Virtue Is Knowledge

The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy

Lorraine Smith Pangle

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226136684
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The relation between virtue and knowledge is at the heart of the Socratic view of human excellence, but it also points to a central puzzle of the Platonic dialogues: Can Socrates be serious in his claims that human excellence is constituted by one virtue, that vice is merely the result of ignorance, and that the correct response to crime is therefore not punishment but education? Or are these assertions mere rhetorical ploys by a notoriously complex thinker?Lorraine Smith Pangle traces the argument for the primacy of virtue and the power of knowledge throughout the five dialogues that feature them most prominently—the Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno, and Laws —and reveals the truth at the core of these seemingly strange claims. She argues that Socrates was more aware of the complex causes of human action and of the power of irrational passions than a cursory reading might suggest. Pangle's perceptive analyses reveal that many of Socrates's teachings in fact explore the factors that make it difficult for humans to be the rational creatures that he at first seems to claim. Also critical to Pangle's reading is her emphasis on the political dimensions of the dialogues. Underlying many of the paradoxes, she shows, is a distinction between philosophic and civic virtue that is critical to understanding them.Ultimately, Pangle offers a radically unconventional way of reading Socrates's views of human excellence: Virtue is not knowledge in any ordinary sense, but true virtue is nothing other than wisdom.

FOUR

The Unity of Virtue: Protagoras

Introduction and Framing Scenes (309a1–16a5)

The central theme of the Protagoras is the unity or disunity of the virtues. This issue is intimately connected to our question of whether virtue is knowledge or wisdom. For if virtue is either, it is clearly a unity, and if the particular virtues are ultimately unified, they must be different expressions of a single principle of action, a comprehensive understanding of what is good being one of the best candidates for such a principle. Again we find in the Protagoras, as in the Apology, the Gorgias, and the Meno, explorations of the power of knowledge or wisdom linked thematically with discussions of the rationality of retribution; of education and corruption; of the relationship between rhetoric, sophistry, and philosophy; and of the tension between the intellectuals who practice these arts and the ancient polis. Here again, as in the Gorgias, we have a dialogue named for one of the famous but somewhat disreputable intellectuals of Socrates’ day, in this case the sophist Protagoras, who turns out to have much in common with the younger and at this point much less well-known Socrates. Both Protagoras and Socrates are engaged in luring promising young men away from their fathers and guardians; both have unconventional views on justice and the gods; and both have an interest not only in politics but in investigating the things in the heavens and under the earth. Ultimately both would die as a result of the hostility of the city of Athens, Socrates by execution and Protagoras in a shipwreck, fleeing the city after his books were burned there in the year 420.¹ In this dialogue we have some of Socrates’ most impressive interlocutors, not only an assembly of sophists gathered in the house of Callias and led by the wily Protagoras but, by proxy, the wise poet Simonides. In it, we will thus see more of what Socrates shares and does not share with his most enlightened fellow Greeks, more of how he understands the wisdom that he identifies with true virtue, and an especially rich investigation of the relation between wisdom and the one virtue that seems hardest to subsume under it, courage.

In the opening scenes of the dialogue, however, Socrates is at pains to emphasize the differences between himself and Protagoras. The dialogue’s framing story of Socrates’ early morning encounter with Hippocrates has the function of emphasizing this distance. Socrates presents himself as a simple, sturdy citizen of democratic Athens, in contrast to the sophisticated foreign sophists who lurk almost shade-like in a kind of underworld in Callias’ house. When the young Hippocrates shows his “courage and impetuosity” (310d3) by rushing to Socrates before dawn and demanding that he take him to Protagoras and persuade the famous teacher to accept him as a student, Socrates engages him in a discussion “to test his resolve” (311b1). Impetuosity is not yet resolution or strength, without which learning would seem to be futile and perhaps even harmful. But Socrates also warns of the dangers of ingesting into the soul the “learnings” of the sophists without knowing in advance whether they are beneficial or harmful (313c4–14b4), implying not only that virtue is not knowledge but that some knowledge may be fatal to virtue. In the same way, he will voice to Protagoras the democratic view that the ability to grasp moral and political questions is not a matter of expertise but something possessed equally by all (319a8–20b5). Therefore, he suggests, Protagoras’ professed art of teaching the political art to the young is almost certainly a sham.

