Abstract
Songe-Møller sets out to locate the position from where philosophy speaks. By investigating the relations between the notion of voice (phonê), the frequent occupation with place, and the notion of atopos (“no place” or “strange”), she offers an elucidating topology of the dialogue and its proposed positions. The first words of the dialogue: “From where, Socrates, have you just arrived?” or “From where, Socrates, are you appearing?” point directly to the dialogue’s leading question: From where does Socrates, the philosopher, arrive? From which perspective does he – and his dialogue partner, Protagoras – speak? In the form of an elegant portrait of how the famous sophist speaks with a foreign, or external, voice, Plato shows that he speaks from an illusionary topos. And this allows Socrates positon to stand out: Socrates does not only speak with his own authentic voice. From the perspective of one that does not know, this is an indeterminate topos within logos, and a point of view necessary for philosophical inquiry.
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- 1.
Unless otherwise specified, the translations of the Protagoras are by Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, in Plato (1997).
- 2.
The Greek word for “friend” is hetairos. Lampert (2010, 22) argues for another translation: “a ‘comrade’, like a shipmate or messmate – not friend.”
- 3.
Cf. Lampert (2010, 22): “Socrates’ pursuit of Alcibiades borders on the criminal or at least the disreputable.”
- 4.
Cf. Stokes (1986, 184).
- 5.
For instance in the Theaetetus, Socrates says: “… they say that I am a very odd sort of person (atopôtatos) [always causing people to get into difficulties (aporein)]” (149a), and in the Symposium Alcibiades characterizes both Socrates and his logoi by the word atopia (221d). See Weber (1998, 453–456) for a discussion on the function of atopos in the Phaedrus. Thanks to Erlend Breidal, both for this reference and for his reflections on the importance of the theme of atopia for understanding the character of Socrates (cf. his unpublished paper “‘Place’ (topos) and ‘Strangeness’ (atopia) in the Phaedrus”).
- 6.
I am indebted to Rørstadbotten for making me aware of the central theme of atopia in the Protagoras (Chapter “Turning Towards Philosophy: A Reading of Protagoras 309a1–314e2” in this volume).
- 7.
Lampert’s translation (2010, 21).
- 8.
Cf. Lampert (2010, 21): “… that question is the essential question: from where did Socrates, that singularity in the history of Greek philosophy, appear?”
- 9.
My discussion of phônê is indebted to Quintela’s article, as well as to Griswold (1999).
- 10.
Cf. Crito 54d2–5: “Crito, my dear friend, be assured that these are the words I seem to hear, as the Crymants seem to hear the music of their flutes, and the echoes of these words resound in me (bombei), and makes it impossible for me to hear anything else.” According to Jordan (2004, 250), bombos “is almost a terminus technicus of the myesis”. This allusion to the mysteries is not a far fetched one, as Callias belonged to the distinguished family of the Kerykes, one of the families that were responsible for the Eleusinian Mysteries, and Callias himself was later appointed torchbearer, the second most important priest at the Mysteries. Cf. Nails (2002, 70).
- 11.
In the Protagoras, Callias was only about 18 years old, but was soon to be sued for adultery. Nails (2002, 68) writes that the comic poet Cratinus, just a couple of years after the scene in the Protagoras took place, made Callius “infamous for licentious behavior”, which is confirmed by the orator Andocides (1968, 131): “Hipponicus imagined that he had a son in his house; but that son was really an evil spirit, which has upset his wealth, his morals, and his whole life. So it is as Hipponicus’ evil spirit that you must think of Callias.” It is well known that Callias, who was the son of Hipponicus, the richest man in Greece, “reduced his grandfather’s estate to less than one per cent of what it had been through extravagance on a heroic scale” (Davidson 1998, 185). Socrates’ description of Callias’ house did presumably not come as a surprise to Plato’s readers.
- 12.
This can be seen as a parallel between Socrates’ entry into Callias’ house and Odysseus’ entry into Hades: just like the shades in Hades cannot speak until Odysseus gives them blood to drink, the sophists does not speak until Socrates enters and speaks to them. Cf. Gonzalez (2014, 41): “The other thing that makes the sophists like the insubstantial shades of Hades is the complete absence of dialogue among them: each is described as pontification in isolation from the others, neither hearing nor even, as in the case of Prodicus, being heard.”
- 13.
Cf. 323b7–c2: “They will say that everyone ought to claim to be just, whether they are or not, and that it is madness not to pretend to justice, since one must have some trace of it or not be human.”
- 14.
Cf. Quintela (2009, 262): “the passage that defines how to be a good citizen fuses together the notion of humanity with that of citizenship.” Beresford (2013, 43), on the other hand, argues that the Protagorean civic virtue is “the common property of humanity”: “His theory … succeeds in its main and original purpose of vindicating the democratic approach to the political and civic task, because it explains why the ethical talents required for good citizenship are bound to be the common property of humanity, the result of our universal nature and of a common and uncomplicated upbringing, …”
- 15.
However, Socrates calls him a foreigner, a xenos (309c6).
- 16.
It is tempting to interpret Protagoras’ tale of mankind’s evolution, starting with the universal, rational man and ending with the irrational crowd present in Callias’ house, as an ironic comment by Plato on Protagoras homo mensura theory.
- 17.
Quintela (2009, 253, n. 26) refers to Aristophanes, fr. 706, “where ξενικα oνoματα are the words of the dialects other than Attic”. Insisting on one Greek linguistic norm, Protagoras, though from Abdera, might have adopted the Attic dialect as this one norm.
- 18.
Cf. Quintela (2009, 264): “The Sophist [Protagoras] says that the Athenians teach what we call “Greek”. But in reality. as Plato would make clear in the passages where he mentions φωνή, what the Athenians taught is what we call the “Attic dialect”. Once more, both Herodotus and Thucydides reveal that the linguistic identity of the Greek speakers was not “Greek”, but instead the specific dialect of each city or region ”.
- 19.
Cf. Griswold (1999), 288: “Socrates here sketches an ideal and tells us to model ourselves on it. The ideal is that of a person who relies on his or her own voice”.
- 20.
On the mutual dependence of Protagoras and his audience, see Berger (1984).
- 21.
Cf. Gonzalez (2014, 43), who claims that Socrates’ purpose, when arguing that virtue cannot be taught, is to demonstrate “the absurdity of a technical conception of virtue”. Moreover, in order to show that virtue is not teachable, Socrates refers to the inability of people like Pericles to teach their sons virtue (319e3–320b5). He thus uses arguments “which were based on the wisdom of the Athenians and the goodness of their statesmen, two bases he will hardly have thought of as unshakable” (Stokes 1986, 439).
- 22.
Cf. Cohen (1994, 47), who suggests that the whole dialogue may be characterized as atopos: ”The Protagoras enjoys an odd reputation – odd, let us say, in the sense of atopos, place-less or uncanny, a term first used by and of Socrates in the opening (309b). What one commentator has called Socrates’ ‘hedonist calculus’ at the end … a ‘crack in the unity of Plato’ (Raven), might almost be applied to the whole dialogue.”
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Songe-Møller, V. (2017). Socrates’ Irony: A Voice from Nowhere? On Voice (Phônê), Topos, and Atopos in Plato’s Protagoras . In: Pettersson, O., Songe-Møller, V. (eds) Plato’s Protagoras. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 125. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45585-3_10
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