I investigate what metaphors are most apt for understanding rational inquiry, arguing that this is Plato's point in the Protagoras. I suggest that Plato's Protagoras offers us a spatial account of the teaching of virtue, understanding the teaching of virtue as if it were a journey. By contrast, Socrates offers us an objective account of the teaching of virtue, understanding acquiring virtue as if it were the mere accumulation of finite goods. Plato shows quite dramatically why both accounts are flawed, and I argue that Plato's use of various literary devices to frame the dialogue amounts to a subtle redirection of the focus of the dialogue. Ostensibly a dialogue about whether virtue is teachable, I claim the Protagoras is actually about the pitfalls of making rational inquiry an adversarial process. In line with recent discoveries in cognitive science, I conclude that objectivity and perspectivity are complementary methods of our human understanding.
In scoring the match, we must keep in mind that Plato has built a bias into the dialogue: This is Socrates' account of the action. Properly speaking, this piece is not really a dialogue at all--Protagoras speaks only through the voice of Socrates. Why does Plato frame the real dialogue within Socrates' retelling? With the framing, we readers are once removed from immediate action and encouraged to identify with the anonymous "Friend" to whom Socrates relates the tale. As when we hear the account of a contest from one of our own friends, we question the narrator's impartiality, even though they are the words of a friend or of such a reputedly truthful speaker as Socrates.
I argue in this paper that our being handicapped in scoring this debate is itself a major thrust of the Protagoras. The dialogue takes as its indirect subject the theory of inquiry, considering--on multiple levels and in many ways--whether knowledge is perspectival or objective. Indeed, though Socrates' moments of victory over Protagoras are apparently by means of logical contradiction, I endeavor to show that he is instead victorious by means of metaphor. Protagoras is forced--or perhaps it is better to say provoked--out of his proffered metaphor system and into another by Socrates' cajoling and playing to the audience, and by Protagoras' own vanity. To make my point, I make a brief foray into contemporary work in cognitive science on metaphor and the roots of rationality.
But a victory is not Socrates' real goal, much as he may relish it; nor do I think Plato content to leave matters there. By forcing the dialogue into a particular metaphor, Socrates has revealed the limitations of a line of inquiry built around a single particular metaphor (i.e., objectivity), as the line of inquiry he chooses by the dialogue's end seems to support the rather un-Socratic conclusion that virtue is teachable. But there is yet one larger frame of the dialogue, for a title is also a frame; and in excruciating irony, Plato has given us a dialogue about perspectival limitations in which Socrates encounters the Sophist whose famous dictum--though absent from this dialogue--epitomizes perspective in philosophy: "Man is the measure of all things." Finally, in what must have seemed a brilliant comic moment to a literate Greek, it is the stonecutter who lectures Protagoras--the man whose most famous saying is on measurement--on the art of measurement.[2]
The tale Socrates tells begins with his being awakened before dawn by an overanxious youth bearing the news that Protagoras has arrived in Athens. Hippocrates, a well-born youth, calls on Socrates because he is in need of an introduction to this cleverest of speakers, whom he hopes he can persuade to become his teacher. As it is a bit too early to call on Protagoras, Socrates suggests they walk together in the garden, where he begins to cross-examine the youth and his desire to visit Protagoras. In this next framing of the dialogue, Plato has Socrates draw an elaborate parallel between the art of the Sophist Protagoras and that of the Hippocrates' namesake, the famous physician. Under questioning young Hippocrates admits that if he were to pay the physician Hippocrates a fee to become his teacher, he would expect that the physician would train him as a doctor; similarly, if he went to a sculptor, he would expect the sculptor would teach him sculpting. What then, does Hippocrates hope that Protagoras can teach him? The suggestion that such training would lead Hippocrates to become a Sophist makes him blush with shame, and it emerges instead that Hippocrates expects to receive instruction that will better his soul. Nussbaum writes that "he and Socrates now agree that there is a therapy of the soul that is analogous to the doctor's therapy of the body."[4]
The analogy revolves about the pertinence of expert knowledge. The point is that the Sophist, who claims to teach anything as well as an expert, is really an expert on no subject at all (or perhaps only on that of how to become a Sophist). Hence, Hippocrates is in grave danger if he wishes to entrust the care of his soul to a Sophist. In framing the dialogue in this fashion, Socrates is foreshadowing his later line of attack on the great speech of Protagoras when Socrates, as a responsible elder, will interview Protagoras on Hippocrates behalf. The method will be to pin Protagoras down on exactly what subject Protagoras claims to be an expert.
