Ep. 233: Plato’s “Protagoras” on Virtue (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 233 is something like, can virtue be taught? Or maybe, what's the relation of the various virtues to each other? Or maybe, how is philosophy different from sophistry? And we read Plato's dialogue protagoras, written around 380 BCE. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, merchant importer of knowledge in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:27 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, courageous but not wise, in Austin, Texas.

0:32 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, sitting spellbound just as if Orpheus had spoken an incantation, in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:38 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:41 Mark: We return once again to Plato. So I think different members of the group had different reactions to this. My initial reaction was, we should have done this earlier. This would have been great introductory dialogue. But as far as just the topics covered, you know, it kind of overlaps with a lot of what we've done. So I was a little dubious. I know others of you were much more enthusiastic. And then after I read some of the secondary literature, I said, okay, yeah, actually, there is plenty to talk about if we go through this in detail. But, yeah, who else wants to have some initial thoughts?

1:08 Dylan: I'm never dubious about reading Plato.

1:10 Seth: I am dubious. But I was won over by this dialogue. Anytime somebody stands up to Socrates bullying, and we get a decent second side of the story, it makes me happier.

1:19 Dylan: Especially when Socrates realizes that he changed his mind and started arguing for the opposite of what he said he argued for at the beginning and he admits it at the end.

1:27 Mark: My initial point of frustration was just that. I was expecting that we would learn more about Protagoras and specifically his famous dictum, man is the measure of all things.

1:39 Seth: Jinx, buy me a Coke.

1:40 Mark: There you go. And, yeah, we don't get that in here. That was actually raised in the Theaetetus that we discussed before. It was taken strictly as a very crude theory of knowledge. But I was kind of thinking in the context of our philosophy of science and social construction episodes here, maybe we could get some insight that's very tangentially raised. But, yeah, for the most part, this is another thing about ethics, or more broadly, about styles of argumentation. There's a lot more humor in this one, a lot more Socrates parodying the style of his opponents. And as is typical, it's a little unclear what Socrates ethical view actually is by the Time we get to the end of this.

2:21 Seth: It's also quite a bit more dramatic flourishes, like more stage description of facial expressions and hesitancy. And there's a lot more richness to the characters, I think, compared to some of the other dialogues where the interlocutor is sort of two dimensional. Yeah.

2:37 Mark: Because it's not written as a play, I guess, as part of it. It's not character name, colon. Here's what they said. Other character name. It's Socrates, I guess he does this. And there are some other dialogues. Like the symposium is. The whole thing is somebody telling about this scene that he just witnessed. So it was really all in the mouth of one narrator. But here it's explicitly that a friend of Socrates comes to him and says, oh, did you know Protagoras is in town? Oh, yeah, I just actually spent last night with Protagoras. Here's what happened. And he lays out this whole series of events of how he got to the party and who was at the party. It wasn't just Protagoras, it was a bunch of people and what everybody said. And so there is more out of the mouth of Socrates, creative narration of how the different characters are relating to each other, Things like that.

3:21 Dylan: Yeah. In fact, the whole thing, once you get past the first bit, the whole thing is in Socrates voice, but telling all the points of view. So narrating the story when he's telling Protagoras story, even though it's Socrates saying. And Protagoras said the great speech.

3:35 Seth: So there's sections where when Socrates presses Protagoras, he says Protagoras was hesitant in his reply or cast his eyes down, or seemed ashamed. This is what I was talking about, that it gives a little more. But now that you're thinking about Socrates describing his discussion with Protagoras as opposed to a third party, maybe that makes more sense. He's painting himself up a little bit.

3:58 Dylan: But of course it's Plato who wrote the dialogue with. Anyway.

4:02 Seth: Oh, you're so meta. You're so meta. Dan.

4:05 Mark: I was trying to find the place where they talk about how Protagoras is walking back and forth and the people part before him.

4:12 Seth: And then.

4:14 Mark: What page is that on? Did Everybody read this PDF that we had was R.E. Allen from 1996? Was the translation. Did other people use different ones?

4:23 Seth: That's the one I used.

4:24 Dylan: I had the Joe Sachs translation. So that's when I read.

4:27 Mark: Is that an older one?

4:29 Dylan: No, it's from 2011.

4:30 Seth: All right.

4:31 Mark: The latest and Greatest, I don't know,

4:34 Dylan: but I found it pretty readable. But it has the Stephanus numbers in it, so.

4:38 Mark: Sure. Well, and Allen also. So this is like volume three of a bunch of his different translations with commentary. And the commentary, I saw this in other volumes too. The commentary here is just about as long as the translation and was very pro. Plato would mention other scholars and say, oh yeah, this other scholar diagrammed out in 11 pages what was going on in this argument and concluded that it didn't make any sense. But you know what? You can just decide as a hermeneutic point of reading Plato, if something doesn't seem to make sense, you can just assume that it really doesn't make sense, or you can assume you don't understand it.

And it's so much easier to assume that the text itself is wrong that you should just put in the extra effort to figure out why the genius was in fact right when he appears to be saying things that could be solved by the addition of modern logical apparatus, like the difference between predication and identity. You know, a very common thing has come up in our past discussions of arguments from this era that if you say two things are the same, what do you actually mean? You mean that they have some property in common? Do you mean that they are one and the same entity?

