Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras' Challenge to Socrates
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Sophistry and Political Philosophy: Protagoras' Challenge to Socrates
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Overview
With Sophistry and Political Philosophy, Robert C. Bartlett provides the first close reading of Plato’s two-part presentation of Protagoras. In the “Protagoras,” Plato sets out the sophist’s moral and political teachings, while the “Theaetetus,” offers a distillation of his theoretical and epistemological arguments. Taken together, the two dialogues demonstrate that Protagoras is attracted to one aspect of conventional morality—the nobility of courage, which in turn is connected to piety. This insight leads Bartlett to a consideration of the similarities and differences in the relationship of political philosophy and sophistry to pious faith. Bartlett’s superb exegesis offers a significant tool for understanding the history of philosophy, but, in tracing Socrates’s response to Protagoras’ teachings, Bartlett also builds toward a richer understanding of both ancient sophistry and what Socrates meant by “political philosophy.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226394312 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 09/12/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 253 |
| File size: | 810 KB |
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Sophistry and Political Philosophy
Protagoras' Challenge to Socrates
By Robert C. Bartlett
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-39431-2
CHAPTER 1
Introduction to the Protagoras
Of the thirty-five dialogues that have been handed down to us as Plato's, the overwhelming majority — thirty — are performed dialogues in which two or more characters address each other directly, as in the text of a play. The remaining five dialogues are narrated either by Socrates (Republic, Lysis, Lovers, and Charmides) or by another (Parmenides). Yet this simple division into performed and narrated is misleading. Some of the so-called performed dialogues, in fact, feature only a performed beginning or frame that gives way to the narration of a single character, a sort of hybrid case. The Protagoras is one of these hybrids — as is, in a somewhat different way, the trilogy of which the Theaetetus forms the first part: the performed section with which the Theaetetus begins soon gives way to the narration of a single character, who reads aloud what has been written down as a series of dialogic exchanges in direct discourse. (The other "hybrids" are Symposium, Euthydemus, and Phaedo, and perhaps also the Menexenus.) The first and most obvious puzzle that confronts the reader of the Protagoras is surely this: what is Plato's intention in adding this brief performed section to Socrates' extensive narration of the conversation he has just had — a conversation that is manifestly the core of the Protagoras and in comparison with which the opening exchanges may well seem slight or trivial? This brief scene, which takes place, as it were, before our very eyes, must add to our understanding of the long and complex conversation that succeeds it. In what sense, then, is this the appropriate and even necessary preface to the conversation that follows?
The opening dialogue features Socrates speaking directly to a man whose name we never learn (he is identified only by the vague title "comrade" or "companion" [hetairos]), together with a group of indeterminate size whose members are otherwise unidentified — except, of course, for the fact that they are in the company of the comrade, include in their number someone's slave (310a3–4), and cannot include the twenty people who will be mentioned by name as being present at the home of Callias. The setting of the dialogue is unclear. It is presumably a more or less public place accessible to a passerby like Socrates but one that nonetheless permits Socrates to narrate undisturbed a story that must have taken a good while to convey. The retelling of the main events of the dialogue takes place in a less private or secluded — indeed, closely guarded — place than did the events themselves, in the private home of Callias (311a1–2, 314c3 and following). In this way, the retelling is a more public act than the original conversation and even takes a step in the direction of publicity.
It is not Socrates but rather the comrade who initiates the conversation. Now clearly alone (compare 362a4), Socrates comes across the group apparently by chance: "From where, Socrates, are you making your appearance?" (309a1; consider also 310a2–3). If the "comrade" is not quite a "friend" of Socrates, with the closeness that the latter term may imply (consider Republic 450d10–11), he is nonetheless friendly toward him and even regards himself as being on strikingly familiar terms with Socrates: the comrade does not hesitate to speak of a quite personal matter "just between ourselves" (309a4), the presence of the others notwithstanding. And after posing his initial question to Socrates, he does not wait for an answer, because he has the strong hunch that Socrates must be returning "from the hunt after Alcibiades in his bloom" (309a1–2). On the one hand, the comrade regards this hunt as perfectly understandable — when he himself saw Alcibiades just the other day, he appeared to him a handsome man indeed (consider also 309c2–10) — but, on the other hand, Socrates really should desist from his pursuit now that Alcibiades is precisely a man and no longer a boy: he is already getting a full beard! The comrade thus assumes that Socrates' interest in Alcibiades has nothing to do with either the heart or the head.