That apparently turns out to be the art of political wisdom. Protagoras' claim to expert knowledge in this matter is not, however, strongly or explicitly made; rather, he dashes it off in a grandiose fashion: "...from me he will learn only what he has come to learn. What is that subject? The proper care of one's personal affairs, so that he may best manage his own household, and also of the state's affairs, so as to become a real power in the city, both as a speaker and a man of action."[5] Socrates takes this subject matter to be the art of politics and civic virtue, and Protagoras nonchalantly agrees. This is the first instance of a pattern of nonchalant agreement on Protagoras' part which will ultimately cause him to stumble seriously in the argumentative boxing match.
Examining Protagoras' early speech more closely, however, we see that he freely makes no such claims to having expert knowledge. Instead, what he does claim is that his art is "an ancient one, but like those who put their hand to it in former times, fearing the odium which it brings, adopted a disguise and worked under cover."[6] What can this mysterious art of Protagoras be, that adopts as a disguise poetry, religion, prophecy, physical training, music and many others? Wisdom, to be sure, but what wisdom could possibly underlie such diverse subject matters? Here the Socratic frame of the doctor's expert knowledge leads us astray--Protagoras is claiming not expert knowledge of the subject of virtue, but a talent for creativity in language and the ability to locate human concerns in an uncertain world. In the terms of Nussbaum's techne-tuche antithesis,[7] Protagoras is not claiming to teach an expert's techne, a method of increasing control over human contingency (tuche) by rigorously acquiring and applying knowledge but rather something quite different: a way of increasing control over contingency through reflecting on examples of human successes and failures. Expert knowledge is alienating even as it comes to our aid; who among us can explain the electronics of the computer, the mechanisms of a typewriter, or the intricacies of the offset web press that bring contemporary philosophical labors to fruition? As Marxist scholars observe, technology is often alienating at the same time it is helpful. In contrast to the Socratic analogy of techne to expert knowledge, the Protagorean techne is the techne of teaching and recognizing the limits of human control over contingency, not merely of realizing such control. As such, we will see how the Protagorean art lends itself to the possibility of tragedy--a world wherein techne does not actually provide complete control over human contingency--while the Socratic account ultimately does not permit the possibility of tragedy.[8]
The philosophical battle that ensues--and it is quite a battle--has, as its fruit, no conclusive philosophical insights on the apparent thesis--the question of whether virtue is teachable. The participants' energy is given over to the boxing match, with none left for serious thought. These frames distance us from the conversation; they allow us perspective to laugh at Socrates' boisterous tale of conquest. And from outside the various frames--the boxing match, the analogy of the doctor, the tale told to a friend, the hunt for Alcibiades' affections, the ironic title, the comedic finale--we can, if we listen carefully, hear Plato's chuckle. For if the author has given us an account of a bittersweet Socratic triumph, Plato has done so by resorting to the Protagorean technique of using metaphors to obtain perspective, repeatedly framing Socrates' philosophic victory until we cannot help but to have enough perspective from the conversation itself to see that, despite his apparent victory, Socrates is in a terrible philosophical bind at the end of the dialogue. The erotic pursuit of the wise and the beautiful succumbs to the bloodlust of the hunt for victory.
Protagoras' account is, upon the consent of audience, in the form of a creation story. The two titans, Epimetheus and Prometheus, are charged with the task of equipping all the mortal creatures with suitable powers, defenses, and the like. True to his name, Epimetheus (Afterthought) uses up all the available powers and defenses on the brute animals, leaving human beings naked, unshod, unbedded, unarmed and unprovided for. When Prometheus (Forethought) comes to review his brother's work at the last minute, he is at a loss as how to provide a means of salvation for the poor humans, so he steals for them fire from the forge of Hephaestus and Athena's skill in the arts. Thus equipped, human beings were able by the arts they possessed to invent clothing, bedding, houses, farming and shoemaking; and by virtue of their (illegitimate) kinship to the gods religion. Thus provided, humans are still on the razor's edge of survival. Although they have the elements of rationality, they still lack political wisdom. Although they may live together in small groups for a while, they injure each other frequently and soon their communities fracture again. Although they have a share in the portion of the gods, what they possess in terms of the practical arts alone is not enough to provide human salvation; they remain in danger of extinction.