So don't let things like that. We can.

5:47 Seth: Yeah, what are you talking about?

5:48 Mark: Flesh that kind of thing out as we go.

5:50 Seth: Let's get it.

5:51 Dylan: He's talking about the commentary by Allen at the beginning of the book. He's very generous and about how pro Platonic it was.

5:56 Seth: No, no, I mean, I started reading that and then I just got straight to the dialogue because I didn't want to spend an extra two hours getting somebody else's opinion about it. So.

6:05 Mark: Well, you got to read those things afterward, even though for some reason they come earlier in the book here.

6:10 Seth: I don't know how to do that, Mark. I can only read sequentially from the beginning of a book to the end.

6:15 Mark: Well, I was looking at another translation of this when I was. We were trying to find a good English one when I was just looking on the web and there's these long commentaries. And I go through this. You know, it's about 40 pages of commentary. Then I finally get to the translation. It actually had said edited by. It didn't say translated by. And when I actually got to the actual text, it was just the Greek. So like, okay, that was a lot of English. Buildup to this is not actually something we can use the commentary on this did, without shame, just put out the Greek terms. You know, it did define them, but didn't tell you how to pronounce them or anything like that. So of course, that makes me. My eyes glaze over a little bit. Except in cases where like, oh, that's Akrasia. We've talked about that in Aristotle. I know that one. I can sound out those letters.

7:01 Dylan: Is it all that different than having to look up other words that you don't know in life?

7:05 Seth: It is a little different.

7:06 Mark: Well, if they're in a foreign Alphabet, that's a little different. Yeah. If you just anglicize them like most commentators do, instead of just insisting on putting the Greek letters in a row. But you guys.

7:17 Dylan: Oh, you mean. You mean letters in a row? You mean use Latin letters instead of to transliterate it?

7:22 Mark: Yes.

7:23 Seth: Yeah. Depending on the way the PDF gets scanned, you can sometimes copy and paste the Greek letters into Google and sometimes you can't. And so it adds just a slight layer of complication. Dylan, for those of us who, unlike you and Wes, read ancient Greek natively and fluently off the page, that's not

7:42 Dylan: true, but fair enough. Shall we start basically close to the beginning?

7:47 Mark: Yeah, wherever you want to start. I didn't take notes on the first few pages because it just seemed narrative setup. But what did you see in there?

7:54 Dylan: I was just going to have us jump to 3:16a, where we get the first interaction with them where Socrates is asking Protagoras about how teach virtue.

8:07 Mark: Sure. That's the setup of the whole thing. Protagoras is famous. Probably the most famous sophist is the way it's set up. Right at a party with a bunch of other sophists, including Prodicus, that Socrates keeps saying, oh, he's so wise. Like for some reason this particular sophist, for reasons that are never explained, Socrates has the hots for. But it's Socrates bringing his young friend Hippocrates. I guess Socrates in this is only 30, just because the way Plato writes it, if he wants to have the antagonist, as with Parmenides, who was somebody that was historically before Socrates substantially, then he has to age Socrates back appropriately.

So I think that was almost embarrassing in the Parmenides that Socrates was like 17 or something ridiculous like that. But here Socrates is 30 and his younger friend Hippocrates is excited that Protagoras is in town and wants to go maybe pay Protagoras to teach him. And so this causes Socrates to ask him, well, what is he going to teach you if he was a horse trainer, then he'd be teaching you to be a horse trainer. But what is he? He's a sophist. He says he's a sophist. Most people think that's shameful, but Protagoras is fine with that label.

Do you want to be a sophist? Well, no, I don't want to be a sophist. Okay, so he's going to teach you virtue, citizenship, something like that. So they go and then confront him, and he's at this big party, and so there's these other sophists and other people, Alcibiades, other people from the symposium that are in attendance, and Protagoras is holding forth there. Do we want to say anything else about the setup, this whole incident with the butler, or any of this?

9:36 Dylan: I enjoy the beginning. It makes me want to interact with the rest of the dialogues and thinking about how these characters are working, like the fact that Alcibiades shows up. And as you pointed out, Mark, there are people in here that are from the symposium. It seems like a different discussion about how these interactions across dialogues are happening. And I'm not so worried about that. To me, the big setup is that there's a whole bunch of sophists here. And in fact, this conversation is going to happen with a bunch of them. And there's side conversations to them, the main one being with Protagoras.

And the fundamental thing that's set up at the beginning, as you pointed out with Hippocrates, is we're here with a bunch of sophists, and what are you exactly teaching? You're getting money for educating people, for teaching them something, making them more powerful in some way. What is it they're going to come away with?

10:27 Seth: What's interesting about the setup is that Socrates is questioning what's being taught. And yet the value of what's being taught, regardless of what it is, is clearly embraced by the fact he's surrounded by people who all want to hear what he has to say. And he's famous across Greece, so there must be something he's doing that people find valuable, regardless of whether or not they can give a Socratic definition of it.

10:50 Dylan: In effect, Protagoras himself, like right around 3:18 a, it's basically put to him, you know, well, what is it the heck that you do? Hippocrates asks him. And Protagoras says, young man, it will assuredly be the case to you if you associate with me, that on the day on which you come into association with me, you'll go home having become better, and the same things will happen on the following day, and each day you'll make continued progress for the better. The basic thing he says, is that if you hang out with me and what I teach you, you'll be better at the end than you were at the beginning.

