Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood
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interlocutor’s definitions. Although he typically professes ignorance and an inability to teach, it becomes clear that, by seeking the common qualities of all the specific instances of ‘virtuous’ or ‘just’ actions, he attempts to find a ‘real’ definition of virtue or justice – not a rule-of-thumb characterization of specific acts in the empirical world but a definition that expresses an underlying, universal and absolute principle of virtue or justice. The object of the philosophic exercise is to elevate the soul, or psyche, the immortal and divine element in human nature to which the flesh should be subordinate. Applied to politics, the object of philosophy is to fulfill the higher moral purpose of the polis.
In itself, neither the Socratic method nor even the conception of absolute knowledge associated with it has any necessary political implications. But Socrates’s most famous paradox, that virtue is knowledge, is altogether more problematic. On the face of it, this principle simply implies that people act immorally out of ignorance and never voluntarily; and, whatever we may think of this as a description of reality, it seems at least benevolent in its intent, displaying a tolerance and humanity towards those who do wrong which appears to rule out retribution. Nor is there anything political in the admirable first principle of Socrates’s moral teaching: that it is better to suffer wrong than to inflict it. But there is more to the identification of virtue with knowledge, which has far-reaching consequences, not least political and antidemocratic implications. The combined effect of this identification and the moral purpose he attributes to the state is, for all practical purposes, to rule out democracy and even to make ‘democratic knowledge’ an oxymoron.
The implications of Socrates’s formulation become most visible in the confrontation with the sophist Protagoras, depicted in Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras. If we can rely on Plato’s reconstruction of the sophist’s argument, he seems to have laid out a systematic case for democracy; and it is based on conceptions of knowledge, virtue and the purpose of the polis opposed to those of Socrates. What we know from Plato’s portrayal and from the very few genuine surviving fragments of the sophist’s writings is that Protagoras was an agnostic, who argued that we cannot really know whether the gods exist; that we can rely only on human judgment; and that, since there is no certain arbiter of truth beyond human judgment, we cannot assume the existence of any absolute standards of truth and falsehood or of right and wrong. Human beings, indeed every individual, must be the final judges – an idea famously summed up in his best-known aphorism, ‘Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are and of things that are not that they are not.’
Such ideas were significant enough. But in Plato’s Protagoras, there is a discussion between Socrates and Protagoras which effectively sets the agenda for the whole of Plato’s mature philosophical work and the intellectual tradition that follows from it. Although this dialogue is no longer commonly regarded as among the earliest of Plato’s works, it has been described as the last of his ‘Socratic’ dialogues, after which he strikes out on his own, developing his ideas more elaborately and independently of his teacher. Protagoras opens up the questions to which the philosopher will devote the rest of his working life and which will, through him, shape the whole of Western philosophy.
What is most immediately striking about the dialogue is that the pivotal question is a political one. Socrates presents Protagoras with a conundrum: like others of his kind, the sophist purports to teach the art of politics, promising to make men good citizens. This surely implies, argues Socrates, that virtue, the qualities of a good citizen, can be taught. Yet political practice in Athens suggests otherwise. When Athenians meet in the Assembly to decide on matters such as construction or shipbuilding projects, they call for architects or naval designers, experts in specialized crafts, and dismiss the views of non-specialists, however wealthy or well born. This is how people normally behave in matters regarded as technical, involving the kind of craft or skill that can and must be taught by an expert. But when the Assembly is discussing something to do with the government of the polis, Athenians behave very differently:
. . . the man who gets up to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, merchant or shipowner, rich or poor, of good family or none. No one brings it up against any of these, as against those I have just mentioned, that he is a man who without any technical qualifications, unable to point to anybody as his teacher, is yet trying to give advice. The reason must be that they do not think this is a subject that can be taught.13
Protagoras gives a subtle and fascinating answer, introduced by yet another story about Prometheus. He sets out to show that Athenians ‘act reasonably in accepting the advice of smith and shoemaker on political matters’.14 There is no inconsistency, he says, between the claim that virtue can be taught and the assumption that civic virtue, or the capacity to make political judgments, is a universal quality, belonging to all adult citizens regardless of status or wealth. His argument turns out to be less a case for his claims as a teacher of the political art than a defence of Athenian democratic practice, insisting on the capacity of ordinary, labouring citizens to make political judgments.
Although there is a brief defence of democracy in Herodotus (III.80), Protagoras’s speech is the only substantive and systematic argument for the democracy to survive from ancient Greece. It is true that we have to rely on Plato to convey the sophist’s views, and we have no way of knowing how much of it Protagoras actually said. But, in contrast to Plato’s attacks on other sophists, Protagoras emerges as a fairly sympathetic and deeply intelligent figure, and Socrates somewhat less so than is usual in Plato’s dialogues. In any case, whether or not these are the authentic ideas of Protagoras, they certainly express a coherent democratic view; and Plato spends the rest of his career trying to counter it. Much of his philosophy thereafter, including his epistemology, seeks to demonstrate that virtue is a rare and lofty quality and the political art a specialized craft that can be practised only by a very select few, because it requires a special and elevated kind of philosophic knowledge.
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