Protagoras

“’The others abuse the young terribly. For when they’ve steered clear of the arts, they drag them back again against their will and shove them into arts, teaching them arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music,’ as he glanced over at Hippias, ‘but when he comes to me he won’t learn a single thing other than what he came about. The thing to be learned is how to make good decisions about his own affairs, so he can run his own household the best way, and about the affairs of his city, so he can be the most powerful in his city’s affairs in both action and speaking.’”

Here, Protagoras defends his particular form of pedagogy and the proper training that he will provide a student like Hippocrates. He implies that young men seek out sophists because they are not interested in having their education funneled into a particular art or craft. Still, to Protagoras’s chagrin, other sophists end up teaching their pupils the arts anyway. Protagoras instead teaches a program of civic virtue in order to make his pupils leaders in their communities. The irony is that Protagoras is something of a vagabond, and the practice of sophistry has fallen into some disrepute by Plato’s era.

“[B]ut whenever something needs to be deliberated on that has to do with managing the affairs of the city, the one who stands up and gives them advice about these things may equally well be a carpenter, a blacksmith, or a leatherworker as well, a merchant or a ship’s captain, a rich man or a poor one, of good family or no family, and no one casts aspersions at them, as in the previous cases, for not having learned it anywhere or not having anyone who’s been his teacher, and then trying to give advice.”

Socrates provides a worldly example used to question Protagoras’s claim to educate civic leaders. The assumption in Socrates’s example is that all men of a Greek city-state were capable of participating in the deliberations of civic import. Unlike carpentry or leatherwork, civics is not a particular art exclusively for the highly trained. How, then, Socrates wonders, can Protagoras claim to edify young men in civics so that they will be superior to the average man?

 “So then Zeus, fearing for our race, lest it might all die out, sends Hermes to bring humans a sense of shame and of a right way, so there could be orderly behavior in cities and bonds of friendship to unite people.” 

Protagoras tells the creation myth of the human race, whose good fortune is due, in large part, to the work of the god Prometheus. However, Prometheus did not give human beings justice or political arts, and humans were in danger of “dying off.” Zeus, the king of the gods, sends his messenger to provide humans with the shame and sense of justice necessary for the possibility of orderly living. Every human receives this gift. Protagoras uses this story to support his view on the teachability of virtue.

“As to the fact, then, that it’s a reasonable thing for people to accept every man as an advisor on this sort of virtue, because they regard everyone as having a share of it, that’s what I have to say. Next after this, I’ll try to demonstrate to you that they regard this virtue as something that doesn’t come by nature or pop up on its own, but as a teachable thing that becomes present in anyone it does become present in as a result of painstaking effort.”

Protagoras builds his case that the teachability of virtue does not contradict the fact that everyone has an inborn share of shame and justice. His central claim is that, regardless of the universality of a modicum of virtue, it is necessary to be trained in the production of virtue for a larger share of it, and that teachers of this art, like himself, should be accepted in society.

“Someone who’s trying to discipline another person with rationality doesn’t take retribution for the sake of the bygone act of injustice—for he can’t make what’s been done undone—but for the sake of the future, so that neither that person himself nor anyone else who sees him being punished will commit injustice again.”

Protagoras articulates the view that the purpose of a penal system is not to make the offender pay dues for the offense they’ve committed. That form of retribution would only inflict further harm and do nothing to rectify the original harm. Instead, the purpose of retribution is the deterrence of future crimes. This is meant to support the idea that virtue can be inculcated in people, presumably because people act justly due to the punishment rendered on an offender. This deters them from possible unjust action.

“But if there’s anyone who surpasses us even a little bit in leading people to virtue, that’s something to be delighted about. And it’s exactly this category that I believe myself to be, someone who is better than other human beings at helping people come toward the beautiful and the good, and I believe I’m worth the fee I charge and still more than that.”

Protagoras, still laboring through his speech in response to Socrates’s original concerns about the viability of teaching civic virtue to another person, concludes that he is exactly the sort of person who should be considered a teacher. This is because, from his own perspective, he surpasses all others in virtue. That Protagoras charges a fee for his teaching and lists beauty before goodness reveals the sophistry that separates him from Socrates, the dialogue’s true philosopher. The latter is more focused on goodness and would never deign to teach, especially for money. 

“So if Protagoras also admits that he’s inferior to Socrates at having a conversation, Socrates is content to accept that. But if he claims otherwise, let him have a conversation by asking and answering questions, not by drawing out a long speech in response to each thing that he’s asked, batting aside the arguments and being unwilling to give an explanation, but just going on and on until most of the listeners have forgotten what the question was about.”

