1 Harvard University Political Theory Colloquium For 11 March 2010 ...

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Harvard University Political Theory Colloquium For 11 March 2010
Draft: not for further circulation, citation or quotation without permission
Weakness of virtue, not will: Plato on self-knowledge and akrasia
Melissa Lane
Department of Politics, Princeton University
mslane@princeton.edu
I. Overview
This paper is part of a nascent book project on ‘The Rule of Knowledge: Plato on
Psychology and Politics’, and within that project, of a broader account of the dialogues
on the relation between knowledge and virtue. As part of that account, here I challenge
the translation, or equivalence, of the phenomenon conventionally labeled akrasia in
Plato (as in Aristotle) with ‘weakness of will’. I argue instead for an understanding of
akrasia in Plato as representing a failure of the virtues exercised by knowledge,
conceiving of knowledge as inherently executive. In this paper, my focus is on the
putative denial of akrasia by the Socrates of the Protagoras and on the relation between
the arguments there and those in the Gorgias and the Republic, though I must largely
assume my account of the latter dialogues for lack of space.
Philosophically the significance of my argument is twofold. First, it argues
against a widespread reading of Plato which contrasts a putative denial of akrasia by the
Socrates of the Protagoras with a putative acceptance of akrasia by Plato in the
Republic. On this view, Socrates in the Protagoras and other ‘early’ dialogues is said to
hold a doctrine of the unity of the virtues as reducing all the other virtues to knowledge,
whereas the Republic introduces the appetitive and thumotic parts of the soul alongside
reason and so makes room for akrasia as a case of psychic conflict. As Christopher
Bobonich helpfully summarizes this view (which he does not wholly share, as he argues
that Plato has other independent reasons for introducing tripartition): ‘In the early
dialogues, Plato denies the possibility of akrasia; in the Republic, he accepts its
possibility and the Republic’s partitioning of the soul is intended to explain how akrasia
is possible’ (2002: 217). Against this widespread view, I argue instead that the unity of

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the virtues in the Protagoras does not reduce the other virtues to knowledge: it rather
expands knowledge to be understood as inherently executive and as exercising rule
through the virtues. Second, my argument draws on and further develops a trend in the
modern philosophy of self-knowledge, advanced by Victoria McGeer and Richard
Moran, to interpret akratic action not merely as a failure of knowledge but specifically as
a failure of self-knowledge understood as first-person authority in practical action. I
develop this line of thought in Plato to identify the rule of knowledge as a form of
deliberative self-knowledge exercised through the virtues, with akrasia as a case of
failure of such exercise of knowledge to deploy the virtues to achieve sufficient selfintegration.
Another way to put this is to say that akrasia is seen by Plato as a
‘constitutional disorder’ (Pettit 2004:69) of the soul on any and all accounts of the
structure of the soul that he entertains.
Motivation for my thesis may be found in two observations: first, that Plato does
not label any of his locus classicus discussions of these matters as akrasia, 1 which should
prompt us to investigate his own terminology for them more closely; second, that his
actual discussions are not well interpreted in terms of ‘weakness of will’, since even the
Republic’s tripartite scheme lacks a concept of the will, as the next section will discuss. 2
In contrast, the link between knowledge, self-knowledge, and self-control which I will
develop was one which was widely recognized in ancient Greek thought. Helen North’s
magisterial account of sôphrosunê identifies its core sense as ‘soundness of mind’ or ‘the
state of having one’s intellect unimpaired’ (1966: 3; cited to this purpose in Annas 1985):
the virtue of sôphrosunê embodies the maintenance of the integrity of the intellect and so
the condition of knowing one’s own mind. Thus the link between self-control and selfknowledge
made by the modern literature is one which was not only available but
favored in Greek, and it is one on which Plato drew. 3
Notwithstanding these linguistic and conceptual points, I will continue to use the
familiar ‘akrasia’ and ‘akratic’ as rigid designators to identify the phenomenon which I
wish to redescribe. 4 Modern accounts of that phenomenon tend to offer an inclusive
definition of it, for example that it involves any set of ‘intentional states in the light of
which [a person] sees that a certain response is required’, yet that person ‘fails to act in
the required manner’, in favorable conditions in which such action would be feasible

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(Pettit 2004: 68). Plato’s approach differs, on the one hand, in focusing on the case
where an agent’s condition would seem to be characterized not by any intentional states
but specifically by knowledge; but, on the other hand, in implying that knowledge which
is not executively effective in preventing akrasia is not truly knowledge at all.
II. The conventional reading of akrasia as weakness of will and its lack of fit with
Plato
The designation of ‘weakness of will’ as an equivalent to akrasia has a long pedigree
which is captured well in Donald Davidson’s classic analysis, consideration of which
reveals its maladaptedness as an interpretation of Plato. Davidson contrasts two images,
the first lacking any notion of the will, the second appealing to it. The first depicts
incontinence (akrasia) as ‘a battle or struggle between two contestants’:
Each contestant is armed with his argument or principle. One side may be labeled
‘passion’ and the other ‘reason’; they fight; one side wins, the wrong side, the side
called ‘passion’ (or ‘lust’ or ‘pleasure’). (Davidson 2001 [1980]): 35)
Although Davidson does not remark it (attributing it rather to Aristotle, Aquinas and
Hare), this is the view attributed by ‘the many’ to ‘most people’ in the Protagoras.
Pleasure, pain, anger, and other emotions and desires are said to be viewed by ‘most
people’ as the sorts of things that can simply overcome reason in a fair fight, with the
contenders on all fours. This is the view against which the purported Socratic
intellectualism of the Protagoras squares off. Reason vs a purportedly autonomous and
equal set of passions and desires: there is no evidence of ‘will’ on either side of this
contest.
It might be thought that the Republic introduces the role of the will in its account
of the divided embodied soul. So thought Davidson in attributing his second image to
Plato (presumably in the Republic), Butler, and Dante. Davidson explains the second
image thus:

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It is adumbrated perhaps by Dante (who thinks he is following Aquinas and
Aristotle) when he speaks of the incontinent man as one who ‘lets desire pull
reason from her throne’ (Inferno, Canto V). Here there are three actors on the
stage: reason, desire, and the one who lets desire get the upper hand. The third
actor is perhaps named ‘The Will’ (or ‘Conscience’). It is up to The Will to
decide who wins the battle. If The Will is strong, he gives the palm to reason; if
he is weak, he may allow pleasure or passion the upper hand. (Davidson 2001
[1980], 35).
While the focus of this paper is on the Protagoras, it is important to begin by
recognizing that ‘weakness of will’ is no more adequate as an interpretation of the
Republic. While I cannot discuss how to read the tripartite model of the soul in detail
here, any account of Republic tripartition should recognize that it is not ‘The Will’ who
‘decides’ which part of the soul wins a battle, but reason – the part of the soul with which
the person as a whole is to identify – which either rules or fails to rule. True, there is a
third part of the soul beyond reason and desire (better translated as appetite), the thumos,
but its alliance with reason – while this can help to instantiate the latter’s rule – does not
give it the sole palm of decision as to whether reason will rule. Nor should such rule by
reason be cast in terms of occurrent ‘choice’, as the image of giving the palm implies, or
in terms of active ‘letting’ another part take control, as the quotation from Dante
suggests. For the issue in the Republic is whether or not thumos and epithumia are
aligned with reason: in the fully virtuous agent, or even the merely well-brought-up one,
this alignment will be both dispositionally embedded in all parts of the soul through the
virtues and also realized in occurrent judgments and actions. 5
If neither the Protagoras nor the Republic should be understood in terms of
‘weakness of will’ (the one denying it, the other acknowledging it), should they
nonetheless be understood as respectively denying and acknowledging some
understanding of akrasia? I contend that the phenomenon often described as ‘denial of
akrasia’ in Plato’s Protagoras, and by extrapolation the contrasting ‘acceptance of
akrasia’ in his Republic, is better understood in both contexts as ‘explanation of
weakness of virtue due to a failure of the executive rule of knowledge’. It is the failure of