Which isn't very different than what most education. Well, what a version of education people say, particularly anything from wellness to liberal education or whatever. When you have a hard time saying exactly what it is you're going to get out of it at the end, they're going to say, well, I was just a better person when I was done. That's what Protagoras says.

11:39 Mark: Yeah. A better citizen. Specifically even.

11:42 Dylan: Does he say that here?

11:43 Seth: He says that in our translation. Yeah.

11:45 Wes: Socrates will interpret that back to him as saying a better citizen. And then Protagoras will go along with that.

11:50 Dylan: Yeah. At 318A says in the Allen, young man, this is what you'll get if you study with me on the day you come to me, you'll return home better, and the next day the same. And each day you always improve.

12:01 Wes: He's pushed. So let's see, it's 178 in our text. You return home better, and what do you claim? I'll be better? How will I improve? And then he gives an answer that is ironic, given some of what goes on later. But he'll say, don't worry, I'm not going to just give you a regular education in the arts, calculation, astronomy, geometry, all that stuff. So this is 318E. The subject of study is good judgment about his own affairs and how he may best order his own house and about the affairs of the city, and about how he may be most powerful in those affairs, both in action and speech.

And then Socrates says, you speak of the political art and undertake to make men good citizens. So already you have the question of whether Socrates is fairly characterizing that. That's sort of a question that comes up every time Socrates paraphrases someone's answer back to them. And this, of course, is a completely legitimate to say, is this really what Protagoras is talking about? Is he actually talking about making people good citizens is questionable since he's talking about power.

13:06 Dylan: Yeah. And in fact, it may be that the first part, that political art is what he's talking about. And then he says, and promising to make men good citizens is just in Socrates reply is a juxtaposition that might be unwarranted.

13:21 Wes: He always Tugs on, you know, what people say in a kind of, I want to say, not insidious, exactly. He starts inserting his agenda immediately.

13:29 Dylan: It's worth pointing out in this section that Protagoras. One of the ways that he's trying to distinguish himself from what other people teach is, you know, he points to other people who get going to get educated. And he says, other people, they maltreat the young who have fled the arts. They lead them back against their will and throw them into the arts, teaching them calculation, astronomy, geometry and music. That basically everybody else is going to try to teach you how to do specific things. And that's a waste of your time and you're going to get abused. But I'm going to teach you how to run your life.

14:02 Wes: The question arises is whether this sort of thing is an art. Because the reason to talk about making men good citizens is to push the argument in the direction of virtue, where virtue, as we know, is something that depends on a lot of factors that don't involve simply learning, like learning how to make shoes or something, or learning astronomy. You don't learn virtue, obviously, in the same way. And you can't just go to a virtue class and come out of that a good person. It depends on, you know, as we saw in Aristotle, depends on character, essentially.

It depends on all this procedural knowledge as opposed to rational knowledge, on habit, on emotional comportment, you know, on the relation between your dispositions to act, your dispositions to feel and think. All of those sort of very ingrained things which aren't as obviously alterable by a standard education. You might say they're therapeutically alterable, but not necessarily rationally alterable, or. That's the question.

15:03 Mark: So does it seem justified to then think that the Greek, when he initially says, you'll be better and better every day, that that doesn't necessarily mean morally better, that that's at least neutral with regard to whether virtue is actually implied in that or not?

15:18 Wes: Yeah, I don't think Protagoras knows exactly because as Plato characterizes him, he doesn't seem to be that precise. Right. So he. By saying, I don't teach you the regular arts, he's already setting up this distinction between learning a typical art and then the question of virtue. But on the other hand, it's not clear that he has any firm conception of that difference at this point.

15:38 Dylan: Yeah. When he says that you're going to study good judgment in your own affairs and how to make best order your own house and about the affairs of the city, and how to be most powerful in both those affairs, in actions and speech. To your point about him not necessarily being that precise, it's not at all clear that he intends that that means that you're going to be a virtuous person necessarily. That becomes a sort of central question throughout the dialogue. Is it aligned that way? And Socrates wants to make sure that it is aligned that way. But there's this constant tug back and forth about whether or not it means that. In fact, I think that Protagoras in the end feels a bit bullied about that fact.

16:19 Wes: He's a self help guru, right? In the same way in self help today there's always that tension between are you just trying to show me how to make money and win friends and influence people? Is it a Thrasymachean project? Purely a matter of self interest and influence. Like when you say you're going to make me better at all these things about arranging my own affairs and the affairs of the city. You're just going to show me how to win elections, I guess, in today's terms, or to rise to the top of a corporation, or to do well in my career, all that very practical, practical stuff. But then you open up a self help book and it promises you to do those sorts of things for you, but then it often moralizes it, right? It asks you to become a better person, it asks you to develop habits like, what is it, the seven habits of highly effective people.

17:05 Dylan: I was just going to point exactly that book as a business book in which it says that by becoming a better person you will become a better business person. And in fact these things that I've gleaned from doing good business will make you a better person, give you a better soul, and that's the key.

17:21 Wes: So as a self help guru, he's sort of straddling this line between this very self interested, cynical project potentially, and then between the moralistic or the more ethical project.

