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

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  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
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 and 14:   13  exercises his virtue by -
Page 15 and 16:   15  ‘inner frame’ for the
Page 17 and 18:   17  failure to exert integrat
Page 19 and 20:   19  resolution to the aporia,
Page 21:   21  but to reject altogether
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
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1 Harvard University Political Theory Colloquium For 11 March 2010 ...

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