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

More documents

Recommendations

Info

  14  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
Page 1 and 2:   1  Harvard University Politic
Page 3 and 4:   3  (Pettit 2004: 68). Plato
Page 5 and 6:   5  self-knowledge understood
Page 7 and 8:   7  achieved through self-inte
Page 9 and 10:   9  means of the art of measur
Page 11 and 12:   11  ruling. On this basis, we
Page 13:   13  exercises his virtue by -
Page 17 and 18:   17  failure to exert integrat
Page 19 and 20:   19  resolution to the aporia,
Page 21 and 22:   21  but to reject altogether
Page 23 and 24:   23  who is believed to be jus
Page 25 and 26:   25  that reason’s rule is i
Page 27 and 28:   27  agreement at 480e: ‘I t
Page 29 and 30:   29  Moran, Richard (2001). Au
Page 31 and 32:   31          
Page 33 and 34:   33          
Page 35 and 36:   35          

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

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?