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

0:00 Wes: Yep.

0:00 Mark: So I think we're finally done with Protagoras long speech. That's about seven pages of this 40 page dialogue.

0:07 Dylan: A great speech, but I think it's

0:09 Mark: only fair that we gave him so much emphasis to try to represent his view and discuss that sort of independently. But this dialogue goes on a lot, a lot more after that, through lots of twists and turns. Seems like it's mostly, at least Socrates tries to focus it mostly on. You're saying virtue is teachable. Well, you don't even know what the hell virtue is. In fact, I'm just going to ask you one thing about it. Are all the virtues one and the same thing? What are the relations between temperance and courage and piety? If you can't even say that, then you certainly don't know what virtue is and shouldn't be claiming to teach it. You are in fact, as the translator put it in his introduction, you are a merchant importer of knowledge. You don't know actually what you're importing. You're passing on things you've heard, but you don't actually know if it's going to be good for the soul or not.

0:58 Dylan: Well, that last part, you're pulling a Socratic trick there, right? Is knowing whether they're parts or not might be distinct from knowing whether they're good for the soul or not.

1:09 Mark: Right?

1:09 Dylan: You might not know if it's good for the soul, you might know what it is, but it might not know whether it's good for the soul or vice versa.

1:14 Mark: Because we never actually get to a resolution of is virtue teachable? Because the dialogue actually ends by saying, well, I guess we really have to go back and look at what virtue is before we can determine whether it's teachable. But no time for that today. Bye bye.

1:28 Dylan: Well, Protagoras just basically claims exhaustion. He says, let's just do this another time.

1:33 Mark: So supposedly the Meno, according to the translator, takes up right after that on that question. Read those in order.

1:40 Dylan: Because Socrates has the fortitude of a God. You just imagine he left Agathon's party last night where he had been drinking all night. He just goes straight over to Protagoras, and then the next day he's hanging out with Meno.

1:52 Seth: Can I read the beginning of the Unity of Virtue section? Just because I love it so much. This is 328e ish. After such and so great a display, Protagoras ceased speaking, spellbound. I for some time still kept looking at him, all eagerness to hear, as if he would go on. But when at last I realized he had really stopped, I somehow with difficulty collected myself, as it were, and glanced toward Hippocrates and said, son of Apollodorus, how grateful I am to you for urging me to come here. For I count it important what I've heard from Protagoras. I formerly believed it is by no human care that good men become good. But now I'm persuaded, except for a certain small difficulty, which it's clear Protagoras will easily explain since he's already explained so many.

2:39 Wes: He's such a passive aggressive douche.

2:43 Seth: I wrote in my notes, here comes the Socratic buffoonery. Yes, that was the.

2:48 Mark: Were you not reminded of. What is it? Peter Falk. What was his TV show?

2:52 Seth: Columbo.

2:53 Mark: Columbo.

2:54 Seth: He's like it's all established thing I just can't figure out.

3:02 Wes: And then you get them to incriminate themselves.

3:04 Seth: Yep, exactly.

3:06 Dylan: Are the virtues like a face?

3:10 Mark: Temperance is the nose and piety is the mouth, obviously.

3:14 Seth: Yeah.

3:15 Dylan: It's actually a super interesting question about parts and wholes.

3:18 Seth: I'll skip down to the part where he poses the question that's going to set off the whole next section, which is. Now then, Protagoras. I'd lack little of having everything if you just answer me this. You say that virtue can be taught, and if indeed I could be persuaded of it by any other man, I'd be persuaded by you. But please satisfy my soul about something which surprised me in what you said. For you said that Zeus sent justice and reverence to men, and again in several places in your speech, that justice and temperance and holiness and all that are in some one thing, namely virtue.

Give me then a precise account of just this. Is virtue one single thing but justice and temperance and holiness parts of it? Or are these things I just now mentioned all names for one and the same thing? That is what I still want to know. This has echoes. I could not remember. There's another dialogue where he pulls this trick too, and I can't remember Parmenides.

4:06 Mark: I mean, there's. Parmenides is just chock full of this

4:09 Seth: whole, whole and part stuff, Whole in parts thing. Maybe that's it, because we did that not too long ago and it's still fresh in my mind. But yeah, and Protagoras response is why that's easy, Socrates. Virtue is one and what you ask about are parts of it. And off we go, which this is

4:24 Mark: where I was referring to as a place where modern logic seems like it would be helpful here, because those surely can't be the only options. Just genus and species seems to capture, you know, there's virtue. It's not that the species are parts of the genus virtue. In other words, do the physical mammals, the animals that make up the kingdom, mammals and amphibians and stuff, are they part in the same way that a tusk and the trunk are part of an elephant? Is the elephant part of its species and that species is part of its genus? No, clearly that's misunderstanding the way categorization works. And neither are they just all equivalent, like so presenting those as the only options just seems right from the outset. Something bad is going on.

5:09 Wes: It does seem to be intentional, though. I just think when Socrates gets into this mode, it's obvious sophistry.

5:16 Mark: He's just jerking him around.

5:18 Wes: It's meant to be, to have an informative subtext. So maybe I'm just trying to save the appearances too much. But my impression for this dialogue is like Protagoras comes across so well in his speech. And then Socrates comes off as a lunatic here and it just has to be intentional.

5:36 Dylan: They don't spend a ton of time on the part relationship thing. When I first got to that part, I thought, oh, well, we're going to go down a sophist road, right, and start talking about how things branch off from one another. But that isn't. Because quickly we get to the question of whether there's a hierarchy between them and whether each virtue has its own power. And that seems to be in many ways a natural way to be getting to the teachability question has a lot in common. If it has a certain power, where is that power from and how is that teachable? If it is teachable, that kind of thing.

6:11 Mark: Sorry, I just want to clarify that what Dylan means by sophistrote is the dialogue, the sophist.

6:15 Wes: Here's one of the things that always makes me think it's intentional sophistry, not in the dialogue sense, but in the negative sense. He'll do the self predication thing, right? So he says justice is a thing, right? It's a thing. Socrates's superpower is to reify, right. Firstly, I'm going to reify it now and then we're going to talk about it as if it's a thing. And if it's a thing, it's also just. Can I predicate justice of the just? Wouldn't it be weird if the just were unjust? Which he's playing. He's playing around. Obviously we're not meant to think he's serious about that sort of thing.