Here we may pause to note that this indication of Alcibiades' approximate age (together with several other clues) permits one to date the action of the dialogue to 433–432 BCE, when Socrates would have been thirty-six or so. And this means, in turn, that the Protagoras offers us one of the earliest portraits of Socrates the political philosopher given to us by Plato (consider 314b5; 317c1–3), with only the Alcibiades I and Alcibiades II clearly having an earlier dramatic date. To be sure, the narrator of the Parmenides presents to us a Socrates who was "very young" (127c5) — perhaps not twenty — but the narration proper occurs many years later and, in any case, sets forth a Socrates before he had made his famous "turn" from the inquiry into nature to the examination of the human concerns characteristic of moral and political life. That is, as Socrates himself indicates in the Phaedo, which takes place on the day of his execution and is the last of the sequence of dialogues that begins with the Theaetetus, there came a time when his extraordinary interest in the inquiry concerning nature, characteristic of his youth, gave way to — or, at any rate, took the form of — a new interest in "the speeches." This turn to "the speeches," or to certain opinions his fellow human beings expressed in speech, is fully compatible with the most striking features of the portrait of Socrates that we receive in all or almost all the dialogues of Plato — that of a man who, because he knows that he himself knows nothing, repeatedly asks others, in the marketplace and elsewhere, the "what is ...?" questions for which he became, in time, notorious (e.g., Meno 79e7–80b7). If he himself did not know the answers to those questions, Socrates was nonetheless able to demonstrate to himself and to at least some of his interlocutors that they too were ignorant about the character of virtue and nobility, for example, to which the "what is ... ?" questions typically point.
All this amounts to saying that Socrates' "turn" from natural philosophy or science to what has come to be called moral and political philosophy — to the most important of the "human things" as expressed in our guiding opinions about them — seems to have taken place at some point prior to the Protagoras and perhaps very shortly before it. What may be even more important for the present purpose, this new interest in "the speeches" goes together with, and may well be the chief motive behind, his keen interest in the young — in Alcibiades above all, at least early on, and also in Charmides at about this time (consider Charmides 153a1–2: the conversation recorded there takes place around 429 BCE, i.e., not long after the one presented in the Protagoras; also Protagoras 315a1–2). As we learn from the Alcibiades I and II, Socrates has indeed been pursuing, and testing and unsettling, Alcibiades — so much so that his interest in the young man is evidently now a byword among some in Athens: "Or is it indeed clear that you're back from the hunt for Alcibiades in his bloom?" And to look ahead a little, young Hippocrates, whom Socrates regards as no more than a "comrade" (313b1, c8), feels remarkably chummy with Socrates; for example, he assumes that Socrates has a lively interest in the details of his domestic affairs (310c3–5), and he feels not the slightest compunction in waking Socrates up before dawn to get him to introduce him to Protagoras, "who alone is wise" (310d5–6).
The comrade assumes that Socrates' interest in Alcibiades accords with the conventional Greek practice, and it is on the basis of this convention that he chides Socrates as he does. Yet in the Symposium, which is the next (the fourth) and final installment in the story of Socrates' relations with Alcibiades, Plato permits us to see the falsity of the comrade's assumption. There, the mature Alcibiades confesses, in a state likely to induce frankness, that it was he who came to pursue Socrates and that Socrates was amazingly, gallingly indifferent to his charms. At the peak of that would-be courtship, in fact, when Alcibiades finally managed to be together with Socrates, Socrates behaved toward Alcibiades as a father or elder brother would have done (Symposium 219c6–d2 and context). Yet in the Protagoras, Socrates declines to make the obvious rejoinder to the comrade's chastisement or the assumption underlying it. Far from asserting outright that his pursuit has nothing whatsoever to do with the usual Greek convention, Socrates implicitly grants that it does (by failing to deny it) but appeals for approval of such deviation as he is apparently guilty of to the conventional authority, Homer: "Aren't you a praiser of Homer, who asserted that the most gracious [gratifying] time of life belongs to one who is getting his beard, the age Alcibiades is now?" (309a6–b2). And this appeal works. The comrade ceases to criticize Socrates (however playfully), and he alters not so much his understanding of the conventional rule as the facts to be judged in light of that rule: if the liaison is licit, then Alcibiades must be not a "man" but a "young fellow" or "lad" still (compare 309a3 with b4). And so the comrade proceeds to pursue his general line of inquiry by asking how things stand between the two as he understands them: lover and beloved, pursuer and pursued. Socrates is willing to leave this misunderstanding intact (compare Theaetetus 143e6–144a1 and context), perhaps because the truth of the matter would be less intelligible, or less acceptable, to the comrade.
To understand Plato's intention in beginning the Protagoras as he has, we must try to take our measure of the comrade. On the one hand, the comrade is certainly friendly toward Socrates, he is excited to learn of Protagoras' presence in Athens, and he is eager indeed to hear of Socrates' just-concluded get-together with him. One might then say that the comrade not only is well disposed to the philosopher Socrates but also has, himself, a certain interest in things theoretical. He is surely no rube. On the other hand, the comrade's principal interest in Socrates does not rise above the level of gossip, he is thoroughly conventional in his deference to Homer and in his preference for the homegrown over the foreign (309c9–10), and he is the last here to learn of Protagoras' stay in Athens, now in its third day: even young Hippocrates found out the news before he did (compare 309d3–5 with 310b7–c7). Since neither the comrade nor anyone else present ever interrupts the narrative or comments at its conclusion (compare Euthydemus 290e1–293a9 and 304c6–307c4; Phaedo 88c8–89a8), we cannot know whether the comrade's initial enthusiasm survived or, more generally, what impression the narration of it made on him (or on the others).
