Thoughts on Protagoras

 

            I have enjoyed reading and commenting upon the last few dialogues. There aren’t any Platonic dialogues that are bad, just that some rise head and shoulders above the rest. The shorter ethical works were beautiful in their own way and did address topics of real substance, but I haven’t read something as outstanding as the Protagoras in a while, probably since I read Timaeus or Parmenides. All of the main topics in this dialogue are now familiar to me as well trod ground in Platonism. This dialogue explores virtue in-depth and urges us to practice it and be careful to whom we open our souls to, they are fragile. Protagoras is most famous for Socrates and Plato’s unique and seemingly ridiculous doctrine that no one does evil voluntarily, also known as the denial of akrasia. Akrasia is the Greek word for the concept of going against one’s better judgment or knowledge or being weak in willpower. So, when Socrates denies akrasia, he is (shockingly) saying that he doesn’t think it is possible to know (or even truly believe) in something and then not do it. I will explore the ins and outs of this mystifying idea later on, but I hope you can see that there is a lot in store for us in this wonderful and deep dialogue.

The dialogue begins with Hippocrates rudely waking Socrates up at an inappropriate hour because he is so excited that he is going to get to see the famous sophist Protagoras that day. He believes that he is going to change his life. Socrates ends up berating him for so eagerly throwing himself into the care of a sophist when he doesn’t even know what one is, let alone whether or not it is good or bad to be a sophist. He counsels him that he should trust people closer to him first.

“When it comes to something which you value more highly than your body, namely your soul—something on whose beneficial or harmful treatment your whole welfare depends—you have not consulted either your father or your brother or any of us who are your friends on the question whether or not to entrust your soul to this stranger who has arrived among us” (313b).

Socrates also tells him that learning is how we nourish our soul, but this is a double-edged sword. Just like we can eat and drink both healthy and unhealthy food and drinks, we can also consume good and bad “information.” We must therefore be careful what we learn and make sure we examine what we are learning thoroughly to make sure it is good and run it by those we consider older, smarter, wiser, and more experienced than ourselves.

            After this pep talk, they go to see what this famous Protagoras guy is all about. He claims that sophistry is an ancient art form; the only reason people don’t think so is because its practitioners hid their true nature out of fear. He includes Homer, Hesiod, and Orpheus in this renowned company and arrogantly claims he is even better than these wise men of old. Whereas they hid in cowardice and now look like liars, he is open and fearless in confessing his sophistry. Socrates is amazed but discloses his perplexity – this all sounds well and good, but he has no idea what on Earth a sophist is. Protagoras replies that a sophist is basically what politicians claim to be – someone who can make people better citizens to their state.

This leads to the first major issue of contention between the two, whether or not virtue can be taught. Socrates takes the negative position, and he does so based on 2 key pieces of evidence. Firstly, it seems like politics (which seems to be the art of teaching virtue) is different from all others in a crucial way. In every other field, people only care about the opinion of an expert. If you want surgery, you don’t go to a gardener, but a surgeon, etc. You often also require seeing a person’s credentials – they must prove to you that they learned the subject from some other person, institution, or that they taught it to themselves – but they must prove they learned it. In politics, it seems like you need no qualifications for you to be taken seriously on political topics and similarly there is no requirement for you to prove you actually learned political theory anywhere. How could this be unless people assumed it couldn’t be taught? His opinion is that we’re all just making it up as we go along and trying our best. The second reason he believes it can’t be taught is because heroic and virtuous men throughout history seem to be unable to instill their virtue in others. Just think about it. When naming off saintly men and women throughout history you will probably be hard-pressed to name off the accomplishments of their children, let alone friends they had. It stands to reason that they’d have the highest motivation to want to teach their children virtue since they probably teach them other things and being a good person is the most important thing you can possibly teach them. Therefore, the only reason why this occurs, for Socrates, is that the parents tried to teach virtue, but it was impossible.

Protagoras, of course, disagrees. He gives his first answer in the form of myth concerning Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus, which is quite delightful – I highly recommend you check it out. It boils down to the fact that he believes that the gods have given almost every single human being some share in the two virtues of justice and respect for others, otherwise it would be impossible for us to live together in societies. The people that seem to lack even a small amount of these two qualities, he says, should be either exiled or killed since “a man cannot be without some share in justice, or he would not be human” (323c). His rebuttal to Socrates argument about politics being the art that doesn’t require experts is quite good. He says we don’t require politicians to have degrees in politics because everyone already has some expertise in justice from their birth, so we aren’t starting from scratch. This doesn’t exactly prove that virtue can be taught, what if the only share we have in justice is the one we are born with?