6:50 Dylan: Don't you think it's serious and not serious at the same time? Yes, I think without trying to get esoteric about it, to me it's serious and unserious, sort of in a kind of plain way in the dialogue and in the dialogues in general.

7:04 Seth: Plain or playing?

7:06 Dylan: Plain. And if it's playing, it's playing in a serious way in the sense of playing around with something to figure it out. So I would agree with both. But the way in which it's plain is that you routinely, just like in this dialogue, get to the end and he says, okay, well, we need to start over again. We need to do this again. Because we got to the end of this way of thinking and we came up with a conclusion that was opposite with what we started with. And therefore we got more work to do. And it's playing for exactly the same reason that you sat around trying to figure something out and you turned this and you twisted that and you took it for a ride around the block and you came back and you're like, okay, now I learned something, but I still don't really understand.

I'm going to have to do it again. And you're going to do it again in a different way, and you're going to come at it with a different set of questions and tug on these set of answers in a different way and come up with another set of conclusions. And that's what I mean by it's serious and unserious. So the way I described it is taking Socrates somewhat seriously in him being open to revising things and him being tremendously earnest. But I think that it always feels like even if he's earnest, he also is not without his point of view in trying to push people in a particular direction.

And so that sort of constantly undermines the notion that he's being earnest in his actual investigation.

8:37 Mark: So we should take him seriously, but not literally. Whereas commentators often say, you should take him literally but not seriously. Is that what you're saying? Just say, no, it's fine.

8:47 Wes: The underlying problem is a real problem, right, which is that when we delineate all these different virtues, justice, temperance, holiness, wisdom, there's significant overlap. There's a kind of a holistic question of whether we could possibly have one without having the other. Do they all end up being kinds of wisdom or sorts of knowledge? These are all real problems. And to say that they're all parts, he gets Protagoras degree that they're like the parts of a face. And to say he also gets Protagoras degree that having one of them doesn't imply having all of them.

I mean, that's what this gambit is going to do. It's going to show that, well, that's not exactly true, that they're too interrelated to simply say that they're all different in themselves and have their completely different particular powers. The idea is that corresponding to these words, to these names of things, are not discrete objects or discrete elements in an ontology. Whatever is going on at the level of ontology, there's a complex interrelated whole. And what we're doing with the names is not simply picking out objects.

10:02 Mark: I'm not sure what the alternative exactly is, because clearly they're not sort of de dicto the same things. You're using different words, they make sense of different contexts. So to say they ultimately boil down to the same thing. I think our commentator Alan says that doesn't mean they're actually the same thing. It means that they are metaphysically different elements, but they are always present in the same circumstances. That's the important. It's their metaphysical interrelatedness that's important. And so if you acknowledge that they are interrelated. Well, on top of that does Wes's description that they're, well, they're all integral parts of a complex whole. I like that. It's not what Plato says, so it's difficult. He seems like Plato has much rougher vocabulary at his disposal.

10:50 Wes: The ontology ultimately is psychology and we'd have to get deep into a description of human psychology, I think, and so we would get a much finer grain, right? We wouldn't just get things in the script. Psychology corresponding to justice and temperance, those are macro level phenomena. And when we're doing psychology we're going to be doing particle physics. So what's going on in the ontology is going to look much different and the macro level phenomena are going to have significant overlap. They're not going to be discrete in of themselves as a person being just in some circumstance or temperate or both. And how are those things related? That's always going to be a complex question because the discreteness, if there is any discreteness, occurs at a much finer

11:35 Seth: grain level or the discreteness itself isn't of. It doesn't express itself in the kind of ontological category the way that Socrates frames it. Like you said, Wes, this idea that he reifies and predicates and then he says, oh well, if you're talking about opposites, there can only be one opposite, right? You can't have two things be the opposite of one thing. You've got a thing that's justice, you've got a thing that's holiness. Justice is just, holiness is holy, but justice also has to be holy. But folly is the opposite of temperance. I mean, he goes on and he just spins a bunch of circles using essentially rules of logic about his ontology.

I don't want to say Platonic ontology, but his ontology. And as long as you assent to that framework, which at least Protagoras and all of the other interlocutors do eventually, is because it's surreptitious through his naive questioning method, you know, he doesn't come and say here are the rules for things, here are the rules for how predication works, right? He just says, you think justice is a thing, don't you? Well, yeah, it's certainly not, not a thing. But nobody ever says, well, what do you mean by thing?

12:42 Dylan: I do. But there's a great point in this dialogue right at the end of the section. You know, they're going back and forth about the meanings of words and this reification and. And justice and piety. But as happens all the time, Socrates interlocutors get really pissed off. And this is one of the things that's great about the dialogues Wes mentioned that Plato's really good at powerfully presenting alternative points of view. And this is a good example. 334 after they're going back and forth and Protagoras is more and more reluctant to engage and.

And they're talking about whether things are good and bad. Protagoras says, yes, by Zeus, even when they're not advantageous to human beings, I still call them good. And at this point, Protagoras seemed to me spoiling for a fight and armed, ready for answering. And then Protagoras goes on to have this great speech. Socrates asks him, which way do you mean a Protagoras? Things that are advantageous to no human beings or things that aren't advantageous at all? Are you calling things that sort of good? Protagoras says, not at all. I know lots of good things that are of no advantage to human beings.

Food and drinks and drugs and 10,000 other things and other things that are advantageous. I know some that are neither one way nor the other for humans, but are so for horses, others only for cattle, and others for dogs, and some for none of these, but for trees, and some that are good for the roots of trees but bad for the buds, such as manure, which is good for the roots of all plants when it's spread on them. But in case you might feel a desire to throw it on the shoots and young branches, it kills all of them. And olive oil, although it's thoroughly bad for all plants and most injurious to the hair of the rest of the animals, other than that of the human being, is a boon to human hair and the rest of the body.

