Motives for Philosophy in Plato’s Protagoras

 

     Though philosophy today is most often regarded as an abstruse special interest which, indeed, struggles to survive even within academia, this isolation is distinctly modern.  If one sees the end of philosophy as the search for a formula for leading the best possible life, it is clearly a matter for everyone’s consideration.  If philosophical speculation is aimed at a determination of ethics, it is likewise a subject that engages all people.  The goal of understanding one’s place in  the cosmos or getting some sense of ultimate reality has been ceded to religion.  Yet we understand that in ancient Athens Socrates plied his trade in public places, the gymnasia and the agora, always a devoted amateur, and in such places made a name and attracted followers and challengers.  General interest in philosophy and skill with words became sufficient to support a class of teachers, the sophists, who, unlike Socrates, were professionals whose tutelage came at a price.  In one Platonic dialogue, Protagoras, traditionally regarded as the first sophist, engages wits with Socrates before an audience of over twenty onlookers who probably would have considered such an encounter as a world-class contest of ideas, as worthy of watching as the Olympics.  From their disputation two motives for philosophic training emerge that suggest that intellectual training has value for everyone. 

     The course of their dialogue suggests several purposes for philosophic thought, though the putative topic under discussion is a somewhat different theme: whether virtue is teachable.  These days few would think of justifying the work of philosophers by its value in furthering social ends, since their expertise seems irrelevant to the lives of most citizens.  Yet Protagoras claims that that he can “promise to make men good citizens” [1], only for Socrates to object, saying that social decisions are made by everyone together, regardless of profession, and neither any individual nor any particular profession has particular expertise in statecraft.          

      Of course, in Classical antiquity, skill in logic and rhetoric was closely associated with deliberative and forensic arenas, either the assembly and other governmental forums or the courts.  Not only did every free Athenian male have a voice in deciding issues of the common good, but, for those engaged in litigation or legal defense, the jury system made persuasiveness of cardinal importance.  Today a mere vote is thought to be all an individual owes the state, though some will go so far as to write an occasional letter to the editor or to put out an election yard sign.  Yet in the view of the ancient Greeks (and the founders of the United States), a healthy democracy requires fuller participation by all, apart from slaves, foreigners, and women.  The disastrous recent American election of a would-be dictator, propelled to power by uneducated voters, reveals the hazards of an ignorant population. 

     For the Greeks a man’s identity was largely constituted by his political role, and the necessity of sound reasoning by the populace is required for a healthy, well-functioning democracy.  Moreover, the training that qualified one to formulate one’s views in a coherent and convincing way and present persuasive arguments when discussing legislation or pleading a legal case, is applicable in many  arenas of life.  The ability to manipulate symbols is the distinguishing characteristic of our species.  The general intellectual skills of taking in information, analyzing it, and producing astute responses are, of course, critical in all endeavors requiring thought and judgement.  Often in our era, with the decay of debating as a common practice in American secondary schools and philosophy classes on that level virtually non-existent and ignored by mot collegians, the development of even fundamental proficiency in thinking and self-expression is left to the belated attention of those who teach freshman English classes in universities.  Whether one engaged with a professional teacher like Protagoras or simply a talkative figure familiar about town like Socrates, the Greeks’ system may have been more effective at encouraging a generally educated populace, more capable in their civic role and in private life as well.  The assumption that every person should possess logical and verbal skills is so strong that people are suspicious of sophists who claim a special expertise and work for hire, and Protagoras concedes that some think ill of professionals like himself, though he is willing to proudly affirm his profession in spite of the “malice and ill-will” and “intrigues” of their critics [2].

     In Plato’s Protagoras Socrates is pleased to be able to meet with Protagoras, ostensibly to gain wisdom from him, but  the reader suspects, even more to enhance his own reputation by showing up a rival in philosophical argumentation.   The traditional subtitle of “On the Sophists” suggests a focus on evaluating those who teach logic and speaking professionally, so, though the general topic is whether virtue may be taught, the rivalry of Socrates and Protagoras provides the drama.

     In the end, as in other Platonic dialogues, especially early ones, most of the logical argumentation has been negative, indicating that received ideas are flawed yet providing no definitive alternative answer to settle the question.  The reader, along with Protagoras and Socrates’ friends, is left wondering.  In  the Meno this process, at the heart of much Platonic ἔλεγχος, is described as a beneficial in itself [3], though in that dialogue aporia is simply a way-station preceding truth.  In the Protagoras there is no further resolution.  The discussion can dislodge error, but it makes little attempt to formulate a correct answer.  What, then, is the point? 