He tries to defuse this by giving two reasons why he thinks we do in fact learn and teach virtue. The main reason we punish people is to try to fix their behavior and we try not to get mad if we know circumstances are out of someone’s control. Since we get angry at people and try to correct them, it follows that we believe we are teaching them. To counter Socrates objection that holy men and women seem to be unable to teach their kids and others virtue, Protagoras doubles down on his idea that we must all have a modicum of justice and moderation for it to be even possible for us to live together. He then shows the myriad ways in which parents do, in fact, work hard at trying to teach their kids virtue. They reward and punish them based on how they behave – you’re more likely to get in trouble for a behavioral problem than getting a C on a calculus exam. They also teach them classical literature so the children can learn how to imitate ancient heroes. They are taught music because this helps them attain harmony and self-control over their behavior. Doing physical training keeps their bodies strong and teaches them courage, etc. Socrates still objects that all this doesn’t seem to make them as great as their parents. Protagoras’ response is that Socrates is being too short-sighted. The difference between a saintly mother and just a decent kid may seem huge to us, since we are all experts – but really it’s a small difference. If you take all the people of the world and graph their level of virtue, Protagoras thinks it would be fairly flat with a few who stand just a little higher than others. When Protagoras claims to be a teacher of virtue, he just claims to be one of these dots on the graph that are slightly higher than the others. He actually seems to convince Socrates and I have to say, I think this convinces me as well. What do you think? Can virtue be taught or is it something you’re born with?

Socrates has one problem with accepting Protagoras’ claim that virtue can be taught. He asks if virtue is a whole or a unity. By this he means are all the different virtues really just one that goes by different names or are they all radically different? If the first idea is true then it should entail that if you have one virtue, you must have the other – in fact, you must have all of them if you have any of them. The latter view would seem to suggest that you could be, say, courageous, but also full of injustice. That’s why this question is important. Once again, they are pitted on separate sides of the issue. Protagoras’ believes they are all totally different and Socrates believes they are all one. Socrates argues that, if Protagoras were right, justice couldn’t be holy, and holiness couldn’t be just since they can’t be the same. Protagoras somewhat concedes that this seems to be true, so he no longer is for the utter separation of virtues, he seems to be in favor of them being similar, but the extent of similarity is what they really disagree on. Later on, Protagoras ends up bitterly conceding that all the virtues seem to be, deep down, types of knowledge—so they really do seem to be one. The typical analogy is that of white light which is made up of all the colors present in the visible spectrum. It is both one and many, just like virtue – although ultimately and more originally it is one. They also end up discussing a famous poem from their time and agree that it means that it is very difficult to become a good man, but it is impossible to remain a good man without divine help. “For when he fares well every man is good, but in ill faring, evil” (344e). This idea is shown beautifully in the movie Parasite. It’s easy to be a nice person when life treats you well, much harder when it’s taking a giant dump on you – but it can be done, especially if God helps you.

Now we have arrived at the most important part of the dialogue, the famed denial of akrasia. I analyze this portion of the text using my own insights and adding to them the inspired insights of Heda Segvic in her seminal article on the topic, No one errs willingly. Socratic intellectualism amounts to the denial of akrasia – the idea that all sin is ignorance, that we are ultimately governed by our reason and so if we do something wrong, it must be that we did it because we were ignorant of its evil character. Even though this idea seems strange it is much better than its alternative, voluntarism, which is the idea that we are ultimately governed by the blind unseeing will rather than reason and intellect. Which do you think makes more sense? Is reason, intellect, things making sense more fundamental to the nature of the world and everything? Or do you think that raw power with absolutely no limits or reason, just randomness and chaos is the ultimate truth? If you believe the former than you are an intellectualist of whatever stripe – and there are many. If you believe the latter, then you are a voluntarist and I feel nothing but pity for you. Some have thought that Socratic intellectualism ignored or at the very least marginalized emotions, desires, and volitions and so his picture wasn’t as rich as that which we know from experience. What they miss is that Socrates did believe that all of these were an integral part of the human experience, it’s just that he didn’t divorce them from knowledge. For him, every single action we take, whether it be a desire, thought, feeling an emotion, whatever – there was always an act of reason involved. Evil is irrationality. So, he isn’t saying we shouldn’t pay attention to the other facets of life, he’s saying that they also constitute a type of knowledge.

