Читать книгу Couch City - Harry Berger - Страница 9

In the Perils of Uglytown (2015), Harry Berger, Jr., shows that the allegedly ideal city of Plato’s Republic, its kallipolis or beautiful city, is more truly an aischropolis, an Uglytown. Couch City: Socrates against Simonides opens with the prehistory of Uglytown in what Berger dubs Klinopolis or Couch City, introduced in Republic 2. In this luxurious, soft, and “feverish” city (372e), couches are associated with pleonexia, “having more, wanting to have more, wanting to be superior and get the better of others, to do unto them before they do unto you.”¹ As Berger writes in Couch City, the idea of the couch, which appears in Republic 10, “transcendentalizes the culture of Klinopolis,” idealizing its way of life. Symbolizing the desire for more honor, money, power, and pleasure, as well as the arguments that rationalize these desires, the idea of the couch exemplifies and justifies Klinopolis’s pleonectic ethics, its instrumental rhetoric, and the power politics its morality and discourses underwrite and produce.

A depiction of fifth-century BCE Athens—the Athens of the new agathoi—Klinopolis is the sociopolitical backdrop of the dialogue that is the focus of Couch City, Plato’s Protagoras. In this dialogue, Socrates tells the story of a gathering of famous sophists, at which he and Protagoras discuss a central topic of Athenian culture and Greek philosophy, namely, aretē, excellence or virtue. The stakes are high. The conversation takes place before an eager group of students and admirers, including Critias and Alcibiades, up-and-comers in Athens’s political scene, as well as the young and impressionable Hippocrates, a political hopeful, who, desiring to learn from the venerable Protagoras, brings Socrates to the gathering to hold the great sage to account.

When asked by Socrates what he teaches, Protagoras answers: “how to make good decisions” about one’s own affairs and the affairs of one’s city so that “one can be the most powerful” in the city “in both acting and speaking.” With Protagoras’s assent, Socrates glosses this as teaching “the political art [technē]” of good citizenship, or the excellence or virtue of citizens (318e–319a). Having introduced virtue into the discussion, Socrates expresses skepticism about its teachability (319a–320c). Picking up Socrates’s thread, Protagoras explains why virtue is necessary in a long myth about the origins of human society (320c–328d). On Berger’s reading, Protagoras’s “great speech” brings to light that, for Protagoras, virtue is a matter of “forethought for appearances (self-presentation),” a skill that involves “teaching oneself and others the art of adjusting one’s public image to conform to public expectations” so as to avoid being overthrown.

Virtue so understood Berger calls “face” or “the aretē of public performance.” This is the virtue of Protagoras’s myth. It is the virtue Protagoras teaches and preaches. And it is also the virtue he practices. Adjusting his own image to conform to public expectations, Protagoras prefers holding his discussion with Socrates not in private but before the gathering as a whole (316b–317e) so that he can burnish his reputation at Athens. Protagorean virtue as face, Berger writes, is a “weapon … of defense and offense,” a “performative skill in eristics” or verbal warfare. In the terms of Protagoras’s myth about the origins of human society, virtue is Promethean aggression seeded by Epimethean fear, by which avoiding being overthrown also means overthrowing others. A technē of attaining power through discursive means, Protagorean virtue reflects and sets in motion the pleonectic ethics, rhetoric, and politics of Klinopolis.

Protagorean virtue stands as a rival to the do-no-harm ethics generally associated with Plato’s Socrates. And, across divergent traditions of scholarship, the prevailing view is that the Protagoras sides with Socrates over its namesake, upholding, against Protagoras’s Klinopolitan morality, the ethics Socrates advocates in other dialogues, namely that, in Berger’s words, “one should always try to do good, to be and stay good, and should never harm anyone, no matter what the cost.” Socrates may engage with Protagoras in all sorts of sophistic ways: deploy argument by antilogy; switch tactics from questioning whether virtue can be taught to asking whether the so-called cardinal virtues—moderation, justice, wisdom, courage—are all one thing or different; defend a kind of hedonism when he maintains that “salvation in life” depends on an “art of measurement” that ensures right action by enabling the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain (351b–358d). Still, in defending the unity of the virtues and insisting that acting against one’s own convictions—weakness of will—is impossible, Socrates, it is said, wins by beating Protagoras at his own game, no holds barred. Although not unscathed, Socrates emerges victorious.

Berger sees things otherwise. Through close readings of the scenes of debate between Socrates and Protagoras about the unity of virtue, courage, weakness of will, measure, and pleasure, Couch City makes the case that, despite important appearances of Socratic ethics in the Protagoras, the dialogue privileges overall the ethics of its namesake. Taking his cue from Socrates’s words at the end of the dialogue, according to which neither he nor Protagoras wins and the two speakers have exchanged places (361a–d), Berger demonstrates that by beating Protagoras at his own game, which includes committing himself to Protagoras’s tactics, Socrates acts against his own convictions and defeats himself. As Berger puts it in an earlier essay on the Protagoras, by “[d]efacing Protagoras, [Socrates] effaces himself” (“Facing Sophists,” 406). Maintaining that he finds “the Prometheus” in Protagoras’s great speech “more to [his] liking than the Epimetheus” (361d), Socrates indicates that he opts for aggression over fear. Siding with virtue as “the forethought that enables humans to protect themselves against pain, danger, defeat,” Socrates affirms the Promethean ethos that Protagoras lives by, thereby strengthening “the very interests he [Socrates] opposes” (FS, 405–6).

Despite their competing ethics, then, Protagoras and Socrates, on Berger’s reading, collaborate “to produce an argument that binds each to the other and divides each from himself.” In their joined performative eristics, they jointly exercise Protagorean virtue in their agon over virtue. This inflects how they speak and the meaning of what they say. Thus, as per Protagoras’s initial account of what he teaches, namely “acting and speaking” as technai of power, the speeches of both Protagoras and Socrates produce Protagorean virtue as the virtue of the dialogue as a whole.

Protagorean virtue reigns in the Protagoras because of what, in the Theaetetus (as modified by Berger), Socrates calls the “inevitable law of our [interlocutory] being” (160b), which is that the I [in speech] is always the I-that-I-am-in-relation-to-my-auditors. In a succinct encapsulation of this law, Socrates says (also in the Theaetetus): “The arguments never come from me; they always come from the person with whom I’m speaking” (161b). Interested in the question of when and how the unavoidable bond of speech gives rise to bondage, Berger is on the lookout, here in Couch City as in earlier work, for the “subversive dynamic” he sees across Plato’s dialogues and names “charismatic bondage.” Exemplified by “[t]he power by which the sophist masters the audience [hoi polloi] [that] derives from the power by which the audience masters him,” charismatic bondage circulates, too, between politicians and their demotic audiences (Republic 493a–d; Gorgias 481e).

Charismatic bondage can also characterize the relation between interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues and their audiences, as well as relations between the interlocutors themselves. Calling the subversive dynamic of charismatic bondage “a contagion,” Berger describes it as something from which no one and nothing is immune. Not even Socrates. Symptoms of contagion spread in all directions in the Protagoras. They are manifest in the reversals that punctuate the “interlocutory warfare” between Socrates and Protagoras, in their joint performative eristics, in their shared ethics of apprehensive defensiveness, and in their weaponization of virtue. Protagoras may be the first to prefer that his discussion with Socrates take place in public, but it is Socrates who goes about gathering the scattered groupings together to assemble them in one place as an audience (317d). For Socrates, no less than for Protagoras, virtue is face. “Enchained” to Protagoras through charismatic bondage, Socrates, as Berger writes, “becomes his double.”