     Greek philosophy offers several options to avoid the cul-de-sac of finding a desired answer unknowable.  In Stoicism suspended judgement, or ἐποχή, is appropriate for some sense experiences (φαντασίαι), while others are sufficiently convincing as to be kataleptic  or “graspable.” [4]  For Skeptics, however, particularly the Pyrrhonist variety, all impressions are doubtful, but in withholding assent and denial alike, the individual might find a serene mental state or ἀταραξία, following the recognition that nothing can be certainly known.  Here, in a mysterious reversal, not-knowing is transformed into enlightenment. 

     Both Plato’s Protagoras, though, and his Socrates seem clearly to be in pursuit of answers.  They are also competitors as providers of wisdom, and each is characterized as polite yet jealous of his reputation.  So the reader might imagine Socrates here as elsewhere playing devil’s advocate for the more vigorous play of ideas and the chance to display his ratiocination to greater advantage.  He may care more about out-talking Protagoras than in finding Truth.  The discussion is civil and good-humored, more in the nature of a friendly game of cards than an angry argument.  The audience listens to both and the conversation, enjoying the spectacle, making the event resemble an athletic contest or a dramatic production, both of which encode tensions and antagonisms in  a generally harmonious form. 

     In the last analysis, the Greeks at Callias’ [5] house were passing the time of day, amusing themselves with intellectual calisthenics that they found pleasurable for their own sake, without necessarily coming to a conclusion or uncovering new knowledge, a form of play very like attending the theater, a foot-race, or any other diversion.  What makes philosophy superlatively entertaining is that human cognitive skill, the ability to deal in subtle symbols and recombine words in ever new combinations , is the distinguishing characteristic of our species.  The speakers and the audience in the Protagoras are doing neither more nor less than having fun with their brains.  So philosophy here is a sort of highest level divertissement with no further end in view than the kitten has when tossing a stuffed mouse, the dog in retrieving a stick, people idly chatting over a backyard fence, or while sitting on barstools. 

     Though neither good citizenship nor amusement is likely to occur to people today as motives for philosophy, their endurance in antiquity is suggested by the fact that both are cited by Cicero three hundred years after Plato.  In his Tusculan Disputations he argues that civilization itself is the result of philosophy, allowing people to live together in large numbers.  He then notes that some come to the Olympic Games to compete, while others come to sell their goods to the crowds, and yet a third group come simply to look on, for the sake of the spectacle.  This last, he says, resembles philosophers, who observe life itself, purely out of curiosity, because they wish to “look with interest into the nature of things.” [6] 

     Philosophy as an enabler of democracy and as an entertainment may seem to have little in common, even to be opposed: one seems serious, even lofty, aiming toward the betterment of society, while the other might appear frivolous and trivial, simple amusement.  Yet casual conversations such as that depicted in the Protagoras form the basis for close ties among fellow-citizens while providing practice in ratiocination and communication that can equally serve the larger community in legislative and legal deliberation.  Philosophy here represents a shared belief that people do have common problems and a common language for inquiring after solutions, and that the quest for knowledge is a primary human pleasure, whether or not anyone ever can arrive at the Truth. 

     Practice in thinking, analyzing, understanding, writing, and speaking had been the basis for all education for millennia.  We moderns can deplore, though we cannot change, the contemporary destruction of the ideal of a liberal education and the transformation of post-secondary schooling into vocational training.  Perhaps a rebirth of philosophic studies justified by social utility or the pure fun of it might rejuvenate our stricken American political culture and reawaken people to the joys and benefits of juggling concepts.  

 

1.  ὑπισχνεῖσθαι ποιεῖν ἄνδρας ἀγαθοὺς πολίτας 319a.

2.  In Greek the terms are φθόνοι and δυσμένειαί (316d).

3.  See Meno (84c)  “Isn’t this numbing then a good thing?” (ὤνητο ἄρα ναρκήσας;).

4.  Epictetus, Discourses 1.18.1 maintains that all human decisions originate in “feeling,” including the suspension of judgment associated with uncertainty.  Thus the ignorant are not to be blamed for their errors.

5.  According to numerous authorities (Andocides, 130, Aristophanes, The Frogs, v. 432, Athenaeus, iv. 67; and Aelian, Varia Historia, iv. 16 as well as Plato Apology 20a), Callias is said to have spent his patrimony in support of sophists and ended his life in penury. 

6.  Book V, section 5 for the growth of civilization and V, 9  for the disinterested inquirer into truth, acting out of curiosity.  In this latter passage the relevant Latin phrases are “sed visendi causa venirent studioseque perspicerent, quid ageretur et quo modo” (“but come to visit to see what was going on and how”).  It is these who “rerum naturam studiose intuerentur” (“look with interest into the nature of things”). 