17:34 Mark: Well, let's see if that interpretation that Protagoras doesn't necessarily mean good citizenship in terms of good morals, but good citizenship in terms of being able to get along with people and get what you want through the next section, which is the speech of Protagoras. So Socrates has asked him to clarify, what exactly is it? What art are you teaching? And he then goes into this whole myth of Prometheus and Zeus, of when all the animals are created, the gods give them various virtues, sharp claws, sharp teeth, etc. But man is forgotten. I've heard versions of this before from different mythologies.

And it turns out that the thing that's missing that Zeus then has to give them is the political arts, because that's the only way, by grouping together, by being in a society. That's our advantage. Strangely, not reason, although that's another interpretation that I've heard given this myth or communication. It's like, I guess we even have reason, we have communication, but we still bicker until we have this political art.

18:34 Wes: It's important to note here because again, we get the same cleavage within the arts between the political art and everything else. And by the way, this whole speech is really impressive and beautiful and it shows that Plato can represent, and here, Socrates, within Plato, represent an opponent as having very formidable and interesting points of view, because there's a lot of insight, ultimately we'll see in what Protagoras has to say about whether virtue is teachable as we go on. So the animals get these natural talents, right? Fur and claws and things like that, and human beings come last.

And so at first they just get the arts. They get speech on the one hand, so reason, but they also get the ability to make dwellings and things. But they're not going to be able to have cities until they have political virtue of some sort. Basically, you need the art of politics for there to be such a thing as cities. So that's something that Zeus sends to human beings by way of Hermes after the fact. So after Prometheus has already given us the regular arts, stolen them, essentially, that's not enough. Zeus is going to send the political art down to us because we can't survive in cities without it.

And without cities, we're no better than the beasts, where even with our arts, we are still subject to them attacking us and making our lives miserable.

19:49 Seth: What Prometheus gives us allows us to be equal to the beasts. But like you said, Wes, it's not sufficient for enabling us to be essentially equal to each other, but we still lack the connection to the divine. So what he says that Hermes brings is reverence and right, so that there might be good order for cities in binding ties of friendship, but presumably also piety. That's a signal to what's required for civic virtue.

20:16 Dylan: I just want to make a little clarification that. What's his name? Epimetheus. Is that what it is? Epimetheus, he gives all the animals a whole bunch of powers and then the end, he doesn't have any more powers to give. That's just an interesting fact that, yeah, Epimetheus runs out of his bag of powers to give. Okay, so Prometheus has to step up. But Prometheus goes and steals powers from Athena and Hephaestus, and those are powers of the gods. So he gives human beings art that makes them partly godlike. They have kinship with the gods, but Prometheus gives them that already separates them from the beasts.

But they don't have the ability to be fully godlike because of the absence of the political art. So Zeus sends it down to them, and then the question comes on how it should be distributed. Zeus says give it to them all equally, not in pockets. Don't make it like the eagles have claws and the bears have fur, or that the blacksmith has the talent for forging iron and the leather maker for making leather. Everybody has the capability to feel shame and know the right of way.

21:26 Wes: And by the way, when we say arts, we mean arts and crafts. Like, so the Greek word is techne. So like technology. And then the political art is something above and beyond technology. And the distribution has to be. Everyone has to at least have some of it, because we couldn't have cities without that. So what would it mean for a person not to even have a portion of it? I think it means you would have people who are uncivilized or basically like animals. And you can imagine a political order in which you have the just or people with the political art who have it, and then those who have none of it, and they're governed by the people with the political art.

You get this radical separation between two very, very distinct classes. And then the question is how those with the political art could even come to impose order if the others are just like animals. You know, we wouldn't be able to do that with animals. No matter how much political art we have, we wouldn't be able to order them politically. That's kind of a foreshadowing of a problem that we'll get to later on. The idea of the relationship between reason and the passions, or reason and desire, whether you can just set up this conception of virtue in which our knowledge of things somehow can override our passions, or whether you need passion and knowledge to kind of run through everything.

So I think these two things are going to end up being related. But I think Protagoras is making a very important point here that I think Socrates ultimately would end up having to agree to. I think we'd all have to agree to him.

23:00 Dylan: Yeah. I think this is the beginning of why, at the end of the dialogue, Socrates says that he has switched places. This speech is being made by Protagoras in response to the disagreement that he has with Socrates whether virtue is teachable at all. And it starts out with Socrates doubting that it's teachable and Protagoras insisting that it is. And this is his response to demonstrate that it is teachable. And this part that we're in, we're about halfway through this speech is one of the key reasons why it's teachable is that everybody has the potential for virtue given to them by Zeus. And that's a feature of human beings, that they're at least open to being teachable. Yeah, it doesn't fully answer the question that it's a teachable art. I mean, it could be that it's learnable but not teachable, as Seth pointed out.

23:55 Wes: He's talking about, he says specifically, bring reverence and right to men and the binding ties of friendship. And then we're talking about a political art or maybe the virtue of justice. All these things have to be present in people, no matter how vicious they are. And like I said, I think it's a way of distinguishing between what it means to be civilized and uncivilized or what it means to be human in our sense post state of nature, or to have the part of the soul that is the spirited part, or another way to put it, is to be involved in the Hegelian mutual recognition relationship.