There are two theses that are crucial to Socratic intellectualism. The first is found only in this dialogue and is the idea that no one makes mistakes KNOWINGLY (352c and 358b). The second is found both in this dialogue (345c-e) and in Gorgias (466a-468e)—it goes a bit further, not only do we not makes mistakes knowingly, but we also don’t make mistakes WILLINGLY. “No wise man believes anyone sins willingly or willingly perpetrates any evil or base act. They know very well that all evil or base action is involuntary” (345e). That seems fairly obvious, so what does Socrates say in the Gorgias? There he makes a technical distinction between doing what you please and doing what you want. His technical definition of “wanting” something is what is unique and special here, because it isn’t what is usually meant by the word “want.” For him doing what you please is NOT the same as doing what you want. Doing what pleases you means doing what SEEMS good to you or what you BELIEVE is good. Doing what you want means you are doing what IS good or what you KNOW is good. This makes use of a familiar trope in Plato’s works. He always holds knowledge as infallibly true and good and above belief, which may or may not be true or good. He also holds being as higher than seeming – it is more solid and stable. This distinction is why Socrates said “orators and tyrants have the very least power of any in our cities, as I just stated now, for they do practically nothing that they want, but do only what seems best to them” (466d).

Now we can start to see the logic behind why Socrates would say something that seems, on the surface, to seem absurd. Most people think that power = doing whatever you want, so a tyrant being someone who has almost unlimited power has the most freedom of anyone. As we just saw, however, Socrates avers that the exact opposite is the case. He also shows that the same applies to orators. A common type of character in many stories is that of the manipulative person who convinces otherwise good people to do evil. Think of Grima Wormtongue in the Lord of the Rings, Iago in Othello, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, Jafar in Aladdin, etc. These people exemplify what Socrates thought of orators – they are people who enshrine mere belief and try to elevate it to faith without regard for knowledge. This process is called persuasion and Socrates detested it – the gaining of knowledge was more his thing. It has now become clear that the move that Socrates makes that allows him to do this is that he connects “wanting” to both knowledge and goodness which are stable, secure, and infallible. For most people wanting is not quite so specific and often we want bad things that have nothing to do with goodness or knowledge. For Socrates, though, wanting is a volitional state in virtue of first being a cognitive state. As Socrates says simply in Gorgias 468c, “we do not will the act but the purpose of the act.”

Some make a slight error here, thinking that Socrates means that we can only be said to “want” something if we find out later that it makes us happy. An example would be if I bought a car and then later found out that it didn’t really make me happy, these interpreters would say that we never wanted it in the first place. I think this is wrong. Socrates makes wanting conditional on the infallible goodness and truth of something, not on how it makes you feel at a certain time or on what you get out of it. In fact, that would ultimately mean that you couldn’t be said to want something if you didn’t selfishly gain from it and also that no action could be taken for its own sake. Much better is the interpretation that we can only be said to want something if it is good. This is why the orator and tyrant don’t do what they want. What they want must be good and since they are doing evil things, by definition, they can’t be doing what they want since that must be good. They are mistaking evil for good – the classical definition of sinning. In Meno 78a, Socrates points out that nobody wants to be unhappy – we all only desire what we think is good, the problem is the vast majority of us don’t have knowledge of what is good, only belief. The inescapable conclusion that results from putting all these ideas together is that evil must be done without us wanting to do it, unwillingly. When we do evil, it is under ignorance that we do it (Gorgias 509e, Protagoras 345e).

In Gorgias 509c, Socrates talks about the difference between doing and suffering injustice. To avoid suffering injustice he says you just need power in the sense of brute force. To avoid doing injustice we just need to want things, in the Socratic sense, which is a type of power as we shall see, in fact the only real power we can have. The author of the article I’ve been using to aid my reflections, Sedvig, says that the first ever concept of the will appeared in Gorgias. The concept Socrates espouses is apparently that it is impossible for the will to be weak – the very function of the will is that it prevents us from doing wrong. The problem once again lies in knowledge, if we don’t know if something is wrong or not, the will is of no use, but if we KNOW infallibly that something is wrong the will prevents us from ever doing it. Another way of putting this is that we all accept that power = the ability to do what you want. If we understand “want” in the Socratic way, i.e., in a way connected to goodness and knowledge, then we see that it is impossible to be both powerful and evil at the same time. This ultimately means that, for Socrates, power is ultimately connected to virtue which he says is a certain kind of knowledge. Knowledge is power and this power can only be expressed in virtuous acts. If you want to be powerful then you should dedicate your life to gaining in knowledge, wisdom, and goodness and not focus on being able to do whatever you want regardless of how good or true it is.

