Protreptic means 'intending to persuade or instruct'. If you believe Socrates, in the dialogues, always has this intention- i.e. he is some sort of salesman or pedagogue- then any theory he proposes would be protreptic. Indeed, this would be the case of any dude who wishes to attract, influence, or educate others. The trouble, of course, is that Socrates could also be considered to be a gentlemanly talker who relished passing the time in a manner he found agreeable. It is one thing to seek to persuade a person and a quite different thing to chat with a chap of a certain persuasion and get him to ponder whether what he is persuaded of really is reasonable or useful.
Speaking generally, a 'protreptic' account features a soi disant 'Structural Causal Model' of great power and robustness. Plato's Socrates offers no such thing. If he had, there could have been no Platonism nor any Academy which Plato could preside over or from which Aristotle could graduate or gain tenure in- before fucking off to more lucrative teaching gigs yet.
Perhaps the chief charm of reading Plato is that, in his invocation of Socrates, onw feels oneself in the company of a gentleman of leisure, albeit means as modest as our own, yet with sophisticated literary tastes.
True, Plato himself suggests that there is another discipline- Mathematics- one of great rigor in which much instruction is necessary, which underpins the insights or intuitions his Socrates casually throws out, but this prose is not protreptic in itself. It is allusive rather than didactic. It eludes axiomitisation and instructs either Faith or Skepticism or a fatalistic teaching of worthless shite so no more horrible pedant teach that worthless shite.
Sadly, as far as his style of argumentation goes, once one understands the 'masked man' or 'intensional' fallacy, Socrates seems a one-trick pony who has found an algorithmic method for generating paradoxes of a puerile kind. Still, because we are interested in his milieu and seek insights into the great aesthetic achievements of his contemporaries, we take pleasure in returning to the dialogues which have inspired so much else in European and Hellenistic Jewish and Islamic literature.
I don't know whether Mathematical Platonists actually read Plato, but, if they do, perhaps they consider the dramatic aspect of the dialogues concerns the issue of game theoretic determinacy. Is there a winning strategy for discussions of this sort? This takes us immediately to deep open questions re. the continuum hypothesis and whether ZFC should be extended using forcing axioms rather than the inner model axiom V equals ultimate L. I should also mention the notion of Turing degree, or degree of unsolvability and how this relates to large cardinality axioms. One may say, even when dealing with Socratic aporia, there are degrees of aporia and there may be a measure theory which could be usefully applied. My point is that it is easy enough, for an intelligent layman, to see that Socratic dialogues are philosophical in that they deal with currently open problems in Mathematics. But, for an obvious reason, nothing in such a dialogue could be protereptic for us in the twenty first century. It could be poetic, it could be suggestive, it might even, to the mind of a Woodin, be inspiring in the highest degree. But, speaking of ordinary mortals who pick up their Plato every decade or so, there is neither instruction nor example to be found there. Aesthetic pleasure is a different matter but it can only be found by a mind content to experience it rather than force the text into some stupid pedantic or programmatic straitjacket.
In other words, Socrates is either a literary character to be appreciated for cultural and aesthetic reasons or else he was framing 'philosophical'- i.e. 'open'- questions in Math. What Socrates wasn't was a guy whom one should take as a persuasive salesman for a particular way of life. It is one thing to imitate Christ- who is God and can get you to Heaven, it is another to imitate a gentlemanly conversationalist who talked his way into a death sentence.
Agnes Callard takes a different view.
EVERYONE DESIRES THE GOOD: SOCRATES’ PROTREPTIC THEORY OF DESIRE
What is the first principle of Socratic ethics?
It is that only the examined life is worth living- at least for the sort of people who like thinking about how life should be led. It doesn't matter what outcome the examination comes to or indeed whether any outcome can be reached. Introspection is its own reward.
Socrates’ oft-repeated contention that everyone desires the good is a reasonable candidate.
It occurs in the Meno. Socrates is showing the deficiency in defining virtue as desiring what is honorable and gaining it. But this is self evident. After all, Mummy is very virtuous but does not clamor for high honors. Indeed, we find virtue is often self-effacing and that it shrinks from the spotlight. The vainglorious may wish to be thought virtuous but don't care to actually become so.
