Protagoras

Protagoras

I had insomnia last night, and today I was a zombie… I read about two thirds of the Protagoras and nothing else, but I wanted to write a little all the same. You asked who Proust was writing for if not for others… there’s a Derrida text I want to revisit and use to address that question – on the nature of writing as something always addressed to posterity – something on fixity of form and an awareness of death – words coming from beyond the grave even when the writer is alive. Proust never really addressed the subject one way or another… his contentions were about how real thought functioned, and he found it incompatible with society. When you say he had no right to speak for everyone, you have to understand he wasn’t describing a personality. For him when writing, reading or thinking the outside world vanishes. The sort of interiority required for creation abolishes time and does not allow attention to be divided and turned towards people or objects. There are of course contradictions – objects of contemplation come from the outside, experience must precede thought, and I never claimed to believe or support Proust on the relative value of conversing, but his ideas are less problaematic than you make them out to be. There are lots of things I’d like to get around to talking about from the comments you made, but my eyes are heavy and my memory is foggy, so I’ll talk about Plato and be done with it.

I have said that in Platonic dialogues Socrates generally does not have a genuine back and forth with his interlocutor… h steers the conversation ably and seems to know exactly where he is heading – he gives the person he is talking to opportunities to take back things they have said, to start again and to elaborate. It does often seem that because he knows where he is going, and because he is so practiced on the subjects that interest him, a certain amount of improvisation is not difficult. The dialogues in which the second person largely just punctuates Socrates’ argument with ‘yes’ and ‘no’ are the clearest cases in which it doesn’t matter at all who Socrates is speaking to. In the Gorgias you get the sense that Socrates’ insistence that the other person keep their responses short is justified – he is obliged to guard against long-winded speeches that change the subject, give very little solid content and in no way really address the questions initially asked. In Protagorus you get the sense that insistence on short responses can be a bar to nuance – the first demand that answers be kept short comes after a straightforward claim on the part of Protagoras that good is relational – that the same thing can be good or bad depending on circumstance – Protagoras is bothered both by Socrates readiness to conflate what seem to him essentially different concepts and makes no serious attempt to seek out what distinctions could theoretically be made between, for example, temperance, justice and wisdom, or what relation could exist between the three apart from absolute identity. How would it affect the language if on e word, say ‘wise’ were kept while temperate, just and good were dismissed as synonymous and therefore superfluous? Some of this goes back to the distinction between thought and conversation – ideas being developed alone and ideas being developed socially – the pace is different in the second case. There is less room for rumination and careful consideration… it would be nice to occasionally have dialogues where Socrates’ partner came back a day after the first dialogue and said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and the problem I have with the analogy you made there is…” Also think of the passage in the Gorgias where Socrates gets his conversation partner (Callicles, maybe?) to take over asking questions for a while, and almost immediately Socrates reproaches him for not asking the right sort of questions – everything always has to be done his way, according to his rules, which clearly puts everyone else at a disadvantage, and means Socrates isn’t challenged as much as he ought to be. I realize characters resurface (soon I want to look at the Phaedrus and figure out whether Phaedrus carries something he got from Socrates in the first dialogue over into the Symposium – does he in any way respond to Socrates or show he has an inkling of what to expect later in the dialogue?), I also realize that Socrates’ little circle is constantly continuing their dialogues and ideas are getting revisited and refined, but so many of the dialogues feel a bit like chess matches – self-contained contests with a clear winner. In fact, Socrates sometimes comes across a bit like a pool shark, luring an unsuspecting partner in, pleading his ignorance and innocence, making sure that they commit to the conversation before he shows his absolutely mastery in the exchange.