In other words, it just. It means that we have to be social, essentially. We have to be social creatures in the human sense of social in order for there to be such a thing as cities. And by virtue of being social, we are the know a lot. We already have a kind of art. And I think at some point he's going to compare it to language. Right. At least in its teachability. It's something we absorb or it's something that just happens naturally by course of our development within a society that we acquire it. But it's a fascinating thing because it's a kind of virtue that is embedded or inherent in what it means to be human.

So.

25:09 Mark: So social in the human sense of social. That's interesting that it requires the communication. Obviously. I always thought the basis for sociality is in animals, right. You can have basically a Hobbesian dominance culture within chimpanzees or, you know, any other kind of wolf packs, tribal animals. And so you wouldn't get a whole city out of that. In fact, you couldn't even have technology with that. Of course, you need relations that are not merely ones of hostile dominance in order to pass on Traditions, you need communication. So it's adding language to that.

So he's saying that the human sense of social involves specifically justice and friendship, which is interesting to me. That seems. Yeah, okay, in a fully formed society you do have that, but couldn't you have that? I guess that's an interesting question. That what you described Wes as. Could we have civilized people that are interacting with uncivilized people and ruling over them? Like that's exactly what. Maybe not the way that the Greeks saw slavery, because I think they maybe saw, okay, we conquered your people, now you're going to become our slaves.

There but for the grace of God, I could be your slave. It's not that we're fundamentally different kinds of people, at least for. That's one description. I've heard of slavery in Greece, but certainly that's how slavery in America, that's what they thought, you know, that these slaves are just animals and we are denying their basic humanity. We need to just like we would control a pack of dogs at a dog show or sled dogs or something like that, we have to control these uncivilized people like that.

26:38 Wes: Right. And therefore they're not citizens, they're not part of the polity, they're excluded from that.

26:42 Mark: So after he's given this myth, which I think you could actually use the myth to argue either way, right. Everybody has a share given to them by Zeus of political know how. Well, in other words, it's inborn in everybody. So there's nothing to teach. Everybody already knows. But the way that I think Dylan just described what he actually says is, or at least the interpretation of why he's telling this story is no, everybody has the potential. Everybody has the seed of this given to them by Zeus in the second half, it's saying, look, according to the opinion of the many, virtue is teachable because look at just how socialization works. Everybody tries their best to teach their kids. Maybe it doesn't always take.

27:20 Dylan: And it comes down to. It's because we point people and try to entice them with pleasures and punish them with pain, right? To get them to behave better. And therefore it must be teachable.

27:31 Wes: So before that he says, and we should recall that all of this is a response to Socrates, who has two objections to the idea that political virtue or the political art can be taught. Doesn't seem like they're experts because we consult, you know, at an assembly, everyone gets to speak about their political opinion, but we would laugh at them if they were not a shipbuilder and they try to tell us about shipbuilding. And then the second one is that, you know, just because a father is a good person doesn't mean a son is going to end up that way. And then before we get to this, the many portion of the argument here, Protagoras will say, yeah, we do.

When it comes to political virtue, which he then identifies with justice and temperance, I think that's important. And we may want to talk about what we think justice is at some point, but we do consult everybody. Even if we don't think we're all that politically virtuous, we have to pretend that we are.

28:24 Dylan: We have to pay lip service to it, otherwise we're crazy.

28:27 Wes: Which I think is really interesting. And then he moves on to this idea that everyone teaches virtue to everyone.

28:34 Seth: I thought you were going to jump in there on that. That section on 323C. So Plato is representing Socrates, representing Protagoras view. But I think, just like you said, Wes, he's responding to Socrates argument about virtue not being teachable because it's not like shipbuilding or flute playing or whatever, and that no matter what station in life you are, if you're a free citizen of the city, your judgment is considered valid on issues of civic virtue. What it says here in the text, which I think is prima facie at least, really interesting response and argument.

He says, I claim then that they reasonably accept advice from all men about this virtue in the belief that they all share it. So it's a tie back to an equal share of right and reverence has been given to every man. So he's explaining Socrates's assumption. He says that they don't believe it exists by nature, arises spontaneously, but can be taught. So here's why we think everybody shares in it. But here's why I think it can be taught and comes to be present in those in whom it comes to be present by study. This I shall try to demonstrate for you with this.

So he switches from. I think, is this the section where he says, should I start with a story or a demonstration? And they say, everybody says tell a story. And so he tells the story. And he says, okay, now I'm going to switch to demonstration. So he says, for no one is angry over such evils as men believe each other to possess by nature or by chance, or admonishes or instructs or punishes those who have them in order that they not be that way, but they pity them. Who, for example, is so irrational as to undertake to do any of this to those who are ugly or small or weak, because I suppose they know that things beautiful and the opposite come to people by nature and chance.

But as to the good things they think people get from study and practice and teaching, if someone possesses not them, but the evils opposite to them, anger rises against them in punishment and admonishment. And he goes on to talk about how we don't punish out of retribution. And that you would be irrational or insane to punish somebody just because you were angry with them. What's done is done in the past. The reason you punish them is is to change their future behavior in the belief that they can in fact change their behavior. In other words, that virtue can be learned.

