that the b majority give a laughable performance of their respective tasks?
   CRITO: Yes indeed—you are speaking the exact truth.
   SOCRATES: And just because this is so, do you intend to run away from all these pursuits and entrust your son to none of them?
   CRITO: No, this would not be reasonable, Socrates.
   SOCRATES: Then don't do what you ought not to, Crito, but pay no attention to the practitioners of philosophy, whether good or bad. Rather give serious consideration to the thing itself: if it seems to you negligible, then turn everyone from it, not just your sons. But if it seems to you to be what I think it is, then take heart, pursue it, practice it, both you and yours, as the proverb says. (307a)

Overall, I think the point of the dialog is to illustrate the open-mindedness of the true philosopher.  Not in the more modern sense of believing anything, no matter how far fetched, that logic and evidence lead us to believe.  But in the sense that we can learn something from any situation, no matter how ludicrous, if we refuse to get annoyed or dismissive, and avoid engaging in ad hominem attacks.  Socrates is totally open-minded, without it turning into gullibility.

Lysis

Lysis attempts (and of course fails) to define friendship.  In this it follows the format we've seen before.  In fact, the only real departure here is that Socrates, because he is speaking exclusively with two young boys, Lysis and Menexemus, supplies both the questions and answers himself.  He's taking it easy on the kids, only hinting at how ignorant they are, rather than proving it to them conclusively as he does with adults.  However, the conclusion of the conversation remains the same -- we generate a strange paradox just as we return to the initial inadequate definition, so we're only left knowing we know nothing about friendship.

The scene opens with Ctesippus inviting Socrates to try out a new wrestling school they've joined.  Ctesippus wants Socrates to come check out Lysis, because he feels that his buddy Hippothales, who has gone gaga over the boy, is going about seducing the youth in completely the wrong way.  Socrates agrees that Hippothales saccharine flattery is the wrong approach and claims that beautiful young aristocrats like Lysis will only fall in love with someone capable of taking them down a peg.  This literary setting of the dialog helps us to keep in mind that the word translated here as friendship has broader resonances in the original Greek.

The Greek word for love here is philein, cognate to the word for 'friendship', philia: 'friendship' in this discussion includes the love of parents and children and other relatives, as well as the close elective attachments of what we understand as personal friendship. It also covers impassioned, erotic fixations like Hippothales' for Lysis. (editorial notes)

In other words, pretty much any of the relationships depicted in the story could be called friendships, without much of a boundary between a friend and what we might call a lover.  In addition, as we see towards the end of the dialog, the word covers the relationship between the philosopher and wisdom.  φιλοσοφία is philo-sophia, the love or befriending of wisdom.  So this word friendship has a lot of work to do.  

The discussion breaks down into three parts, the first two of which are really just drawn out preliminaries.  First, apropos of the setting with the young boys, Socrates asks which direction friendship runs in.  Is the lover the friend, or it is the loved?  Or perhaps friendship is necessarily reciprocal?  Hippothales love of or friendship with Lysis is proof that the relationship need not be reciprocal.  But if we choose one direction or the other, Socrates finds we can end up saying strange things like we're friends with people that hate us or hate people who are our friends.

Having run aground, Socrates changes directions and next asks whether friends must be alike or share some kinship, or whether opposites attract.  If we're only friends to people just like ourselves though, what good does that do us?  We assume friendship provides some sort of benefit, but here we're just getting more of what we've already got.  But if we agree that opposites attract, then will the friend be attracted to the enemy, and vice versa?  There is one more option though, and it begins to take us to the heart of the question.  What if the neutral is a friend of the good?

"And the good is not a friend to the good, nor the bad to the bad, e nor the good to the bad. Our previous argument disallows it. Only one possibility remains. If anything is a friend to anything, what is neither good nor bad is a friend either to the good or to something like itself. For I don't suppose anything could be a friend to the bad." (216e)

Socrates analogy is that the body, which is neither good nor bad in itself, becomes a friend of medicine in cases where it is ill.  This would explain why friendship is a benefit.  We are drawn to something that is neither like us nor opposite to us, but something that fills a gap within us or cures us of a sort of contamination by the bad.  We yearn for the good as something that heals us, that takes a neutral but corruptible matter and leads it in the right direction.   Though it sounds suspiciously like an untutored young man falling in love with a wise old soul, this is what friendship must really be.  Socrates immediately makes it explicit that this is exactly why the philosopher is a friend to wisdom.