But clearly there is also much that is ironic in this anti-sophistic stance of Socrates, as Plato reveals from the very beginning of the dialogue. For the framing story of Socrates and Hippocrates has itself a framing story in which Socrates relates his whole conversation with the sophists to some nameless companions, and if Socrates is eager to tell them all about the warnings he has given Hippocrates, he also confides to them that he himself is totally smitten with Protagoras. While Hippocrates and the other companions learn of Protagoras’ unpublicized arrival in Athens only on the third day, Socrates has known of it from the start and has evidently been spending time with him, even if he has waited until today to take him on in a public contest.² Socrates, for all his protestations that he is not a sophist, is taken for one by the lowly doorman who hears him conversing on some theoretical topic with Hippocrates in the courtyard. Finally, although Socrates will adopt here the democratic position that there are no expert teachers of virtue (319a8 ff.), it is at least strange, as he himself points out (361a3–c2), that he should be the one to do so, when he is also the one who argues that virtue is knowledge or something akin to it—and when elsewhere he argues that only a few teach virtue and the many are corrupters (Apology 24d1 ff., Republic 492a–c and 494b–e).

Now if Socrates does much and perhaps Plato still more to distance Socrates from the sophists in popular opinion, these ironic elements of the Protagoras raise the question of whether the difference may not have been considerably smaller than is usually supposed—and whether Plato does not wish this truth too to be somehow preserved. Plato encourages us to view Socrates as the radically original inventor of political philosophy and the only genuine heir of the pre-Socratics, who defended philosophy against the distortions and abuses of the mercenary sophists. But Stauffer, in a thoughtful essay on Socrates’ relation to the sophists, makes the intriguing suggestion that it may be more accurate to view Socrates as “a new kind of sophist, practicing a modified version of the sophistic art.”³ If it is part of Socrates’ and especially Plato’s rhetorical project to present Socrates as the moral opponent of the immoral sophists, and if at the same time it is a requisite of Plato’s philosophical project that he provide access to the full truth of who Socrates was, may we not find important clues to Socrates’ own thought in the statements of Protagoras, who boasts of saying openly what all of the ancient wise men, beginning with Homer and Hesiod, have secretly thought in common (316d3–17c5)? In particular, might the idea that virtue is knowledge or wisdom be an important part of the common ground between Socrates and all of the sophists?

But if Socrates was a different kind of sophist, we would also expect to find significant differences in the way he and the others understood the equation of virtue with knowledge or wisdom. The impression Socrates gives at the beginning of the Protagoras is that he rejects the thesis entirely on the basis of moral and political beliefs he shares with democratic Athens; the impression he gives at the end is that he accepts it even more thoroughly than Protagoras does. But if there is, then, much irony in the first suggestion, might there not also be a serious thought there—that Socrates, living as a citizen and taking more seriously than does the itinerant cosmopolitan Protagoras the civic and moral outlook of the citizen, or the moral aspirations of the city to be a worthy object of reverence and love, understands objections to the virtue-is-knowledge thesis that Protagoras, in his overly hasty dismissal of conventional opinion, has missed? Hence, having thought through these objections, Socrates may have articulated more clearly the sense in which the thesis is still true, and may have digested this truth more deeply than Protagoras. Thus, in making the extreme claims for knowledge that he makes in this dialogue, Socrates would be both using a piece of defensive rhetoric adapted from the sophists and also giving indications as to the core of his most serious thought.

Intriguing further clues as to the way in which Socrates may have been a different kind of sophist may be found in the rich references to Homer throughout the first part of the dialogue. In retelling the dialogues to his companions in the first framing scene, Socrates compares the charm of Alcibiades to that of Hermes. He alludes to the passage in book 24 of the Iliad where Hermes protects Priam against the hostile Greeks, and, in the only reference to nature in all of Homer, the passage in the Odyssey where Hermes shows Odysseus the plant whose “nature” is to make one immune to the spell or enchantment of the gods (10.280–306). In the third framing scene, after Socrates arrives with Hippocrates at the house of Callias, Socrates compares the sophists Hippias and Prodicus to the shades of the Greek heroes that Odysseus encounters in Hades in book 11 of the Odyssey. By implication, then, he compares himself to the wily Odysseus, very much the old companion of these shades. But unlike the shades, Odysseus has his wits fully about him and will succeed in winning his homecoming against the opposition of a hostile god, by using the root whose nature is to make one resist the charms of the divinities, by coming to Hades to investigate the thing under the earth, and by questioning the prophet Teiresias. May Socrates have found a way to contend with the challenge posed, by the gods or revelation, to philosophy in a way that the other sophists did not? Protagoras, on the other hand, Socrates compares not to the shade of a hero in Hades but to Orpheus, who like Odysseus went down alive into the underworld but failed to accomplish his mission of rescuing Euridice because, in a moment of fear, he looked back; the myth has it that he later died at the hands of women. This comparison would suggest that Protagoras of all the sophists is the shrewdest and most perceptive, but less courageous or steadfast than Socrates and hence unable in the end to win a satisfactory homecoming.

