Άγων λóγων: Il "Protagora" di Platone tra eristica e commedia (review)

This is a book of two halves and Two Parts, perhaps, respectively, "literary" and "philosophical": one primarily concerned with the form of the Protagoras, the other more concerned with the dialogue's argumentative content and context. More helpful, however, is the author's own subtitles for the Two Parts: "Plato 'persuades' his audience" and "Socrates 'persuades' the sophists." Capra is admirably conscious throughout of the need to distinguish between what Socrates is saying and what Plato is trying to achieve through what Socrates is saying; between the audience for whom the written artifact is composed, on the one hand, and the fictional audience that the character, Socrates, is addressing, on the other. Plato—so Capra claims—has constructed a dialogue for hearers or readers who would have been thoroughly familiar with the dramatic theater and its conventions and who would immediately have recognized the allusions to comedy in setting, action, even characterization. Why construct a dialogue in this extraordinary fashion? No other dialogue is so constructed, even if there are comic touches in many. Here is one of the most interestingly worked parts of Capra's overall thesis: It isn't just any comedy that the Protagoras resembles—it's the Clouds, which figures so centrally in Plato's account of Socrates' accusers in the Apology. Only everything is turned upside down, so that it's Socrates who's outside (the right side?), the sophists inside (the house of Callias), whereas in Clouds, it was Socrates inside (the phrontisterion/pensatoio), and Socrates was a sophist. So here is Plato, as it were, talking over the heads of his characters and replying to Socrates' critics by turning the tables on them.

But that is only half of the picture, half of Capra's book (or a pretty inadequate description of half of the book), and, of course, rather less than half of the Protagoras itself. What about the conversation between Socrates and Protagoras that occupies by far the largest proportion of the pages? To say that it resembles a comic agon is of course only a beginning; if it is to be an effective riposte to Aristophanes and to those jurors he so fatally influenced, then Socrates has to win. And that, of course, he does hands down. But then we have the problem, or rather Capra has the problem, that he seems to win by taking over the very method that his sophistic opponents use, i.e., eristic; and this is bizarre, given the way that the opening dialogue between Socrates (or Strepsiades) and Hippocrates (or Pheidippides) in Socrates' house emphasizes the distance, and difference, between what Socrates has to offer and what his opponents offer. What is afoot here? Capra's answer is that crossing the threshold of Callias' house, into the company of Protagoras and the rest, is like the philosopher's descent into the Cave in the Republic. Being with the prisoners, Socrates takes up their methods, their ways of doing things. But he has no option but to do that with an opponent like Protagoras in the other corner, for Protagoras denies the very basis of Socratic dialectic. There is, for him, no such thing as science, no such thing as objective knowledge; Socrates is therefore forced to fight by Protagoras' rules to get a grip on him at all. What emerges, paradoxically, near the end of the dialogue is the requirement—even on popular (the prisoners' own) premises—for a measuring art, which makes measuring not the prerogative of each and every Protagorean individual but rather a matter of technical expertise. And so (according to Capra's argument) we arrive back at that very realm of knowledge, which in the Republic is the means by which we shall raise...