So varied and multifarious a thing is the good, that there is something that's good for the outside of the human body, but for its insides, the same thing is the worst. Hence all doctors forbid people in a weakened condition to use olive oil other than the smallest possible amount on the things they're going to eat, just enough to subdue any unsavoriness in their foods and sauces that might make the way of their senses through their nostrils. There's a huge applause. So Basically, Protagoras is saying, look, the good is different in different ways.

And olive oil is a perfect example.

14:56 Mark: Yeah, this is the closest we get to the man is the measure of all things in this dialogue is this speech that you just gave. Yeah.

15:01 Wes: Yep. It's a completely reasonable point, right?

15:04 Seth: Totally.

15:04 Wes: And then after which Socrates throws a tantrum and says, you got to stop making these long speeches or I'm going to leave and we're not going to have this discussion anymore.

15:13 Seth: He does.

15:14 Wes: This is another hint, obviously, that Socrates is intentionally being a sophist. And when he can't do that, obviously, what Protagoras is saying here is right, that when we talk, we can't just say the good. We have to say, good for what and to who? And all that stuff. We have to relativize it for it to really make sense. And a lot of Socrates moves depend on trying to avoid that sort of thing and simplifying. I mean, he does it. When I said his superpower is to reify. He has a point in doing that. He does it so he can smash it. It's like dropping something into liquid nitrogen so he can show how brittle it is and destroy it and then imply that it's got to be much more. Like I said, there's got to be a much finer grain that we have to do particle physics instead.

15:57 Mark: Can I just look at one of the arguments Seth mentioned before, this of opposites to show that temperance and holiness are the same and wisdom? You just look at, well, what is the opposite of each of these? You know, the opposite of wisdom is obviously folly. Well, but the opposite of temperance is also folly. Oh, okay. Well, if they both have the same opposite. Well, everything just has one opposite. Right. He has already gotten him to agree on that. Whereas really, he shouldn't have agreed with that. He should have, like. Well, in different respects.

I mean, what is the opposite of day? The opposite of day could be night. The opposite of day could be the end of all time, you know, or something. You know, something that is in one respect. You take the adjective and you flip it in some respect. And if somehow the adjective has more than one quality to it. So I'm saying day is a category within time, and night is its opposite. But then day is also expressing maybe time itself. So what would the opposite of time be? What would be lack of time or something like that. It's just you're cutting the joint at a different spot.

And clearly. So the way that the opposite of temperance is folly. Well, it's folly. About being intemperate. It's just not generally folly, which seems like the opposite of wisdom, is generally folly.

17:11 Wes: And he need not do any of this. Right. To make the obvious legitimate point that underlies all of this, which is that temperance and wisdom are intimately related. Right. Aristotle tries to spell out some of this. Right. I think he tries to tell us how practical wisdom is related to temperance. So you might say things, well, is temperance a kind of wisdom, or is there a kind of wisdom that's implicated in temperance? Are there causal relations, or do we break it down into smaller pieces and show the relationship between those pieces? Whatever you want to do, we have to do something like that. Obviously, they're implicated in each other. But what he does here. Right. Is. Yeah, it's this very simplified version designed to put his interlocutor in a bind.

17:58 Seth: Right. Which is true. And that's a Socratic move we're all familiar with. But in this particular case, it's important that he's talking about wisdom, because what Socrates is trying to do is he's trying to maneuver the conversation away from all the reasonable things that Protagoras said, and he's trying to get back to the relationship between knowledge and virtue so that he can circle back around about whether or not virtue can be taught. And ultimately, that's the rhetorical structure of what he's trying to accomplish here. And it's kind of opaque, I think, when he's talking about temperance and wisdom and folly and opposites.

But as the conversation evolves, after he settles down and they convince him not to leave and that there's going to be a middle way where Protagoras will talk more briefly and less expositorily, and Socrates will do the opposite. There's the discussion about courage and whether it's possible to be basically ignorant and courageous, or do you need to have wisdom or knowledge to be courageous? And I think that brings it out a little more clearly, even though that's a very hard conversation to follow.

19:00 Dylan: It's not quite here, Right. It's after the Simonides discussion, after that interpretation, which we could probably save to

19:07 Mark: the end because it is kind of just an interlude.

19:09 Seth: But let's.

19:10 Mark: Yeah. So let's talk about. While we're on the unity of virtue, let's talk about courage. Yep.

19:14 Dylan: Ultimately, Protagoras agrees that several of the virtues are like one another, but that courage is made distinct insofar as they're like wisdom. So piety and justice and wisdom are all sort of the same sort of thing. But Courage stands out as not being like wisdom, because the courageous person is audacious. And so they commit acts that seem to be unwise. And if someone was wise, they would not necessarily be courageous. And so those two things seem to be different.

19:45 Seth: And yet courage is part of virtue. It's one of the parts. Correct.

19:48 Dylan: Courage is part of virtue, but it's not the same as wisdom, because the act of being courageous would require people to do acts that are unwise. Or it could, it could, it could.

20:01 Wes: Courageous people might do unwise things.

20:03 Seth: Right?

20:04 Dylan: This is all right around 349D.

20:07 Wes: And then Socrates tries to say basically that courage is just a sort of confidence in what you can do. Otherwise, if you have that confidence, you're just mad. He tries to assimilate it back to wisdom through knowledge.

20:23 Dylan: The courage becomes a kind of knowledge.

20:26 Wes: And then Protagoras says, well, then you could just say strength is wisdom too, because it involves knowing how to wrestle, for instance. And then he'll say, and look what I'm not saying. I'm not saying, for instance, it's not that all powerful people are strong. Strength is just one kind of power. And there are different kinds of powers. And you can say the same things with courage. There are different sorts of courage. Some of it comes from madness or from anger, and some of it comes from knowledge. And at that point, they seem, in a way, to be agreeing and just disagreeing on semantics.

21:04 Mark: But that's what happens is that Socrates gets Protagoras to agree to redefine courage as only the good kind of courage, only the wise kind of courage. And it's by pulling it apart from the word bold that you might think that those just mean the same thing. But no, boldness is going out and taking on the challenge, regardless of how tough it is. And it might seem like that that is always a virtue. That, wow, that's. There's something admirable in how bold that person is, and the more danger they're confronting, the better. But really, if they're confronting something that is just going to wipe them off the map and there's not a real purpose, you know, it's not going to gain an advantage.

