Patrick J. Coby: Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment: A Commentary on Plato’s Protagoras. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987.
Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 17, Number 2, Winter 1989-90. Republished with permission.
Intellectuals: What to do with them? With one foot in the cave, one foot out, they urge the citizens within to chain-breaking liberation, charge philosophers beyond with uncaring detachment. Neither fully underground nor above, they would rather lead than think, and thus risk a trampling—voilà, historicism.
In ‘synthesizing’ politics and philosophy, historicism denies that philosophers see beyond their time and place, even as it holds out the prospect of revelations ‘progress’ will bring. Patrick J. Coby demonstrates the falsehood of this denial, showing that Socrates conceived something very like one of the lower versions of modern utilitarianism, commending it lukewarmly to a sophist it might have tamed. Coby thus uses history to refute historicism, showing that Plato’s Socrates both formulated and implicitly criticized a well-known philosophic doctrine, more than two millennia before ‘its time.’
Coby fits his commentary to the order of the dialogue, beginning at the beginning and working his way through. The dialogue itself fits its topic—Protagoras, or the nature of sophistry—in being “a war of words.” Perhaps alone among commentators, Coby emphasizes the importance of one silent auditor of the conversation—Alcibiades, here a combative young man attracted by Socrates’ combativeness, in whom Socrates may wish to awaken an erotic attraction to wisdom. A combative soul will want to know how to conquer; it may not know, but merely presume, the worth of conquest. “The difference between knowing [a] doctrine and knowing its worth is the difference between —technē [artistry] and sophia [wisdom],” the wisdom Socrates may want Alcibiades to love. The sophist, preeminent vendor of technē, might easily seduce a spirited young man. Socrates would convince Alcibiades that sophistic technique cannot withstand the manly assaults of philosophy, which enables those possessed by it to wield certain superior techniques along with their superior understanding.
Despite his apparent spiritedness, Protagoras lacks the true conqueror’s soul; he seeks pleasant safety. “Protagoras is both safe and famous”—or so he believes. “It will be Socrates’ purpose in the dialogue to show him why safety and fame are mostly incompatible.” Socrates does this initially by exposing the contradiction between the sophist’s praise for democracy and the undemocratic character of sophistry itself, which offers a technique for ruling the many, a technique that finally consists more of coercion than of persuasion. The ‘virtue’ Protagoras professes to ‘teach’ amounts to a technique of political control.
“Justice to Protagoras is what human beings declare it to be.” Socrates undertakes to pull Protagoras away from his conventionalism and toward a low-level appreciation of nature, specifically of pleasure. In doing so, Socrates must centrally prove—not by words but by action—that he can walk away from his audience. That is, he shows his independence from his listeners’ desires, even as Protagoras, despite his boasts of control-techniques, betrays his own subservience. Socrates forces Protagoras to accept short speeches, dialectic, and to eschew rhetorical declamation.
Protagoras accepts the philosophic form of speech, but tries to escape into the thickets of literary criticism—a move that should amuse readers today who’ve seen much the same strategy at work on college campuses. In fairness, the sophistic, posturing Protagoras does have rather more nobility in him than our ‘deconstructionists’; he at least vaguely senses the appeal of tragedy, of heroic struggle. Socrates responds by citing the example of the Lacedaemonians, an example not likely to move many academics today, but effective in ancient Greece. (Historical relativism does apply to rhetorical appeals, shaped as they are to the character of the audience. Does historicism’s desire to lead, which necessitates the conflation of logic and rhetoric, ‘naturally’ incline its devotees to relativism? That is, does not historicism result ‘logically’ from the intellectual’s libido dominandi?) Socrates claims that those admirable citizens the Lacedaemonians secretly partake of philosophy; “what seems to the world like courage is in fact wisdom.” An esotericism so effective none but Socrates ever suspected it: This “elaborate jest” forms one part of Socrates’ thoroughgoing effort to “intellectualize” the virtues. In its most extreme formulation, this means that virtue is knowledge (easy to practice once you know what it is), vice ignorance. This resembles Protagoras’ notions, with a significant exception: Protagoras only knows his techniques, not nature. Perhaps this accounts for the deficiencies of Protagorean technique; a tool designed for the rule of human beings will fail in the hands of one who does not understand human being. Poetry, being imaginative, more easily lends itself to manipulation by clever technicians than does the logical apprehension of nature.
Protagoras misunderstands human nature not only in the abstract but in the particular. He will teach, or claim to teach, anyone who pays, regardless of the student’s nature. Socrates would redirect Protagoras’ attention to an art whose primary purpose is perception, not manipulation: “The art of measurement,” better known to readers now as the utilitarian calculus of pleasures and pains. The knowledge this art brings does not reach the heights (or the depths) of human nature; intellectuals, in their ‘middling’ circumstance of soul, cannot stretch so far. But the art does induce them to measure man instead of unwarrantedly supposing man the measure. Knowledge, however narrow, and pleasures, however unrefined, will replace the will to power, and the susceptibility to worship power, so noticeable in sophists generally—a will and a susceptibility that finally issued in historicism.
Socrates prefers a different solution to the problems of political life and heterodox thought present to each other. By exoteric speech, the philosopher “endeavors to protect the body politic rom indiscriminate rationalism while at the same time making it tolerant of philosophy.” Socrates can indeed befriend political men—at one extreme, the flamboyant Alcibiades, on the other, Crito—and they him. Unfortunately, citizens may mistake the philosopher for a sophist and make him poison himself. The prospect of this inconvenience requires the philosopher to “confront his fellow intellectuals,” to help them deplore the closing of the Athenian mind in some way suited to their own capacities and defects.
Socrates may harbor some sympathy for the sophistic intellectual, in one sense. The sophist, caught between cave and sunlit fields, in his own way imitates human being, with its “in-between, daemonic nature,” bestial and godlike. Like Nietzsche, Socrates sees the difficulty in tightrope-walking; unlike Nietzsche, Socrates foresees no godlike overcoming of this activity, at least not for any other than the rarest of humans. (Too, Socrates conceives of no creativity in godliness, the creativity that intensifies Nietzsche’s ambition.) Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment presents or suggests these issues with a sober, thoughtful precision that enables readers to think more clearly about the problem of thinking in regimes in which popular opinion rises to dominance.
Recent Comments