For consider what its competitors might be. Socrates also believes that one ought to devote one’s life to care for the soul, that no one willingly does wrong, that wisdom is the only thing that is (really) good, ignorance the only thing that is (really) evil, that being wronged is better than wronging, that justice is piety and temperance is wisdom6 that only good men have the power to do evil and that a good man cannot be harmed.
We don't know what Socrates believes. He may simply have been passing the time in an agreeable manner.
Assuming that some of these Socratisms are grounded on others, the desire thesis is likely to stand in a relatively foundational position.
Not really. It is empty. The fact is desire has nothing to do with what is good or bad. We may say 'that particular desire of yours will get you into trouble!' but that has to do with its consequences of which no man can be sure.
As Rachana Kamtekar observes: “it does seem more likely that the doctrine that wrongdoing is unwilling should be a consequence of some deeper philosophical commitment about our orientation towards the good [viz., the desire thesis], rather than the other way round.”
What seems likely to a cretin is beside the point. There is something admirable in Socrates desire to sacrifice himself for the sake of his City. His good breeding and the charm of his conversation too are traits we would wish our young men to possess though, no doubt, we would also like to see them excel in sports and gain success in the law courts or in the armies of our country. We may say, 'Socrates's commitment was to Athens and the peculiar atmosphere which produced some of Humanity's greatest art and literature.' But we don't know anything about his fundamental metaphysical beliefs. Platonism is a different matter. Aristotelianism and Cynicism and Epicureanism and Stoicism do appear to have fundamental metaphysical presuppositions. But Socrates was the Sappho of persiflage. He set up no school. But Plato did so and Plato's pupil was the teacher of World Conquering Alexander. When we read Plato we feel a little more kindly towards the Academy because it seems to have had its genesis in a gentlemanly enough Symposium. It is Socrates' urbanity, his lightness of spirit which, however, never lacked graver grace notes, which adds glamour to a type of discourse which, in lesser hands, is tedious, pedantic, and wholly inutile.
The desire thesis may, then, be conceptually prior to Socrates’ other views; it is also, I think, prior in another way. Socratic theory-building happens via conversation, and these conversations have practical as well as theoretical aims.
What is Socrates's theory? Boring shite about how it is good to want the good, goodness gracious me?
Socrates is speaking not only with a view to discovering the truth, but also for the sake of redirecting both himself and his interlocutor onto a pursuit of virtue and wisdom.
Or he is just passing the time in a manner less sordid than sodomy.
Paraphrasing Plato (Rep. 518d3- 7), we can say that he aims to turn misdirected souls, his own included, toward the light.
His students or other interlocutors may certainly say so. But the lights to which they turned were different in each case.
Consider a few examples of Socrates’ characteristically protreptic conversational style. He concludes the discussion of the Laches
about defining courage
with the striking injunction: “What I don’t advise is that we allow ourselves to stay as we are.”
The dialogue ends in confusion or 'aporia'. I suppose, a guy who has fought in wars knows that courage means different things at different times. You can't stand still or the enemy will figure out a way to use your own definition of courage to entrap and defeat you.
He has managed to divert a conversation about educating children to the topic of the adults’ need for moral improvement. Plato indicates that this was a habitual Socratic practice by having Nicias predict early on that the conversation would turn inwards.
The Greeks did a lot of fighting. They knew that to be predictable in battle is to risk defeat.
Likewise, Socrates ends his discussion about akrasia
lack of self-control
with “the many” in the Protagoras by chiding them for not directing themselves to acquiring the art of measurement that would be their salvation.
This would be like a utilitarian calculus. However, what is interesting here is that Socrates and Protagoras end up exchanging positions. There is 'antidosis'. This is in line with Socrates's dictum that philosophy is about being able to give as good an account for both sides of a case. However, some other discipline might 'close' the question in which case the topic ceases to be philosophical.
He tames the vaulting ambition of Alcibiades (“you want your reputation and your influence to saturate all mankind”) into an avowed commitment on the part of Alcibiades to “start to cultivate justice in myself right now.”
There was an obvious political motive for that passage.
In the Euthydemus he both asks for and himself offers, “an exhibition of persuading the young man that he ought to devote himself to wisdom and virtue.”
Rather than gambling and whores. Nothing wrong with that.
His own “exhibition” concludes with the claim that “it seems to be necessary that every man should prepare himself by every means to become as wise as possible.”
As opposed to gambling away his fortune or getting the clap.