They're sacrificing themselves in the face of this, then that's not actually something we want to encourage. And so we're not going to call it courage at all. We'll call it boldness, but it's unwise. Boldness, therefore, not courage. Courage is a virtue. So by definition, it is always good to pursue courage. And so if you look at something that looks like courage, that actually would not be a worthwhile sacrifice, that is just merely foolish, then let's by definition rule that out of being courage in the first place.

22:10 Seth: Right? And by doing that, where he, he helps Protagoras disambiguate courage and boldness and associate wisdom with courage, then that's going to make courage accord with the other parts of virtue better. But it's also going to allow him to say, oh, well, wait a second, you know, if wisdom is required for courage, then isn't wisdom required for all the other parts of virtue? And then isn't virtue knowledge?

22:33 Dylan: And it's knowledge of the good.

22:36 Wes: Then we get into he's going to change tact and virtue will become knowledge of, or the art of measurement, as he calls it, knowledge of different sorts of pleasures and then the art of being able to weigh them against each other. So that's where we get into this. What an art text. It's been sectioned out. Is the hedonic equation section not my

22:56 Seth: favorite part of this dialogue, really.

22:58 Mark: It's tremendously influential. I mean, it's like Bentham right there.

23:04 Seth: Well, we can have a conversation about that, but.

23:07 Wes: Well, Seth, do you admit that pleasant things are good things? Is to live pleasantly good and unpleasantly

23:16 Seth: bad, perhaps for the person who is living pleasantly, yes, but it's not unmitigated good for all. There are many things that are good for a horse, Wes, that are neither good nor pleasant for a communist.

23:28 Mark: Well, that's kind of what, that's what. Protagonist doesn't give exactly that response, but it says, I think it's safer to me. Replying, looking, this is 3:51 C. Some pleasant things are not good, and again, some painful things are not bad, but there are some which are, and a third kind which is neither good nor bad. So taking pleasure in evil things is ultimately what he's trying to say is not good. Which is something that in other dialogues, Socrates makes that very point.

23:55 Seth: Let me tell you the challenge I have here, why I struggle a little bit with it. So talk about the hedonic equation. And it's often, I guess this is associated with utilitarianism. But the point he's making here is not so much about weighing pleasure versus pain or weighing pleasure versus pleasure. What he's talking about is why would somebody do something that seems pleasant in the short term or seems pleasant in the moment, but ultimately has longer term injurious effects like sex, drinking? And he says it's because they're ignorant of what sex might seem great when you're doing it, but if it ends up in a sexually transmitted disease, down the long run, it's ultimately not good.

So you think it's good because you don't know any better. You're not wise, and if you were wise, you would abstain from sex, or at least sex with that person in the moment on the chance that in the future you would get a sexually transmitted disease which is actually bad, not good. So it's about ignorance of the outcomes of the actions, but it's not about ignorance of the experience of the action. So in other words, there's no denying the pleasure in the moment. You're not mistaken about that. You're not weighing it against the possible benefits in the future.

It's just straight up ignorance about the fact that this is actually a bad thing versus a good thing.

25:15 Wes: Well, it's a kind of ignorance, but. Right. He's responding to the many who would say, look, the way it works, it's akrasia. Intemperance is a matter of I know what's good for me and I know what's bad for me, but I'm governed by my passions and I just can't help myself. I know that the long term consequences are going to be negative, but in the moment I just can't help myself and I do it anyway and I'm just governed by my passions. And then there's this big war between knowledge or reason is the way we typically think of it. And Socrates is going to point out that, and I think he's right, that's an enormously flawed point of view.

The idea that the reason on the one or knowledge on the one hand and then instincts or impulses on the other, and that they butt up against each other and there's a war between them. It's a view that's hard to make sense of when you start to analyze it because it looks like that the elements in whatever tugging war of push and pull is going on, that they all actually have to be alike and they have to be components of desire or have something to do with pleasure and pain. So at bottom, right when we start to do what I call the particle physics, it looks like we need things that are always a matter of force, always a matter of attraction and repulsion.

They can't be inert. You know, as Hume pointed out, it can't just, you know, there always must be some sort of vector. And so the idea here is that really what we might think of as that struggle between knowledge and Passion comes down to a competition between passion and passion. It comes down to the weighing of pleasures and pains against each other, so that when we are intemperate, it is actually a failure of knowledge. It's not that I don't know abstractly that in the long term something is bad for me, it's some other deeper type of knowledge.

It's that. So when I say, for instance, oh, I'm going to eat this piece of cake, I know it's bad for me, but I'm going to do it anyway because my desire just wins out in the moment. And the theory here isn't that, oh, I didn't really know that the cake was bad for me in the long run in some abstract sense, but that there's something else I don't know that truly allows me to weigh the pleasure of the present versus the pain of the future. Does that make sense? Am I explaining that?

27:28 Dylan: Well, it makes sense in terms of what the Socratic argument is. It seems like a separate question of whether knowledge works that way.

27:35 Mark: Right. I think we got a much greater treatment of this in our Aristotle on incontinence episode.

27:42 Seth: I guess the point I'm trying to make is it feels like what he's describing is a mechanism of the general incapability of people to project into the future and weigh the possible or the not existent, not real with the present. And it doesn't feel to me like a utilitarian calculus. It feels to me like how can human beings live in such a way that they understand the longer term implications of their actions and act accordingly in the present? And he's making the point that temperance really is unusual. It's the virtue of the wise who are not the many.

And that leads me then back to this. If temperance is a virtue and it's not of the many, it's of the few. But you know, we go back to the Protagorean point about things being handed out equally to human beings. Is then the capability of temperance something that's not handed out equally? It's an innate ability and hence is not teachable. It can be cultivated but not taught, well, habituated.

