Clitophon

Whether or not Plato himself wrote this one, it's fitting that Clitophon is our final early Socratic dialog.  This shortest dialog acts like a summary of what Socrates has offered us in the aporetic dialogs, and as a transition to what comes next in Plato's philosophy.  It's another unusual dialog in that Socrates barely gets to speak at all.  Clitophon is a former student of his who summarizes what Socrates has taught him by quoting one of Socrates characteristic paens to the pursuit of the virtue of one's soul above all else.  But this secondhand recitation is really all Socrates get to say.  Clitophon then goes on to criticize his former teacher, applying Socrates' own method against him and asking what exactly we should expect to get out of studying virtue.

In other words, the dialog asks the clear question of how we develop Socrates' endless inquiry into a fully formed philosophy.  Clitophon agrees that inquiring into our lives and our selves is a necessary starting point.  But he is unwilling to accept that simply posing the question again and again is enough; he wants it answered.  Instead, he uses the same analogies Socrates always favors to reveal that Socrates himself knows nothing about the virtue he is constantly extolling.  "What do we say is the skill which concerns the virtue of the soul?" (409a) he asks Socrates.  If the answer to this is justice, then what does mastering the skill of justice enable us to produce?  If we were doctors, or carpenters we could produce health and houses.  And don't say we produce the beneficial, the useful, or the appropriate (the sequence from Greater Hippias) because every skill produces those things in its own way.  We want to know what particular good justice produces that distinguishes it from other knowledge.  Friendship and harmony in the city are good candidates for an answer, but then, is justice only about producing agreement among people, even if they agree on false things or things they know nothing about?  And doesn't every discipline produce agreement amongst those who learn it?  Carpenters and doctors produce agreement on what makes houses and bodies strong because they know how those work, so what is it that the study of justice knows.  Clitophon gives up on Socrates because he can't tell us how to define virtue, and can't even concretely point us towards the next step we need to take to achieve it. 

I came to the conclusion that while you're better than anyone at turning a man towards the pursuit of virtue, one of two things must be the case: either this is all you can do, nothing more—as might happen with any other skill, for example, when someone who's not a pilot rehearses a speech in praise of the pilot's skill as being something of great worth to men; the same could also be done for any other skill. And someone might accuse you of being in the same position with justice, that your ability to praise it so well does not make you any more knowledgeable about it. (410c)

It's impossible to know definitively how to interpret this criticism, especially without knowing for sure who wrote the dialog.  Is this from an outside critic of Plato's whole oeuvre?  Or is this Plato himself as Clitophon, leveling a charge at his old master and main character?  Could it be one of the last early Socratic dialogs that Plato wrote, meant to announce a new, more positive, constructive, and definitive phase in his philosophy?  Did we already glimpse the direction this takes when we saw in Phaedo how Socrates' famous ignorance could be amplified into a more elaborate theory of Forms?  Or, on the contrary, is Clitophon (or Plato or whoever) completely missing the deepest point Scorates has to offer?  We are immersed in a world with no firm transcendent markers of the good.  All we know is that there is something more to life than cocaine and hookers, my friend.  But we don't know how to define the goal, much less find the path to it.  We are on our own with an unanswerable question.  Maybe every attempt to reach for a certain conclusion is a mistake?  

 

Menexenus

This one's a true oddball. I'm not sure what to make of it.  It's not much of a dialog at all.  There's a brief frame story exchange where Menexenus asks Socrates to recite a funeral oration for some fallen soldiers.  Socrates claims he learned a beautiful one from Aspasia, the renowned lover of Pericles.  The rest is Socrates giving the speech, which is basically just a bunch of ra-ra crap about how great and brave Athenians are and how proud one should be of dying for the patria.  

While the editorial comments suggest that the speech could be a satire, I don't see much evidence of that.  Of course, I don't know the style one should expect from a speech like this, nor the detailed history of Athenian bravery in the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars that it references.  There are plenty of other occasions where Plato's jokes are obviously funny even after 2500 years, so the hypothesis seems a stretch.  

Perhaps he's trying to convey what he considers important and essential about Athenian politics?  The speech contains two main themes.  First, Athenians are the authentic and pure Greeks and they don't mix with barbarians™.  Second, Athenians love freedom and they consider themselves the guardians of freedom for all Greeks.  But given that Kagan's course seems to indicate both would have been establishment views in Athens, it's hard to figure out why Plato would bother to put othodox platitudes in Socrates' mouth.   

So basically we just don't know dude.