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self-knowledge understood as first-person authority which constitutes, and is expressed
in, a failure of self-control. Rather than ‘incontinent’, therefore, which is a term better
reserved for the absence of mere continence, we would do best to refer to the person or
action generally called akratic as ‘intemperate’. The akratic is literally (as in French), the
person lacking the virtue of temperance (see the use in Sissa 1997, a stimulating analysis
of Plato versus the Epicureans in understanding drug addiction in terms of rival accounts
of the relationship between pleasure, time, and desire). 6 Textually, a key passage will be
this one from Republic IX, diagnosing and responding to a praiser of injustice thus:
…let’s tell him that he is simply saying that it is beneficial for him, first, to feed
the multiform beast well and make it strong, and also the lion and all that pertains
to him; second, to starve and weaken the human being within, so that he is
dragged along (elkesthai) wherever either of the other two leads; and, third, to
leave the parts to bite and kill one another rather than accustoming them to each
other and making them friendly. (588e-589a, trans. Grube/Reeve in Cooper)
This appears to reiterate the view of the many in the Protagoras that pleasure, pain, and
other emotions can ‘drag along’ reason in their wake, as against the Socratic
intellectualism of that dialogue focusing on knowledge alone. At the end of the paper,
we will see how the Socratic stance of the Protagoras may be reconciled with this
passage in the Republic. Broadly speaking, the ability to account for akrasia within a
unified whole-person account of the soul which Bobonich (2002) identifies in the Laws,
is one which I also wish to tease out of the Protagoras, while at the same time finding the
outlines of the relation between knowledge and virtue in the latter dialogue to be more
consonant with the Republic than the usual contrast between intellectualism and
tripartition would suggest.
III. The practical-deliberative turn in the modern philosophy of self-knowledge
In fact, a new interpretation of akrasia as not ‘weakness of will’ but lack of integrative
self-commitment has recently been advanced in the philosophy of self-knowledge.
Victoria McGeer and Richard Moran are interested in a conception of self-knowledge as

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practical, rather than theoretical: as consisting in the achievement of first-person authority
over one’s beliefs and actions. So understood, self-knowledge is neither absolute nor
incorrigible, while remaining different in kind from the third-person forms of knowledge
which may nevertheless on certain occasions supplement or correct it. Their conception
of integrative self-commitment can be further developed, I will suggest, by assimilating it
to the Platonic virtue of self-control.
Moran himself takes the first-person authoritative role of reason to be something
which the ancients failed to recognize:
The ancient contrast between the seductive, misleading Senses [sic], and the
trustworthy dictates of Reason [sic] can be seen, in part, as resting on a failure to
recognize a related difference in kind between the two. The Senses can be
compared to an unruly mob, in conflict with itself, because they belong to the
category of deliverances on the basis of which one forms a judgment. But, insofar
as Reason represents the unifying judgment one forms from this basis, it is not a
faculty superior to or in competition with the Senses. (2001: 75-76, n.4).
I will argue against this that Platonic psychology consistently across the Protagoras,
Gorgias, and Republic does in fact recognize just such a ‘categorical’ (Moran, 76)
difference. In those texts, reason or knowledge is inherently such as to rule, with an
executive dimension; it is only when that rule fails (due to a lack of virtue) that other
contenders within the soul such as anger and appetite can fill the vacuum that it leaves.
They do not overcome it as rivals but rather surge into force in the wake of its absence or
failure. Just as Moran depicts akrasia as (in effect) a collapse of the first-person
authority of practical reason, so too – I contend – does Plato. 7
The executive rule, or role, of knowledge in Plato is further illuminated by the
approach taken by Moran and also by Victoria McGeer. Both focus on the form of
knowledge which is the self-knowledge exercised in practical agency. This
understanding of self-knowledge treats as posing not theoretical questions about oneself
to be answered by discovery, but rather practical/ deliberative questions to be answered
by decision or commitment (Moran 2001: 57-58). Such first-person authority is

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achieved through self-integration involving scrutiny and adjustment of beliefs and desires
in the light of one’s overall conception of the good (Moran 2001: 108, 118). McGeer,
who had pioneered a similar ‘agency model of authoritative self-knowledge’ (McGeer
1996: 506), 8 makes an important amendment to this point. For Moran, deliberation
excludes the ‘idiom of “control”’ (Moran 2001: 119). For McGeer, in contrast, ‘[f]irstperson
authority can very much depend on our abilities to exercise rational control’ –
though she prefers ‘to speak of “self-regulation” or “self-governance”’ (McGeer 2007:
89, where she draws precisely this contrast with the quoted view of Moran).
Taking Moran and McGeer together yields a portrait of first-person authority and
self-knowledge as consisting in something strikingly akin to the cultivation of selfcontrol,
understood as self-governance, which constitutes the virtue of sôphrosunê in
Plato. In a famous passage of Republic IV, the just person ‘puts himself in order’, and
‘regulates well what is really his own and rules himself’ (both, 443d), doing so through
an ongoing exercise of virtue that is not a tyrannical subduing of desire but rather an
assertion of what we will see to be (for Plato) the natural exercise of rule of knowledge:
an assertion which I will find also to be implicit in the Protagoras.
A similar parallel holds for the discussion of akrasia as the failure of selfknowledge.
On Moran’s account, akrasia is not something which one can acknowledge
in speaking with first-person authority (128), though one may acknowledge it in
observing one’s past behavior or in predicting (as opposed to deliberating) one’s actions
in the future, and it may also be identified by third parties. Akrasia is not the result of a
wrong outcome of deliberation, nor of a hijacking of deliberation, but rather of a failure
of the first-person authoritative stance. The akratic does not speak for herself nor does
she attain conviction about how to act: rather her behaviour cannot be thought of (by her,
or therefore by others) as intentional action at all. (127-8) The role of an as-it-were thirdperson
evaluation of one’s moral condition accords with Raphael Woolf’s recent analysis
of the dramatic absence of first-person introspection (or rather its casting in third-person
terms) in Plato’s Socrates (Woolf 2008). Yet whereas Woolf suggests in a footnote that
the absence of the Cartesian epistemological observational privilege of the first-person in
Plato leaves open the possibility of other approaches to first-person authority as in
Moran’s work (Woolf 2008: 93 n.37), I will argue that Plato himself demonstrates such

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an alternative approach in terms close to those of Moran and, especially, McGeer. Like
them, Plato develops the self-governing executive authority of reason which issues in
self-integration, doing so however in his characteristic terms of virtue. 9
IV. Socrates in the Protagoras
Come now, Protagoras, and reveal this about your mind: What do you think about
knowledge? Do you go along with the many or not? The many think that
knowledge (epistêmês) is neither strong (ischuron) nor fit to lead (hêgemonikon)
nor fit to rule (archikon); instead, [they think that] while knowledge is often
present in a man it is not knowledge itself which rules (archein) but something
else, whether anger, pleasure, pain, at times love, often fear – they think of his
knowledge as if it is being dragged about by all these other things like a slave
(hôsper peri andrapodou, perielkomenês upo tôn allôn apantôn). Does it seem
(dokei) like that to you, or that knowledge (epistêmê) is something noble and such
as to rule a man (kalon…hoion archein tou anthrôpou), and if someone were to
know the good and the bad, he would not be forced (kratêthênai) by anything to
act other than as knowledge commands (epistêmê keleuêi), and so knowledge
(phronêsin) would be sufficient to save a man.
(352b-c, my translation, partly following Lombardo and Bell in Cooper, with
thanks to Raphael Woolf for suggesting the translations of ‘fit to lead’ and ‘fit to
rule’ to bring out the –ikos endings)
This passage, which I situate as the ‘inner frame’ for the putative ‘denial of akrasia’, will
be central to my understanding of the Protagoras, and is discussed in detail below. Here,
I use it to put on the table the ‘measure doctrine’ which Socrates opposes to the
contention ascribed to ‘the many’ and which is a locus classicus for his purported
intellectualism. Against the claim that pleasure, pain, anger and the like can overcome
reason, which he attributes to the many in the ‘inner frame’ just quoted, Socrates
eventually advances the view that these passions and emotions do not independently
determine action. Rather they are simply data which reason then measures correctly, by