30:44 Wes: He's saying, look, the many believe that virtue is teachable because the teachable just is the domain of responsibility and moral dessert. If it's not teachable, then it couldn't be otherwise it would just be you're this way because of external influences or you're not, and no one could ever hold you morally responsible for that. But we do hold each other morally responsible for that, which means that we think that we can alter ourselves or each other through teaching. And it's not just a matter of natural external influences that we become inevitably the way that we are.

Then he gets to the argument portion where he has to say why good men have sons who maybe are not as good. So now there's still that inherent tension which Socrates pointed to. How is it the case that everyone has it, but then also it's teachable? You would think if something is teachable, then they don't have it, and you're going to teach them into having it. And the argument is going to be that it's really a spectrum of scale and we all have some of it, but we could have more of it. And I, Protagoras, will help you have more of it.

31:51 Dylan: Isn't it in that way, make it like any other art in that everybody has the capability of learning?

31:57 Wes: What about the flute players, Dylan?

31:59 Dylan: Well, so I wondered a little bit about this, and maybe this is part of the conversation to have later on, but is it the account of the arts and how one learns the arts and how one is excellent at the arts and even how we understand the kind of judgment that goes into the arts and its teachability More complicated, It's often that the teachability of flute playing or blacksmithing is something that is transparently easy to do and that is somehow the paragon of teachability. I would raise the question that what the form of the teaching is that is going on is that question and also what it means to be having good judgment in those regards. And whether you're teaching that good judgment

32:47 Wes: or not, it is really interesting. So when he talks about the sons being no better, I always think of the film Gladiator and Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. Marcus Aurelius, who's such a great person apparently. And at least he seems that way from his writings. And he was reputed to be such as an emperor. And of course we did our own episode on that. And I still actually look back at the Meditations. I use it almost like a self help manual, but it didn't help Commodus, he was a raving lunatic. So that's sort of the paradigmatic example of that sort of thing.

And the story that Protagoras goes on to tell is we educate our children and all these sorts of things, we use punishments. And it's not just teachers, but it starts with parents and then ultimately it's the laws. So you get this triumvirate, parent, teachers, laws. And then moral teachings also suffuse other teachings, like poetry, for instance. There's little moral lessons in there. But I think there's a larger point to be taken there, which is that our social environment is suffused with these ethical teachings. Right. And this goes to the point, you know, of social construction, actually Mark, that you were hoping for some of.

In this, it's our identities, we're constantly identifying with others, you know, especially parents and authority figures and teachers and, and the law. But we are constantly being shaped by these oughts, by these mandates of what we're supposed to do and what is prohibited. And that's something very different. You know, maybe it's comparable to the way we acquire language as a child, but that's very different than the way we pick up a language as a child. Or these, a super ego, let's say, or a conscience is much different than the way we pick up flute playing, where we're just, we're trained in how to do it and we have to practice it.

This is not just a matter of practice, it's a matter of absorption.

34:39 Mark: So if something were required, then it would be, you know, everybody's doing it all the time, then it might be something that you would at least get a base competence in just kind of absorbing it. Like think about not flute playing specifically, but just rhythm, you know, music that whether or not you've had a class, you're around it enough that you would get some. The way we learn to sing, for most people is closer to the way we learn language, that we just kind of pick it up. People are doing it, we sing along. Maybe we're good at it, maybe we're not.

And it's only when then you want to become a really, really good singer that you use training and practice. And so it just happens to be the status of flute playing that that's a very specialized thing that not too many people do. And unless somebody says you're going to learn flute or you express that interest and put the flute in your hand, that you even would get on the road to getting even basic competence in that. But it's something like singing that does seem a lot closer to citizenship, that what Protagoras is claiming is that, yeah, everybody has.

Gets the basics, but there are trainers like me that will then actually train you to, say, use your powers of speech to get what you want out of the assembly. Where most people. That's not just something people just pick up. They pick up, like, how to behave and not get swatted by their elders because they don't know basic manners, but they don't actually know how to accomplish things politically.

36:02 Wes: I was going to bring up manners, actually, because that's a good example. I mean, I think what you're pointing to, Mark, is that just it's an inherent part of the social that we get to practice these things all the time. So we internalize, let's say, prohibitions and oughts. We should do this, we shouldn't do that, but we do get to practice them all the time, partly just because a lot of it's just negative, right? So if I'm not allowed to hit someone whenever I want, I'm practicing it by virtue of just not doing it. So that's one interesting thing.

But with manners, I'm practicing them all the time. You know, we learn to say please and thank you, for instance. And the same thing with language, right? Children do absorb language, but they also. There is a kind of practice built into that. But all of that is very different than, say, the kind of practice I do when I'm learning to play a flute. Because flute playing isn't so naturally integrated into what it means to be social. I'm not forced to play the flute every time I want someone to give me something. You know, when I'm in a store trying to purchase something, I'm not forced to say please, but it might be advisable to say please.

But it's not like I have to do a little flute routine every time I'm purchasing something.

37:14 Dylan: But Isn't that just underlining the fact that it requires practice and that the case with virtues, you have this sort of ubiquitous practice that happens as a result of being part of society and socialization. Whereas the art of flute playing is something that you have to proactively put aside time because it's just not part of your day to day life. It's a little bit like learning a foreign language. If you're trying to learn a foreign language like you're trying to, you live in the US and you want to learn even Spanish, right? You have to set aside time to go and do that. Whereas if you live someplace where all they're doing is speaking Spanish, just your mere fact of going about life, you're going to have to start learning it.