For all his humility, Socrates seems to arrogate to himself a limitless power to transform any desire anyone approaches him with into an impetus to inquire after virtue.
Actually, what he seems to have been good at was talking in a gentlemanly manner so as to pass the time agreeably.
It is as though Socrates takes himself to be able to say something like this to anyone he meets: “If you like power (or pleasure or money or honor or health or beauty or fame or not fearing death or educating your children or….) you’ll love virtue and wisdom.”
Because there were 'Sophists' whom rich men engaged to teach their sons. Clearly, there would be a reputational benefit in saying 'my son was taught civic virtue by the great Protagoras'. The family might be awarded a tax farming contract in the Colonies.
Readers are often struck by Socrates’ many pedagogic failures (Meno, Alcibiades, Anytus etc.), but the other side of that same coin is Socrates’ remarkable willingness to take on the hardest cases. One thing Plato may be trying to show us by filling his dialogues with ‘bad’ interlocutors is that no one is too avaricious (Meno), cynical (Callicles), self-satisfied (Hippias), belligerent (Thrasymachus), scatterbrained (Hippocrates), sophistical (Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus), fixed in his ways (Protagoras, Gorgias, Cephalus), naïve (Charmides, Lysis), power-hungry (Polus), conventional (Anytus), spoiled by flattery (Alcibiades), narcissistic (Agathon), or pompous (Euthyphro) for Socrates to deem them worthy of his pedagogic efforts.
But, since he wasn't paid, he wasn't a pedagogue. He was merely an agreeable conversationalist who, however, was devoted to his City.
Socrates seems to think that virtue and wisdom will get someone (anyone!) what he really wanted out of the (possibly bad) actions he was antecedently inclined to perform.
No. There is no evidence that he set up as a reformer of morals or an examiner of consciences. He may not have been high born, but he was gentlemanly.
The desire thesis could explain why he thinks this: Socrates can convince anyone to pursue virtue and wisdom, because everyone desires the good.
Which is why those at his trial became so virtuous and wise that they passed a death sentence upon him.
The desire thesis would, then, be more than a premise on the basis of which Socrates draws some of his more idiosyncratic conclusions. It would also serve to underwrite his protreptic activity, fortifying Socratic protreptic against charges of futility and foolhardiness.
If the desire thesis were true, Socrates would have spent his last moments asking himself where he had gone wrong in his speech to the court.
This would, then, be a second way in which the desire thesis might be foundational for Socrates. In this paper, I will explore a closely-related third way.
Stupidity may be incestuously related to all manners of other stupidity.
Beyond believing that the desire thesis makes his conversations profitable, Socrates also uses the desire thesis to actually make them profitable.
Which is like the fact that you believe your farts are smelly can be used to actually make them smelly.
He seems to think that explicit acknowledgement of the desire thesis has an educational function.
But the 'desire thesis' is obviously silly unless, as for Plato, there is a 'real' form of the Good. Nothing wrong with being a Platonist. Plenty of Mathematicians are. But we have no warrant for holding that Socrates was a Platonist. We can merely say that Plato's Socrates sometimes seems so.
I will examine how, in the Meno and the Gorgias, Socrates introduces the desire thesis as a way to encourage his interlocutors to reflect critically on their own desires.
But they don't do so. Meno isn't going 'fuck! I've just realized I was wrong to desire drinking a whole barrel of wine!'
But how can claiming that everyone desires the good motivate a turn towards virtue and wisdom on the part of interlocutors who don’t already identify virtue and wisdom with the good?
Easily enough. When we hear the word 'good' we are reminded of Mummy telling us to be good and quit pulling the tail of the pussy cat.
Before ansering this question, we must settle what the desire thesis actually says.
Some shite Agnes made up.
Despite its importance for both Socratic ethical theory (sometimes called, “Socratic intellectualism”) and Socratic ethical practice (protreptic conversation), scholars have not been able to come to a consensus as to what Socrates means when he says that everyone desires the good.
But the thing is no great mystery. I say 'dude, I really want to fuck my neighbor's daughter. She is so hot!' You reply 'do you really want to have your head kicked in by her brothers? Sure you do. You think you'd be better looking without any teeth. Tell you what, I'll help you pull out all your teeth. That way you'll get what you really want without pissing everybody off.'