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means of the art of measurement, or incorrectly, when acting in ignorance. When reason
exercises the ‘art’ or ‘knowledge’ of measurement, it is able to measure pleasures and
pains correctly against one another, and so (for example) to pursue greater long-term
benefits instead of lesser immediate ones (347a-c). It is this contention – that ‘those who
make mistakes with regard to the choice of pleasure and pain…do so because of a lack of
knowledge’, and specifically a lack of the knowledge of measurement – which is widely
taken to constitute the ‘denial of akrasia’: not passion, but ignorance, explains the failure
to act according to what knowledge would prescribe.
My reading of the Protagoras and of the measure doctrine’s putative denial of
akrasia hinges on three aspects of the surrounding text, which for convenience (though
not entirely aptly, as noted in the next footnote) are labeled here as three frames. 10
- The outer frame of the poetic exposition by Socrates of the poet Simonides, which
is the first context in which the ‘denial of akrasia’ claim that ‘no one does wrong
voluntarily (ekôn)’ is actually raised. On my reading, this poetic exposition
demonstrates a correct analysis of how a virtuous person would handle anger
(thus showing both that a virtuous person is liable to experience anger, and how
he would handle it). Accordingly, interpreting what Socrates later says about the
so-called ‘denial of akrasia’ should be done in light of this earlier statement of a
richer moral psychology in which he allows for emotion (and perhaps desire) in
the framework of virtue.
- The middle frame returns to the dialogue’s earlier discussion of whether wisdom,
temperance, courage, justice and piety are five names for the same virtue, or are
different virtues, and the immediate part of this frame relevant to our interests is
Protagoras’ assertion (giving up his earlier ‘parts of a face’ answer) that four of
them are fairly close but that courage is completely different.
- The inner frame is Socrates’ interrogation of Protagoras as to whether or not the
sophist believes that knowledge is inherently ruling and powerful, and Protagoras’
agreement that this is so. It is this putative agreement which is the real object of

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scrutiny in the ‘denial of akrasia’ passage: Socrates introduces the views of the
many only insofar as he can enlist Protagoras in a joint refutation of them, and so
bring Protagoras himself to admit further implications of the priority of
knowledge (such as, eventually, the connection between courage and knowledge,
closing the second frame).
What completes the inner frame is clearly marked in the text, but is both surprising in
itself and surprisingly seldom noted in the literature. This is Socrates’ conclusion of the
putative joint refutation of the many by inferring that since ‘being overcome by pleasure’
is actually ignorance, it is therefore curable by teaching: hence, he concludes, the many
would do well to pay for themselves and their children to be instructed by the sophists.
He goes so far as to propose that he and Protagoras say to the many: ‘By worrying about
your money and not giving it to them [the sophists], you all do badly in both private and
public life’ (Prt. 357e, trans. Lombardo & Bell). This last sentence – and the warm
approbation it elicits from Hippias and Prodicus as well as Protagoras – should be a red
flag for those interpreters, such as George Rudebusch, who embrace the measure doctrine
as a full account of Socratic knowledge, and so embrace a fully hedonistic Socrates. 11
(Another more minor red flag may be the enjoinder to Protagoras to join in ‘persuading’
and ‘teaching’ people at 353a: Protagoras and his fellow sophists are comfortable with
the language of ‘teaching’, but it fits uneasily with Socrates). Socrates here presents
himself and Protagoras as jointly persuading the many to give their money to the sophists
and so to do better by learning the art of measurement and so not being overcome by
pleasure. In effect, he concludes the measure doctrine by framing the art of measurement
as the newest line in the sophistic bag of tricks. 12
My analysis of the text takes this red flag seriously. By looking at each frame in
turn, and then at the core discussion and refutation of the views of the many, I shall argue
that by submerging what I will call the executive dimension or intrinsic executive role of
knowledge, the measure doctrine gives only a partial and misleading account of what
Socrates means by knowledge, so deteriorating into sophistry and aporia. However,
there are clues in the text which signal what is going wrong and provide the lineaments of
an alternative view, on which the crucial issue is the success or failure of knowledge in

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ruling. On this basis, we can resolve tensions between the Protagoras, Gorgias, and
Republic, when each of these dialogues is not reduced to a collection of propositions but
is interpreted as a dramatic whole. It may help to note a parallel with my approach in the
way that Myles Burnyeat has argued that ‘knowledge’ in the Theaetetus can be read out
of the dialogue to be better construed as ‘understanding’ than as the more limited
cognitive state of justified true belief assumed in much modern epistemology. Similarly,
I argue here that ‘knowledge’ in the Protagoras can be read out of the dialogue to be
better construed as ‘executive’ than as the more limited cognitive state assumed in the
usual interpretation of Socratic intellectualism. 13
The outer frame: Socrates on Simonides
The topic of the ‘denial of akrasia’ is not confined to the measure doctrine. It is
anticipated earlier in the Protagoras when Socrates is expounding the poet Simonides.
Socrates says that Simonides was not so uneducated as to praise those who do no evil
voluntarily (ekôn) ‘as if there were some people who do evil voluntarily (ekontes)’. He
continues:
For I am pretty much of this opinion, that no intelligent man believes that anyone
does wrong voluntarily (ekonta examartanein) or voluntarily acts shamefully or
badly (oude aischra te kai kaka ekonta ergazesthai), but they well know that all
who do shameful and bad things do so involuntarily (akontes poiousin). And
Simonides, for his part, doesn’t say that he praises those who do no evil
voluntarily (ekôn), but he applies this term ‘the voluntary doer’ (to ekôn) to
himself. For he thought that an upright man (andra kalon kagathon) often forces
him[self] (epanagkazein) to be a friend and praise someone… good men (tous d’
agathous) conceal it all and force (anagkazesthai) themselves [note: supplied: the
Greek verb is not reflexive] to praise them, and if they get angry at their unjust
treatment by their parents or their country 14 they calm themselves down [this is
reflexive: autous heautous] and make friends again, forcing themselves
(prosanagkazontas heautous] to love and praise them.

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(345e4-346b5, trans. Taylor, modified in translation of ekontes, akontes and
cognates, and in making the sentence after the ellipsis refer to a plural subject, as
in the Greek, rather than an individual one, as well as other minor points)
In a neat move of strong poetic interpretation, Socrates in effect moves a comma in the
poetic quotation from after ‘voluntarily’ to before it, so making it modify the poet’s own
speech rather than the claim about some doing evil. In other words, rather than parsing
the poet’s lines so as to read ‘All who do no wrong voluntarily/ I praise and love’, he
parses and interprets them thus: ‘All who do no wrong / voluntarily I praise and love’.
This passage is important for two reasons. First, it introduces the topic of whether or not
doing what is bad (and known to be bad) is voluntary action. Notice that in this way,
Socrates has before embarking on the so-called ‘denial of akrasia’ already accepted that
akrasia is at least apparently phenomenologically possible: the question is not of its
possibility but of its modality (whether or not it consists in truly voluntary action).
Second, the passage gives a notable example of intrapsychic conflict and its resolution in
the virtuous man. That resolution involves appeal to intrapsychic ‘forcing’, though
balancing this with intrapsychic calming and befriending. The upright or good man both
forces himself to praise and, when he (as a whole) has become angry, calms himself
down. Such forcing is a voluntary action: although she has to exert force upon herself,
the good person does this voluntarily, in line with her understanding of the good. She
does not act without knowledge of the good in doing so, rather she exercises her
knowledge of the good in acting virtuously. The language of ‘making friends’ with
oneself in fact echoes the Republic Book IV. Self-integration as the achievement of inner
friendship by the exercise of virtue is available to Plato here even without the Republic
framework of the tripartite soul. In other words, outside the narrow context of the
refutation of the many, the Socrates of the Protagoras can account both for anger and for
virtue.
It is worth noting that the third-person language of ‘forcing oneself’, which seems
to objectify part of oneself, is not actually an objectification at all. It is a way of
describing the project of exerting virtue in and through practical reason. The good man