What, then, is the source of Socrates' interest in recounting all that he does to the comrade and the rest? It is undeniable that he has such an interest. He readily agrees to relate the conversation he has just now had, a conversation that must have taken a good many hours to unfold and hence would take a good many more to repeat — and this despite the fact that Socrates was denied a full night's sleep and, for all we know, has yet to eat (310a8–b3). And although it is indeed the comrade who begins the conversation, it is not impossible that Socrates saw the assembled group and headed over to them. There is certainly no indication that they needed to call him over or otherwise constrain him (compare, e.g., Charmides 153a6–b6, to say nothing ofRepublic 327b2–8; Protagoras 335c8–d1); Socrates states that he would be "grateful" to the group if they should listen to him tell his story (310a5). Could it be that the very qualities of the comrade's character one can detect in these opening pages make of him not indeed an excellent interlocutor, but an excellent audience? By way of contrast, Socrates shows no independent interest in seeing Protagoras — whose arrival in Athens two days ago was, of course, known to Socrates immediately (310b8–9 and context) — and is prompted to visit him only on account of Hippocrates' reckless desire to study with the famed sophist. Yet, to repeat, Socrates clearly is willing to comply with the comrade's request to relate the event thus brought about, and who would deny that Socrates could have skirted that request if he had wished to do so? We return to our question: what is the source of Socrates' willingness to act as a dutiful reporter?
A simple summary of the action of the Protagoras suggests an answer. Socrates accompanies young Hippocrates to the home of Callias, apparently to see about bringing student and sophist together but as it turns out to subject Protagoras to a devastating cross-examination concerning the very subject — virtue — in which he claims expertise; in so doing, Socrates saps any desire of the young people present, Hippocrates among them, to pay handsomely for the privilege of studying with Protagoras. If we accept for now the common view that the sophists as a class are of dubious worth and even uprightness — a view the Protagoras does much to promote — we can conclude that, far from "corrupting the young," Socrates saves them from corruption. As the mention of Alcibiades at the beginning of the dialogue also serves to underscore, the Protagoras is concerned from the very beginning with the question of the education or corruption of the young; the Protagoras is concerned in particular with Socrates' involvement with young people, which seemed to have something "not quite right" about it (as the comrade in his way indicates) and which was, in any case, to bring him so much trouble, not least in his associations with Critias and Alcibiades (consider, e.g., Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.12–47; Alcibiades enters the home of Callias in the company of Critias: Protagoras 316a4–5). Because the comrade is both well disposed toward Socrates and gossipy, he makes an excellent conduit to relate to others the story of Socrates' intervention on behalf of Hippocrates that took the form of his spectacular combat with Protagoras before the (sons of the) cream of Athenian society, in which the aged and renowned sophist got very much the worst of it at the hands of the relatively young Socrates, whose prominence is clearly on the rise (361e2–5) but far from its zenith. And in permitting us to witness this brief drama, Plato encourages us to reflect on the concern Socrates had for his reputation and the steps he sometimes took to secure a good (or better) one; the dialogue as a whole evinces some such concern (consider 343b7–c3 and p. 213 below). In writing the Protagoras, of course, Plato also took an active part in carrying out that same task.
The presence of the comrade can serve, then, as an aid to seeing Socrates' (and Plato's) concern with his reputation as a "corrupter" of the young. But it may also be an obstacle to our access to the conversation Socrates had with Protagoras. This is so for a simple reason. Socrates followed with the greatest consistency and self-awareness the ordinary principle, adopted perhaps unawares by most of us most of the time, that it is only reasonable to adapt what we say and how we say it to the audience with whom we are speaking, whether we do so for the sake of those whom we are addressing or for our own sake or for some combination of these reasons. In any case, it is certain that Socrates spoke differently to different audiences, partly in the manner of that wily man to whom he will soon compare himself, Odysseus (Xenophon Memorabilia 4.6.13–15 and Protagoras 315b9, c8 and context; consider also Republic 450d10–11 as well as Protagoras' sensitivity, from the very beginning, to the question of the audience to be addressed: Protagoras 316b3–4). And Plato insists that we witness Socrates relating his adventure to the comrade — that is, to a man of a certain character or type. We do no injustice to the man in saying that, on the basis of the evidence Plato chose to put before us, the comrade does not have the finest character and is not the most outstanding human type. It is only to be expected, then, that Socrates stressed some features of the conversation, and of the actions relating to it, likely to be of interest to or to make the greatest impression on the comrade, for example, while omitting some things altogether: on three occasions, Socrates notes that he made additional arguments, but he declines to state what they were (314c3–7, 316a6–7, 348b1), just as he declines also to convey Protagoras' remarks in their entirety (e.g., 333d1–3). And Socrates' occasional editorial comments are, of course, directed in the first place to the comrade (see, above all, 339e3–4) — his impressions of Hippocrates' courage and impetuosity (310d3), for example, and Protagoras' dramatic shifts of mood as his fortunes rise and fall in the course of the conversation (e.g., 333e2–5 and 335a9–b2).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sophistry and Political Philosophy by Robert C. Bartlett. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionPart One: On the Protagoras
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Part Two: On the Theaetetus (142a1–183c7)
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index