Protagoras

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 390

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Pages 42-68

Pages 68-89

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The Teachability of Virtue

Hippocrates, Socrates’s young friend, is overcome with the desire to gain a proper education in virtue from the traveling sophist Protagoras. Socrates is skeptical of this pursuit, and it soon becomes clear that one cause of his negative reaction is his skepticism that virtue can be taught at all. Socrates asks Protagoras how it can be that virtue is teachable. Protagoras indulges him, although he seems to think this is a silly question. He asks Socrates to compare a civilized person to one who lives outside civil society:

[T]hink of anyone who appears to you as the most unjust human being of those raised among laws and human society as himself being just, and a skilled practitioner in this matter, if one had to judge him against humans who have no education, no courts, no laws, and no necessity at all incessantly compelling them to care about virtues; they’d be some sort of savages (58).

The implication is that civil society teaches people how to be civil and, therefore, virtuous. Even those who may seem to have learned nothing are quite educated compared to their counterparts who live in a state of nature. This basic fact should be enough, Protagoras thinks, to prove that virtues are teachable. This supports the idea that human institutions, such as laws and court systems, are the true social mechanism by which justice operates. He also uses examples of paternalism and punishment to prove his point.

By the end of the dialogue, Socrates concludes that knowledge is necessary for the production of any virtue. It, therefore, appears to him that virtue must be teachable, since knowledge can be taught. However, in another of Plato’s dialogues, the Meno, this question is more fully elucidated, and the conclusions do not support Socrates’s suspicions at the end of the Protagoras.

Although it is never clear whether virtue is teachable, since the interlocutors never resolve this question, the dialogue does prove that Protagoras is not the one to teach it. Despite Protagoras’s skill in rhetoric, Socrates continuously upstages him, yet Socrates does not himself believe in the teachability of virtue. If wisdom and knowledge are integral to the development of virtue but cannot be taught, the question of teaching how one learns virtue is left open.

The Distinction Between Sophistry and Philosophy

The distinction between sophistry and philosophy was a major concern for Plato. He sought to clearly distinguish the two, since in his milieu they were often conflated. Because of the disrepute of sophistry, this confusion carried dangerous implications for the philosopher. Famously, it led to the death of Socrates.

From the Platonic perspective, the key difference between sophistry and philosophy, which explains all the other differences, is that the sophist takes the world of appearances to be the one, true world, whereas the philosopher does not. The philosopher is not beholden to appearance in this manner and is, therefore, able to pursue truth, regardless of how it may look to others. Socrates, often characterized as a man with an unpleasantly ugly face, is the archetypal figure of philosophy in Plato’s writings. He does not accept money for his teachings and, in fact, does not even profess to teach. He rarely makes long speeches, instead relying on interlocking sessions of questions and answers. The sophist, on the other hand, sells his “knowledge” for repute and financial gain.

Socrates compares the sophist to a merchant:

Well, Hippocrates, isn’t the sophist in fact a sort of merchant or dealer in commodities from which a soul is nourished? […] So if you happen to be someone who knows what among these things is sound or unsound, it’s safe for you to buy learnable things from Protagoras or from anyone else whatever; if not, though, you blessed one, see that you don’t roll the dice and take a risk with the most precious things. For as a matter of fact, the risk in the buying of learnable things is much greater than in the buying of food (46).

Socrates’s caution reveals the wisdom of the philosopher in the marketplace of ideas. The sophists traffic in ideas, and it is not necessarily clear which are healthy and which are not. Like the produce and other goods offered at a marketplace, some of these ideas may appear very attractive but could be extremely harmful.

Protagoras, the exemplar of sophistry in this dialogue, purports to teach civic virtues. He displays some positive characteristics, such as the love of beauty, a concern for virtue, and a talent for rhetoric. These attractive qualities are often held in tandem with the more negative qualities of a sophist. Protagoras also reveals himself to be egotistical, proud, and vainglorious. Socrates’s ability to prove that Protagoras does not know what he’s talking about on several occasions is meant to expose the sophist’s wisdom as an illusion.

The Unity of the Virtues

The discussion between Protagoras and Socrates veers in several different directions, but at multiple points it returns to the question of the unity of virtues. This originally emerges from Protagoras’s use of such terms as piety, moderation, and justice, all of which he refers to as “virtues.” Socrates is curious as to the exact way in which these various concepts can be labeled virtues. He uses two metaphors as illustrations: the relationship of parts of a face to the whole face or that of pieces of gold to a block. The parts of the former are distinct but related; the parts of the latter are totally indistinguishable from one another.

After Protagoras claims that the virtues are more like the parts of a face, Socrates employs his method to prove just the opposite. Plato writes the following:

‘Is a lack of good sense the opposite of moderation?’ ‘It appears so.’ ‘Now do you remember that it was agreed by us in the earlier discussion that a lack of good sense is the opposite of wisdom?’ He joined in agreement. ‘But one thing is opposite to one thing only?’ ‘I’d say so’ (63).

The obvious implication, then, is that wisdom and moderation are one and the same. Since a nose and a mouth do not share that relationship, the parts of virtue are not like the parts of a face. Instead, they are more like gold.

This question is dropped but reemerges after a tangent on the distinction between being and becoming. At this point, Protagoras concedes that four of the five virtues are unified, as Socrates suggests: piety, wisdom, justice, and moderation. Courage, though, he thinks is substantially different. Socrates uses the same method again to dispel this notion. In the process, he reveals the centrality of wisdom to the entirety of virtue. Despite this strategy, it is still unclear how the virtues are united. If it is through wisdom, as Socrates seems to be suggesting, then it is the art of measurement that is the true salvation of humankind and the most important idea to emerge from the dialogue. The art of measurement is the skill in which the wise person is most adept. This makes such a person a good judge of the relative value of things. Socrates shows that this skill is applicable to pleasures and to courage in particular. Whether it is equally applicable to the other virtues is a question that Plato leaves unresolved.