28:43 Wes: So, yeah, how does someone who say chronically and pathologically overeats and say they overcome that, what have they gained in order to overcome that? We might vaguely say, well, they were finally habituated differently. But that's as I said, it's a very vague explanation that doesn't tell us a lot. Or if we're contemporary, in the contemporary therapist frame of mind, we might say Well, I helped them overcome certain emotional problems that eating was somehow a solution to. So I might give this. And again, this is a very vague, vague explanation, but this explanation in terms of some sort of therapeutic component that led to the rehabituation, right. That allowed them to be rehabituated. But ultimately, do we say that that's a kind of knowledge? Once a person makes that transition, haven't they gained a certain kind of knowledge? And I think that's what Socrates is onto here.

29:41 Mark: So in ancient Greek, Wes, you mentioned the difference between procedural knowledge and the alternative, you know, explicit knowledge, declarative knowledge. What's the term? The kind of thing you could actually write down, whereas you can't write down how to ride a bike or something. That is procedural knowledge. This is why I was having trouble thinking of, you know, it's knowledge simpliciter versus procedural knowledge, that the word knowledge. Knowledge in our language implies that. That it is not something that your bones and your muscles know, it's something that your brain knows and that you could potentially teach to somebody else.

Is that inherent in the Greek term as well, for knowledge? Or is knowledge kind of neutral in Greek between whether it's explicit or not, whether it's verbalizable, something for a Greek scholar to write in and tell us? Because it obviously makes it very different. If you're saying, oh, yeah, the Platonic take on virtue is that virtue is knowledge, which is actually. Our translator says that's actually wrong, that he explicitly argues against that in the Republic and other places. But certainly in this dialogue, this looks like what he's arguing throughout here, right?

That temperance is wisdom, that all these things are wisdom and wisdom is knowledge. You know, maybe he's ironically doing Protagoras work for him. Socrates says, wow, it's weird. At the end of this dialogue, it looks like if I'm saying virtue is knowledge, knowledge can be taught. Right? But I guess it's a question still, like, what kind of teaching is it? Is it laying out doctrines or is it habituation in the way you were talking about, Wes?

31:08 Wes: So this is all about the distinction between explicit and procedural knowledge and the distinction between the typical sorts of teaching as occur in the arts and as opposed to the therapeutic approach, which becomes a dominant. I mean, the virtue ethics tradition that grows out of this, right. Is very focused on the therapeutic. We saw that in Aristotle and Epicurus. And, you know, the Stoicism is sort of the height of that.

31:33 Dylan: I just looked up in my Loeb, at least in this section, with the word knowledge is being translated. It's episteme.

31:38 Wes: Right.

31:39 Dylan: It's the one that you're used to seeing.

31:41 Wes: I mean, I suspect it's neutral. I think it's a fairly broad term and it allows for these sorts of arguments around it.

31:47 Dylan: Exactly. It may be that there's another word that's used in Greek, and maybe somebody will take up Mark's call for a Greek scholar to chime in there. But my guess is that's one of the sources of the richness of the dialogue or the conversation, just like it is in English about what kind of knowledge are we talking about? We end up having adjectives to qualify different kinds of knowledge in order to get at that distinction, but acknowledging that they're both kinds of knowing.

32:14 Mark: Well, wisdom is nicely ambiguous in English, too. That I'd say even more so, you know, when you're considering, oh, the wise man. What is the wise man? You know, that it could be just not that there's a lot of doctrine involved in being wise. Maybe being wise is actually a state of Zen, like simplicity or something. So it's completely habituated. Implicit. Not what's explicit. Might be a bunch of sayings that are very hard to decipher, that then, you know, a scholar would have to, then, unlike the wise person, have to answer to.

32:43 Wes: I think the talk of pleasure and pain is really important because that has something to do with how we're habituated.

32:49 Seth: Right.

32:49 Wes: We were talking about being taught to say please and thank you. And a lot of what happens in childhood is fear of disapproval and the pain of disapproval. That's how these things get habituated into us. And so even the things that we think of as our higher values and maybe even rationality itself, the capacity to reason, everything could be built up of the clay of pleasure and pain or the instinctual. Right, the instinctual, and this is part of Nietzsche kind of thesis, our morality is. The stuff that morality is made of is power. It's will to power.

It's Thrasymachean at bottom. And then you could say the same here at bottom. Even what we call rationality is composed of pain and pleasure. That would be our deep particle physics of all this stuff. Not saying it's right necessarily, but it's a very serious contender for all this stuff. So you don't just get, hey, here's reason, or and that's one type of thing that's radically different from desire. And those two things conflict. You say everything deep down is. There's an atomism to it and the atoms are the same in some important sense. And then the rest, the macroscopic phenomena emerge from that.

Reason and desire emerge from the same.

34:05 Dylan: I mean, just thinking back about rules for the regulation of the mind in Descartes, you know, it's hard to understand the process of figuring out that leads you to the clear and distinct. Except to understand that the clear and distinct has something of an erotic allure to it that draws you to it, such that you are both attracted to it and can feel its distinction. I will admittedly say that I've just, you know, given a very kind of Socratic interpretation of knowledge. Knowledge is attractive and erotic.

34:39 Wes: Or as the pragmatist might point out, there's a psychology to say truth seeking, right? It has to be gratifying. And we learn to recognize the true by virtue of the fact that it gratifies in some sense.

34:51 Mark: So if we think that teaching virtue might be more habituation than laying out explicit doctrines, it seems actually that the other sophists that Protagoras disses might actually be doing that more directly. Like the way that you train, as in Descartes, the way that you train someone to be in a position that they will be virtuous, that they'll be temperate, is to make them focus on geometry and astronomy and other things. You know, if you can stifle your urge to chaos enough to sit still and study things, it's like paint the fence.

35:27 Dylan: Wax on, wax off.

35:28 Mark: Exactly. These indirect methods of teaching. And Protagoras is saying, you won't get that with me. I'm just going to lay it out for you every day. I'm going to make you better and better in this particular way. I'm going to give you more power through better speech, to control your space in the social scheme.

35:45 Wes: It's like doing the liberal arts versus being indoctrinated, learning to be free, learning to develop, even though I hate this phrase, critical thinking skills or just absorbing, you know, doctrine and being able to repeat it.