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exercises his virtue by – or better, in – calming himself down and forcing himself to
praise those whom he should praise. This process bears out McGeer’s remark that
exerting active self-control and self-scrutiny can be seen as an exercise of virtue rather
than as a sign of its absence. For it is striking that in contrast to Aristotle, for whom the
person described by Socrates (interpreting Simonides) would be no more than continent,
Socrates calls him virtuous. What he gives is a dramatization of how the virtuous man
exercises his virtue: reason in ruling virtuously exerts the force of the whole soul in the
right direction, ‘forcing himself’ when necessary to conform to reason.
The middle frame
The proximate (and properly so-called) frame for the so-called discussion of akrasia is,
as several commentators have remarked, the discussion of whether wisdom, temperance,
courage, justice and piety are five names for the same thing, or are different things.
Previously Protagoras had offered the answer that they were different, but all parts of a
whole, on the analogy of parts of a face; now he answers that four of them are fairly close
but courage is completely different. It is this question – of whether courage is the same
as wisdom – which constitutes what I call the ‘middle frame’, and which Socrates will
later remind Protagoras is the reason for his introduction of the views of the many about
pleasure overcoming reason at 352b.
The importance of the middle frame for my present argument will be developed
shortly. Here we digress briefly into a consideration of the moral hedonism which
Socrates seems to articulate just before the middle frame, and which many scholars have
taken to complement the measure doctrine. This is to show that the dialectical progress
of the dialogue severely qualifies the sense in which Socrates should be taken to be
endorsing hedonism, just as we will see that it also severely qualifies the sense in which
he should be taken to be endorsing the measure doctrine.
Socrates has certainly insisted that to live pleasantly is good, refusing to allow
Protagoras to limit this claim only to cases of pleasure in honorable things (352d). This
refusal seems to be a refusal to allow Protagoras to take refuge in a conventional category
of honor, thus failing to think for himself about virtue. 15 It is Protagoras who then
ascribes to Socrates the view that ‘pleasure and good are the same’ (351e) and asks

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Socrates to investigate it to see whether they should agree. Socrates himself had
advanced only the more limited claim that ‘a pleasant thing is good just insofar as it is
pleasant’: i.e., qua pleasant, its goodness consists in pleasantness. While this claim
implies that no pleasant things are bad, and that all pleasant things are ‘good just insofar
as’ they are pleasant (351c), it does not imply that ‘pleasure and the good are the same’.
Compare the Gorgias 499b-500d, where Socrates employs the contention that
what is pleasant is good, builds from this to the assertion that we do what is pleasant for
the sake of the good, but then concludes that the pleasant and the good are distinct. There
too, the initial prompt for this line of argument is Callicles’ assertion that some pleasures
are better, others worse: Socrates at first challenges this (based as it is, like Protagoras’
scruples, on a supercilious view of honor and value) but then uses it to introduce the need
for a true knowledge of the good. Hence, from Socrates’ point of view, the real question
on the table at this juncture in the Protagoras is whether in saying ‘to live pleasantly is
good’ means that one is condemned to whatever passing or immediate pleasures attract
one, as opposed to being able to construct a pleasant life which fits the test of the rational
good. Thus Socrates’ refutation of the many is not the establishment of a thoroughgoing
hedonism for himself but rather of an endorsement of pleasure as part of a rational good:
the nucleus of the same view that will be defended in the Philebus. And so I endorse a
compatibilism across the dialogues on these issues, but not on the grounds of Rudebusch
2000, who reads and endorses Socrates’ position as the ‘hedonist thesis that there is a
single standard of pleasure by which all our choices can be measured’ (23); rather on the
inverse ground that Socrates is showing that even hedonism must be interpreted and
constrained by an overall theory of the good as the rational aim.
The inner frame: the refutation of the many
The question that Socrates now presses on Protagoras is where knowledge fits in the
relation between the pleasant and the good. Remember that the wider issue in the middle
frame is whether courage is a form of knowledge: Protagoras’ views about pleasure and
the good must therefore be tested to see whether they can make room for knowledge. I
now recapitulate the challenge of ‘the many’ which Socrates introduces in what I call the

15
‘inner frame’ for the measure doctrine [please ignore the solid lines here and below as
typographical gremlins which I have been unable to expunge]:
Come now, Protagoras, and reveal this about your mind: What do you think about
knowledge? Do you go along with the many or not? The many think that
knowledge (epistêmês) is neither strong (ischuron) nor fit to lead (hêgemonikon)
nor fit to rule (archikon); instead, [they think that] while knowledge is often
present in a man it is not knowledge itself which rules (archein) but something
else, whether anger, pleasure, pain, at times love, often fear – they think of his
knowledge as if it is being dragged about by all these other things like a slave
(hôsper peri andrapodou, perielkomenês upo tôn allôn apantôn). Does it seem
(dokei) like that to you, or that knowledge (epistêmê) is something noble and such
as to rule a man (kalon…hoion archein tou anthrôpou), and if someone were to
know the good and the bad, he would not be forced (kratêthênai) by anything to
act other than as knowledge commands (epistêmê keleuêi), and so knowledge
(phronêsin) would be sufficient to save a man.
(352b-c, my translation, partly following Lombardo and Bell in Cooper, with
thanks to Raphael Woolf for suggesting the translations of ‘fit to lead’ and ‘fit to
rule’ to bring out the –ikos endings)
Protagoras agrees that so it seems to him (dokei: a neat allusion to his ‘man is the
measure’ doctrine?), and adds: ‘it would be shameful (aischron) for me to admit that
wisdom (sophian) and knowledge (epistêmên) are not such as to be most powerful
(kratiston) of all things in human affairs’. Socrates then announces that he agrees with
Protagoras, but warns that ‘most people aren’t going to be convinced by us’ (352d,
Lombardo and Bell in Cooper trans.). Notice that here Socrates is positioning himself
against the views of the many, and on the side of Protagoras. He will use Protagoras’
agreement that knowledge is inherently such as to rule, as a lever (ultimately) against his
view that courage is radically different from knowledge.
I begin by observing that despite the formulation of the inner frame passage just
quoted at length, it subsequently emerges that what ‘the many’ think is not what they

16
themselves think, but rather a doctrine they are advancing in the first person. Socrates
makes this clear a few lines later:
you [Protagoras] know that the many (hoi polloi tôn anthrôpôn) will not be
persuaded by me and by you, but they say that most people (pollous) are
unwilling (ouk ethelein) to do what is best, even though they know (gignôskontas)
what it is and are able to do it, but act otherwise’ (352d4-7, my trans. modifying
Lombardo and Bell)
It is easy to elide hoi polloi and pollous here: easy, but mistaken. For it is significant that
‘the many’ (hoi polloi, as agents in the nominative case) do not assert that they
themselves act akratically. Rather they assert that ‘most people’ (pollous, as objects in the
accusative case: I will continue to distinguish the two groups as hoi polloi and pollous
even when having to use these Greek terms ungrammatically) do so. Even if one holds
that the extensions of hoi polloi and pollous must logically overlap (since both refer to a
majority), so that the many may indeed be speaking about themselves (as is borne out
when Socrates enjoins them to visit the sophists for instruction (357e: a passage flagged
earlier and to be discussed later), it is crucial that hoi polloi are not avowing akrasia but
rather describing it. They are speaking not in the first-person but in the third. Indeed
there is a double distancing here. Protagoras (who is the real focus of the discussion) is
not made himself to avow akrasia, but is rather shown its refutation via the refutation of
the many; and the many themselves are not made to avow it but are rather made only to
describe it in the putative actions of those they describe as pollous.
The double distancing of akrasia bears out Moran’s contention discussed above,
that it is impossible to avow akrasia when speaking as a responsible practical agent. 16
One can describe and even predict one’s own akratic actions, but one does so in a
theoretical mode which fails to affect the sense in which as a practical agent one cannot
intend to act akratically. This is why, as Moran explains, Sartre calls such predictions
‘bad faith’. 17 Akrasia is in this perspective – a perspective which the double distancing in
the Protagoras reveals to be Platonic as well as that of the practical turn in the modern
philosophy of self-knowledge – is not a failure of the will to dominate agency but a