A Unique Oeuvre (Like Everyone Else’s)

 

     Poetry on the Loose, the name of my poetry and performance series and of this site, may seem somewhat foggy in meaning, but that is precisely the point.  “On the loose” is meant to imply an overstepping of boundaries, a flouting of restrictions, a phrase meant to describe my writing, my taste, my sensibility, perhaps my life. 

    My poetry reading series have had always an open door to writers of every sort and style.  My main goal was to bring something new every time, and thus I never repeated a feature.  People of all backgrounds were equally welcome, and I specifically sought performers who would stretch the listeners’ expectations.  Every personality has a certain beauty, and one may sometimes learn more from a writer who does not at first seem particularly appealing.

     As a critic, I cultivated similarly broad interests.  Whereas scholars generally specialize in a single author or, at most, an era, I have been willing to contemplate literature of all ages and all cultures.  Recognizing that I lack the depth of an academic mandarin, I claim in compensation a Gargantuan all-devouring breadth.  While professors treat texts they have been rereading repeatedly for years, I typically write about something I have just finished, sometimes for the first time.  I write even about works I can read only in translation, a taboo in the Comparative Literature discipline in which I was educated.  (A well-published friend, with books from Yale and Cambridge, once said to me, ”You know the unspoken rule, ‘it’s okay to read in translation, if you quote in the original.’”)  Yet, like academic papers, my essays usually seek to demonstrate something new about the topic.  When I write about a Tibetan novel, my ignorance, if it does not allow a novel insight, at least reproduces the average reader’s equal lack of knowledge and thus may be useful in ways a professional monograph may not.  Yet I differ as well from journalistic reviewers who assume little if any prior knowledge and assume the task of either praising or panning as a guide to readers’ choices, with analysis subjugated to the aim of recommendation.  The scholar creates new knowledge; the reviewer basically advises potential readers.  I find myself aiming toward the liminal space, halfway between.

     My poetry betrays a weakness for the recondite, and does not shrink, now and then, from using as seasoning a word that might send readers to a dictionary.  A town at the end of a dusty foreign road is a likelier source of inspiration for me than the walls of my study, for I am a poor meditator.  My poems are for the most part, I believe, lucid, though with a hermetic residue to thicken the plot.

     In literary essays I often treat somewhat obscure books, and I do not shrink from the use of technical terms, even deploying a bit of jargon at times.  While regularly providing evidence and citing sources in notes, I violate academic standards with informal usages, personal references, and casual organization.  Since virtually no one apart from professors will care to read about Praxilla, or Matthew of Vendôme, and the academicians will look only at peer-reviewed professional journals, I have reduced my readership to a minimum, though I like to think of them as a kind of saving remnant, preserving culture in a philistine era.

     Far from cultivating a limited field until I make it my own, I wander from one author to another, “floating on the ocean of words.”  Having little system may disable some investigations, but it opens unsuspected possibilities in others.  I am aligned thereby with the common reader who like me reads for pleasure, though I cannot doubt that long years in graduate school have left their mark.  Further, the more fundamental and theoretical a question may be, the less the choice of a specific text matters.  My dissertation dealt with medieval European love poetry, but its thesis, about the transformation of convention, might equally have been demonstrated by a study of television situation comedies or, for that matter, literary research papers themselves.  People are everywhere and in all times in most important respects the same; their literature reflects this commonality, so any reader is entitled to have a look at any text.

     Though I shy away from confessional poetry, I foreground the role of delectation.  The subjective, in which the strongest impulse is erotic, has more influence in the consciousness than any product of ratiocination or article of faith.  My poems do not presume to retail eternal verities, but only to reflect the rapidly shifting ripples in the mind.

     In criticism as well, I privilege pleasure.  Art provides, I believe, the most densely signifying symbolic system our species has devised, and stories, poems, and dramas do accurately express states of consciousness, but the lure of the aesthetic is invariably the promise of pleasure.  Beauty, as Santayana said in The Sense of Beauty, is "pleasure objectified" or "pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing."  In spite of being the leading human motive for consuming art, pleasure is notoriously resistant to analysis, stubbornly subjective, and thus often ignored or discounted in discussions of art.  The pursuit of pleasure in one form or another must be the fundamental motive for reading literature; indeed, it is the fundamental motive for all action.