Two important relations have already obtained at this early point in the parable: the practical arts (those subjects which lend themselves to the accumulation and transmission of expert knowledge) are something stolen from a higher power, and this act of theft which Prometheus has undertaken on behalf of the fledgling humans has bound them to that higher power. When Zeus sends Hermes to deliver the art of political wisdom to hapless humankind, it is because Zeus fears for their total destruction. But why should Zeus fear for humankind? Only because they are now kin to the gods, thanks to the Promethean theft. Thus when Hermes asks Zeus how he is to distribute this new art, Zeus decrees that all must have their share in political virtues. Without an aspiration to political wisdom located in every human being, city life is impossible; and those who refuse to exercise their capacity are to be put to death. Politics is not to be external to humankind; it is to become a part of their nature.
Protagoras' "genetic" theory of virtue accounts for the distribution of political virtue, but so far he has not addressed how virtue can both be distributed to all and yet be something which can be taught, let alone answer Socrates' second objection to a genetic account of virtue (namely, how can it be that virtuous Athenian men do not necessarily produce virtuous sons, even though they presumably do their best to teach them virtue). In describing how virtue may be distributed to all, but not executed automatically, Protagoras makes an enthymatic argument. First, he observes that the Athenians do not rebuke or chide the ugly, dwarfish or weak, for those qualities are thought to be the results of nature or chance, but they do correct each other on matters of civic virtue. Second, he observes from civic life that in the particular matter of law-breaking, a punishment is not inflicted as vengeance for the past act of transgression, but as a lesson for the future so that the law-breaker does not transgress again, or that others are deterred from transgressing in witnessing the punishment. To take such care in the correction of civic behavior and the deterrence of transgression is only possible if the Athenians believe virtue is something teachable.
What is missing from Protagoras' argument is that a distinction is being drawn between how the capacity for virtue is transmitted, and how virtue is exercised to its fullest potential. The genetic explanation for the distribution of virtue speaks only to how the capacity for political virtue is transmitted between those who are kin, not to how virtue is exercised. For Protagoras virtue is not an object; instead, it is a capacity located in all Greeks which may be exercised. The exercise may be taught, and the capacity developed thereby; the virtue therein may be recognized by the teacher, and encouraged to express itself to its fullest potential; but becoming virtuous is a process requiring practice, not merely acquiring the right knowledge.
Protagoras uses precisely this sort of distinction to answer the second Socratic objection.[9] A genetic explanation may be true if it is the capacity which is inherited, not the execution; in this theory, the quality of the behavior of sons would be more closely linked to the execution and the failure of their moral instruction than to the quality of their genetic lineage. However, their genetic lineage--that they are kin to the Greeks, who are kin to the gods thanks to Prometheus--makes certain that they have the capacity for civic virtue. The amount of potential in the capacity may vary, and thus as in flute-playing there may be someone with a greater natural talent than another, but since all are instructed in civic virtue all the time, they are all better than those non-Greek barbarians who had never had occasion to have their natural capacities fostered, no matter how much potential their capacity for virtue may have contained.[10] Just as good flute-players may have sons without much potential for flute-playing, so virtuous men may have sons without much potential for civic virtue. Though every effort be made to foster the universal capacity, a person's native potential will limit its expression.