17
failure to exert integrative agency altogether. For Plato, such self-integration comes from
the executive rule of knowledge manifested in the virtues; for Moran, it comes from
rational deliberation; for McGeer, it comes from exercising forms of self-control which
are akin to virtues. Moran and McGeer speak of the special status of self-knowledge;
Plato speaks of knowledge simpliciter, but treats it as an executive form of practical
agency which functions similarly to this modern conception of self-knowledge, or so I am
arguing.
The core passage: is the measure doctrine Socratic gospel?
The many deny that knowledge is inherently executive, taking its rule to be contingent on
not being overthrown by a rival passion or desire. Socrates too in the ‘measure doctrine’
ignores the executive role of knowledge. Instead he articulates the measure doctrine in
simple terms of possession of knowledge or its lack, which is ignorance. Thus he
contends that the many are making a simple mistake of measurement, a bad exchange: by
‘being overcome’ they must, Socrates imagines telling them, mean that in exchange for
less of the good things they take more of the bad things (355e). In other words, what the
many call ‘being overcome by power’ is actually ignorance of the art of measurement
(357d).
Now, because Protagoras was first of all in the inner frame enrolled with Socrates
on the side of knowledge as all-powerful in human activity, he must accept this
conclusion. But the many believe that ‘being overcome by pleasure’ is not ignorance,
but something else, and so, thinking it not to be teachable (ou didaktou, 357e), do not go
to sophists or send their children for instruction. The last sentence of this peroration is
crucial in calling the validity of the measure doctrine into question, as was highlighted
earlier: for the implication which Socrates draws from the measure doctrine is that he
should join Protagoras in admonishing the many that they should be sending themselves
and their children to study with sophists. To recall the outrageous formulation he uses:
‘By worrying about your money and not giving it to them, you all do badly in both
private and public life’ (357e).
Given this red flag, how should we assess the art of measurement and the part it
plays in the refutation of the many? The art of measurement has done its job of moving

18
Protagoras to an acknowledgement of the power of knowledge, hence can be used to
refute his view that courage is entirely different from knowledge, but it cannot be
seriously ascribed to Socrates as the entirety of the latter’s position. Were it so, then
Socrates would be straightforwardly committed to the view that because virtue is
knowledge, it must be teachable (by sophists or others): yet this is precisely the claim
which he highlights as aporetic at the end of the dialogue (361b). On the other hand,
Socrates has signaled that this is a joint refutation, and so there must be a sense in which
he too can be interpreted as agreeing to the position – even though that agreement must
be interpreted so as to insulate it from the implication that virtue is (sophistically)
teachable.
The clue to a resolution lies at 357b, where Socrates says ‘what exactly this art,
this knowledge is, we can inquire into later; that it is knowledge of some sort is enough
for the demonstration which Protagoras and I have to give in order to answer the question
you [the many, putatively] asked us.’ (trans. Lombardo & Bell). As others have
observed (among them Ferrari 1992: 125-6), this is a hint that the measure doctrine is not
to be read as Socratic gospel. 18 That doctrine has served to refute the many – to show
them that ‘if you laugh at us now, you will be laughing at yourselves (357d) – but has
not in itself made clear the (executive) nature of knowledge or its relation to virtue.
Immediately following the crucial caveat at 357b, Socrates recalls the starting
point of what I have called the inner frame discussion between him and Protagoras: he
recalls that the specter of the many was raised ‘when we were agreeing that nothing was
stronger than knowledge, which always prevails, whenever it is present, over pleasure
and everything else’ (357c, dropping ‘or better’ supplied without support by Lombardo &
Bell). The back-reference is to the inner frame proper at 352b, where Socrates
challenged Protagoras whether he agreed with ‘most people’ who think that knowledge
‘is not a powerful thing, neither fit to lead nor fit to rule’, but rather that knowledge may
be present in a person even though and when ‘what rules him [often] is not knowledge,
but rather anything else’ (i.e., anger, pleasure, pain, love, fear). What Socrates and
Protagoras had agreed upon at 352b – but which is subsequently silently elided in the
transformation of the measure doctrine into a justification for sophistic teaching for pay –
is the identification of knowledge as inherently ruling. And this, I submit, is the hidden

19
resolution to the aporia, which would (if recalled) have blocked the deterioration of the
measure doctrine into a justification for sophistry. Knowledge is inherently such as to
exercise rule. The rule of pleasure can arise only if the rule of knowledge is absent: the
former is not a cause, but a consequence, of the latter’s absence.
This interpretation is arguably even voiced by Socrates in the sequel to the
agreement on the measure doctrine, when he remarks: ‘Being overcome (to hêttô) is
nothing other than ignorance (amathia), nor is governing oneself (kreittô heautou)
anything other than wisdom (sophia)’ (358c1-3, my trans.: Lombardo & Bell inexact).
This is most often read as a mere restatement of the measure doctrine, as if it were stating
that what the many have referred to as ‘being overcome by’ and ‘being governed by’
(picking up ‘their’ usage of hettômenous and kratoumenous, 352e1-2, my trans.) pain,
pleasure, etc., is merely to be equated with the measure doctrine’s definition of
ignorance. But the statement can also be read with a different argumentative force.
Rather than reducing ‘being overcome’ and ‘governing oneself’ to conventional
understandings of knowledge, Socrates is here expanding our understanding of
knowledge to include its ineliminable role in governing oneself. ‘Wisdom’ is not merely
something to be possessed, stuffed into the soul. Rather it consists precisely in ‘governing
oneself’ by exercising the virtues, and in particular the virtue of self-control. This
formulation is very close to that used for the virtue of sôphrosunê in other dialogues, the
Alcibiades, Gorgias, and Laws among them, though this observation is here a placeholder
for a full discussion of those passages and their relevance. 19
We may infer that the establishment of the rule of knowledge is not something
which the teaching of the sophists can establish. Knowledge is not something to be
transmitted by a teacher but rather a capacity for deliberation and self-governance – for
practical agency along the lines of Moran and McGeer -- to be cultivated in one’s own
soul. Such cultivation involves the cultivation and exercise of the virtues and in
particular of the virtue of temperance or self-control. It is the significance of knowledge
as inherently executive on which Socrates and Protagoras had originally seemed to agree,
but which the subsequent elaboration of the measure doctrine in its slide toward sophistry
elides.

20
What is wrong with the many’s account of akrasia is not their contention that
knowledge sometimes fails to rule. It is rather their contention that the cause of this
failure is the success of a rival in ruling, as if knowledge were simply one contender
among others (including pleasure, pain, etc) to wield the scepter of executive authority.
Getting measurement right is indeed part of the task of knowledge, but it is only part.
Knowledge must succeed in ruling, and to do so, as the Simonides exegesis showed, it
must operate in conjunction with the virtue of self-control or temperance. Hence the
solution to phenomenal akrasia is not the art of measurement conceived as a theoretical
instrument which will provide knowledge in the form of a possession. It lies rather in the
virtue of self-control of which Socrates in his exegesis of Simonides spoke, and in the
view of knowledge as inherently exercising rule with which he presented the many as
disagreeing. 20
Sôphrosunê as the exercise of the rule of knowledge
In the Protagoras, we encounter the role of sôphrosunê or temperance in this kind of
argument only indirectly. In explicating Simonides, Socrates spoke of the kalos kagathos
and of the agathos, and his language of forcing suggested an effort at restoring the
virtues, implicitly in particular the virtue of temperance which is what anger disrupts.
Even earlier in the dialogue, Protagoras’ ‘parts of a face’ view had been attacked by a
Socratic argument concluding (with Protagoras’ agreement) that wisdom and temperance
are the same thing (333b). I suggest that we are meant to read the refutation of the many
as involving this already agreed identity (given that the middle frame treats only the
status of courage vis-à-vis wisdom as still to be established), though the nature of the
identity is notoriously not unpacked in this or other dialogues celebrating the unity of the
virtues. So if wisdom and temperance are here to be spoken of as the same thing, what
might that mean in respect of the executive rule, or role, of knowledge?
Here a moment in the Gorgias may help us. There, at a certain stage of the
argument, Callicles has ascribed intelligence and bravery to the ‘superior’ men he
admires, describing them as phronimous and andreious, and has redefined justice too as
their having a greater share, as rulers, than do the ruled (491cd). But he balks at
Socrates’ introduction of sôphrosunê: this is the one virtue that he wishes not to redefine,