Some have taken him to mean that people desire what appears to them to be good, while others hold that Socrates thinks people desire what really is good.
I suppose we could say our 'meta desire' is to want to want only what is good for us and what is truly good for us is also good for everybody else and so nobody will have to kick my fucking head in.
In this paper, I will show that it is possible to make use of the foundational status of the desire thesis, specifically its protreptic function, to help us adjudicate this interpretative dispute.
In other words, by an arbitrary ipse dixit assertion, an arbitrary ipse dixit judgment will be offered. But this can be equally done by asserting that Socrates was a walrus. Since walruses think whatever I say they think, it follows that what I say Socrates thought is what he actually thought.
I argue that the two standard interpretations are less opposed than they might seem: both sides pick out what Socrates takes to be a necessary but insufficient condition on desiring. If what we desire must both be, and appear to us to be, good,
It isn't. I may want to fuck an ugly syphilitic whore who however tickles my fancy for some sordid reason.
then people desire a subset of the things they take themselves to desire,
nope. We may desire things we didn't know we desire which is how come Vance ended up fucking the sofa.
and a subset of the things that really are good. Pointing this out to people is an effective way of turning them towards inquiry about the good, since they will be motivated to discover which appearances are mistaken and which goods they have missed out on.
Nobody has ever made any such inquiry though a few useless pedants might have written books about the difficulty of being good or some such shite. Still, if you happen to be a clergyman or a quack, you might want to spend a lot of time explaining how your desire to understand what it really means to be the world's greatest scientist led you into a pretty brain-dead line of work.
And this, I argue, explains why Socrates so frequently asserts that everyone desires the good: it serves his protreptic purposes.
No it doesn't. The thing is silly. Try going up to a hot chick and saying 'you desire the good'. She won't feel she has been instructed or persuaded. She will think you have shit for brains.
Still, I suppose, those who didn't relish Socrates's conversation could give him a wide berth. If they desired to converse with him perhaps they wanted something more than to pass the time agreeably, though in the end, that is all they had done.
I suppose one might add that the Greeks were aware that behind the various gods and the gifts they could bestow, was just one God or Substance and one gift in which all other gifts were included. It would be perfectly proper to allude to this in a gentlemanly fashion without dwelling too much upon it and, as far as we know, that's all that Socrates did. True, one might say 'in my view Socrates was groping towards the truth of my religion' but this is just an ipse dixit assertion.
Callard speaks of 'apparentism' which 'presents Socrates as asserting that desire is directed at the apparent good'.
But this is just the distinction between ex ante and ex post in economics. We choose things based on expectations which in turn are based on appearances. If the appearances coincide with reality, ex ante and ex post are the same. There is 'equilibrium'. If not, there is an adjustment of expectations as something different appears to be the case. This continues till there is an equilibrium. At that point we may say there is 'endoxa'- i.e. an accepted opinion which is good enough for any particular purpose.
Apparentism is a natural way to hear Socrates’ claim in the Meno that: “It is clear then that people who are ignorant of bad things do not desire them, but rather they desire those things they believe to be good.”
Surely, the natural way to hear this is as a proposition- not a sound or well considered one, but a good enough conversational gambit. We may desire things- e.g. sex or death or being humiliated by a dominatrix- of which we as yet have no knowledge and which aren't desired because they are good.
On an alternative reading, the desire thesis says that everyone desires that which, as a matter of fact, is good—
which is fine if you believe a compassionate God created man in such a way- but again this is not what Socrates was doing. He was a charming conversationalist, not a preacher.
To illustrate the force of this interpretation, suppose for a moment that Socrates believes that wisdom is the only thing which is, as a matter of fact, good.
In that case he would also know he was babbling nonsense because few desire wisdom which, speaking generally, comes only with bitter experience. Joy is nicer.
If this alternative reading of the desire thesis is right, then Socrates would be in a position to conclude that everyone, despite his protestations to the contrary, desires wisdom.
If they like talking to him- sure, because Socrates took seriously the claim that he was the wisest of men. Similarly, I may believe that any lady who rings me up to ask me to take part in a survey is sexually attracted to me. Otherwise why would she bother?
I’ll call this version of the desire thesis “externalism,” since it holds that the objects of desire are not fixed by the first-personally introspectible details on which desire-ascription is usually taken to rest: “we desire not whatever may be in accord with our conception of good…but rather whatever the good may really be, even if we don’t know what it is.”