But the analogy with flute-playing only seems to place Protagoras' account back onto the horns of Socrates' dilemma, for now civic virtue is an expression of an inborn potential and seems unteachable, though everyone may try to do so in good faith. How can anyone be a teacher of civic virtue? Why does Protagoras claim to be a teacher of virtue, when Athenian men who have exhibited perhaps a higher potential for virtue than he have not been able to teach their own sons? Protagoras' answers are that "all are teachers of virtue to the best of their ability," and "if we can find someone only a little better than the others at advancing us on the road to virtue, we must be content."[11] The teacher of virtue is but a guide to virtue, not the source which transmits it. One teaches virtue when one recognizes it in others, and brings it to their attention. Teaching virtue is then different than performing virtuous acts, for the latter requires realizing the virtuous act implicit in oneself and one's situation, and the former merely recognizing and exalting virtue in others. Protagoras' claim to being a teacher of virtue is based on his moral eyesight, not his possession of moral truth and an ability to transmit it to others; hence, his is a claim to being a undisguised Sophist akin to a poet or prophet, not to being a man with expert knowledge of virtue.[12]
But why the insistence on short answers? Is it to trap Protagoras into a logical game, wherein he cannot answer without snaring himself in a Socratic contradiction? Or is it to keep Protagoras from being able to shift the metaphors back onto his own ground? Indeed, when Protagoras protests that he is being misled by Socrates' questioning, Socrates offers to change places and assume the role of the answerer. But Socrates gives no short answer; instead Socrates' great speech[16]--which is a comic throwaway to the audience with its satiric acknowledgement of the insight provided by the Laconic brevity of those 'great intellectuals,' the Spartans and the Cretans--fills nearly as many pages as the great speech of Protagoras. In this boxing match, Socrates' is playing the home crowd advantage for all it is worth. He can cry foul when Protagoras does not fight using his rules, but he is not subject to them himself.
The game of short questions and short answers proceeds because Socrates wishes to keep Protagoras on a different metaphorical ground than the one Protagoras has used in locating Socrates' concerns about Athenian behavior with respect to the proposition that virtue is teachable. As Socrates has framed the story in recounting his conversation with Hippocrates, to teach something requires that one be an expert in it--as the doctor is in respect to health and illness--for only experts possess the requisite expert knowledge of their subject matter to transmit it to others. Protagoras, however, has proposed a different understanding of teaching,[17] one which denies expert knowledge and instead places the teacher and student on a journey ("on the road to virtue"[18]) and situates them both together as travelers on the road to virtue. Socrates is determined to not let this understanding of teaching stand; but rather than attacking this difference directly with a long speech of his own, he seeks to undermine the Protagorean position with a series of questions which treat virtue as an object, not as a destination.
The first sally of the questioning establishes that each of the parts of virtue is distinct.[19] Socrates asks Protagoras whether justice, self-control and holiness are parts of one thing called virtue; or all the terms simply names for the same thing? Protagoras responds that virtue is one, and justice, self-control and holiness are parts of it. Next he agrees that the parts differ from one another as do the parts of a face--the parts of virtue do not resemble one another. But the parts of virtue may be possessed individually and they are separable, unlike the parts of a face, for Protagoras notes that "many men are brave but unjust, and others are just but not wise."[20] Socrates seizes on this, and courage and wisdom are added to the agreed-upon list of the parts of virtue, each part not resembling the other and each performing its own function. Each part of virtue is distinct from each other and from the whole.
Socrates then moves to considering what sort of things the different parts are. He asks Protagoras whether there is a thing called justice, and when Protagoras agrees, whether the thing called justice is in itself just or unjust. Protagoras agrees with Socrates' suggestion that it must be just. Socrates proceeds to establish the existence and nature of holiness; Protagoras agrees that there is such a thing and that it must be by nature holy, thus falling into the first Socratic trap. Socrates then reminds Protagoras of his statement that the parts of virtue do not resemble one another, and the jaws of the trap spring: "Then it is not the nature of holiness to be just, not of justice to be holy; it will be not-holy, and holiness not-just?"[21] Protagoras cannot agree with that, and he backtracks on his statement that the parts of virtue do not resemble one another at all, but will not agree that there is a slight resemblance between them. Sensing that he has sprung his trap too soon and Protagoras will not admit of a contradiction, Socrates backs off and tries another line of argument.
The game of indirect argument continues, and in rapid succession Socrates obtains Protagoras' agreement[22] that folly is the contrary of wisdom, that a temperate act is performed with temperance, a foolish act is the contrary of a temperate act, that foolish behavior stems from folly, contrary agencies cause contrary acts, that everything which has a contrary admits of only one contrary, and that folly is the contrary of temperance. This final point of agreement presents Socrates with a contradiction, for folly cannot be the contrary of both temperance and wisdom if things have but one contrary. When he points this out to Protagoras, he reluctantly agrees. Socrates points out that then temperance and wisdom must be the same, just as justice and holiness did before.