     In my critical oeuvre, I not only readily grant pleasure its primacy in the experience of art.  I most commonly address topics linked to sexual love, the jouissance outstripping other human experiences yet which is familiar to everyone.  This embraces, yet is not limited to, orgasm, romantic attachments, courtly love, marriage conventions, loveless laments, and ribald transgressive verse.  Mystical love of the divine, misogyny and other aggression, fetishism, and a whole panoply of phenomena arise from the same energies, if in  errant or tangential directions.  Erotic energy generalized to tint all life experience manifests as the carnivalesque as we see in its physical aspect in Rabelais and in its spiritual in Gerard Manley Hopkins.

     I confess to a fondness for the recondite.  Apart from the novelty of little-studied texts, I fancy the reader will more easily come upon novel insights traversing fresh territory than when trekking more frequented paths.  Thus I write about remote places I have visited and odd characters I have encountered.  I relish as well a bit of the grotesque and the eccentric in Gogol, Poe, and Céline and of the aesthete in Wilde, Dowson, and Firbank.  My philosophy tends toward the skeptical and I appreciate Gorgias, Sextus Empiricus, and Nagarjuna.  Quite intentionally, I have pursued a largely counter-cultural career, such as it is, and I am fascinated with the avant-garde: Dadaists, Surrealists, and Beats. 

     These elements interchange and mingle and, in part, account for my fondness for Sappho, Jaufre Rudel, Christopher Smart, Kleist, Pound, and Nabokov.  My love of essays has led to my reading and rereading Montaigne, Burton, Browne, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt, and Lamb.  Just as I can scarcely imagine a better way to spend an hour than in conversation, offering opinions on anything under the sun,  I continue to contribute to the ongoing discussions of all things in written form.

     All these characteristics of my oeuvre are reflected as well in my personality and thus in my life.  Yet this fact is quite ordinary.  Any body of work of any size will similarly reflect (sometimes refract) its author.  Every writer seeks readers, yet each is self-conscious about being read, since one cannot help setting down one’s nature on the black and white page.  Whereas it may or may not possess beauty, every text embodies its creator in detail and thus each is as unique as a profile or a handwriting sample.  One writer will hew to the punctilios of convention with reserve to spare like T. S. Eliot’s suits while another will slash those same expectations like an apache and run for a getaway.  One will luxuriate in lush descriptions like a canvas by Boucher while another will be ascetic like St. Anthony.  Existential edginess or pious confidence.  Melodious song or the croaking of frogs.  Comradely chatter or magisterial pronouncement.  Each has a place.  Each may succeed or fail in the reading, but all are in the running.  The reader will return to revisit those texts which have been catalyst to the most satisfying reactions when first read, but every literary work bears the imprint of a human mind and thus must be fascinating and complex and subtle. 

     The beauty of art requires both the skill of the artist and the taste of the consumer; beauty is not demonstrably inherent – it manifests only in art’s reception, and art cannot, alas, bring those who experience it to every enlightened realization, but it does reliably delver one truth.  Every work of art embodies a take on reality, either copied from life or compounded in imagination or, most often, midway between.  The artifacts a person makes indicate with considerable precision how one might have viewed the world at a moment in time.  This, I submit, is as close to Truth as any of us will approach. 

Maeterlinck’s Bees

 

 

      My thrift store copy is a 35 cent Mentor New American Library book translated by Albert Sutro and with an introduction by Edwin Way Teale..

 

     Numbers in parentheses refer to the book’s sections; those in brackets indicate endnotes.

 

 

     Maurice Maeterlinck is primarily remembered for his Symbolist drama, notably The Blue Bird and Pelléas and Mélisande, but he wrote as well poetry, translations, a memoir, and a number of mn0onfiction books, mostly on philosophic topics and on nature.  The most successful of this last category is The Life of the Bee (La Vie des Abeilles) [1]. 

     Maeterlinck makes clear in his first pages that his book is neither a scientific treatise nor a practical guide to apiculture, but it is also not a work of pure poetry.  He says he wishes to speak as a passionate amateur, “very simply, as one speaks of a subject one knows and loves to those who know it not.” (1)  The book has proven consistently popular since its appearance in 1901.  The author was a lifelong apiarist, raising bees for their honey, and was consistently informed by his own experience, often writing at a table while observing the insects’ activities in a glass hive.  He describes in fascinating detail their highly organized society and the extraordinary round of their life.  In addition, he seems to have studied the chief authorities on the subject and often comments on the previous findings of experts. 

     Maeterlinck does not simply observe his bees; he marvels at them.  To him their behavior is more wondrous than what a reader might find in “the most miraculous fairy stories.”  To students who watch a hive closely, “astonishment becomes so habitual to us that we almost cease to wonder.”  (111)  He assumes a sort of Darwinism, saying that improvement is a consequence of “the triumph of the stronger,” (112) though he tends toward the unscientific assumption that evolution creates ever more sophisticated organisms (rather than simply those that better fit an ecological niche), an attitude best viewed as an  expressive reflection of his enthusiasm.  Seeking to come face to face with “the intelligent will of a life” (112) in the “stupendous incident” of the insects’ daily lives is for him a technique for “amusing the darkness” through receiving “some revelation, a message, for instance, from a planet more ancient, more luminous, than ours” which might reveal the secrets of “the obscure forces of life” (164).