Here, Alcibiades, a beloved young man of Athens, chimes in to support Socrates. More critically, though, he supports the Socratic method of philosophical argumentation. Alcibiades is implicitly criticizing Protagoras’s beautiful orations as distractions from the philosophical labor of conversation. Instead of working through arguments in dialogical form, he makes his views appear true through elegant presentation. For the listeners to follow the thread of argument, short back-and-forth questions and answers are more useful than speeches. Alcibiades’s criticism of Protagoras reflects a general criticism of sophists and sophistry.

“Ah, but it’s hard in truth for a man to become good,

Built squarely in hands, feet, and mind, beyond reproach.”

This is a verse from Simonides, a Greek poet whose works have not survived but who was of enormous importance in the ancient world. Protagoras includes this verse in a speech in which he seeks to challenge the consistency of the verse with another of Simonides’s verses. Protagoras rhetorically uses the verse to make a point about the importance of education in poetic verse and the proper analysis of the truth of those verses. This verse supports his view that becoming good requires painstaking education.

“And if being isn’t the same thing as becoming, Simonides himself isn’t contradicting himself. And Prodicus here, and many others as well, would probably claim, in accord with Hesiod, that becoming good is a hard thing,

For before virtue, the gods have placed sweat,

but when

One reaches its summit, then it’s easy going,

Hard though it was to attain.”

In summation of his defense of Simonides’s wisdom, at least as it’s displayed in the aforementioned passage, Socrates cites the words of Hesiod, an esteemed Greek poet who lived from roughly 750-650 BCE. According to Hesiod, it is divinely ordained that hard work is required to become good, but once this goodness is achieved, it’s easy to maintain. This rearticulates the ontological difference between becoming and being.

“And you can recognize that I’m telling the truth about this, and that the Spartans are the people best educated in philosophy and arguments, in the following way. For if anyone cares to associate with the most insignificant of the Spartans, he’ll find for the most part that in his talk he is to all appearance just some insignificant fellow, but then at some random point in what he’s saying, like a fearsomely accurate javelin-thrower, he tosses in a remark worthy of note, short and pithy, leaving the person he’s disputing with appearing no better than a child. And there are some people nowadays and some among the ancients who’ve noticed this very thing, that being like a Spartan is much more a matter of devotion to philosophy than of devotion to training in the gym, realizing that being capable of uttering such remarks is the mark of a perfectly educated human being.”

Socrates’s musings on Sparta are tangential to the main themes of the dialogue, other than being meant to show that poets and philosophers of earlier generations were pithy and succinct in their demonstrations of genius. He includes Simonides in this class of men and women and uses that as an explanation for the apparent—but false—contradiction in his verses. The example of Sparta is common in Platonic dialogues, and it is clear that Socrates has great respect for Sparta’s style of governance and the virtue of its citizenry.

“Because one thing I’m pretty sure of is this, that none of the wise men thought any human being willingly goes astray or willingly does shameful and evil deeds; they knew well that everyone who does shameful and evil things does them unwillingly.”

One of Socrates’s beliefs expressed in many of Plato’s works is the view that no one willingly does wrong when they could have done right. In modern parlance, no one voluntarily wills evil. Everyone wants the good. People make mistakes out of ignorance and its accompanying lack of virtue. This view may be connected to the view on the unity of the virtues, since it implies that a lack of wisdom has an effect on the realization of any virtue. Someone may be cowardly in war, for instance, due to fear of the wrong things, not because of the will to abandon the cause.

“’All right, then, Socrates,’ he said, ‘I say to you that these are all parts of virtue, and that four of them are reasonably close to one another, while courage is very much different from all the rest.’”

Protagoras responds to Socrates’s questioning on the unity of virtue with a unique stance. Four of the virtues—piety, wisdom, justice, and moderation—are all united in a way, but courage is utterly different. This is, according to Protagoras, based on his observation of people who have acted courageously in battle but are still evidently unwise or lacking in virtue in other aspects of their lives.

“So if doing well consisted for us in this, in acting on and taking large distances while avoiding and not acting on small ones, what would appear to us as our salvation in life? Would it be the art of measurement or the power of what appears? Didn’t the latter lead us astray and make us mistake the same things back and forth over and over again and have regrets in both our actions and our choices of large and small things, when measurement would have deprived this appearance of its authority, and, by revealing what was true, would have made our soul hold itself at rest, abiding in truth, and would have been the salvation of our life?”

Socrates posits the art of measurement as necessary for salvation in life. In other words, the path of virtue consists largely in having wisdom in the art of measurement, or knowing how to weigh and balance various claims on the soul. This emphasis on the art of measurement is posited in opposition to reliance on appearances, which often leads people astray. Just as a small object may appear larger than a much larger object if it is close to the viewer and the large object is far away, an apparent good close at hand will seem more valuable than a true good in the distance. It is only through rightly measuring their respective values that one is saved.