By now the game is getting tiresome, to the reader as well as poor Protagoras, and Protagoras, perhaps sensing that he is unable to speak for himself in the mode of inquiry Socrates has brought him into, distances himself from his answers. But then Socrates makes a curious statement: "It is the argument itself I wish to probe, though it may turn out that both I who question and you who answer are equally under scrutiny."[23] Is it, however, the same argument? Or has Socrates, like a good boxer, shifted his opponent so he is off-balance? And why does Plato have Socrates suggest that they are both under scrutiny?
The argument Socrates is probing is not Protagoras' any longer, although Protagoras has consented to it. The metaphorical ground which Protagoras has claimed in his great speech is that of a spatial theory of teaching virtue as a journey; Socrates has claimed the ground of objective explanation. In Socrates' questioning the parts of virtue are made into properties which cannot come into conflict with one another and remain a part of a single object known as virtue--that leads one into a contradiction, for then all the many names must refer to the same one object. Socrates' account may be contrasted with a Protagorean account where the parts of virtue might be conceptualized as forces which push and pull a human being in different directions, toward or away from goal of becoming virtuous. I now turn to recent work in cognitive science which has shown that these two metaphorical stances toward the world are deeply embedded in human conceptualization--not simply in Plato's Protagoras--in order to make a careful analysis of Socrates' rebuttal and why it leads him at the dialogue's conclusion to the uncharacteristic position of maintaining that virtue is knowledge, a position which would seem to imply that virtue is teachable.
I have argued thus far that the account of virtue that Protagoras advanced in his great speech is intelligible when viewed being virtuous is viewed as a destination in a spatial framework, and the strategy of Socrates' rebuttal was to reposition virtue as an object in an objective framework, thus rendering Protagoras' account contradictory. The accounts differ on the conceptualization of the teaching of virtue: Is the teacher of virtue the expert transmitting specialized knowledge in hopes of producing another expert, as Socrates suggested to Hippocrates before his encounter with Protagoras? Or is the teacher of virtue an experienced guide, capable of recognizing and correcting the missteps of the young, as in Protagoras' great speech?
In the Protagorean account, the gift of Zeus--the art of political wisdom--is given to humans to enable their survival. According to the myth, the gift changes the nature of humankind--they become political animals, and their mastery of politics is the arete (virtue) which sets them apart from the other animals. After the gift, the purpose of humankind becomes to seek this peculiar virtue--politics--for those who are unable to acquire their share of skill in it are to be cast from the city or killed (in either case they do not survive). Protagoras' account of the teaching of virtue makes use of the location version of event structure, and its close offspring: the metaphor "A PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS A JOURNEY." Under this metaphor, human life is conceptualized in terms of a journey: humans are all travelers, seeking out those who can better advance us on the road to virtue, and advancing our children and neighbors so that all may have a better chance of surviving together. The metaphorical mapping of the location version of the teaching of virtue is as follows:
Source domain: SPATIAL MOTION Target domain: VIRTUE/EXCELLENCE
path road to excellence
journey a life
traveler student
destination (location) to be known as excellent
straight-line motion along the path becoming virtuous
to the destination
self-propelled motion actions chosen by the student
guide (another person on the journey) a teacher
road map of the routes to the education
destination
pushes and pulls from other travelers corrections, threats, beatings
physical forces compelling the justice, respect, wisdom, holiness,
traveler toward the destination courage (all virtues)
conflicting physical forces conflict of virtues
possibility of movement potential for virtue
participating in the journey capacity for virtue
Fig. 1--Metaphorical mapping of a spatial account of becoming virtuous
The evidence that Protagoras is relying on a spatial metaphor system is found throughout his great speech. I have already discussed Protagoras' conclusion where he notes the importance of finding "someone only a little better than the others at advancing us on the road to virtue."[26] Now take Protagoras' analogy of the bent wood. To straighten bent wood, one applies force to straighten it out, as when one attaches guide lines to a young tree to straighten it out after it has been blown over by a windstorm, or as when one straightens a piece of bent lumber by wetting it, weighting it and allowing it to dry. Similarly, Protagoras suggests, the way to have children grow up to become virtuous is to encourage and admonish them toward virtue and away from vice. When a child is disobedient and strays off the straight path to virtue, Protagoras says the Athenians "straighten him with threats and beatings, like a warped and twisted plank."[27] Another analogy Protagoras uses is the learning of writing:
You know how, when children are not yet good at writing, the writing master traces outlines with the pencil before giving them the slate, and makes them follow the lines as a guide in their own writing; well, similarly the state sets up the laws, which are the inventions of good lawgivers of ancient times, and compels the citizens to rule and be ruled in accordance with them. Whoever strays outside the lines, it punishes, and the name given the punishment both among yourselves and in many other places is the correction, intimating that the penalty corrects or guides."[28]In this passage the laws are conceived as patterns for the young to follow, and the fellow citizens are the writing masters who help train the young learn how to stay within the bounds of the outlines that the writing masters have given them. Writing is another spatial motion analogy; becoming virtuous is a matter of staying with the boundaries--staying within the limits of the law.