     He might equally have sought such intelligence in any biological phenomenon, but he has the energetic dedication of the amateur bee-keeper.  To him the insects’ cognitive skills are scarcely inferior to those of humans, indeed, while undeniably different, he finds the bees perfect in their own way.  “Other beings may possess an intellect that differs from ours, and produces different results, without being therefore inferior.” (34)  He insists that “the habits and the policy of the bees are by no means narrow, or rigidly predetermined; and that their actions have motives far more complex than we are inclined to suppose” (48).  To him they have “more confidence and courage than man” (43)  Human intervention is inevitably a disturbance in their lives.  “It is not chance that controls them, but a wisdom whose deep loyalty, gravity, and unsleeping watchfulness man alone can betray” (55). 

     For him the bees display not wisdom alone, but even a sort of  morality.  “When we, in our study of human history, endeavour to gauge the moral force or greatness of a people or race, we have but one standard of measurement – the dignity and permanence of their ideal, and the abnegation with which they pursue it.  Have we often encountered an ideal more conformable to the desires of the universe, more widely manifest, more disinterested or sublime: have we often discovered an abnegation more complete and heroic?” (36)  The patterns of their lives limns out not the “unconquerable duty of a being” (165) alone, but glows with a kind of holiness, “the god that the bees obey” (36).  He envies the bees their perfect adjustment to this difficult world, the fact that the hive has been able to  “create its own little triumphant and permanent place in the midst of the stupendous inert forces of nothingness and death” (56).  They seem to him more satisfied, more enlightened in a way, than people.

     Yet he does not shrink from  anthropomorphizing the bees.  When he hears the sounds of a frustrated queen it is to him a war-song, or angry complaint . . . resembling somewhat the note of a distant trumpet of silver” (106).  Since their adaptation is so successful, though, their sounds are more frequently joyful.  A swarm is lit by a “spirit of holiday”; they enjoy the “blind happiness” of acting perfectly in accordance with their nature (58).  Their work of gathering nectar is form a series of “blissful journeys,” leading ordinarily to “peaceful abundance,” though he senses – and it is here that the most obvious projection occurs – that “underlying the gladness . . .  there reposes a sadness as deep as the eye of man can behold” (92).  Nonetheless, it is primarily what he sees as their profound pleasure in being alive from which he wishes to learn.  To him their most “precious gift still is their summoning him to the gladness of June, to the joy of the beautiful months . . .They teach us to tune our ear to the softest, most intimate whisper of these good natural hours.” (38)

     For Maeterlinck the apparently superior analytic abilities of the human mind may be in fact a hindrance, a disadvantage.  “There are intentions in nature that it is dangerous to understand too clearly, fatal to follow with too much ardor, and that it is one if her desires that we should not divine, and follow, all her desires” (114).  Thus lack of knowledge may be the greater wisdom, and moderns recognize the potential of self-consciousness to generate disabling anxiety, the fruit of too much reflection.  The model that the bees offer “as they go from flower to flower” resembles the human mind as it flits “from reality to reality seeking food for the incomprehensible flame.  This flame, which represents vitality itself must recall the “hard, gem-like flame” of which Pater spoke.  If people, like bees, might only follow their own natural inclinations, without striving for mastery, without feeling dissatisfaction, “a time will then  come when all things will turn so naturally to good in a spirit that has given itself to the loyal desire of this simple human duty, that the very suspicion of the possible aimlessness of its exhausting effort will only rebnder the duty the clearer, will only add more purity, power, disinterestedness, and freedom to the ardor wherewith its seeks” (166).  Maeterlinck recommends a state of mind that has much in common with the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment [2].  Thus the bees point the way, first toward following one’s essential nature and living the life for which nature designed every creature, but even beyond that, toward an acceptance that lies beyond questioning and acting, that finds rest and perfection in simple being.

 

 

 

1.  Twenty-five years after his book on bees, Maeterlinck published a study of termites, largely copied from a volume by a South African Eugene Marais.  No accusations of plagiarism have been made against La Vie des Abeilles.

2.  In Chinese, wú niàn (無念), “no thought,” which refers to non-attachment, not in fact to an utterly blank mind.  The concept is rooted in the Hindu ideal of vairāgya (वैराग्य), “dispassionateness.”