21
but to reject altogether as unbefitting to such men. 21 Socrates, for his part, introduces
sôphrosunê by invoking the need for ‘each individual [to rul[e] himself’, and says that he
means by this ‘just what the many (hoi polloi) mean: being self-controlled (sôphrona)
and master of oneself (enkratê auton heautou), ruling (archonta) the pleasures and
appetites within oneself’ (491de). 22
This is a strikingly strange locution. Why should Socrates go out of the way to
identify his view of sôphrosunê with that of ‘the many’ or hoi polloi? 23 I suggest that this
may well be a reference to the Protagoras, to the many (hoi polloi) there whose view of
what has come to be labeled akrasia can with its help be better understood. Socrates in
the Gorgias and the many of the Protagoras agree that sôphrosunê is the exercise of selfcontrol,
which is understood as controlling and ruling one’s pleasures and appetites. The
many however, if implicitly here, see it as sometimes overcome by pleasures which rebel
against their master, thus as fragile and as unrelated to the knowledge which may or may
not be present. Callicles, for his part, insists that knowledge is entirely unrelated to selfcontrol:
it is unbefitting for the knowing man so to limit himself. But the Socratic view
departs from the view of the many, as from the view of the elite Callicles, in insisting that
the full virtue (as opposed to mere continence) of temperance or self-control arises from
and through the exercise of knowledge. The virtues are a unity, and that unity is
knowledge, but that does not dissolve the virtues into knowledge. Rather it calls for an
account of how knowledge rules in and through the virtues. 24 Indeed, Socrates goes on to
argue in the Gorgias that knowledge is indeed only fully realized in and through the
virtue of self-control, which is the root of all the other virtues. The failure of virtue arises
not from an absence of knowledge conceived merely as ignorance, but from an absence
of knowledge – the absence of its rule – which is tantamount to its impotence.
I conclude this section with a remark on the contrasting strategies of the
Protagoras and the Gorgias. The many in the Protagoras describe the pollous as
knowing the good, but not willing (ouk ethelein) to do what is good, instead doing
something else. The ‘orators and tyrants’ whom Socrates and Polus debate in the
Gorgias are, by contrast, confident in pursuing what seems to them best (doxê beltiston,
466e and passim). They may not enjoy full knowledge, but they are phenomenologically
fully committed to acting on their belief about what it is good to pursue. In refuting the

22
Protagoras’ many’s description of the pollous, Socrates focuses on questioning the
knowledge of the latter (though only implicitly questioning its executive force as well as
its measure-doctrine possession); in refuting Polus’s description of the orators and
tyrants, he focuses on questioning whether what they think they want to do (what seems
to them best) is what they really want to do (which he argues is what is actually best).
One might have expected these terms of refutation to be reversed. Why not focus
on the sense of ‘willingness’ or ‘voluntariness’ in the Protagoras (which after all
highlights ouk ethelein), and on the true nature of what is best in the Gorgias (which after
all highlights doxa, as opposed to knowledge, of what is best)? The answer lies in the
larger dramatic context of each dialogue. In line with its refutation of the man-as-themeasure
doctrine, the Protagoras is focused on vindicating truth as opposed to mere
appearance: it is focused, that is, on the theoretical existence of knowledge, leaving its
practical or executive aspect largely submerged. (This may also explain why Socrates
introduces a ‘measure doctrine’: to refute further the ‘measure doctrine’ of the
eponymous sophist.) In contrast, the Gorgias is concerned with the status of rhetoric as a
putative rival to politikê technê, and so focuses on undermining the self-confident selfunderstanding
of the orators (and the tyrants whom they admire). The two moves
however are complementary. Both rely on the assumption that all men desire (what is
really) good. Both ascribe vice to a failure of knowledge, yet both point to – without
fully spelling out – an executive dimension of that knowledge, an implication which both
dialogues support by proposing an identification between the virtue of sôphrosunê and
wisdom, albeit one which has to be unpacked. The doctrine of the unity of the virtues
should be considered a starting point for the understanding of the relation between virtue
and knowledge rather than as eliminating the need for such an understanding.
V. The Republic: endorsing the view of the many?
At first glance, as noted earlier, the Republic seems expressly to signal its endorsement of
something like the view of the many in the Protagoras, and so to reject or depart from the
refutation of that view by Socrates in the latter dialogue. In Book IX, Socrates introduces
the man-lion-beast image as an ‘image of the soul in words’ designed so that ‘the person
who says this sort of thing’ – namely, that ‘injustice profits a completely unjust person

23
who is believed to be just’ – ‘will know what he is saying’ (all 589b). To such a praiser
of hidden injustice as profitable (a thinly designed portrait of Glaucon himself setting out
the ring of Gyges challenge in Book II), Socrates proposes to Glaucon the following
response:
…let’s tell him that he is simply saying that it is beneficial for him, first, to feed
the multiform beast well and make it strong, and also the lion and all that pertains
to him; second, to starve and weaken the human being within, so that he is
dragged along (elkesthai) wherever either of the other two leads; and, third, to
leave the parts to bite and kill one another rather than accustoming them to each
other and making them friendly. (588e-589a, trans. Grube/Reeve in Cooper)
Notice the reference to being ‘dragged along’ (elkesthai) by the two lower parts of the
soul: this is a form of the same verb embedded in ‘dragged about’ (perielkomenês) in the
statement ascribed to the many at Prt. 352c2. As remarked at the outset of this paper,
this reference may appear to be an unambiguously pointed rejection of Socrates’ rejection
of the many’s view: in other words a revocation of the measure doctrine, in order to
endorse a passional view of akrasia, allowing that indeed the other parts of the soul can
drag knowledge about.
I propose an alternative reading of this passage. I read the implied reference to the
Protagoras instead as a signal that the real issue at stake between Socrates and the many
in that dialgoue was the question of whether other psychic forces can exercise an
executive role in the absence of a prior collapse of the natural wielder of such a role,
which is knowledge. What is weakened when the ‘human being within’ is starved is the
executive rule of knowledge. And Socrates takes care to state that the weakening must
take place first: in my terms, the rule of knowledge must first collapse along with the
virtues in which it is normally realized, before pleasure or other passions or emotions –
whether conceived as affections or as fully fledged agent-like parts -- have a chance of
taking over.
It is this sequence that is really at stake in the disagreement between Socrates and
the many. The many hold that pleasure may rise up even against an executively

24
functioning knowledge, or rather, they fail to identify the executive role of knowledge at
all. Socrates in the measure doctrine seems to advance only the possession of knowledge
against this view, but that formulation is maladroit and engenders sophistry. The broader
discussion of the Protagoras shows that anger (and by extension pleasure, pain, love, and
fear) may arise even in the virtuous person’s soul, but ruling reason can exercise virtue to
reestablish the appropriate balance. If passions, pleasures or pains are not reintegrated
into a virtuous balance, they do not enslave reason, but rather they set up their tyranny (in
the language to be used in the Republic) in the space left vacant by the collapse of its
supporting virtue and thereby of its rule. Only reason is an inherent ruler: the tyranny
exercised in its failure is imposture. 25 Hence it is not mere ignorance, but the specific
failure of the rule of knowledge, which generates the phenomenon known as akrasia.
Contrary to Davidson’s story (which he attributed to Plato as well as to Dante), for Plato
– and for his Socrates – desire does not pull reason from her throne, nor pleasure
overcome reason as in the view of the many. Rather the fundamental precondition for
akrasia is that reason’s rule collapses in a failure of virtue.
The Republic may seem to suggest here in Book IX that the three parts of the soul
are simply rivals for rule – that, as Moran charged, Plato (and other ancients) failed to see
the difference in kind between the first-person authoritative rule of reason and the ‘rule’
of its rivals (generalizing his point quoted earlier from a contrast between reason and the
senses, to reason, thumos, and epithumia). But this impression can be dispelled. Reason
in the Book IX image is identified with the human being, who is for Plato fundamentally
different in status from the lower-part animals. Only the human being has the
deliberative faculties to exercise rational rule. When the virtues of the whole person
(encasing, in the image, human, lion, and beast) fail and that rational rule is undermined,
what ‘rules’ in its place is not true ‘rule’ at all. The lower parts of the souls are better
described as impostors than as rivals: their rule is fake rule, not the rule of a genuine
rival. (Compare the impostor-sophists of the Statesman with the genuine closest rivals of
the true statemen, the rhetor, general, and judge: Lane 1998.)
This last point is borne out by an analysis of Republic IV. On my reading, we
should take very seriously Socrates’ claim in that book about the ‘naturalness’ of rule by
reason. This is not just a way of saying that reason rules better. It is rather an assertion

