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A Political Interpretation of Plato's Protagoras and Gorgias

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THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA Self-Deception and the City: A Political Interpretation of Plato’s Protagoras and Gorgias A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of the School of Philosophy Of The Catholic University of America In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Doctor of Philosophy by Mary Elizabeth Halper Washington, D.C. 2019 Self-Deception and the City: A Political Interpretation of Plato’s Protagoras and Gorgias Mary Elizabeth Halper, Ph.D. Director: V. Bradley Lewis, Ph.D. Sophistry and rhetoric possess the disturbing power to appear to be precisely what they under- mine. Sophistry passes itself off as education even as it subverts genuine ethical and intellectual formation; rhetoric looks like a particularly compelling form of communication even as it sub- verts the possibility of seeking truth in speech. This dissertation begins with the claim that Plato wrote his Protagoras and Gorgias to treat of this disturbing power and its political consequences. I argue that the Protagoras and the Gorgias, as representative treatments of sophistry and rhetoric, should be read together in order to gain insight into the genuine art of politics, of which sophistry and rhetoric together form a subversive imitation. First I undertake an exegesis of the Protagoras and the Gorgias, both as individual dialogues and as a composite whole. Then I present systematic and philosophical arguments to support my central thesis, which emerges from my interpreta- tions and is supported by my thematic investigations. This thesis asserts that self-deception isan inherent feature of political communities, whereby political communities both must rely on the efficacy of appearance and cannot acknowledge this very reliance. This feature in turn explains the possibility and power of sophistry and rhetoric within those communities. Ultimately, I use the self-deception thesis to defend the possibility of a unique political good—-a good that remains susceptible to the subversions of sophistry and rhetoric but also one that is capable of resisting them. This dissertation by Mary Elizabeth Halper fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in Philosophy, approved by V. Bradley Lewis, Ph.D., as Director, and by Cristina Ionescu, Ph.D., and Antón Barba-Kay, Ph.D., as Readers V. Bradley Lewis, Ph.D., Director Cristina Ionescu, Ph.D., Reader Antón Barba-Kay, Ph.D., Reader ii To my son David, the wonder that keeps the stars apart. iii Contents Introduction 1 Truth and Politics; True Politics . 1 A Political Reading of the Protagoras and Gorgias ........... 4 Hermeneutic Principles and Argumentative Structure . 8 Plan of the Work . 10 Part I The Dialogues 12 Chapter 1 Protagoras 13 Introduction . 13 Entering the Dialogue: 309a–317d . 23 The Teachability of Virtue: 317d–320c . 39 Protagoras’s Great Speech: 320c-328c . 43 The Unity of Virtue: 328c-334c . 56 Interlude: 334c-338e . 66 Interpreting Simonides’s Poem: 338e-348c . 73 Courage: 348c-351b . 91 Wisdom, Pleasure, and Power: 351b-358d . 99 Courage, Again: 358d-360e . 108 Conclusion: 360e-362a . 113 Chapter 2 Gorgias 116 Introduction . 116 Opening Scene: 447a-448c . 122 iv Gorgias & Socrates: 448d-461d . 126 Polus & Socrates: 461b-481b . 155 Callicles & Socrates: 481b-505d . 180 Socrates: 505d-527e . 214 Part II The Argument 241 Chapter 3 Protagoras & Gorgias & Politics 242 A View of the Whole . 243 A Problematic Politics Revealed . 267 The Self-Deceptive Nature of the City . .279 Chapter 4 Sophistry & The City 292 Introduction . 292 Civic Education and Sophistry . 301 The City’s Susceptibility to Sophistry . .311 The City’s Resistance to Sophistry . .321 Chapter 5 Rhetoric & The City 330 Introduction . 330 The Practice of Justice and Rhetoric . .338 The City’s Susceptibility to Rhetoric . .348 The City’s Resistance to Rhetoric . .356 Chapter 6 The City & Philosophy 369 The Central Claim & Planes of Consideration . .369 Consequences of the City’s Self-Deception . 385 v Acknowledgments I must express my profound thanks to my director, Professor V. Bradley Lewis for his thoughtful attention to and precise guidance of this work. In addition, I must thank myreaders, Professor Cristina Ionescu and Professor Antón Barba-Kay, who offered insight and encourage- ment along the way. Each member of my committee deserves my gratitude for their patience, professionalism, and sincere passion while shepherding their student through this final stage of formal education. They were each a midwife in their own way. Many more deserve my gratitude: the Dean of the School of Philosophy, Dr. John Mc- Carthy, for his inspiring honesty as well as his dedication to the students under his charge; the professors of the School of Philosophy, for their exemplary commitment to the contemplative life; and my fellow graduate students who constituted the community on which I relied and from which