I have already argued that the generative metaphor in the speech is the kinship relation between the gods and humankind engendered by the Promethean theft of Hephaestus' fire and Athena's art.[29] How is a kinship metaphor a spatial metaphor? Consider a genealogical chart or a timeline. We habitually imagine time as if it were unidirectional motion along one dimension of our spatial experience. Our ancestors are farther away in time as they are more distant from our position on a timeline. Further, on a genealogical chart, our ancestors all represented as locations on a chart, and our relation to them is indicated by connecting lines to our location. All those linked on the chart form a natural kind in the strictest sense--they are family. Anyone who is not on the chart is not kin, and hence is not a member (or is outside the boundaries) of the kind. Or pushing the analogy one step less abstract than a genealogical chart, for the Athenians that person is someone who belongs outside the city walls. To live within the bounds of the city, one must have inherited their share of the political or civic virtue that Zeus gave to the Greeks. What binds the Greeks together is their common ancestry and heritage of being city-dwellers committed to sharing the same living space. To sum up then: Protagoras repeatedly chooses his analogies for teaching virtue from spatial activities--learning to write, play the flute, straightening wood, etc.--because he has a theory of the distribution of virtue wherein the capacity for political virtue is located in all those Greeks who are related to the gods (as the tradition of Homer and Hesiod would attest).
The spatial account of the teaching of virtue highlights the importance and uniqueness of perspective to virtuous actions. In this metaphor, perspective brings engagement and care to the subtleties and nuances of a crisis facing the city, imaginatively feeling it out for its possibilities and potentialities as to what might make the best action for the city. The possible courses of actions are considered and more than one competing good can be identified in deliberation. Each competing good may be seen as a physical force compelling us to lean toward making the decision in one direction or another. The course of action which is chosen is that which expediently finds a balance among many competing goods that advance one along the road to virtue. Teaching virtue is then teaching the student to cognize and recognize the latent possibilities of their unique situation which bring about the various goods. I now turn to the exposition of the Socratic alternative to the account of virtue in the great speech of Protagoras.
In the next brief round,[31] Socrates fails to convince Protagoras that courage, the virtue which Protagoras now claims least resembles the others, is knowledge; Socrates initially springs his first trap too soon, and Protagoras manages to wriggle out of it. Socrates is forced to try again, and this time he takes a broader approach.[32] The first step is the identification of good with pleasant; Protagoras objects that only some pleasures are honorable and good, while others are dishonorable and evil, and yet others are neither good nor evil. To answer these objections, Socrates asks Protagoras to consider whether the reason why some pleasures are evil is not that their pleasure is fleeting while their consequences painful, as in gluttony or lust. Protagoras agrees, and Socrates asks him about the converse, that some current pains, such as physical training or a doctor's treatment, are done for the sake of something further, such as health, which is good. Protagoras again assents, and Socrates observes that they are now agreed that the names for both phenomena are pleasure and pain. Hence, Socrates says "if anyone objects that there is a difference between present pleasure and pleasure or pain in the future, I shall reply that the difference cannot be one of anything else but pleasure and pain."[33] The implication is that differences can then be weighed, present pleasure against future consequences, and the action to choose is the action which will bring the most pleasure.