25
that reason’s rule is inherently different in kind from what I would call the impostor-rule
of the other parts of the soul. Consider for example the identification of injustice as a
kind of civil war at 444b. One of the parts rebels:
[it] rises up (epanastasin) against the whole soul, in order to rule it
inappropriately (archei….ou prosêkon), but this rebellious class is by nature such
as is suited itself (phusei…prepein) to be a slave (douleuein), while the other part
is not a slave but belongs to the ruling kind’ (444b2-5), reading with the
manuscripts as printed in Slings; trans. Grube/Reeve in Cooper modified).
The idea of the naturalness of the rule of reason is reiterated at 444d, following an
analogy with health and disease: ‘isn’t to produce justice to establish the parts of the soul
in a natural relation of control (kata phusin kathistanai kratein), one by another, while to
produce disease is to establish a relation of ruling and being ruled contrary to nature
(para phusin archein te kai archesthai), one by another?’ (444d7-10, trans. Grube/Reeve
in Cooper modified). So it is only rule by reason which is according to nature. Its rule –
its executive authority – is different in kind. It is not merely one rival among others, but
the only one which is a natural ruler (recall the language of knowledge as ‘fit to lead’ and
‘fit to rule’ on which Socrates and Protagoras agreed). The others are mere impostors.
VI. Conclusion
In closing, we may consider a rival reading of the refutation of the many in the
Protagoras advanced by Raphael Woolf. This reading concludes that after Socrates has
identified the special ‘indicative word-deed inconsistency’ of the many in that dialogue,
there is nothing which follows for the many to do. Woolf contends:
Socrates uses the many’s stated principle of action to show that they cannot be
acting akratically. There is nothing for the many to “do” as a result of this
discovery. What has been shown overtly is not the falsity of a belief that might
need eliminating but the non-existence of an action whose elimination is thereby
redundant. Nothing further is required on the basis of that conclusion - the many

26
can stand happily on the principle they have espoused, and carry on with their
lives. (Woolf 2002: 244)
A first challenge to this contention has been developed above. We saw that Socrates in
fact draws an explicit injunction to action from his refutation of the many – that the many
should go study with the sophists for a fee – even though this is flagged as problematic.
So it seems that the views of the many do indeed have ‘normative’ implications (they are
not a merely ‘indicative’ logical contradiction, in Woolf’s terms (2002: 233)). If the
many hold to their own explanation, they will not feel the need to study with the sophists;
if they accept Socrates’ putative refutation, they will make haste to do so.
More broadly, Woolf’s argument overlooks the further point raised above, that the
many are not the real interlocutors of the passage in any case. On the one hand, they do
not themselves avow akrasia but ascribe it to those they characterize as ‘most people’
(pollous); and on the other hand, they themselves are only a briefly imagined proxy for
the purposes of the interrogation of Protagoras. And the word-deed inconsistency of
Protagoras – one way to loosely describe akrasia – is in fact, in Woolf’s terms, not
merely indicative but rather normative: it bears on his acceptance of arguments and of
their implications. Such an inconsistency is morally of the highest importance (Lane
1998; cf. Gergel 2000).
Protagoras demonstrates normative word-deed inconsistency at the end of the
dialogue. Socrates having led him to the conclusion that ‘wisdom about what is and is
not to be feared is courage and is the opposite of this ignorance’ on the basis of previous
verbal agreements, ‘[h]e would not even nod at this; he remained silent’ (360d, trans.
Lombardo and Bell). Subsequently, lashing out at Socrates that the latter wants only to
win, he qualifies and undercuts the verbal agreement to which he has been driven, saying
that he will agree only in order to gratify Socrates (360d-e). Here the word-deed
inconsistency is in relation to the purported agreement itself: both through body language
and verbally, Protagoras enacts an undercutting of his own verbal agreement. Strikingly,
both Polus and Callicles in the Gorgias exhibit similar normative word-deed
inconsistency in which each goes along with the argument while making clear that he
does not really accept it. For Polus, consider for example his refusal to enunciate

27
agreement at 480e: ‘I think these statements are absurd, Socrates, though no doubt you
think they agree with those expressed [and agreed to by Polus] earlier’, trans. Zeyl; for
Callicles, the response to Socrates’ question ‘Are we to put this down as true?’ as
‘Certainly, if that pleases you more’ (514a, trans. Zeyl). These failures to integrate words
and deeds (even at the level of enacting allegiance to their own verbal agreements) model
a paradigm failure of the virtue of temperance, arising (we may infer on the basis of the
argument of this paper) from a failure of the executive rule of knowledge. In this respect
it is the drama of the dialogues more than the purported teaching of the measure doctrine
which can instruct us. 26
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1 Plato only once uses any cognate of akrasia, in the context of a child born through the
akrateia of a male guardian who has sex when either too young or too old for optimal
reproduction (Rep. 461b), a passage isolated from the context of those normally
interpreted as ‘denial’ or ‘vindication’ of akrasia (but see its mention in Walsh 1980
[1971]). There is no explanation given for this failure of self-control, nor is this text
referred to in the passages of primary interest to us.
2 Christopher Bobonich (2002: 277-8) notes the absence of ‘the will’ in the Republic’s
tripartite scheme, while following David Sedley (1992: 146-8) in arguing that the thumos
‘can account for the person’s willpower’ as an ally of reason.
3 Nicholas Denyer (2008:108, on Prt. 322b5-c1), remarks that whereas ‘tradition had
confidently associated’ aidôs and dikê, ‘[it was, however, becoming the custom [in late
fifth and early fourth century Greece] to associate – sometimes even to equate – aidôs
with sôphrosûnê (Chrm.160e, Thuc. I.84.3, Isoc.7.48, Xen. Smp. I.8, Arist. EE 1234a27-
33).’ He continues, in a remark to be recalled when we return to the question of the unity
of the virtues below: ‘Such vagaries present a crack where Socrates can insert the wedge
of his question about the unity of virtues (329c1-d2).’
4 In this respect my approach converges with that of Ferrari 1992, who argues ‘that
neither Socrates the character nor Plato the writer is refusing to acknowledge the
phenomenology of akrasia (to give this behavior its customary label)’ (115). However,

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Ferrari accepts the standard cognitive reading that akrasia in the Protagoras is ‘a kind of
ignorance’, while advancing his own stimulating understanding of the kind of ignorance
involved as a second-order ‘ignorance of their own ignorance’ (115).
5 Philip Pettit and Michael Smith have argued in their account of failures of practical
reason, among which they classify akrasia, that what matters is that desire and
deliberation are in the right relation to each other. The point is not that reason is
constantly exercising active control over desire (Pettit and Smith 1993), but that right
relation is maintained through the ongoing exercise of what they call the ‘executive
virtues’ which include temperance. These virtues maintain a balance rather than
assuming directive control (1993:76-77). I find this account to resonate with that of Plato
despite the fact that they take their own inspiration for it from Aristotle.
6 Here Aristotle’s opposition between akrasia and enkrateia is helpful, as is his insistence
that the phronimos would not exhibit either, but would rather exercise the self-control of
full virtue. But Aristotle went wrong in his initial account of Plato’s Socrates in NE VII,
misunderstanding the significance of the executive function of knowledge for him (even
though at 1147b he endorses Socrates’ conclusion after all). We may wonder whether
Aristotle goes wrong in his accounts of Socrates and Plato deliberately, for his own
purposes; I have documented such a case in his presentation of purported Socratic
eironeia in Lane 2006, as has Garnsey 2007 in his diagnosis of Aristotle’s presentation of
purported Platonic communism.
7 Two further features of this view commend it to a comparison. The first is that it
identifies rationality with psychic health (136). The other is that it rejects a sharp line
between theoretical and practical reason, a line which Plato, notably, never drew: ‘from

