From the Beginning to Plato

SOCRATES AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 311
expertise to be ontologically distinct from its power. It is not a power; it is what
confers a power on its possessor.
While I cannot fully argue the point here, I believe that this is to take the
analogy with the parts of the face too strictly. Recall that the point of the
analogies is to get clear about what Protagoras is maintaining when he claims that
the virtues are distinct. Is he maintaining that they all are (or have) the same kind
of power but differ in some other way, or is he maintaining that their powers
differ as well? It is at least open to Socrates to maintain contrary to Protagoras
that they are (or have) the same kind of power, and so that they do not differ in
any essential way. 58 Moreover, there is simply no organ analogous to the eye in
the case of expertise or the virtues. Surely, the possession of fully functioning
vocal chords does not suffice for the possession of the expertise of rhetoric, for
example. But to postulate some entity between the vocal chords and the power to
persuade that is rhetoric is simply to add an unnecessary ontological layer.
Indeed, it is to add an ontological layer that is not demanded by the text. None of
the passages that I have cited are incompatible with understanding expertise as
a kind of power in the way that knowledge—on a justified true belief model—is
a kind of belief. Perhaps most important, there are various passages in which
Socrates appears to use the word for power and the words for knowledge or
expertise interchangeably. 59 At the very least these passages indicate that the
ontological distinction that the present objection presupposes is of little moment
for Socrates. For all these reasons, as well as others, 60 I conclude that for
Socrates an expertise is some sort of power or capacity.
Saying this, however, only raises a further question: what according to
Socrates is a power or capacity? Surprisingly little attention has been devoted to
this question, but there are a few preliminary things we can say. First, a Socratic
power or capacity is typically associated with particular types of activities or
behaviours. 61 For example, in the Laches Socrates defines quickness as ‘the
power to do many things in a short time concerning speech and running and all
other things’ (Laches 192b1–3). In the Hippias Minor he describes the one who
has power (the dunatos) as the one ‘who does what he wants when he wants’
(Hippias Minor 366b7–c1). And finally in the Ion, Socrates says,
What moves you [Ion] is a divine power [dunamis], like the power
[dunamis] in the stone which Euripides dubbed the ‘Magnesian’, but which
most people call the ‘Heraclean’. This stone, you see, not only attracts iron
rings on their own, but also confers on them a power [dunamin] by which
they do the same thing that the stone does.
(Ion 533d3–31; adapted from Saunders trans.)
But as many commentators have pointed out, for Socrates, a thing does not have
a power simply in virtue of the fact that it acts or behaves in certain ways. It does
not have a power simply in virtue of what it does. Rather, for Socrates, a thing
has a power in virtue of some state of the thing that occasions it in the