Plato on Protagoras
7 Jan 2009
Managed to make it to the Rose Reading Room at last. Bought a new scarf on the street. And the Internet fairy came two days early! Life is pretty good.
It took a couple of days to synthesize Plato's Protagoras (it always does, dammit), but when I woke up this morning a bit that had been nagging at me started to fall into place a little more. Let's see if I can recollect the gist of the argument from my memory and scribbled notes without doing too much harm to the poor thing:
The ultimate conclusion is that virtuous things are based on knowledge and can therefore be taught. This is achieved in fits and starts, but finally through the example of courage. Basically, it is agreed that all (healthy) men do pleasurable things and not painful ones. However, in some instances they choose wrongly the thing which is a short term pleasure (drinking) but a long term pain (cirrhosis). But, since they are healthy, and it was earlier agreed that all healthy men choose pleasurable things, the only explanation for the bad decision is that they were not knowledgeable enough about the long term pain their choice would cause. In other words, if they had been knowledgeable about cirrhosis, they would not have drunk. The same set up is used for courage—cowards flee from battle because fleeing would seem to provide them with short term pleasurable benefits (not getting stabbed to death), however, courageous men are courageous because they understand that battle needs to be done for the longterm victory and glory to the nation, yadda yadda yadda. Ergo, Protagoras and Plato-as-Socrates conclude, if a man has knowledge (and it is agreed that knowledge can be taught), he will also be virtuous. In the argument somewhere also appeared the assertion that knowledge is the highest thing that man can possess, though they admitted that not all men agree with them, but that that is because other men are wrong (seriously, that part was just like the playground, and that is almost exactly how they put it).
This was nagging at me for a while because, honestly, it just doesn't seem right. As I lingered lazily in bed this morning it started to occur to me why, though I don't think I've worked it all quite out yet. But it centers around a phenomena that I was discussing with my friend (whom we shall call Isabel) recently, in which we both observed that many other liberals seem to believe that if only everyone became educated enough, goshdarnit, then they would agree with the liberals.
There are two assumptions here that I don't believe are right. One is that people with the same set of information will agree on things—in addition to it being impossible to force all people to have all the same pieces of information, it is also impossible to force people to place the same emphasis on the same pieces of information, whether because of their personal life experiences, biological brain quirks, personality, or goals. The other is that the speaker making such a conclusion is definitely right, which, given the fact that no person can have all information at their disposal at any given time and is also subject to the weighting bias mentioned above, is a rather bold presumption.
Now, these things are awfully big, so I'm afraid I can't flesh them out much further than this at this point. But I think I will really need to come back to these two ideas a lot more, because they seem like they may hold some pretty important keys for me.
On Being Certain