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”). 

Notes on Recent Reading 47 (Colette, Alegría, Xenophon)

 

Chéri and The Last of Chéri (Colette)

     The fascination of Chéri is the reader’s vicarious delectation in reading about these demimondaines.   Chéri is as languid a figure as anyone in Ronald Firbank (though considerably more substantial) and yet his love for Léa is intense, creating an impossible tension, the mainspring of the plot’s movement.  The secondary characters are marvelous, old Pal, Madame Aldonza (whose name memorializes her quondam career), and the masculine (as the reader is all too often reminded) Baroness de la Berche.  Colette afforded us all the recreation of reading of characters bred (or said to have been bred) in the borderlands between the light of accepted society and its only semi-hidden counterpart where love is for sale.

     As the title suggests, the sequel The Last of Chéri strikes a more somber tone with its merciless description of Léa’s aging.  The exaggeration dramatizes Chéri’s horrified reaction to aging.  The conclusion is disturbing, even painful, full of pathos.  The focus turns from the high spirits of the theatrical performers to Chéri’s melancholy end.  Though this endgame was surely implicit in his decadent hedonism in the original novel, it is, to one reader at least, less of an entertainment.

 

The Golden Serpent (Alegría)

     The Golden Serpent is less a novel than a collection of sketches of the rural poor in Ciro Alegría’s home territory on the banks of the Marañón River in Peru.  Episodes describe the ordinary round of life for the community of farmers and boatmen, stressing the hazards and hardships they regularly face and the effects of visitors: an engineer contemplating development, a couple of sufferers from a dreadful disease, a fugitive on the run. 

     Alegría’s sympathies are altogether with the poor cholos or “half-breeds” of his story.  A founder of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (Apristas), the author was a lifelong advocate for progressive change whose activism led to his imprisonment, a twenty-four-year exile, and eventual election to the Chamber of Deputies.  The book was published in 1935, when variations on socialist realism were prestigious, and its constant theme is the survival of the people against the challenges of their lives.  The message resembles that of Ma Joad when she assures her son, “Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people - we go on.”

     The symbolic machinery (such as the river as snake) can sound a bit clunky, but it is consistent and appropriate.  The narrator is a local man, a normative figure, a lens on the others with little to distinguish him.  Alegría went on the write The Hungry Dogs (1939) in which he depicted the life of the full-blooded Indians and, most ambitiously and successfully Broad and Alien is the World (1941).  Here his primary motive is to educate his readers on how the other half lives.

 

Anabasis (Xenophon)

     Xenophon’s Anabasis contains such detailed reports of the author’s leadership of the ten thousand in their “march up country” that the reader’s experience is almost cinematic. Of course, the speeches and conversations he records are his own composition, doubtless shaped by his own interests as well as the erosion of memory and the conventions of oratory.  Still, the descriptions of the daily life of the troops is vivid and convincing.  For those who take an interest in military tactics, the battle narrations are rich in data, though their interest may pale for others.  The frequent repetition of vocabulary and phrasing in battle scenes, which seemed a gift to the centuries of students for whom the Anabasis was the first book read in Greek, is unlikely to please to common reader. 

     Unsurprisingly, Xenophon comes off as a patriotic hero, devoted to his men, discerning in judgement, altruistic and unambitious. His rise to command is the result of his impressing the assembled troops with realistic strategy couched in well-chosen words. 

     The modern soldier will be surprised at the degree of democracy in the decision-making of this army of mercenaries. In a crisis the troops assemble to decide on a course of action. Xenophon himself, after proposing his own plan, explicitly invites any of his comrades-in-arms, officer or common soldier, to suggest alternatives. The decision to return to Greece occurred only when the army, realizing that Cyrus had hired them under false pretenses, rebelled, and Xenophon agreed to continue to lead.  On the other hand, in combat situations he regards absolute discipline as mandatory. 

     Xenophon was at times a controversial figure. Though an Athenian, he, like others in Socrates’ circle, sympathized with Sparta, and was for that reason exiled. The Spartan king Agesilaus gave him an estate for his services which, in the continuing political turmoil was confiscated after several decades. 