36:01 Dylan: And there's always this tension, to use the example of the liberal arts. There's always this tension between the process of becoming competent at something and whether or not it's attaining the sort of broader goals of inculcating sensitivity, of choosing things and a well and other kind, you know, all the characteristics that seem to be unteachable about preference and quality and justice and moderation, and whether those things are actually an outcome of something like a liberal education or not, and whether or not they come by accident or on purpose the way Protagoras says they do.

36:41 Mark: So does protagoras actually end up agreeing that what he teaches is the art of measurement. So this is what Socrates has laid out, this hedonistic calculus, which is just the heading given by our editor here then, right? The reason that people feel like they're overwhelmed by their urges as against their better judgment is because just like something physically in space looks like it's bigger if it's up closer, it's not habituation, it's more knowledge, it's more explicit knowledge that lets you put off immediate pleasures in order to take a hold of longer term, greater goods. It's just like learning these facts about optics. You learn those facts about. I guess it's still open from that, whether it's just facts or whether it's.

37:30 Wes: I took this to be more procedural. So he says measurement renders the appearance ineffective. So we've learned something. What we literally see when we look out into the world, it's not what we see once it's interpreted. So we're seeing things in three dimensions, right? Our interpreted field of vision is in three dimensions and all that stuff. But if we were to take it literally, right, Instead of seeing my rectangular desk at an angle, I would see a trapezoid or something like that. Do you understand what I'm saying? So we automatically interpret it and see it as the rectangle. The theory wouldn't help us there to do that. So it has to be integrated.

38:09 Dylan: You know it's not a rhombus, right? You know that the top of the glass isn't an ellipse, but it's a circle.

38:18 Mark: Some illusions are easier to dispel than others. I think this connection to analogy to illusion doesn't actually answer the question of how much explicit knowledge versus how much procedural knowledge would be involved in this training. Which is why I wanted to figure out does it seems like Protagoras agrees to this, right? In fact, virtue is teachable. And thanks Socrates for spelling out this whole everything boiling down according to the opinion of the many. In any case, that the many, if they were consistent, they shouldn't believe that weakness of the will is possible.

They should believe that people make these mistakes about long term versus short term goals through lack of knowledge. And I, Protagoras, that's exactly the kind of stuff that I'm going to teach. I'm going to make you better and better every day at being able to measure and internalizing that measurement scheme. So therefore, yeah, there is something that Protagoras is teaching and maybe you should submit the tuition. In fact, he has a Money back guarantee.

39:12 Wes: Unlike us, you can keep your first

39:15 Mark: pair of underwear without no questions asked. If you've not listened to our Mack Weldon ads, you will not get that joke.

39:25 Wes: But there you go.

39:26 Mark: But nonetheless, he is stymied at the end. What is the part of the text where Protagoras is driven to silence?

39:32 Seth: 360d and E. Here he was no longer even willing to nod agreement and was silent. And I said, why do you neither affirm nor deny what I ask? Protagoras? Finish it by yourself. He said, I have only one question for you. Still, said I. Do you think still, as you did at first, that some people are extremely foolish? But most courageous, I think you're contentiously eager for me to answer, Socrates. He said, well, I'll gratify you and say that from what's been agreed, it seems to me impossible. And at that point Protagoras is like, all right, enough of this nonsense.

40:04 Wes: He does say at the very end, I admire your earnestness, Socrates, and your way with arguments. Actually, I don't think I'm a bad man in other ways. And I'm least of all men envious. Indeed, I've told many people that among everyone I've met. I especially admire you far beyond others of your age and wouldn't be surprised if you become famous for your wisdom. As for these matters, we'll pursue them later when you wish. But now it's time to turn to something else. And then Socrates leaves. They don't just hang out and do small talk and drink.

40:35 Mark: The whole hedonistic thing and defining knowledge as a matter of measuring that, that is. Actually, I thought that was an evolution from the discussion about courage.

40:45 Dylan: It's part of the courage discussion.

40:46 Mark: No, because most of the courage discussion happens before that. It's just they return to the courage at the end just to say, oh, Protagoras, you're burned. That thing we were talking about earlier about courage. Nope. Yeah, by this whole hedonistic calculus thing, I guess you were wrong. So it's not that he disagrees with the whole hedonistic calculus and teaching virtue as teaching measurement of that. It's just that how that applies to the specific argument he made about courage, which seems like kind of anticlimactic because. Okay, fine, acknowledge that the good kind of courage is unified with virtue and that the bad kind is mere boldness and not courage at all. Like Protagoras should be able to suck that up like he agrees to it at the time and not be driven to elder humiliation.

41:29 Dylan: But I think it's because it's explicitly linked up with this question about it being a consequence of being not intelligent. The whole link with knowledge. Protagoras is presented as not wanting to directly assent to this question of it being knowledge. Socrates recognizes this at the end, so he's asking about what virtue is. For now, I know after this has made its appearance that matter that you and I each have gone on speaking about at length, me saying that virtue is not teachable and you saying that it is could most effectively get cleared up.

And it seems to me that the upshot of the discussion we've just been having is as if a human being were to point his finger and laugh at us. And if he got a voice, say, you guys are pathetic, Socrates and Protagoras, you for one, after saying at the beginning that virtue is not teachable, now get yourself rushing off in the opposite direction, trying to demonstrate that everything, justice, moderation and courage too, is knowledge, which would, by the way of virtue, would appear a teachable thing most of all. And for if virtue were anything other than knowledge, as Protagoras was trying to say, it would plainly not be something teachable.

But now it's going to appear as knowledge through, through and through. As you're in such a hurry to have it be Socrates, it'll be a wonder that is not teachable. But Protagoras, for his part, after setting it down before as teachable, now, on the contrary, looks like someone who's in a hurry to have it appear as just about everything but knowledge. And that way it would be least of all teachable.

42:57 Mark: Yeah, so that does make you think. Again, I'm kind of referring to Alan's interpretation. Alan thinks that he's being deeply ironic in this whole latter section, that actually Plato does not believe, and Socrates definitely did not believe, that what is good ultimately boils down to pleasure and pain, that he's specifically taking the view of the many and trying to make that consistent. The many believe this hedonistic premise.