One of the unvoiced assumptions is that pleasure and pain are measurable and can be divided into identical units. Future consequences are then commensurable with present action, each neatly quantifiable, and ethical deliberation proceeds according to a calculative rationality. Nussbaum[34] remarks on the similarity of this thesis to the Benthamite calculus, and suggests that this is a radical proposal for the transformation of human life. If this measurement is to be Socrates' gift, then "like the other gifts mentioned by Protagoras, the science of measurement will enter into and reshape the nature and attachments of the being who receives it .... it restructures our attachments so that they are far less fragile,"[35] for all valued objects are valued in terms of a single, identical and quantifiable unit, pleasure. In these terms, the loss of one's lover to another would no great loss because if one measure of pleasure in love (number it 10) is lost, it can be replaced by a like amount (10) of identical pleasure from a future consequence--perhaps in not having certain in-laws, or the acquisition of a new lover who brings an equal amount of pleasure. A uniform, single, measurable end--pleasure--would be substituted for the multiple ends and plurality of values engendered by Protagoras' account.[36]
Unfortunately, Socrates tells us that Protagoras meekly accedes to this proposition, and Socrates continues to press the absurdity. He uses an analogy to argue against perspectivity having any value in the new rationality, claiming perspective deceives us in philosophical judgement as in physical judgement.[37] Just as when we stand closer to one object than another of the same size and the closer appears larger, perspective deceives us in weighing future pleasures against present pleasures. Only the art of measurement will tell us that they are the same, objectively quantified by a scale of evenly marked units. In a science of measurement lies human salvation; to this too Protagoras readily assents. From this agreement it is a short jump to an agreement that the art of measurement is a branch of knowledge. Hence, if measurement is a branch of knowledge, and measurement is to be our deliberative art, when one makes a poor choice it must be from a lack of knowledge.
Now that Socrates has exacted this admission from Protagoras, it remains only to show that courage is a form of knowledge and the Many will all be One: virtue, courage, knowledge; and justice, holiness, temperance, and wisdom from the earlier inquiry. To complete the argument, Socrates observes that knowledge of pleasure and pain is the same as knowledge of good and evil, since by previous agreement those pairs were identical.[38] Socrates next suggests that if fear is the expectation of evil, then no one with knowledge of that evil would willingly go and accept that evil, provided another course were open. But this is precisely what the courageous do. Since the courageous are virtuous, we must find another explanation: if evil is measured in terms of the units of pleasure, then the immediate future expectation of evil may be outweighed by the future good (also measured in units of pleasure), and the courageous may still go into battle, as they do. And so courage has been shown to be the knowledge of what is and is not to be feared--or the expectation of immediately future evil weighed against the distantly future good in the units of pleasure--and hence courage is at one with the other virtues, all measured evenly in the units of pleasure, motivated by a tipping of the balance to the side of pleasure. Protagoras admits this with great reluctance; like a boxer off-balance, he senses he has lost the boxing match.
Protagoras has lost his footing because he has been a victim of a Socratic metaphor quake. However, Socrates has not directly attacked Protagoras' argument, and although Socrates has given by example an argument for rejecting perspective and spatial explanation in the pursuit of philosophy, it is by no means an explicit one in this dialogue--this Socratic triumph is obtained by diversion and subterfuge. The Protagorean metaphor of virtue as a destination has been redrawn to depict virtue as an object, an effect of acquiring the knowledge which teaching transmits from teacher to student. To Socrates, it seems odd that he is advocating virtue as knowledge, for given the framework of the expert theory of teaching he has outlined to Hippocrates at daybreak, he has chosen the easier path to prove that virtue is teachable, and Protagoras the more difficult; though to this Protagoras might not necessarily agree. The metaphor system which has replaced the Protagorean one at the end of the dialogue is outlined below. To make the structure more closely parallel the argument, I have given a tripartite mapping, between objects to knowledge to the domain of virtue.