We may be asking the question, why does Socrates link wanting and desire to goodness? Why does he say we can’t want something bad or something false and untrue? Desire by its very nature is something intentional which means it is directed to some purpose beyond itself. When I desire to eat it is so that I can replenish the nutrition in my body.  Ultimately all desires are directed towards goodness because goodness is the standard by which everything is judged. The problem, once again, is that we often take what only SEEMS to be good, for what truly IS good. The most important question we can ever ask ourselves: “Is what I am doing or about to do REALLY good, or does it just SEEM good?”

There are two different views of akrasia—a weak view and a strong view. The strong view is akrasia = acting against your knowledge. The weak view is akrasia = acting against your better judgment. Socrates would deny both, since both entail the ability to do wrong knowing it is so after considering other options. We must remember that the Platonic (Socratic) view of knowledge is inextricably tied to the Platonic view of wanting. It must be said that Socrates does NOT deny that we experience painful episodes that feel like a titanic battle between evil and good are fought inside us where one side or another wins or loses. He acknowledges that these experiences happen, he just doesn’t agree with the usual interpretation. He thinks people incorrectly label these experiences as akratic episodes—he thinks they are really due to ignorance. If you talk to most people, they will say they believe akrasia is real because they have experienced it first-hand. They knew something was bad but did it anyways due to feeling a powerful impulse. What they get wrong is that a firmly held conviction is NOT infallible knowledge. Your actions show what you truly believe and know. If you think you believe in God, but never pray to Him, then you don’t really believe in Him. If you say you love baseball, but you never play it or watch it and don’t even know the rules then you don’t love it really. If you say you believe or even if you say you know murder is wrong and evil, but you commit murder, Socrates would say that your actions prove you don’t really believe or know what you think you do.

What at first seems like an arcane and esoteric doctrine is revealed to be based on the commonsense notion that our actions show what we really believe and know. As the Lord said, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Mt 6:21). The Socratic view of knowledge is lofty indeed. It must be infallible; it is not sufficient to merely hold a correct belief for the right reasons. There is no such thing has having bits and pieces of knowledge – to have any knowledge at all you must fully understand all the implications of the pieces and see how they fit together. So then what about the passions we experience, such as lust, fear, etc.?  Socrates would say that wrongdoing doesn’t mean that the passions defeat us, it’s just that reason is malfunctioning within us. The passions are ultimately good – they are just used in the wrong way based on ignorance at times – Evagrius later elaborated on this view. Fear, for instance, can be good. In fact, Socrates defines courage at the end of Protagoras as the knowledge of what to fear and what not to fear. A virtuous person hasn’t gotten rid of their passions, they still have them, they are just functioning PROPERLY. 

To sum up, when people say their emotions overpowered their reason and caused them to do something bad like eat something off their diet when they are not supposed to or look at pictures and videos they shouldn’t be watching, or whatever the case may be – this is not true. What is true is that they never actually knew or believed what they thought they knew or believed. Therefore, what people call akrasia (weakness of will) is impossible – it is really the malfunction of reason, the inevitable result of ignorance that can only be fixed by knowledge. The virtuous person does what he wants – he knows what is good and does it without fail. Now the problem is how do we learn virtue? At the end of the dialogue, we are left with some Socratic irony. Socrates thinks virtue is unteachable, but also believes it ultimately is a type of knowledge which should prove that it is teachable. Protagoras thinks the exact opposite, that you can teach virtue, but that virtue isn’t knowledge which would mean it can’t be taught. Seems like we are stuck in another Socratic aporia. The subject of whether or not virtue can be taught and if not, how it can be instilled in the soul will be the focus of my next post, on Meno. I will end this overly long post with an overly long quote that Socrates gives us that exhorts us to be patient with those who are ignorant. These beautiful words touched me and reminded me of the desert fathers’ words in my Eastern Orthodox tradition. I hope they touch your soul as well.

“Good men on the other hand conceal such faults and are constrained to praise, and if they feel anger at some wrong done to them by parents or country, they calm themselves and seek reconciliation, compelling themselves to love and praise their own kin” (346a-b)

See how close this is to the words of St. Macarius the Great:

“Christians should judge no one, neither an open harlot, nor sinners, but should look upon everyone with simplicity and a pure eye. Purity of heart consists in seeing a sinful and weak man and having compassion for him and being merciful.”