43:22 Wes: I don't buy that.

43:23 Mark: So, yeah, so he just points to other dialogues Alan does to say, look in the Crito, clearly, what is good, it's not pleasurable. An epicurean would not let himself be killed by the state because there's more pleasure in that. No, Socrates at that point is saying, what is virtue is the good of the soul, and that has nothing directly to do with pleasure.

43:48 Dylan: That just seems to be a corrupted version of what you understand pleasure to be.

43:51 Wes: To me, I mean. But what do we think in Our day to day experiences, I think what we think of as good is. And Socrates even points this out. You know, if we're going to talk about the good, typically we're talking about health, right? Or that's the way we would cash things out today. And I think he gives that example in this dialogue and that's a matter of pleasure and pain. So for instance, you might say, well, in our day to day deliberations we're trying to figure out what we're going to do, right? This is what all this stuff boils down to. And we say, well, what's really going to be good for me?

And that may be the good, as in, you know, something that would be good for everyone. What's the right thing to do? Typically we're doing something with pleasure and pain. We're trying to figure out if it's what we desire, what we want. And so I don't think we can ignore that. I'm not sure how we cash out the good ultimately, except in those terms. Tell me how I'm wrong.

44:39 Mark: But that's a very anti Platonic point. I think maybe that Aristotle, you could argue, takes that and that's what drives a lot of the virtue ethics tradition after him. But that the Platonists, there's an objective source, extra human source of what is good. I don't know. This is at least that's why Christians like Platonism is because they can say it's not that the human constitution runs counter to this, right? God created us. So of course what's going to be more healthful to us is in general going to align with what the good according to God's great plan is. But there's still a conceptual gap between the good and human health or human wishes of any sort, human pleasures.

45:22 Dylan: I guess the conflict we're running into is maybe this is why Alan calls it ironic. This whole section on the hedonistic calculus is if you look at, just take the Republic where the question is put forward regarding the just man, the most virtuous man, and that the one, you know, the greatest test will be that they're willing to suffer and be known as the most unjust, even though they're the most just and suffer all the consequences of being recognized as being unjust when they're not, not right.

45:53 Wes: We can't just point to suffering because we can always look at the way that's balanced out by future pleasure or different sorts of pleasure. Right? So I might suffer, I might sacrifice myself. The thing that Nietzsche was concerned about, right. I might sacrifice myself entirely. But there's the pleasure of being the martyr. There's the pleasure of having that self concept as the one who does that. So even if I allow myself to be tortured, there might be a countervailing pleasure.

46:24 Dylan: This was my source of my comment earlier about having the right understanding of what kind of pleasures there are and that pleasures aren't necessarily physical. That sort of becomes part of the challenge of the whole conversation, is that the paradigm of pleasure ends up being physical, which is why hedonism gets a bad name. But if you have a hedonistic calculus that understands pleasure as being something that transcends the physical, then it becomes easier to understand.

46:51 Wes: And Epicurus actually advocated a kind of asceticism because of that.

46:55 Mark: You know, despite what I just said about Christian interpretations of Plato, I think Aristotle is right in following Plato that virtue has to boil down to the health of the soul, like anything more objective than that. Even if you say, okay, well, Plato believes in forms. And what is the good is what accords with the.

47:12 Wes: The form.

47:12 Mark: Well, the form enacts itself through the structure of the soul. So it still does come down to health of some sort. But not like you were just saying, Wes, that health, the way we think about it, ultimately shows up in terms of pleasure and pain. No, I think Plato might say that. It's very likely. But like Dylan just said, you know, you could be the most. Just that you could be. You could be in the best state of your soul and still be in suffering, maybe because the alternative is worse. So if Socrates in the Crito had decided to flee from his execution, then, well, he wouldn't have been dead.

So it seems like his soul would have been in better shape. Isn't the soul in any shape better than it being dead? Well, no, because if the soul is out of balance, if it's unjust, if it's contradicted itself, if it's broken in some way, then that's actually worse than death. So there's no obvious, like pleasure, physical pleasure and pain showing up in thinking

48:07 Wes: of the soul that way, not physical. But if I say I'd rather die than be compromised in that way, I don't think you can avoid questions of pleasure and pain. I think Plato is fundamentally a virtue ethicist. And ultimately I don't think as a virtue ethicist you can actually avoid describing health in terms of pleasure and pain.

48:27 Dylan: One of the reasons I would agree with that isn't so much in this dialogue, but is in something like Symposium and the interpretation regarding the good and knowledge as being fundamentally erotic, and that it comes right out of our education and love and our physical attraction to things. That there's a deep analogy in the experience of our bodies and the wants we have and the kind of wanting we have for knowing things is directly analogous.

48:58 Mark: You're making me feel like in all the episodes, Dylan, where you talk about curiosity and stuff, that there's an underlying perviness that I wasn't cued in on. The scientist's pleasure in figuring things out really is very libidinal.

49:13 Dylan: It is. I wouldn't have called it pervy, but libidinal, sure, yes.

49:20 Seth: That put me in mind in Wes's comment about pleasure and pain and virtue ethics at 348d of this dialogue, when they're revisiting the unity of virtue, Socrates says, so I said, protagoras, please don't suppose I wish anything else in discussing with you, except to inquire into what I am myself often perplexed by. For I believe Homer is surely right in saying when two go, one observes before the other, for we're all somehow more resourceful in every deed and word and thought when we're together. If a man observes alone, he forthwith goes about seeking someone to show it to and with whom he can confirm it.

That's exactly why I'd rather discuss with you than anyone else, believing that you can best examine the subjects a good man naturally considers, and especially virtue. There's been a theme about philosophy as a dialectic versus the contemplative Cartesian approach of securing knowledge for yourself in your own certainty, etc. Etc. Vs what's epitomized by the character of Socrates in the Platonic dialogues. But I think there's something really meaningful there that flows over into the notion of the social, of habituation, of virtue being taught.