     One may come to Xenophon from a historical interest.  He wrote an account of the Peloponnesian War that picks up where Thucydides’ history leaves off, the Hellenica, a number of works on political theory, and four Socratic works, our fullest picture of the philosopher outside of Plato.  In the Anabasis Xenophon consults Socrates about whether the army should accept Cyrus’ offer and Socrates prudently warns him that he might be criticized in Athens for doing so.  After finding favorable sacrificial omens, Xenophon decides to ignore his teacher’s advice.  Though he had come along solely due to the invitation of his friend Proxenus (who was among those treacherously put to death by Tissaphernes) with the thought that he might achieve greater advancement from Cyrus (whom he admired) than at home, the unusual processes of Greek democracy made him a “people’s leader” and the author of one of the most-read books of antiquity. 

Professors Kick the Willy Bobo

     As a Greek living in Egypt in the second century C.E., Athenaeus of Naucratis straddled cultures. He was a littérateur, a rhetorician, and grammarian, with wide-ranging interests who literally wrote of “cabbages and kings” with equal relish. His single extant work, the Deipnosophists, is vast though incomplete. Using the form familiar to readers from Plato’s Symposium, Athenaeus portrays a group of scholars discussing food as well as health, music, pornography, and, above all, poetry and words. The dinner seems to stretch on forever, as the appetite of the guests for food and phrases and facts is never satisfied. Even at fifteen volumes, the work is incomplete. The title, “the dinner-wise-guys” is often translated as “doctors at dinner,” or something similar, but more literally means “the dinner experts,” that is, the gastronomers or, in the current American term, the “foodies.” In spite of the inaccuracy, I like my own version “professors kick the willy bobo,” because the talk covers many topics other than food, and the hiphop phrase carries the appropriate sense of expansive desultory recreational conversation. Athenaeus’ book defies genre. It is a mighty river of words, or perhaps a swamp, since it has little apparent direction. Why, indeed, would a reader choose to ramble in this trackless slough of dead language?
     Taste remains a mystery at the heart of aesthetics. Can any critic prove the superiority of Shakespeare to Superman? While some may be led to the café or the parkland on a bright summer day, others will lurk in the back corners of the less prosperous used book shops, perhaps vainly searching for Florio’s Montaigne, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, or even Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists. All these texts are notable for their hungry inclusivity, their vain but worthy attempt to encompass everything. While an author like Wang Wei or Hakuin shows the universe in the glint of one discrete phenomenon, a sunset’s ray or a breath of breeze, and a troubadour or an Elizabethan sonneteer will chase the same ox through the nuances of love, a poet like Whitman describes everything under the sun, piling detail on detail, word tumbling over word, trying to catch up to the truth. Today’s cultural critics are not the first readers to whom every detail is meaningful and worthy of contemplation. Thus Montaigne discusses odors, drunkenness, “a monstrous child,” and “a custome of the ile of Cea”; the reader of Rabelais is thrown by the barrage of learned and vulgar material; the visitor to Jubilate Agno finds that to Smart the postal service and the stretching cat are equally numinous. And these works tend to go on and on, as though their very length in some way could help to reproduce the fascination of the cosmos.
     I read literature rather than philosophy because, while words are always slippery, experience seems a sounder ground for knowledge than authority or the syllogism, but experience may be processed to any point along a spectrum from unedited data to highly abstract, conventional symbols such as the World-Tree. At the limit one approaches monism: Parmenides, or Spinoza, or all is Buddha-nature. If every datum reveals the ultimate reality, each makes an equal claim on our attention, and thus the search for truth can become a wandering scan through the bewildering array of phenomena. Some writers have attempted to order this unmanageable field of information through the illusion of an exhaustive catalogue, which may take the form of epic or of anatomy. In the epic form the Mahabharata, the Iliad, Sundiata from Mali, or the synthesized Kalevala seek to include encyclopedic information: all the most relevant data about belief systems, behavior, and the received ideas of the culture.