32
the first-person perspective, theoretical reflection…cannot be kept separate from
deliberative reflection…’ (184). In Moran, this line is erased insofar as any theoretical
proposition must be practically endorsed to count as mine; in contrast, in Pettit and Smith
(1993), the significance of such practical endorsement is highlighted rather by drawing a
sharp line between theoretical and practical reason. In my view, Plato, who does not
draw that line, nevertheless achieves a parallel form of highlighting by speaking of
knowledge as ruling.
8 McGeer presents the agency model as involving three contentions: ‘(1) intentional states
are dispositional; (2) self-ascriptions are, in many cases, commissive; and (3) first-person
authority is an acquired capacity instilled in us, and preserved by us, only to the degree
that we act, and expect others to act, as responsible self-directed agents’ (1996: 506).
9 At this point in the longer version of the paper delivered at the Keeling Symposium in
November 2009, I gave a taxonomy of representative approaches to akrasia in both the
philosophical literature and in the scholarly literature on Plato. While I have had to cut
out this section for reasons of time and space, I have retained all the references in the
bibliography and would be happy to discuss the views expressed in these works.
10 It is true that the poetic exposition which I take to constitute the ‘outer frame’ is
marked by Socrates as a digression from the main argument about virtue, and disparaged
by him as similar to the ‘second-rate drinking parties of the agora crowd’ (347c): thus
one could say that this discussion is not properly described as a textual frame for the
measure doctrine at all, as Wolfgang Mann objected to me in discussion of an earlier
draft of this paper. But because it is in the poetic exposition that the ‘denial of akrasia’ is

33
first raised proleptically, I consider it a relevant argumentative frame even though it is not
strictly a dramatic one.
11 Compare Denyer 2008:111, commentary on Prt.323d6, remarking that it is in
Protagoras’ interest ‘to have us confuse “There are things we can do to improve
ourselves” with “The thing we should do is submit to the instruction of a sophist”.’ Jyl
Gentzler has raised in discussion of an earlier version of this paper a number of important
challenges to my reading of this red flag: I have tried to respond to these and defend my
reading in the present text.
12 It is true that many arguments end in aporia in Plato which still contain merit, another
objection made to me by Jyl Gentzler: perhaps the best example is the end of the Meno,
when the definition of knowledge as ‘true belief with a logos’ is dismissed but is felt by
many interpreters nevertheless to be an indication of the path one should continue to
pursue. However, the partnership with the sophist which leaves his goals intact which
frames this argument suggests to me that we have the right to be more skeptical of this
argument. I do concede that the measure octrine is correct insofar as virtue turns out to
be some kind of knowledge, but in leaving out the executive dimension of knowledge, it
is also crucially misleading.
13 Burnyeat in Burnyeat and Barnes (1980) 186: ‘Much of what Plato says about
knowledge and its relation to true belief falls into place if we read him, not as
misdescribing the concept which philosophers now analyze in terms of justified true
belief, but as elaborating a richer concept of knowledge tantamount to understanding’.
14 An implicit reference to Socrates in the Crito, perhaps?

34
15 Compare the sophist’s conventional scorn for the many as irrelevant rabble at 353a:
‘why is it necessary for us to investigate the opinion of ordinary people, who will say
whatever occurs to them?’.
16 See the similar claim made in Gombay 1988.
17 This also better explains the third-personal feature of the reference to ‘the many’
themselves which Raphael Woolf has discussed than his own explanation of the practical
insignificance of their form of word-deed inconsistency (Woolf 2002); this is a point to
which I return in my conclusion.
18 Ferrari 1992: 127 also notes the aporia at the end of the dialogue as a second hint that
the measure doctrine is not to be taken as gospel. However, he mislocates the problem
raised in the aporia, viewing it as a failure of Socrates to have proven to Protagoras that
virtue is knowledge.
19 On the role of the virtues in the Laws, including the two definitions of sôphrosunê as
enkrateia and as sumphônia between desires and the good, see Bobonich 2002: 288-92,
esp. 289-90. He discusses the ‘reciprocity of the virtues’ as maintained, but with
changing defenses and explanations, from the middle dialogues to the Laws.
20 This is the best way to explain Socrates’ single use of ‘knows or believes’ (358c) in
what is otherwise an account of what is distinctive to knowledge per se, a use which
C.C.W. Taylor (1976) in his commentary ad. loc. can only gloss as a simple mistake.
‘Knows or believes’ signals that the important thing is not the cognitive possession, but
the role that it plays. As the Theaetetus shows, belief can play a ruling role analogous to
that of knowledge, though it cannot do so securely and perfectly.

35
21 Callicles however coordinates temperance and justice – meaning here conventional
justice – in his coruscating condemnation at 491e-492c.
22 This Gorgias passage is adduced by Denyer 2008:123 in reference to Prt. 329e6-7.
Compare also Rep. 430e: ‘moderation is surely a kind of order, the mastery of certain
kinds of pleasures and desires’, a passage in which Socrates goes on to elaborate that
‘self-control’ means that ‘the naturally better part is in control of the whole’ (431a) even
though ‘the stronger self that does the controlling is the same [person] as the weaker self
that gets controlled’ (430e-431a). This passage was discussed by Aryeh Kosman in his
contribution to the Keeling Symposium 2009.
23 Denyer 2008:170 remarks on Socrates’ contempt for the hoi polloi in the Protagoras.
24 Hence, while I credit an article by Julia Annas with calling my attention to this
passage, and agree with her contention that for Socrates, sôphrosunê is the basic virtue, I
cannot endorse either her reading of that virtue as ‘knowledge of what is impersonal’
(Annas 1985: 136) – seeing it as I do rather as an executive form of agency selfknowledge
– or her view that the Republic replaces sôphrosunê with justice as the basic
value and models wisdom instead on mathematics. As noted above, I have argued
elsewhere that sôphrosunê is developmentally, at least for natural philosophers, the
psychic core of justice and courage, arising from the love of knowledge, a view we can
find in both the Republic and the Symposium (Lane 2007).
25 In her comments on an earlier version of this paper at the 2009 Keeling Symposium,
Miriam Leonard drew attention to Nietzsche’s discussion of akrasia in The Twilight of
the Idols, where he rejects the Platonic distinction between natural and unnatural, or
illegitimate rule: ‘When a man find its necessary to create a tyrant out reason, there is no

36
small danger that something else wishes to play the role of tyrant’ (‘The Problem of
Socrates’, sec.10, quoted from the Wordsworth Edition, 2007: 15).
26 This is a shortened and now substantially revised version of a paper which was first
written for the Keeling Symposium on Self-Knowledge in Ancient Philosophy,
University College London, November 2009, and subsequently lightly revised for a
conference at Columbia University funded by the Columbia-Paris Alliance in February
2010. I am grateful to my Keeling hosts, Bob Sharples and Fiona Leigh, and
commentator Miriam Leonard; my Columbia hosts, Katja Vogt and Dimitri El Murr, and
commentator Melissa Schwartzberg; and to fellow symposiasts and attendees for
discussion on both occasions, in particular for pressing me to rethink the relation between
knowledge and self-control. A future version of the paper will appear in the proceedings
of the Keeling Symposium to be published by Brill in which I expect to acknowledge
comments from discussions at Stanford University and Harvard University in the spring
of 2010. I am also indebted to Tori McGeer for comments on a prior draft of the Keeling
version and to her and Philip Pettit for much inspiration.