37:59 Wes: Compare language acquisition as a child to learning language as an adult, and then compare procedural knowledge to knowing that something. So you absorb grammar as a child, you don't learn grammar in the way you learn it as from a textbook as an adult. And I think there's a comparison between ethical, if there's an ethical art, between our acquisition of morals, let's say, and the difference between that and then flute playing, which is that with flute playing, the scale, with morals, we don't have to practice the scale to learn it. Exactly. In other words, you don't learn the scale, a musical scale, by people frowning at you or saying, no, don't do that, or you simply absorbing the expectations of a society or just saying, okay, everyone dresses this way and isn't running around naked.

And I infer that that's what I ought to do, or however it is we acquire these things. It's much different than the way we acquire other arts. Even though practice is involved.

39:00 Dylan: But the way you just described it made it sound like it's a lot more like learning language, especially immersively as a child, right? You learn the grammar and the associations without having anybody teaching you from a textbook.

39:14 Wes: And language acquisition is built on the capacity, right, for joint recognition. And I'm able to point at the same thing as you're pointing at and know what pointing means. Knowing that there's another consciousness who can appreciate there's another intentionality that can appreciate that my intentionality is directed to something. We're in that mutual recognition game. We're in that with language acquisition, and we're in that with the acquisition of morals. And that's what's distinctively different about those things. Not just the absorption factor, but the fact that they're inherently social, that there's this mutual Hegelian recognition game going on that we're self conscious. In other words, that self consciousness forms the basis or is tied very intimately to it and consciousness of other consciousnesses frowning at me when I don't say please.

40:01 Mark: I'm still trying to decide whether how relevant this is what I'm about to say here. I was noticing in so my daughter just had a piano recital and a parade of kids. Exactly. With that kind of learning and instrument. How restrictive it actually is. How it really is not just a matter of learning to move your hands in this way and do this. But I almost think of it as largely prohibitive that it's so easy to ruin it with a bad note. Whereas other kinds of musical learning, you know, if you're in a rock band or something, then there are ways that you can screw up and things.

But like there's not just one right thing you can do at any given time. Like there's a lot of freedom. So it really is kind of just working up your overall power. And so thinking about social by comparison, I think we in a basically free society might think in terms of the rock and roll model of society that like yes, you can gain your power. There are different ways that you could go before the assembly. I'm thinking of what I was just describing Protagoras as describing the thing that you'd actually have to develop. You could just choose not to argue things in front of the assembly.

Like it's not actually required that you take these positive actions. But there's a lot of room for initiative in trying to get the assembly or persuade your fellows to do this or that. Or you could just be a follower and you're still a citizen. As opposed to a very stringent society where these totalitarian regimes where that's more like playing a high difficulty piano piece in a recital, that there's, you know, one false move and the secret police are going to come and get you. And like just thinking about that sort of comparison, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what that means for the dialogue here and what you could be learning about, if anything.

I just, I want to be wary about dis analogies between where I think Protagoras is arguing for this more free and you know, they're in a Athenian democracy. Something that would say there are multiple possible answers, you know, right answers to any given problem. I think that is maybe part of what Protagoras conception of virtue is going to be, why it's not going to be as singular. Whereas Socrates might be a More traditional moralist that like, no, most of the ways that you do things are going to ultimately be bad if you look at them more closely.

42:17 Wes: Wherever we fall on this dispute, the important thing is to reflect on the extent to which the arts and the quote unquote, political art or virtue in general are like each other, our virtues. I think that's the discussion we've been having, right? Does virtue work like techne? Does it work like the other arts? Does the thing that Hermes brought us, is it just of the same sort of thing that we already got from Prometheus, or is it something else? That's the point of reflection.

42:47 Seth: That's an important question. But also Protagoras is trying to answer that in the context of, to quote the text at 327A, why are there many worthless sons born to good fathers? Right? So if virtue can be taught, why are there all these good men that have terrible children? Wouldn't it be insane for them to not try to teach them virtue? And this is when he brings up the flute player example, and he's trying to associate the capacity for virtue is a natural ability, like having an ear for perfect pitch or having strength. Right? And so he wants to say something like, if we look at children who aren't as good as their parents, we have to see that as a function of the children just not having the same natural ability as the parents.

But when he does that in the context of talking about virtue versus, say, strength or speed, because there's, you know, Socrates later says on don't compare me to this runner who, you know, at his peak, right? You have to make him run slower so I can keep up with him. My point is, is that where earlier the Protagorean argument is, we don't hold people accountable for their natural abilities. Like, if you're not 6 foot tall, I'm way 230 pounds, and you can't bench press 300 pounds, then we don't hold you responsible for that. But we do hold you responsible for being virtuous because you're given an equal share.

Now, at the same time, if he's going to associate virtue with a natural ability, it feels to me like he's undermining that earlier argument or that this point undermines that. But it also confuses the issue about what you were just talking about, Wes, the notion of does virtue function as a techne? And he makes it sound like it does.