     While epic is typical of oral cultures in which one mythological/philosophical/moral system is shared by all, the anatomy is the product of a less certain society, one more confident with details than with dogma. In Montaigne’s prefatory note, he declares his true focus to be not the subjects he discusses, but rather himself, i.e. his reactions to those subjects. Though one cannot know the truth about cannibals, for instance, to take one of his most exotic and insightful essays, one can know one’s own reaction. Montaigne sets this down with admirable precision, making a lesson even of error: “My imperfections shall therein be read to the life, and my natural form discerned.”
     Such a “natural form,” the “lineaments of my conditions and humours” (to quote another of Florio’s felicitous renderings of Montaigne) is for a skeptic the closest approach to truth. “Real” conversations such as those in television reality shows or those recorded in Visions of Cody or Louis Armstrong’s tapes of himself and his friends talking seem necessarily “true” because they sound like life itself. Even the marijuana (in the cases of Kerouac and Satchmo) appears to remove preconception and intention and bring the reader a step closer to Montaigne’s prelapsarian ideal: “my selfe fully and naked.” Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists reads like an ancient version of these wandering colloquies.
     Being scholars the guests’ table talk is filled with allusion and citation. In fact, for years the book has been valued primarily for its many quotations from works now lost. Though it has never had many readers, Casaubon published an edition in 1612 and Sir Thomas Browne wrote a lovely elegiac essay on it. In the Victorian age James Russell Lowell combined harsh imagery with literary sentimentalism in his declaration that “the somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and-bone-picker like Athenaeus, is turned to gold by time.”
     Gold or not, it is one of the most intertextual of works; topics are often viewed through the traces they have left in books. The guests are given the names of real people as though the event had really occurred, but this is a pose (though, like pastoralism, it gives itself the lie). In fact, Athenaeus projects circumstantial truth, a mediated and fragmentary reality. The text gives us an editor, a narrator, characters, and an author, none of whom claims authority. It is a highly artificial story told at fourth-hand, based on dubious memories, in a far-distant language. But is this not an accurate model for the greater part of our experience of reality?
     Just as the cubist painters, while highlighting formal experimentation, used as their content the daily litter of the pleasures of urban bohemian café life (newspapers, wine bottles, musical instruments), Athenaeus’ characters talk of food and sex rather than of Platonic ideas. They may seem to be loafing, doing nothing whatever, but their dinner is a studied affair. In the book dining is not just healthful and pleasurable, more even than an artful activity. In Athenaeus the dinner table centers an Edenic commune which promises not only an equal share to every diner in a kind of charming appetitive egalitarianism, but which reserves as well an extra portion for “strangers.” The very word for dinner is assigned an etymology from the words for equal distribution.
     Whatever else it may be, the book is a cabinet of curiosities, individualistic, whimsical, and eccentric. The word-play around tripod reads like nothing so much as a Abbott and Costello routine. One can learn, too, of Charmus the Syracusan who accompanied every dainty he offered his guests with appropriate poetic words. Athenaeus discusses the qualities, the taste, and the effects on health of more waters than Dean & Deluca could ever carry, and provides an explanation of the culinary use of swine’s uterus. The book is endlessly learned, its characters inspired by the pursuit of information, not toward the solution of a problem, practical or spiritual, but rather bits of information treasured like a child’s souvenir of rocks and shells from the beach, handled and examined as marvels. Where else might one learn that the same King Midas who was so fond of gold poured wine into a pond in an attempt to capture Silenus in his cups?
     And the loping syntax of association is as odd and natural as the facts: the praise of topers as good fellows leads to mention of a hero called the “drinker of unmixed wine” which leads to several cooks with nicknames derived from their cooking activities whose celebrity had reached the point that statues were erected in their memory. In a momentary return to the starting point of conviviality, drinking is praised as the source of dinner-table joking and improvised poetry, but the speaker immediately adds that it can also bring obnoxious boasting. Wine is linked to meat as a cause of verbal aggression because it feeds false consciousness, and then a catalogue of the delusions of intoxication is suddenly capped with the identification of wine and literature, and the word tragedy is provided a false etymology to strengthen the link. Athenaeus has constructed a semantic field charged with the tensions between truth and lie, discipline and self-indulgence, love and aggression. The code is rich and suggestive. Indeed, this free flow of ideas, which might become tiresome and aimless, is often animated in the text with a mild glow of revelation, not unlike that available from wine in the belly.
