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.