Ion

Ion is a rhapsode -- a professional reciter of poetry -- who specializes in Homer.  And he's portrayed as a bit dippy.  In this short dialog, Socrates doesn't engage in argument with him so much as simply tell him what to think.  Ion claims that Homer is the greatest poet.  Stop me if you've heard this question before but ... how is it that Ion is given to know that Homer is the greatest poet?  What is a rhapsode really a master of that would enable him to make this evaluation?  

The question is inconvenient for Ion because it turns out that he knows nothing about the contents of those subjects Homer discusses in the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Ion doesn't know whether Homer's description of how to drive a chariot is a good one, or whether the home remedies he shows characters taking would actually work, or whether the fishing techniques he depicts actually catch fish.  For these questions, you would need to consult a charioteer, a doctor, and a fisherman respectively.  In fact, Ion can't come up with any particular thing that the rhapsode knows.  Even his contention that, having memorized all of Homer, he at least knows how different people should speak, founders on an argument we saw in Gorgias -- to know if someone is speaking well, you have to know something of what they are speaking about.  Finally, Ion claims that since he knows so many speeches made by generals, he knows how to be a general.  Technically, this last contention goes unrefuted by Socrates, but is clearly meant as a reductio ad absurdum type of joke.

You might say that this argument seems to miss the point.  You don't need to be an expert on whales, after all, to appreciate that Moby Dick is a great novel.  So why can't we say that Ion's expertise is not related to the contents of poems, but to their forms?  The dialog doesn't really deal well with this question.  The closest it comes to explicitly treating the form of poetry is a brief early passage where we discover that while Ion recites other poetry, most of it bores him, and he only claims to really know how great Homer is.  Socrates takes this to indicate that the rhapsode is really not a master of anything like the evaluation of the form of poetry.  Have you ever heard of the master of a subject only being able to venture an opinion on one exemplar of it?  A master painter or sculptor would know whether any painting or sculpture was valuable, not just whether Picasso's qualified.  It's a fair argument, but I think we still come away from the dialog wondering if Socrates has addressed poetry itself as an art form over and above the mere contents of a poem.  

Or perhaps the lack of focus on the form of poetry is deliberate, and is meant to allow a special place for a 'formal' understanding, one that would be orthogonal to the type of argumentative understanding Socrates calls knowledge or mastery.  In a sense, this might fit with the glimpses we've seen of Plato's later works.  Phaedo and Gorgias (and I think we'll see many if not all of the later dialogs) end with a myth.  There's no myth in Ion, but perhaps Socrates is setting the stage.  Here, he says that while Ion is not a master of any profession, he can say all sorts of interesting things about Homer because he is divinely inspired.  Given how daft Ion seems, it's hard to read this as a compliment exactly, but Socrates doesn't seem to mean it in a derogatory sense either.  Divine inspiration may not be mastery, but it's not worthless either, so long as we understand what it is and is not.  Socrates illustrates his claim with a beautiful metaphor about magnets (which come from Magnesia, it turns out).

As I said earlier, that's not a subject you've mastered—speaking well about Homer; it's a divine power that moves you, as a "Magnetic" stone moves iron rings. (That's what Euripides called it; most people call it "Heraclean.") This stone not only pulls those rings, if they're iron, it also puts power in the rings, so that they in turn can do just what the stone does—pull other rings—so that there's sometimes a very long chain of iron pieces and rings hanging from one another. And the power in all of them depends on this stone. In the same way, the Muse makes some people inspired herself, and then through those who are inspired a chain of other enthusiasts is suspended. You know, none of the epic poets, if they're good, are masters of their subject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all those beautiful poems. The same goes for lyric poets if they're good: just as the Corybantes are not in their right minds when they dance, lyric poets, too, are not in their right minds when they make those beautiful lyrics, but as soon as they sail into harmony and rhythm they are possessed by Bacchic frenzy. (533d)

Greater Hippias

... a prelude to Greater Hippias?  This is clearly the longer and more complex sequel to Lesser Hippias.  However, its authorship is apparently in doubt; Plato may or may not have written it.  The philosophical content and literary setting fit pretty seamlessly with Lesser, but the style is distinctly more arch-ironical.  Socrates blows so much smoke up Hippias' ass his eyeballs is like to float.  It reminds me, in this respect, of Alcibiades, another dialog with disputed authorship.  Both take some of the stylistic elements that are certainly present in Plato to an extreme that borders on caricature.  All of which is to say that it's a little problematic to interpret Greater Hippias as Plato providing the more compelling theory of knowledge that I thought the end of Lesser Hippias was clearly begging for.  Nevertheless, from a philosophical perspective, that's how I'd like to read it.