"From this we may infer that those who are already wise no longer love wisdom, whether they are gods or men. Nor do those love it who are so ignorant that they are bad, for no bad and stupid man loves wisdom. There remain only those who have this bad thing, ignorance, but have not yet been made ignorant and stupid by it. They are conscious of not knowing what they don't know. The upshot is that those who are as yet neither good nor bad love wisdom, while all those who are bad do not, and neither do those who are good. For our earlier discussion made it clear that the opposite is not friend to the opposite, nor is like friend to like. Remember?" (218b)

Just when it seems we've reached a satisfying conclusion, Socrates adds a third and final twist that pulls the rug out from under us.  Because at this point he begins to tug at the implications of his seemingly successful definition.  A neutral thing (the body) becomes the friend of a good thing (medicine) for the sake of some property possessed by that good thing (health) on account of a bad thing (illness) that has happened to it.  But if we are only friends with the good because it possesses some good quality, then aren't we kinda just using our friend to get at the quality?  Isn't it the quality itself, the thing for the sake of which we're friends, that is the real friend?  In this example, isn't the true friend health, not medicine?  But then, don't we want health for the sake of something else as well?  Don't we face an infinite regress of friends, each of which is actually just a means to an end?  Shouldn't we only call the final link in this chain, the first friend, our only true friend?  Of course, this one true friend would be the Good itself, the thing for which we love all the good things and by which we benefit from their ability to draw us away from the corruption of bad things.  This would be a thing that we could love for itself, in itself, and not for the sake of any other thing.  

You might think this is exactly the sort of theory of friendship the Plato™ would say.  I mean, it's so similar to a Christian love of God or Kant's categorical imperative.  The only true friend is the radiant sun which illuminates all the other things we love only for their reflection of it.   And yet this is the exact moment when the dialog collapses into confusion.  Because we've produced another circle or paradox.  Socrates asks whether this Good itself meets his definition of a friend.  All the friends in our chain were similar to one another insofar as we loved them for the sake of something else, some good they possessed.  However, it appears that we love the Good only for the sake of its opposite, the bad.  That opposition was central to our desire to become friends with the first good thing in the chain, and then all the rest.  Take away the bad (illness) and it seems the good (health) would be useless and meaningless to us.

"Then that friend of ours, the one which was the terminal point for all the other things that we called 'friends for the sake of another friend,' does not resemble them at all. For they are called friends for the sake of a friend, but the real friend appears to have a nature completely the opposite of this. It has become clear to us that it was a friend for the sake of an enemy. Take away the enemy and it seems it is no longer a friend." (220e)

We should pause for a moment to note how weird this is coming out of the mouth of Socrates.  We don't love the Good for itself at all, but precisely for the sake of its opposite.  And if we take this as an early reference to the theory of Forms, then this Form of the Good that is meant to be the preeminent good at the end of the chain turns out to be nothing like the links in the chain that it structures.  It's like saying that the proverbial Form of a Table is nothing like a table, but actually like its opposite (a not-table? a chaise lounge?).

Socrates partially pulls back from this conclusion by continuing his strange thought experiment.  He wonders whether, if the bad were eliminated, we would have any desires at all.  Without the bad, could there be such a thing as friendship?  Would we ever be hungry and thirsty if these didn't cause us to suffer?  But then, are hunger and thirst just motivated by the bad?  It seems that these can be good or bad feelings depending on the circumstances.  We don't experience hunger as a bad thing just as we sit down to a good burger.  So perhaps they're neutral feelings in themselves?  In which case maybe we could desire and love something in a neutral sort of way?  Might we be able to tell our spouse we have a purely Platonic relationship with the Good, so to speak?  This at least would mean that we don't love it just for the sake of the evil it will deliver us from, but positively and in itself.

Of course, if we love the Good only neutrally, it's not clear anymore what good it actually does us!  This was exactly the problem we began with -- if like is friend to like then what good can they offer each other?  The dialog ends with some foreshadowing of a theory of love proposed in the Symposium.  What if we really just love the other half of our self, from which we have somehow become separated?  In this context, the thought is meant to have a sort of circle-squaring effect because we are both like and not like the thing that we love, or, as Socrates puts it here, it belongs to us without being like us, since it is in some sense our opposite.  Since it's our missing piece, it would be good to be reunited with it.  But since it's also really just us, we can love it in itself and for the sake of itself, or at least, for our own sake.