This may be externalist if God is the only efficient cause or if there really is a 'form of the Good' whose rippling emanations we mistake for reality. But we have no warrant for attributing any such view to Socrates. We could say the 'intension' here is epistemic and the extension not yet known. Indeed, it may never be known. Still, talking of such things may be an agreeable enough way to pass the time.
I propose that the truth lies at the intersection of the two standard interpretations, with apparentism and externalism stating severally necessary conditions on desire.
But there are no necessary or sufficient conditions for desire though no doubt a particular bunch of pedants may desire to speak in such high falutin, pseudo mathematical, terms.
The natural interpretation is that Socrates understood the 'intensional fallacy' and used it entertainingly enough to generate sophistical paradoxes to pass the time.
Socrates’ view is that in order to desire something it must be good,
He wasn't that stupid. He merely wanted to steer the conversation away from pederasts gassing on about which little boy they wanted to sodomize.
and, in addition, it must appear good. The objects of desire lie in the overlap between what is good and what appears so.
There is no 'overlap' because we are speaking of intensions of an epistemic sort whose extensions may never be known.
An assumption of intertextual consistency stands at the background of the interpretative dispute between apparentism and externalism.
No. What stands in the background is that these stupid cunts think Socrates was doing the sort of shitty philosophy they themselves do. The fact is Socrates was a charming conversationalist who cared deeply about his City. He didn't have a sheepskin in useless shit.
Why think that Socrates is saying one and the same thing every time he asserts that everyone desires the good? We ought to consider the possibility that the texts are more equivocal than they are usually taken to be: perhaps Plato changed his mind; perhaps Socrates is speaking dialectically in some of these contexts; perhaps he means different things by “desire”; perhaps some of these assertions represent the views of Socrates, and others those of Plato.
Or perhaps, Plato and others who wrote of Socrates, felt he was one of the most interesting characters in Athens and recorded his interactions, possible or real, with other famous personalities or stock types.
We have a variety of interpretative tools ready at hand to justify accepting intertextual discord; let me make the case that we shouldn’t make use of them to simply accept the tension between the two texts at the heart of this dispute, namely Meno 77b-78a and Gorgias 466b-467d.
Meno was a pupil of Gorgias. The only tool we need is the distinction between 'intension' and 'extension'. There are lots of 'intensions' which don't have a definition which yields an extension. They should be treated as Tarskian primitives. It is a separate matter that there was a time when some thought it important to prove Socrates was naturaliter Christian, or pro or anti Democracy etc. But, the truth was and is that he was a gentleman of some charm and conversational ability. Reading Plato's dialogues when you are an adolescent may ensure you don't spend your College days in a state of drunken debauch. Instead, you might learn to sip your sherry while learning to converse like a gentleman. Also, talking philosophy might stop young people bumming each other incessantly.
In the Meno, the desire thesis comes up in the context of Meno’s definition of virtue as a combination of desire (for good things) and power (to achieve them).
No. What comes up is the masked man, or intensional, fallacy. You can't define virtue. It is a Tarskian primitive.
While working through the first half of this definition—what is the desire for good things? who desires bad things?—Socrates offers an argument for the desire thesis.
No. He demonstrates that there is an intensional fallacy because otherwise there would be a well defined extension for virtue and therefore desire and so forth.
In the Gorgias, the desire thesis surfaces in the context of an argument about power—what is it, and who has it?
Again, the thing is epistemic or impredicative. It may appear Sheikh Hasina had power in Bangladesh but when the Army Chief told her his troops would not obey her, she had just 45 minutes to jump on a plane. Who actually had or has power in Bangladesh? We don't know.
Socrates is arguing against a conception of power as the ability to do whatever seems best to you. Instead, he thinks it is the ability to do whatever you want. He invokes the desire thesis as a way of insisting that people do not want the bad things they pursue, and therefore that a tyrant without wisdom is powerless to get what he wants.
what he really really wants. This is like the no true Scotsman fallacy.
The fact that the desire thesis shows up in the Meno to explain one half of Meno’s definition of virtue, and in the Gorgias to explain the other half (power), suggests that the Meno and the Gorgias take up one another’s slack.
It suggests Socrates was a one trick pony. Still, decies repetita placent. The public likes repetition.