The Wisdom of the Ancients and the Art of the Sophists (316a6–320c1)

When Socrates tells Protagoras that he and Hippocrates have come especially to see him, Protagoras, who needs no introduction to Socrates and shows no curiosity about Hippocrates, asks merely whether they wish for a private interview or a public one. The fact that Protagoras is prepared to break off a lecture he is giving before many admiring followers to talk privately with Socrates testifies to the esteem he already has for him. Socrates suggests that Protagoras should choose between a public and private interview after hearing why they have come; he then proceeds to introduce Hippocrates as a potential student in terms that are at once carefully respectful and carefully guarded. While explicitly raising the subject of Hippocrates’ nature, Socrates vouches only for his good family and good reputation (316b8–c2). We are not told whether Socrates considers it wisest for a teacher to interview a potential student in private; if so, it might be either to encourage frankness on the student’s part or to provide greater safety for the teacher.

Protagoras, however, shows no interest either in hearing about Hippocrates’ nature or in testing if for himself: he addresses only the potential concern with his own safety. Thanking Socrates for his solicitude or forethought,⁴ Protagoras acknowledges the dangers of envy and hostility that he faces as a foreigner who comes to great cities and who encourages the noblest of the youth to prefer his company to that of their kinfolk. What he does not mention is the hostility much worse than personal envy that citizens often displayed towards these men who taught students to take their bearings from nature and to despise as mere conventions the laws and moral teachings of their fathers. Protagoras asserts, nonetheless, that he seeks his safety in frankness rather than in secrecy. In this he claims to have found a new approach to the old art of sophistry, which he says very many of the poets and famous wise men and others have covertly practiced, beginning with Homer and Hesiod.⁵ Protagoras, the greatest of the sophists, thus claims a far closer resemblance than was normally suspected between his activity and that of the revered educators of Greece.⁶ Even if Homer and the other great poets never taught students for pay, still Protagoras suggests that they, no less than the fifth-century sophists, had revolutionary teachings that they wished to shield from public gaze. But Protagoras, whose name means “first to speak out” or “first to address the public assembly,” argues that the sophists of old did not escape detection and that their secrecy only brought them into ill repute. “So for the one who tries to run away and is not able to escape but is clearly seen, the attempt is very foolish, and it necessarily makes human beings much more ill disposed to him. For in addition to everything else, they consider such a person a scoundrel” (317a6–b3). By acknowledging openly that he practices the art of sophistry and by taking other precautions that he declines to specify, Protagoras boasts that he has lived safely to a great age.

All of this is most intriguing, but does Protagoras’ account of his and the great poets’ contrasting strategies make sense? In what way were they found out? Even if sophisticated Greeks agreed in attributing to their poems great subtlety and wisdom beyond what is at first apparent, none of the poets was ever prosecuted as Protagoras would be. In the passage just quoted, Protagoras presents his predecessors as foolish and his own approach as purely prudential. But if the brilliant Protagoras’ policy was in fact less prudent, might it not also have been motivated by something other than a concern for safety? Given the pride he expresses in his speech, it seems likely that a distaste for disowning a profession he was proud of contributed to his departure from his predecessors’ more cautious esotericism. And yet, if Protagoras is distinguished from his predecessors especially by a manly love of frank speech, is he even wholly courageous in his practice of it? After all, he is speaking out not in the agora but virtually underground, in the midst of a friendly gathering in Callias’ well-guarded house, which he seldom if ever leaves during his stay in Athens. Moreover, even in praising bold frankness he proves himself a flatterer of his aristocratic audience, with his claim that the “many” perceive so to speak nothing at all and merely repeat whatever the great men in their society say, while the great are impossible to deceive (317a2–b3). But lest we attribute to Socrates a prudence that Protagoras lacked, we must remember that Socrates in the end met the same fate as he. If there is any difference between the two in point of prudence, perhaps it is only that Socrates was not driven by pride to take risks without reason.

