Socrates offers a list of five virtues: wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, and piety. Are these just the same thing under different names, or are they different? Protagoras insists that courage, at least, is quite different from the others and often found in people who lack the other virtues. Socrates asks if courageous people are confident, and Protagoras agrees. Socrates asks if some people without knowledge are confident in facing dangers, and Protagoras agrees. Is their confidence courage? No, because they are foolish. But the wise are the most confident and the most confident are the most courageous; so it appears, Socrates concludes, that wisdom is courage.[6]
But at this point Protagoras objects. He does hold that all the courageous are confident, but not that all the confident are courageous. The fact that wisdom increases confidence does not entail that wisdom is courage because, on his view, confidence is not the same thing as courage. Protagoras has caught Socrates in a fallacious argument.[7] The issue is important, because if Protagoras can show that even one virtue is not a matter of knowledge, he can overthrow Socrates tacit assumption that all the virtues are alike, and all are instances of knowledge of a certain kind. If, on the other hand, Socrates can show that even the apparently most unintellectual virtue is an instance of knowledge, then he will have gone a long way to make his case.
Undaunted, Socrates sets off on a new tack. “What’s your view about knowledge?” he asks. “Do you agree with the many or not? They think something like this, that knowledge isn’t powerful nor authoritative nor in command, nor do they think of it in these terms at all. But even when knowledge is in a person, this knowledge doesn’t rule him, but something else: now anger, now pleasure, now pain, sometimes lust, often fear, so that they really think of knowledge as being like a slave, dragged about by everything else. Do you share this view of knowledge, or do you think of it as something noble and capable of ruling a person, so that if one discerns good and bad things, one wouldn’t be forced by any power to do anything but what knowledge commands, and wisdom would suffice by itself to rescue him?”[8]
Protagoras, the purveyor of knowledge, agrees with Socrates. But, Socrates asks, what shall we say to the many, who claim that even when they know what is best they are overcome by pleasure, pain, or some other passion? Protagoras thinks it is hardly worth replying to them, but Socrates insists that they must be instructed. He addresses an imaginary inquiry to them, with Socrates asking questions and Protagoras standing in for the common people as the two intellectuals jointly try to enlighten them.
Here Socrates departs from his usual method of examining only the views of his partner in discussion. But sometimes in his conversations Socrates makes his own suggestions to forward the discussion—by addressing questions to an imaginary answerer; but even in these cases, he conducts the same kind of inquiry, testing the consistency of the answers and thus the consistency of the answerer.
“Don’t you say, gentlemen,” Socrates asks of his imaginary answerers, “that something like this often happens when you are overcome by food or drink or sexual desire, which are pleasures, that knowing your actions to be bad, you do them anyway?”[9] He describes a case of what philosophers call weakness of will. Everyone seems to experience such behavior, but Socrates wants to challenge the phenomenon. He goes on to ask what makes the problematic actions bad. Isn’t it that they bring about pain in the long run? Protagoras agrees that so they will say. “Thus you pursue pleasure as being good and flee pain as being bad?”[10] Although Socrates is not didactic in his approach here, he has exposed the underlying value theory of the many as what philosophers call Hedonism, the theory that pleasure is the ultimate good and pain the ultimate evil.
He goes on to apply the value theory to the situation. You say, he continues, that you do bad because you’re overcome by pleasure. But if pleasure is the good, then you’re saying that you do bad because you are overcome by good. But that is absurd. What must be happening in terms of the hedonistic assumption is that those who show weakness of will lose a long-term good by giving in to an immediate but short-term good. What people need is some way of measuring or weighing the pleasures in question. Those pleasures that are nearby often seem more appealing than those far off, but we need a kind of art of perspective to see which are the most important. If that’s so, then “What would bring salvation to our lives? Wouldn’t it be the art of measurement, the control over appearances?”[11] Socrates goes on to draw his big conclusion: “Since then [this art] is a measuring, it is no doubt an art and a kind of knowledge.”[12]
In this argumentative triumph Socrates shows that even if pleasure is the good, life can’t consist merely in the mindless pursuit of pleasure. The difference between a good life and a bad life is marked by the presence of knowledge in the former and absence of knowledge in the latter, where the relevant knowledge is a kind of prudent ability to calculate outcomes. “So this is what ‘being overcome by pleasure’ turns out to be: the supreme ignorance—which Protagoras here professes to cure, as well as Prodicus and Hippias.”[13] Socrates exposes weakness of will as not a failure of will-power, but a lack of knowledge, and he makes his conclusion irresistible to the sophists by showing how they could incorporate the result into their own advertising campaigns.