I derived much intellectual sustenance. I am especially grateful for the support and en- couragement graciously and perpetually given by my parents, Kathleen and Robert, and by my siblings, Anna, Evan, and Wolf. Of course, for my own family, which came into being along- side this dissertation, I can express only feebly the preponderance of my gratitude; without my ever-patient husband, Aaron, and my dear son, David, there would be nothing that follows. vi Introduction Truth and Politics; True Politics Politics is a problem for truth. The converse of this claim—that truth is a problem for politics—is a commonplace. There is a Yiddish proverb to this effect: “One lie is a lie; two lies are lies; three lies are politics.” Indeed, the fraught relationship between politics and truth has been noted repeatedly. For some this situ- ation presents an opportunity: consider Machiavelli’s prince who is to imitate the fox’s deceitful cunning as much as the lion’s courage.1 For others it is a woeful but ultimately inescapable effect of forces beyond the realm of politics: consider Augustine’s resignation in the face of the dark- ness of social life.2 For no one is it surprising that politicians are deceitful and that even those with the best intentions succumb to the shadows that suffuse the political realm. Beyond these uncontroversial if lamentable observations, deeper and more disconcerting is the problem that politics poses to truth. The power of politics seems to render truth itself shamefully feeble or altogether useless. There is an abiding sense that the truth about what is good, noble, or just should determine the norms that govern human life lived together. Yet all too often what holds sway in politics is what is believed, not what is. One reaction tothis situation is to cede to politics all the power it seems to grab, to subordinate truth entirely to the coercion of politics.3 Truth thus becomes nothing but a production of political power. The extreme opposite of this reaction is to double down on the power of truth and insist that rational discourse will prevail, provided that we are sufficiently careful to keep that discourse scrubbed 1. See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (University of Chicago Press, 1998), 69. 2. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, Book XIX, chapter 6: ”In his tenebris vitae socialis, sedebit iudex ille sapiens an non audebit? Sedebit plane.” 3. Representative of this severe position is Michel Foucault, a position prepared for by Machiavelli’s verità effetuale, and before then, I would argue, by the sophists of Socrates’s time. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 109–133; Machiavelli, The Prince, 61. 1 2 clean of ambiguity, equivocation, or irrational appeals to emotion.4 In making politics pristine, though, this response also impoverishes it, barring it from metaphor, genuine political feeling, and even, one might say, beauty. Over these unsatisfying poles still hangs the question Hannah Arendt put perfectly: “Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of politics to be deceitful?”5 With this dissertation I argue that the practice of true politics—a practice Socrates claims to attempt and uniquely so—is a different kind of response to the problem politics puts totruth. This response immediately differs from the extreme that concedes all efficacy to power andre- serves none for truth. For if there is such a thing as true as opposed to counterfeit politics, then there must be some crucial role that truth plays in the practice of politics. This crucial role, I argue, manifests itself in the common good. The common good is the polestar for the practice of true politics. It is the end in service to which it becomes possible to discern between genuine and pseudo politics, between a practice that supports human thinking, loving, and living together and a practice that hollows these out from the inside. This common good is unique to the political realm, and in this respect it demands that its context be truthfully apprehended. That is, true politics must be grounded on a true answer to the question: “What is the city?” The central thesis of this dissertation is that self-deception is an essential feature of the city and one that necessarily conditions the practice of true politics. With this answer, there arises a resistance to the other extreme of the positions above: resistance to a conception of the political that is or can be fully transparent. What does it mean for the city to be inherently self-deceptive? It does not mean that the city is barred from pursuit of its true good. It does mean that this pursuit is essentially and 4. Representative of this view is Jürgen Habermas (see Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Commu- nicative Action, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Christian Lenhardt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 43–115), who is perhaps preceded by Hegel and his insistence that the actual is the rational (see G.
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