Of course the possibility remains that Protagoras is only pretending to be hiding in plain view and only pretending to think that the elite parents of his students have seen through the guise of Homer and others, as a way of flattering and disarming them. If so, his Promethean courage may be only an act. Or the truth may be even more complex. Protagoras may think that in his pretended openness he is fooling most of the people most of the time—and yet he may harbor a secret admiration for Promethean courage that undercuts his cautious prudence and his willingness to say that cautious prudence is the sum of virtue. And this possibility will in fact be borne out by the rest of the dialogue.

When Protagoras has expressed the desire to display his educational wares before the whole gathering and his host has obligingly assembled all the guests, Protagoras asks Socrates to repeat his reason for coming so that those who were not present before might hear it. Socrates repeats his statement (cf. 316b8–c4 with 318a1–5), but, since no repetition in Plato is ever simply a repetition and every revision is potentially significant, we note that Socrates now omits his prior comments on Hippocrates’ nature. Evidently he realizes that Protagoras is not interested in his potential student’s natural endowments, an inference immediately confirmed by Protagoras’ first words to Hippocrates:

Young man, it will be possible for you, if you associate with me, on the day you do get together with me, to go home in a better state, and the same holds for the next day as well. In fact, every day you will continually progress in improvement. (318a6–9)

Protagoras thus expresses confidence that his art may be profitably taught to anyone with any ordinary degree of alertness and will reliably produce virtue of some kind. On the question of whether and to what extent virtue is knowledge or wisdom, Socrates appears to differ significantly from the sophists in giving much more weight to the natural soil in which learning must take root if it is to bear good fruit. But again, we may ask, does Protagoras really believe his own advertising, or is he exaggerating for the sake of money and fame? Either way, Plato indicates here that he may not be thinking enough about natural differences and the dangers that learning may pose to the wrong natures; this carelessness may be connected to a limitation in his understanding of the origin and essence of virtue itself.

And what Socrates immediately presses is the question of what virtue is. One way of understanding virtue is that it is an art. Exactly what kind of art do you profess, he asks Protagoras, and what kind of virtue or improvement are you promising? To make his question perfectly clear, he gives as examples a painter and an aulos player, who are both skilled practitioners of relatively high arts and able to teach their skill to students. Protagoras, however, replies that he, alone among the sophists, does not subject his students to the study of any art at all.

“For the others abuse the young. For although the young have fled the arts, they lead them against their will and plunge them back into the arts, teaching them calculation and astronomy and geometry and music”—and as he said this he glanced at Hippias—“but coming to me he will not learn about anything except what he came for. And this study is good counsel about his own affairs, that he may best manage his own household, and concerning the city’s affairs, how with respect to the city’s affairs he might be most capable of acting and speaking.” (318d9–19a2)

The arts, as he presents them, are full of drudgery and petty in their exacting demands for precision; what he teaches is in every way more noble, more magnificent, and more satisfying.

Socrates, however, wonders whether Protagoras has an adequate account to give of this ability that he claims to teach, and he probes him by continuing to insist that it must be some art, and even coining a name for it: “Do I follow your argument? . . . For you seem to speak of the political art and to promise to make men good citizens” (319a3–5). By adding what Protagoras did not say, that he makes men good citizens, Socrates offers him a respectable presentation for his enterprise; Protagoras’ own statement is compatible with his teaching students to manage both private and public affairs in whatever way is most profitable to themselves. Protagoras, taken with Socrates’ definition, replies, “That is indeed, Socrates . . . the very profession that I profess” (319a6–7). He turns out to be ambivalent on the question of whether what he teaches is an art, just as he is evasive and perhaps ambivalent on the question of who the chief beneficiary of his activity is—whether it is the public, his students, or himself.⁷ But if one is not even perfectly clear about whose good one’s activity is intended to secure, can what one practices be a true art?

And indeed, no sooner has Socrates introduced the art of politics than he questions whether anyone is in fact a master or at least a teacher of it: “‘It is, to be sure, a noble craft you possess,’ I said, ‘if in fact you do possess it. . . . For I didn’t suppose this to be something teachable’” (319a8–b1).⁸ Socrates’ argument that the art of politics cannot be taught has two parts. First, he observes that the Athenians summon experts to consult on everything they consider to be a matter of teaching and learning, but they treat everyone as competent to deliberate about the management of the city’s affairs. Hence they must consider this competency to be on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. Education and Corruption: Apology
• Two. The Critique of Retribution: Gorgias
• Three. Virtue and Knowledge: Meno
• Four. The Unity of Virtue: Protagoras
• Five. The Socratic Thesis Applied: Laws
• Notes
• Bibliography of Modern Works and Editions
• Index