But Socrates is still not done. Despite all the digressions and detours, he hasn’t forgotten that the present inquiry was just a groundwork for the question he raised at the beginning of his discussion with Protagoras. What is virtue, and in particular, what is courage? Everyone seeks what is most pleasant to himself. “Now no one willingly goes after the bad nor after what he thinks is bad, nor is it, it appears, in human nature to go after what one thinks is bad rather than the good.”[14] Here Socrates produces a principle of human motivation, one that seems paradoxical in light of human propensities to do bad things. Surely people don’t really want what is bad; they want only what is good. In terms of the hedonistic psychology, people pursue pleasures and shun pains. When they err it is not through the moral failure of wanting what is bad, but through the cognitive failure of mistaking the bad for the good.
Socrates asks what fear is. It is “an expectation of something bad.”[15] So do the brave and the cowardly engage in different actions? Not really, for both of them seek the same thing; both go toward the thing they are confident about and flee from what they fear. But what they feel confidence and fear about are different things. The courageous go into battle because it is noble and honorable, whereas the cowards flee from it, even though it is shameful to do so. “Do the cowards trust in shameful and bad actions for any other reason than ignorance and lack of knowledge? . . . Hence cowardice must be ignorance of what is and is not to be feared?”
Socrates is now in a position to define courage: “So courage is wisdom about what is and is not to be feared, which is opposite to ignorance of these things?”[16]
At this point Protagoras becomes sullen and taciturn. He is beaten. Even the most un-intellectual virtue is ultimately a kind of knowledge; so, presumably, are all the others. Yet Socrates doesn’t gloat. “I ask these questions, you know, with no other object than to try to find out how things are with virtue and what this thing is, namely virtue.” And perhaps that’s the biggest difference between Socrates and the sophist. The philosopher is more concerned with finding the truth than with the fame, power, and prosperity that will come with winning a contest. But the philosopher isn’t yet satisfied; there’s more to learn.
“The end of our conversations seems to me to be accusing and mocking us like a man, and if it could speak it would say, ‘You are ridiculous, Socrates and Protagoras. You, Socrates, whereas you said at the outset that virtue was not teachable, now strive to contradict yourself, maintaining that all virtues are knowledge, including justice, temperance, and courage, which would obviously mean virtue is teachable. But if virtue were something other than knowledge, as Protagoras is wanting to say, clearly it would not be teachable. . .’.”[17] Far from winning a contest, Socrates has just upped the stakes. His position, that virtue is knowledge but is not teachable, seems contradictory, just as Protagoras’ position that virtue is not knowledge but is teachable. Instead of coming to a firm conclusion, they have only begun to consider the issues that their inquiry raises for virtue.
“I praise you for your zeal and perseverance in discussion,” says Protagoras. “As I’m not a sore loser, I don’t begrudge you your success; I’ve often said in public that of everyone I’ve met I admire you most, especially among those of your generation. And I declare that I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you become renowned for your wisdom. Concerning the present questions, we shall pursue them again, whenever you wish. But it’s now time to turn to other matters.”[18]
“After these exchanges,” reports Socrates, “we left.”
[6].Plato Protagoras 349b-350c.
[7].Plato Protagoras 350c-351a.
[8].Plato Protagoras 352b-c.
[9.Plato Protagoras 353c.
[10].Plato Protagoras 354c.
[11].Plato Protagoras 356d.
[12].Plato Protagoras 357b.
[13].Plato Protagoras 357e.
[14].Plato Protagoras 358c-d.
[15.Plato Protagoras 358d.
[16].Plato Protagoras 360b-d.
[17].Plato Protagoras 361a-b.
[18].Plato Protagoras 361d-e.