Since last time Socrates problematized the common sense notion that the honest man is better than the liar, this time he carries the argument backwards from where Lesser Hippias began.  If Achilles isn't better than Odysseus, then maybe the Iliad isn't finer than the Odyssey, which seems to be what Hippias contended in his presentation on Homer.  So Socrates goes to find Hippias again and ask him how to define "fine".  

The translator's have a useful note on the breadth of Greek term.  

The Greek word here translated 'fine' is kalon, a widely applicable term of highly favorable evaluation, covering our 'beautiful' (in physical, aesthetic, and moral senses), 'noble,' 'admirable', 'excellent', and the like—it is the same term translated 'beautiful' in Diotima's speech about love and its object in Symposium. What Socrates is asking for, then, is a general explanation of what feature any object, or action, or person, or accomplishment of any kind, has to have in order correctly to be characterized as highly valued or worth valuing in this broad way.

So, as usual in these early dialogues, the challenge is to define something that's a major component of, perhaps even synonymous with, the good.   And, following in the footsteps of people like Charmides, Laches, and Euthyphro, Hippias makes all the same land-war-in-Asia type mistakes in his attempt to define fine.  First he says that girls are fine, then he moves on to mares, lyres, gilded things, burying your parents, the appropriate, the useful, and the beneficial, all before giving up when his final attempt, "things pleasant to sight and hearing", proves to reduce back to beneficial pleasures.  Naturally, all the initial forays are fine things, but not the fine.  The later ones are closer to the mark, but Socrates argues that they confuse the fine itself, with what causes something to be fine.  Since we've seen a lot of this argument several times before, I won't try to go through every step, but just focus on the new distinctions that make Greater Hippias employs in deconstructing its object.

To begin with there's a stylistic innovation at work here that you'll see in all the quotes I use.  The conversation only involves Socrates and Hippias; there's no audience for this one.  But Socrates pretends that he wants to get Hippias to tell him exactly what the fine is only so that he can use the definition as a comeback to an argument he previously lost.  He tells us that someone asked him how he knew could go on about which speeches were fine and which "foul" without even being able to give a definition of fine.  This, of course, is a joke.  Socrates has asked himself this question.  Nevertheless he spends the whole dialog pretending that he's not asking the questions, but that he's only trying to get Hippias to help prepare him to answer this anonymous third party.      

In terms of content, the dialog begins by adding an interesting twist to now familiar objection that you can't define something in itself by adducing mere examples of it.  After Hippias submits girls and mares as definitions of fine, Socrates adds pots and other well made utensils.  But then he wonders what happens if we say girls are fine and well made pots are also fine.  Because which of these is the fine?

HIPPIAS: But I think that's so, Socrates. Even that utensil is fine if finely made. But on the whole that's not worth judging fine, compared to a horse and a girl and all the other fine things.
SOCRATES: Very well. Then I understand how we'll have to answer him when he asks this question, here: "Don't you know that what Heraclitus said holds good—'the finest of monkeys is foul put together with another class', and the finest of pots is foul put together with the class of girls, so says Hippias the wise." Isn't that so, Hippias?
HIPPIAS: Of course, Socrates. Your answer's right.
SOCRATES: Then listen. I'm sure of what he'll say next. "What? If you put the class of girls together with the class of gods, won't the same thing happen as happened when the class of pots was put together with that of girls? Won't the finest girl be seen to be foul? And didn't Heraclitus (whom you bring in) say the same thing too, that 'the wisest of men is seen to be a monkey compared to god in wisdom and fineness and everything else?' " Should we agree, Hippias, that the finest girl is foul compared to the class of gods? (289a)

There's a distinction between relative fine and absolute fine implied here.  If you use different and incomparable types of things in the definition of fine, you can be sure you're only getting at the relatively fine.  As soon as you step back and broaden your horizon, you discover that the things you were calling fine before have changed character and don't look so fine anymore.  In this sense "the fine" is functioning like "the finest".  Comparing types of things takes us in the direction of a superlative.

The next distinction isn't exactly new -- we saw it already in Gorgias -- but it's the first time I can recall the appearance-reality distinction coming up in one of these short Socratic dialogs.  It appears just when the conversation shifts in a more abstract direction, when Socrates and Hippias examine whether the appropriate is the same as the fine.  

But see if you think this sort of answer is fine. We had a grip on it just now when we replied that gold is fine for things it's appropriate to, but not for those it's not. And anything else is fine if this has been added to it: this, the appropriate itself—the nature of the appropriate itself. See if it turns out to be the fine." (293e)

...

SOCRATES: See here, then. What do we say about the appropriate: Is it  what makes—by coming to be present—each thing to which it is present be seen to be fine, or be fine, or neither? (294a)

Socrates doesn't include the option "both" in this definition, even though that's what Hippias immediately tries to choose.  But if what made things fine and what made it apparent to us that things are fine were identical, then there would never be any dispute or ignorance possible about the fine.  So we have to make a choice between being and seeming.