Source domain: OBJECTS Target domain 1: Target domain 2:
KNOWLEDGE VIRTUE/EXCELLENCE
desirable objects knowledge virtue, excellence
possessor of desirable source of knowledge teacher
object
recipient of desired recipient of knowledge student
object
process of acquiring process of acquiring a life
desirable objects knowledge
acquisition of desirable acquisition of acquisition of virtue
objects appropriate knowledge
transfer of desirable transmission of knowledge teaching of virtue
objects
possession of many expert with much being virtuous, to be
desirable objects knowledge known as excellent
undesirable objects (and opinion (common being common (as opposed
the possession thereof) knowledge) to being
excellent/virtuous)
value attributed a a number pleasure
desirable object
value attributed to an a number to be subtracted pain
undesirable object
comparison of the value calculation moral deliberation
of objects
*irreplaceable objects *contradictory knowledge *conflict of values
Fig. 2--A metaphorical mapping of an objective account of virtue
I have starred the last entry in the mapping to emphasize Nussbaum's observation that if pleasures and pains are measurable and their values can be known numerically, there cannot possibly be any irreplaceable objects, for those objects would be incommensurable and contradictory with a system of measure. Nor can there be any conflict of values for the virtuous, because all the values are in one objective measure, and hence any conflicts are reduced to mere differences, and summed up accordingly.[39] If we adopt this radical proposal of Socrates, we will have to give a name to this measure for pleasure and pain--call it money--and, as I believe we often do in making contemporary moral decisions in politics and personal lives, our moral life will be ruled by a form of economic rationality. Contemporary economic rationality is, of course, considerably more complex than the model presented here--but we have had 2500 years of developments in philosophy and economic theory to improve upon Socrates' proposal.[40] Nevertheless, our contemporary theories of moral accountancy have their roots in the Socratic proposal that future pains can be quantitatively assessed and compared with present pleasures. The calculation of risk management with regard to the release of nuclear waste is a one example of this proposal's longevity, the cost-benefit analysis in which Ford weighed the safety of its passengers against the cost of a Pinto recall another--in both cases a dollar amount is placed on human life, and the irreplaceable value and uniqueness of a human existence is hidden by the tyranny of expert knowledge and the science of deliberative measurement.
Socrates himself notes[41] that the outcome of this boxing match is unclear, for the opponents have taken the positions with respect to virtue being or not being knowledge which seem most contradictory to their original positions on whether virtue is teachable. Socrates says: "It seems to me that the present outcome of our talk is pointing at us, like a human adversary, the finger of accusation and scorn."[42] In this final frame the conversation has been animated as the real adversary of the dialogue--the boxing match has mastered the contestants--and the real obstacle to any substantive conclusions on the question of virtue's teachability is not the participants, but rather the incompatibility of the styles of inquiry themselves--both of them are too locked into winning the contest by using their own metaphor system to allow themselves to see the virtue in pursuing the other's mode of inquiry. In the end, the Protagoras is actually a dialogue about the limitations placed on inquiry by dogmatically sticking to one's own perspective, not a dialogue on whether virtue is teachable.
In animating these two metaphorical stances as lines of inquiry, Plato has asked us to scrutinize two deep philosophical problems: first, What form of inquiry are we to chose?; and second, Can we join them together? (as Socrates urges Protagoras to join him in shared inquiry at the close of the dialogue). If we choose the Socratic rationality alone, then we may well become a different kind of being, much as the Greeks do in becoming city-dwellers in Protagoras' fictional history. We also risk denying the importance of perspective in sorting out the conflict of values, and the uniqueness and irreplaceable qualities of a particular human life. We might, in short, become bureaucrats. If we choose the Protagorean techne alone, we will be forever bound by our own perspective and unable to systematically assess the consequences of applying knowledge to contingency--for the power of accurate measurement will be beyond us. It is altogether too easy for Socrates to imagine that Protagoras will join with him in another inquiry at the end of the dialogue, but first their differing approaches must have a meeting of minds and both recognize the complementary characteristics and the value of the other's approach. Perhaps the first statement which should be given up is the Socratic dictum of one thing to one contrary, if that will allow the inquiry to be shared.
Finally, if we are to take Nussbaum's suggestion that we treat Plato's dialogues as a form of anti-tragic theater seriously,[43] we must also consider how such theater would be performed. This dialogue would begin as a comedy, with a boisterous Socrates exaggerating his triumph over the wisest man of Greece. This frame of exaggeration would serve to illustrate the matter of perspectival handicap, and provide laughter even when Socrates makes his radical proposal--for all of us can recognize the limits and shortcomings of our own perspective, even when we, like Socrates, claim it to be objective. Here Plato employs the mode of Protagoras, where the quest for control and mastery is inevitably tripped up by the natural limits of human wisdom. Lastly, as in the Protagoras there are only two speakers, the Friend and Socrates, and Socrates relates most of the story, one can imagine a performance of the Protagoras in which only one actor played all the parts--as Lily Tomlin does in Jane Wagner's play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe--or even where the author and actor the selfsame person--as Spalding Gray does in his Monster in a Box. A monologue would certainly serve to reveal the limits of having only one perspective in the Protagoras.