166d: The wise person is the one who can make good things appear for others rather than bad things. One might ask, "What determines if something is a good thing?" I suppose Protagoras might reply, "Well, the one having the appearance judges that it is good." So the wise person would be the one who, for someone experiencing something bad (where bad is cashed out as that person judging that the experience is bad), causes that person to have different appearances. Namely, ones that are good, where good is cashed out as that person judging that her experiences are good. Or does that not work?
167a: "...because the other state is better". Well, maybe Socrates' Protagoras has a different notion of good and bad in mind than the one I just proposed.
167c: "Whatever in any city is regarded as just and admirable is just and admirable in that city and for so long as that convention maintains itself; but the wise man replaces each pernicious convention by a wholesome one, making this both be and seem just." This is an absolutely baffling passage. Is Socrates' Protagoras bringing in the analogy/metaphor of the city-soul by saying that cities are merely people writ large, and that is why a city can have appearances and judgments? If man is the measure of all things, then shouldn't each individual in the city be the judge of what is just and admirable? Also, it seems that Socrates' Protagoras believes in an objective perniciousness, which does not seem to be coherent given the position sketched thus far.
Happy reading, everyone.
IanH: You must be right that, however we make out the Socratic-Protagorean position on relativism about goodness and badness, it cannot be directly parallel to relativism about being and truth. One obvious reason, as you point out, is that we can make comparative judgments of better and worse, but not of more or less true/false. So here's one suggestion about what might be going on with the value-judgments.
ReplyDeleteRemember that Socrates's list of perceptions included pleasures and pains. One of Plato's frequent claims about pleasures and pains is that they are motions in the soul and/or the body: e.g., pleasure is the filling up of some lack, and pain is the emptying of state of satisfaction or fullness. That is, the experience of pleasure and pain (even if not all pleasures and pains are consciously experienced) seems to be the experience of a change from one state to another; we might even be able to think of them as comparative experiences, insofar as pleasure occurs as we become *more full* (moving in the direction of filling) and pain occurs as we become *more empty* (moving in the direction of emptying). So perhaps we could say on Protagoras's behalf - and Theaetetus's - that judgments of goodness and badness, better and worse, are based on experiences of pleasure and pain, which are in some sense comparative experiences. Since pleasure and pain are perceptual states, according to Socrates's earlier classification, we are still using the resources of Theaetetus's first definition of knowledge. And what's more, relative fillings and emptyings can still be relevantly relative to individuals: what counts as an experience of filling or emptying *for me* can depend on the level at which I began. So this would also fit within the resources of Protagorean relativism as well. At least, that's one idea.
Of course, we might also get better answers in what follows.