Therefore, if the appropriate is what makes things fine, it would be the fine we're looking for, but it would not be what makes things be seen to be fine. Or, if the appropriate is what makes things be seen to be fine, it wouldn't be the fine we're looking for. Because that makes things be; but by itself it could not make things be seen to be and be, nor could anything else. Let's choose whether we think the appropriate is what makes things be seen to be, or be, fine. (294e)

Continuing in the same vein, Socrates distinguishes between a neutral sort of apparent power or pure ability (the useful), and the real power to do good or provide a benefit (the beneficial).  The truly fine will not be merely appropriate in any situation, or useful for just whatever, but directly beneficial for us (even if, perhaps, this isn't apparent to us).  This is the same notion he argued for at length in Gorgias, and is exactly the sort of morally active definition that we lacked in Lesser Hippias.  

SOCRATES: Then here's what got away from us: the able-and-useful without qualification is fine. And this is what our mind wanted to say, Hippias: the useful-and-able for making some good—that is the fine. (296e)

Unfortunately, just when you think we might be getting somewhere, Socrates introduces another distinction, this time between the fine itself, and the cause of the fine.  Since he claims that the beneficial makes something good, and we hypothesize that the fine is the beneficial, then it follows that the fine makes something good, or is the cause of it being good, but is not the goodness itself, so to speak.  Succinct as it is, there's a slippery obscurity to this argument.  To say the beneficial causes the good seems a bit circular -- the beneficial was defined as "the useful and able for making some good", but we know that it's good only because we are benefited by it.  Then later this same circularity is used to distinguish cause from effect as if the two were only related linearly.  

SOCRATES: The cause is not a thing that comes to be, and the thing that comes to be is not a cause.
HIPPIAS: That's true.
SOCRATES: Good god! Then the fine is not good, nor the good fine. (297c)

So we distinguish the fine from the good as cause from effect.  Though doesn't this provide a perfect definition of exactly what we were seeking though -- the fine?   We weren't trying to define the good.  But here Socrates counts it as an objection that we've only discovered the cause of the good (not the fine).  In a way, we might think of this as a version of the circularity that implodes other Socratic dialogs, though perhaps not handled as clearly.  The good appears to be the cause of itself.  I can't quite tell whether this constitutes the fulfillment of the demand in Lesser Hippias for an active (not neutral) definition of the good, or the proof that such a definition doesn't exist.  Does possessing justice force us to be just?  Or is this just the cause of our just actions, but not the being of justice itself?

Socrates introduces one final interesting distinction that we haven't seen before.  As I mentioned before, Hippias' last attempt is to define the fine as something that "is pleasant through hearing and sight".  The qualifications are meant to exclude 'base' pleasures like eating and sex.  But then, how do we know in advance which pleasures are going to be base?  Why do seeing and hearing get a privilege here?  It turns out this final definition hasn't advanced beyond the earlier attempt made with "beneficial".  What distinguishes these pleasures is that they are good for us.  In and of itself, this final argument might not deserve comment.  But in pursuing it, Socrates distinguishes what we might call continuous from discrete qualities.  

The issues arises because it seems natural that we want to characterize something that visual and auditory pleasures have in common.  In other words, we want both types of pleasure to share a characteristic that each of them also has.  You might think of this as the definition of "in common".  But Socrates points out that there are certain qualities that both together could have even if each individually did not possess that quality (and vice versa -- qualities that each individually possesses, but not both together).   For example, oneness.  A pleasure through sight could be one, and a pleasure through hearing also one.  But a pleasure through sight and hearing would be two.  Twoness, naturally, works the opposite way.  Socrates uses this distinction to refute Hippias' claim that all qualities are continuous, in the sense that they can be added together and divided without changing nature.  Some, it turns out are discrete -- individuated properties, rather than properties of individuals, if you like.  Socrates wonders aloud whether the fine belongs to the former or latter category, before agreeing it's the former, and dropping the issue.  We might wonder instead why they only discussed the conjunction "and", without inquiring into "or".  Couldn't we just say that something is fine if the pleasure it produces comes through sight or hearing?  I think the omission is explained by the fact that this definition wouldn't give us the -- one and only -- fine, but two distinct types of fine.  As we've seen, this just leaves us at the level of examples and the merely relative fine.

So, as usual, the dialog ends without a satisfactory definition of "the fine".  Hippias insists that Socrates is wasting his time with these with all these little distinctions.  But Socrates literally can't get the questions he asks himself out of his head.