44:29 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

44:30 Dylan: Your first point, Seth, that he seems to be undermining the teachability argument is exactly What Socrates picks up, summarizes at the end, is that by making virtue an innate ability, he wants to have it both ways here. He wants to say that we have the innate capacity and that it's therefore teachable in us. And therefore the variations in ability varies by the maybe the relative capacity, we don't really know. But there's a kind of midichlorian kind of aspect of virtue here, right? That some of us have it and some of us don't, and that it's cultivatable, but maybe some of us don't have it at all.

45:08 Wes: Well, in defense of Protagoras, he might say everyone in this hypothetical society, everyone plays the flute, right? So it's not like there's some flute players and some not. Because not playing the flute is just like being uncivilized, like not even being human.

45:22 Dylan: It's like not wearing clothes. Everybody in society wears clothes.

45:25 Wes: Yes, some people have better natural ability than others. So some people are going to be great flute players. And some people, even if their father is a great flute player, no matter how much training they get, their natural talent is not going to rise to that ability. But they could still be better or worse flute players with training. So it's still teachable. You could still get better at flute playing. It's just that you're limited. You have to do that within the limitations of your natural talent. How did Commodus become Commodus? He had a great father.

It's not really plausible to say that he became a raving lunatic just because he was born that way, or it's his natural level. There are other influences. I mean, yes, temperament or genetics. You might say, okay, play some role. But what's really going on is that the teachability factor suffuses society. It's not just located. Even though parents might be especially important, or teachers, and also teachers, authority figures and the laws are especially important, those sorts of things that Protagoras mentioned. It's also really subtly interwoven into the social.

So it's Commodus's interactions with his peers. It's the fact that he was, you know, maybe he was raised by. It's not just. I mean, Aurelius might have been relatively absent in his life, and he's raised by servants and all sorts of other social forces. So that's the more plausible explanation that's being ignored here, which is just that the number of teachings going on at any given time, the number of influences, they're enormous and various, and they're everywhere.

47:02 Dylan: The reason Commodus is a raving lunatic is his education is terrible. To that end, you would say that the reason why the children of virtuous people often end up being invertuous is because those virtuous people don't know how to set up the education for their children.

47:22 Mark: Yeah.

47:22 Wes: And being good doesn't necessarily mean being a good teacher of the good. That's a good point.

47:26 Dylan: Exactly.

47:27 Mark: Well, that they're basically spoiled. That if you're good, according to this, then you're not just a meek person, but you're successful in your career, you're more likely to rise to the top of society. But then when you raise your kids, yes, you are a moral influence on them, but they are raised as entitled and they don't have the constant no, no, no of everybody that somebody in a lower class would be. It's just, you know, the father is the only one that can say no to. If a realist is the only one that can say no to Commodus and a realist is gone most of the time, then Commodus actually is raised in the rock and roll.

All is permitted. Use your initiative and that. That is not a complete moral training. Take all the drugs is not. Yeah, it's not complete moral training. You need to be. Have a variety of people constantly smacking you down and saying no, no, no for you to have a basic degree of citizenship.

48:17 Dylan: In fact, the outline of the progress of education that Protagoras has involves a fairly articulated and progressive method of. There's the influence of the immediate family and even his father, and then a progression of different kinds of teachers, all of whom are inculcating a progressive level of knowledge about the world, about citizenship, about themselves and their relationship with the world so they can live in harmony about how the relationship with themselves in terms of their physical bodies, and then ultimately reading between the lines a little bit to prepare them to be receptive to the laws.

49:04 Wes: And I forget whether it was Dylan or Mark who said this, but this point about someone who's a good person not necessarily being a good teacher of virtue, you know, a virtuous person is not necessarily a virtuous influence, I think is really important because it goes towards the whole Socratic problem that when we teach people in general, we can't just pour knowledge into them as if we were pouring wine into them. The acquisition of it is a problem in and of itself. And it's not just by being in proximity to virtue that we become virtuous, where our habituation into it is more complex than that.

We don't acquire it by sort of, you know, I said was using absorb earlier, but it's not absorption in the sense of like eating something or just, you know, any sort of being near it is going to work. We might say the whole concept of identification is important, but how that occurs is very complicated.

50:00 Dylan: I would say that this is true of anything that is learnable. And the relationship of the learnable to the teaching of it is very complicated. And I think you could even raise the question of whether anything is actually taught in the sense of if you understand teaching as pouring wine into a carafe.

50:19 Wes: It requires activity. It's not just passive and receptive. It requires activity on the part of the person doing the learning.

50:25 Seth: Gee, I wonder if there's another Platonic dialogue that would help illustrate that point for you.

50:31 Wes: Yes.

50:32 Dylan: The only other thing I wanted to say was Wes, you know, reiterated the comment that the virtuous person might not be able to teach virtue. I think that's true of everything that's teachable. So great musicians to me are notoriously terrible at teaching music. And if you try, just ask Mark about nem, how often is it possible to find someone who's actually capable of really talking about their music? Mark just has to drag it out of them.

51:01 Mark: Sometimes things happen, things happen, I mess around and then it's all lost in the mists of time.

51:11 Seth: Yes, yes.

51:11 Dylan: I mean, people who are really good at things often in my experience are terrible at talking about them, articulating it, teaching them all of those things. It's just they are not the same activity.