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From Section 166, Socrates now assumes the persona of the late Protagoras, and gives a long speech (until 168c). It’s pretty funny. He perfectly reproduces the ‘more in sorrow than in anger,’ pompous, demeanour which we might associate with such a senior sophist.
There are rhetorical questions and lots of confusing double-negatives, but the key points are as follows:
It’s an impressive performance: Theodorus says ‘It was a very spirited rescue’ of Protagoras’s positions. He’d rather not take part in the next stage of debate with Socrates, though, but his friend insists.
To recap, Socrates says, was it a big deal that they had got Protagoras, as it were, to admit that some men are superior to others in being called ‘wise’? (169d). To explore this further, Socrates reminds us that in normal life, we readily consider that some people are wiser than others: we trust a sea captain on the water, or a general on the battlefield, because they have the practical knowledge for that sphere. If people don’t have such knowledge, they have false judgment. Sometimes even a Protagorean would admit that sometimes people think their neighbours are judging falsely, or are ignorant (170c).
In fact, such contests happen all the time! Somebody will come out with an opinion. What happens then? A crowd of opponents rise up to challenge their view! Theodorus says poetically, ‘Heaven knows they do, Socrates, in their “thousands and tens of thousands,”’ a reference to Homer’s Odyssey xvi.121. With social media, we can certainly confirm that such is indeed the common experience.
In this way, the person with the opinion may claim it is true for them, but there will be thousands for whom it is false (170e). Indeed, Protagoras’s own opinion, that ‘man is the measure of all things,’ is one of these highly contestable and contested theories. But Protagoras himself, Socrates concludes, has to admit that, thus, his opinion must indeed be false:
‘In conceding the truth of the opinion of those who think him wrong, he is really admitting the falsity of his own opinion?’(171b)
This might be going a little too far. Theodorus says that Socrates is not quite fair on the late sophist. Willing to pull back, Socrates imagines that Protagoras would manage to defeat them in argument even from the tomb – where he would be as busy and sought-after as he was in life:
‘Hence it is likely that Protagoras, being older than we are, really is wiser as well; and if he were to stick up his head from below as far as the neck just here where we are, he would in all likelihood convict me twenty times over of talking nonsense, and show you up too for agreeing with me, before he ducked down to rush off again’ (171d).
Within The Walled Garden, I write ‘Roots of the Garden,’ a series of short essays which introduce important works from the Western philosophical tradition, starting with Plato.
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