     Athenaeus is a late writer, as we, perhaps, are late in our own great imperial American Kali Yuga age. His fragmentary and circumstantial material, his close grasp on small and concrete facts and his coolness to generalizations, his tolerance of all and failure to claim access to Truth either religious or political, all these join him to our own time. His characters talk, not to pursue and finally capture the truth as Plato presumed, but to pass the time, yet their endless dinner escapes triviality. Signifying monkeys, as all men are, they talk as apes groom and the conversation has neither beginning nor end. Both eating and talking become arts, games, enough “human business” to occupy a lifetime.
     The oral societies of the past typically granted poets a vatic voice with a unique connection to divine inspiration. This view was still influential in classical times, though not universal. In the Middle Ages the church asserted its own didactic imperatives, though the flourishing of secular literature eventually led to lesser claims: the poet as sensitive and insightful, inspired, but by his own genius now. With Chekhov and Joyce fiction came to treat of the apparently inconsequential. The “unity of action” became instead a slice of life, and the poet’s attention shifted focus as time passed from the details of realism ever smaller to imagism, objectivism, minimalism, and finally to the level of the word in language poetry, while at the same time scholars have moved from “great ideas” to minutiae. Athenaeus’ diners would find themselves at home, I think, at the MLA Convention, and perhaps they even lurk between you and me, scanning this essay.
     Though the sloppier post-structuralists at academic meetings proceed as though every text were primarily self-reflective, concerned with its own verbal material, this is in fact true of Athenaeus. The speakers most often quote authorities, cite passages, and discuss words, their history, etymology, and regional variations. Whatever their putative topic they are skating on the edge of the semiotic resistance, uttering words not meant as transparent conveyors of content, but rather as material objects, whose procession bears within it the code of the cosmos, no less than the Milky Way itself. They live in citations, quoting one author after another, with the professorial conviction that, whatever the value of their own remarks, they have excellent taste in reading. But this pose only masks the conviction that keeps them reading, the conviction that reading, too, can lead to enlightenment. Their implied footnotes shape a map of consciousness at least as informative as their profile or the crazy pattern of gulls’ tracks on a beach.
     Since the work strives to be encyclopedic after a fashion, it includes even the antithesis of this worship of the word. Cynulcus the Cynic denounces the diners both for their hedonism and their erudition, saying: “You glutton, whose god is your belly . . . you have misused your whole time in asking ‘is such a word found or not? Is it used or not used?’ And you test every word that occurs to your companions in talk as one tests a smooth surface by drawing his nail over it, collecting all the thorny places, ‘like one making his way through prickly plants and thorny licorice,’ forever wasting time, but never gathering the flowers that are the sweetest.”
     Having gathered, I believe, worthy bouquets in Athenaeus, I would differ from Cynulcus. I fancy, for instance, the figure of a dancer called Memphis (a reference to “the oldest and most royal of cities”). This “philosopher-dancer” expounded, we are told, the Pythagorean philosophy in pantomime more effectively than it ever was taught in words. Whether such a dance is plausible or not, the implied glimpse of truth beyond words indicates that even Athenaeus’ professors, amid all the grubbing and eating and chit-chat through which they ordinarily attempt to sidle up to reality can also imagine a pole-vault into the beyond. If one person’s pole be meditation and another’s sex or sunsets, there are those, too, for whom it is words, and Athenaeus is a wordy writer indeed. But is it not often through words and the carefully constructed complexes of words that constitute literature that we can snare a new insight and even, on occasion, catch a glimpse of freshest vision just being born in our own consciousness?