You all say what you just said, that I am spending my time on things that are silly and small and worthless. But when I'm convinced by you and say what you say, that it's much the most excellent thing to be able to present a speech well and finely, and get things done in court or any other gathering, I hear every insult from that man (among others around here) who has always been refuting me. He happens to be a close relative of mine, and he lives in the same house. So when I go home to my own place and he hears me saying those things, he asks if I'm not ashamed that I dare discuss fine activities when I've been so plainly refuted about the fine, and it's clear I don't even know at all what that is itself! "Look," he'll say. "How will you know whose speech—or any other action—is finely presented or not, when you are ignorant of the fine? And when you're in a state like that, do you think it's any better for you to live than die?" (304d)

Lesser Hippias

This is a short and not very interesting dialogue that we can cover pretty quickly.  Socrates catches the famous sophist and know-it-all Hippias just after he has given a presentation on Homer.  It seems, to foreshadow the conversation in Greater Hippias, that Hippias was discussing how the Iliad is a finer poem than the Odyssey.  Socrates, has heard this argument before,  based in that case on the difference between the heroes of the two poems.

Indeed, Eudicus, there are some things in what Hippias said just now about Homer that I'd like to hear more about. For your father Apemantus used to say that the Iliad of Homer is a finer poem than the Odyssey, to just the extent that Achilles is a better man than Odysseus; for, he said, one of these poems is about Odysseus and the other about Achilles. (363b)

So he asks Hippias about why Achilles, portrayed as honest and strong, is better than Odysseseus, who is seen as a wily distorter of the truth.  Surely, 'everybody knows' that it's better to be honest than to lie, so obviously Achilles is the superior hero?  But if there's one thing that Socrates does, it's question exactly what 'everybody knows'.  

He points out that in order to lie effectively, a man like Odysseus must know the truth pretty intimately.  Odysseus doesn't lie by accident, but on purpose.  Which means that he could tell the truth, but chooses not too in some cases.  Whereas Achilles, who always tries to tell the truth, may involuntarily make mistakes.  So it seems like Odysseus actually has more power or ability than Achilles.  Achilles is limited to the truth, where Odysseus can tell the truth, but he can also do so much more.  Most of the dialog consists of Socrates forcing Hippias to agree to this position by analogy -- the faster runner could go slow, the better archer can more reliably miss the target, the mathematician who knows the true answer is in a better position to propound a false one, etc ...  This all culminates, as usual, in the question of justice.  

   SOCRATES: And if it's both? Then isn't the soul which has both—knowledge and power—more just, and the more ignorant more unjust? Isn't that necessarily so?
   HIPPIAS: It appears so.
   SOCRATES: This more powerful and wiser soul was seen to be better
and to have more power to do both fine and shameful in everything it accomplishes?
   HIPPIAS: Yes.
   SOCRATES: Whenever it accomplishes shameful results, then, it does so voluntarily, by power and craft, and these things appear to be attributes of justice, either both or one of them.
   HIPPIAS: So it seems.
   SOCRATES: And to do injustice is to do bad, whereas to refrain from injustice is to do something fine.
   HIPPIAS: Yes.
   SOCRATES: So the more powerful and better soul, when it does injustice, will do injustice voluntarily, and the worthless soul involuntarily? (376a)

...

SOCRATES: So the one who voluntarily misses the mark and does what is shameful and unjust, Hippias—that is, if there is such a person—would be no other than the good man. (376b)

 

To our modern ears filled with Christian notions of reward and punishment for acts of our free will, this argument may seem to completely miss the point.  Fine, we might say, someone who could do wrong is technically more powerful than someone incapable of it.  But truth and justice don't really lie just in what we are capable of, but in what we freely choose to do.  

Freedom, I notice at this point, is not discussed a whole lot in Plato, at least so far.  Instead, it's becoming clear that he is searching for a more compelling idea of knowledge or power.  For example, like the definition of power Socrates argues for in Gorgias -- power is the power to do good, the ability to do yourself harm isn't real power at all.  Likewise, he's not really looking for some objective knowledge of the just, at least if we take the term to refer to some neutral description of what it is, that we could choose to look at or ignore, depending on our interests.  He's searching for a notion of justice that has immediate moral consequences, so that to see the just is to do the just, without the need for some intervening choice.  Knowing true justice makes you just, which makes injustice purely a matter of ignorance.  

Lesser Hippias is perhaps designed to illustrate the confusion that happens if we don't insist on this kind of definition.  In the end, even Socrates cannot bring himself to believe the paradoxical conclusions he has argued for.  Which suggests it is meant to function as a sort of prelude ...

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.