All of which I in some sense agree with. But Plato, even though he's made the strongest argument for some kind of pure reason, apprehension by pure reason, of forms of. And so on, that in his demonstrable works, really articulating philosophy as a social activity, which I think plays much more into the concept of virtue ethics, as for example, Aristotle puts it out.

50:54 Mark: So we're not going to deal explicitly. What we've been calling the Simonides section, is that there's a break where Protagoras and Socrates. Actually it's a long speech from Socrates right after he says, don't give long speeches, he gives a long speech. But it's presented maybe as a parody of the Sophistic style. And he's talking about interpreting some poetry. And Protagoras says, oh, you like this poem? Well, look, there's a blatant contradiction in it. And so Socrates says, why? It's actually not a contradiction. I mean, that says interesting things about the different methods and you know, how philosophy is different than ultimately, Socrates just says. Right. This whole exercise was. What is the quote that you were throwing at us, Wes, about men actually using their own ideas?

51:35 Wes: It's at the end of the section, page 207, I guess. I think discussing poetry is much like attending the drinking parties of worthless and vulgar people. They're unable to associate with each other through their own voice and words due to their lack of education, so they run up the price of flute girls and spend a great deal for the alien voice of the flute and associate with each other through such voices as that you should set aside the poets and fashion accounts with one another, putting the truth and ourselves to the test. But I think the poetry thing is actually quite brilliant. But anyway,

52:08 Mark: so that's a major rip on our podcast, I think. And things, you know, secondary literature in general, don't stop. Oh, what did. What did Plato actually mean in putting this in Socrates' mouth?

52:18 Seth: No, just.

52:19 Mark: Just say what you actually think. It'd just be a much more direct way of doing it. And that's probably true, but too late. This is our method. People should be encouraged to learn about Plato. So I'm fine with this.

52:31 Dylan: It's not like we don't say what we think along the way, insofar as

52:34 Mark: we can figure it out. Yes.

52:36 Seth: I've never once expressed an opinion on this podcast. I'm just strictly.

52:40 Dylan: I forgot about that. So thanks for reminding me.

52:43 Mark: But I was interested in the actual topic that the poetry was arguing about was it's hard to be virtuous. Or in the other place in the poem, it's hard to become virtuous. And maybe considering that as a conclusion here, that I think that does come down to what we've been talking about, about habituation, that maybe it's really hard to become virtuous because it requires all this knowledge and habituation training. But then once you're in that, then it's not that hard to stay virtuous. That's at least one of the points of view that they consider.

53:13 Wes: He rejects that. Right? He rejects that for another explanation, which is that it's not hard to be virtuous because no one can really be virtuous. It's not possible. No. Or. Good. Sorry. Good. So no one can really be good. So it doesn't make sense to say. It's hard to say to be good, you become good, but you're always in a state of becoming and you fall out of it as quickly as you become it.

53:35 Mark: So doesn't that sound like the very classical view of virtue? That it's a razor's edge, that it's not just that. Yo, okay, you're generally well socialized. Then there are multiple good things you could do with your life and just keep trying and you're basically fine. We can call you a virtuous, honorable person, but I think that Plato underlyingly has a much more exacting standard that is more. No, the only truly virtuous thing is the form of the good is the, you know, the gods we're always going to be. Our most virtuous attempts are going to fall short of those. So, you know, it's this kind of more original sin friendly view of virtue by saying it's unobtainable in its full form.

54:15 Dylan: Just depends upon which voice you think Plato is having is the one that's saying it's all about being or is saying about it's all about becoming.

54:24 Mark: Maybe he just wants to make us think.

54:27 Dylan: Maybe. I myself am not sure exactly what he thinks. But this distinction between being and becoming runs right through the spinal cord of Western philosophy.

54:38 Mark: Any last closing thoughts? I guess, you know, I started off because I was looking for man is the measure of all things. I was looking for direct contributions to our social construction thing. So I was disappointed at first. But then looking back through it, I just. I really enjoyed this stylistically, certainly more than Parmenides or Theaetetus. Like, this is just. This is one of the dialogues I would more recommend to people. And it raises a lot of interesting things. But it didn't blow me, the way you were describing Wes, that you just, just why did this blow you away? I don't know if that's really been conveyed in what you've said.

55:10 Wes: It blows me away because all of these questions, I think it's just a. It's such a skillful way to get you to grapple with some of these very interesting questions about the teachability of virtue and the role of pain and pleasure and all that. I think as our conversation illustrated, I think we did a good job of getting into some of that, you know, early on with the whole question of the political art and whether that's like other kinds of arts, but. But the main thing is it's a much more balanced dialogue in the way that. Because Protagoras gets to say a lot and he says things that are really good and interesting, and then Socrates's.

The stuff that he does that's sophistical is so obviously outlandish. It just. It gives the dialogue an air of, like, craziness or just being really outlandish in parts. And I just thought that was great. I just thought it's so obvious that what Socrates is doing in terms of just saying a bunch of crazy stuff, I don't know. And yet the subtext of it is so sophisticated and fascinating. It's that tension between the. Like I said, the weird simplifications that he does, dropping things in liquid nitrogen so he can smash them, and the sophisticated subtext underneath Seth or Dylan.

56:22 Mark: Nothing else.

56:23 Dylan: I'm good.

56:24 Seth: Nothing further. Your honor.

56:28 Mark: Next time, we're going to do more of Simone de Beauvoir's the Second Sex. I thought we'd focus on relationships, so there's a chapter, the Woman in Love and Myths, Chapter one. Please tell us what you think about this. Tell us what else we should cover. Comment on the blog post at partiallyexaminedlife.com, respond to the postings on Facebook, tweet at us. And today's closing song could perhaps be advice for many a philosopher. The song is called Make It Clear by Feelies. I interviewed their frontman on Nakedly Examined music number 41. Please find that@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Good night, everybody.

57:01 Wes: Good night.

57:02 Seth: Good night.

57:02 Dylan: Good night.

57:23 Mark: You're right. What can you do? You just might know it's true? Anything for you? Anything for you? You know it's true? Anything for you? When you're here you just, like,

58:25 Wes: make

58:25 Mark: it clear that it's all right?

58:39 Wes: You.

59:10 Mark: Anything, Anything.