It is hard to believe that Plato did not intend us to see these connections, and thus that he would speak in a thoroughly equivocal way between the two dialogues.
Gorgias has more dramatic irony. Meno is important because of the mention of anamnesis which connects with metempsychosis and is kind of mystical- not to say spooky.
Consider the argumentative trajectory of Meno 77b-78b. Meno defines virtue as desiring good things and having the power to secure them.
Which is obviously false. A virtuous person may have no desires. Mummy was like that. Still, it might not be gentlemanly to mention Mummy. Why not let the lad chatter on and then, in a charming manner, pull the rug from underneath him?
His definition presupposes a separation of desirers into two classes: those who desire good things and those who desire bad things. Socrates is incredulous that any people belong in the second category, and asks Meno for clarification.
Meno can point out that there are people who want to rob and kill you. But he doesn't because the game is rigged.
At Socrates’ prompting, Meno divides (purported) desirers of the bad into those who: (I) believe that the bad things are good, and those who (II) know that they are bad. Meno further divides (II) into those who (a) believe the bad things benefit them, and those who (b) know that the bad things harm them.
and don't give a fuck. Lots of us desire bad things which will harm us.
Socrates expresses skepticism about IIa: “And do you think that those who believe that bad things benefit them know that they are bad?” Meno grants that they do not.
Why? There is no need to. It is enough to say that they think there will be an exception in their own case.
Socrates thereupon takes himself to be licensed to claim that not only these people (IIa) but also all the people in the first camp (I) really desire good.
Because you can always say people who are kicking you in the head actually want to suck you off.
Agnes quotes this passage from the Meno- It is clear then that those who do not know things to be bad do not desire what is bad,
Yes they do. It is a different matter that they shouldn't or that wouldn't if better advised. But that is an irrelevant 'extension' to the stated intension which is simple enough. X wants items a, b & c but not d. If better advised he would want d and stay the fuck away from a,b & c. But that is a separate intension with a different extension.
but they desire those things that they believe to be good but that are in fact bad. It follows that those who have no knowledge of these things and believe them to be good clearly desire good things
'Clearly' here means 'really', but that's like saying everybody really wants to suck me off though they keep kicking my head in.
Gerasimos Santas analyzes this passage by way of a highly influential distinction between an ‘intended object’ and an ‘actual object.’ He offers the example of a man who reaches for the salt shaker in the belief that it is the pepper shaker, and observes, “there is no contradiction in saying, for example, both that the intended object of the man's desire was the pepper mill and that the actual object of his desire was the salt shaker.”
That is irrelevant. One may believe the pepper shaker will dispense salt to you and only you. Thus, I may know that bank robbers tend to end up in prison. But I may feel that in my case, I will evade arrest and live a long and happy life making love to beautiful super-models on a Brazilian beach. Also, though every woman I have ever approached has tried to kick my head in, what they really want to do is to make tender love to me with their mouths. This is despite the fact that I know I'm as ugly as shit. I just think, in my case, an exception would be made.
Virtually everyone writing in Santas’ wake has accepted that some such distinction is in play. Santas’ discussion of the distinction is, however, less helpful than it might be, because he vacillates between taking the distinction in question as a distinction between two different things, as in the quote above, and two different descriptions of a single thing.
The mistake is to think a particular thing might not have different properties for different people or that they might believe this is the case.
A lot hangs on the way we cash out this distinction. On the two-objects way of hearing Socrates’ point, he is saying that when something bad is the actual object, we do not desire that bad thing but instead the good thing we confused for that bad thing.
No he is saying that what we really really want is whatever he thinks we should want. Fortunately, it had nothing to do with performing fellatio on him. As I said, Socrates was a gentleman.
On the two-descriptions way of hearing Socrates’ point, he is saying that we can desire bad things, so long as it is under some good description. If the latter were correct, it would be possible to desire bad things. This would make apparentism the only viable interpretation of the desire thesis. I am going to argue, however, that it is not correct: the text of the Meno argument calls for a distinction between two objects, and not two ways of describing a single object.
It calls for more than that- viz. the substitution of a completely different intension for the one under discussion. But the extension of that intension is unknowable. On the other hand, it is quite useful to say X wants to acquire a,b & c but does not want d.
The two-descriptions reading has the disadvantage of construing Socrates as talking past Meno.
What's wrong with that? Socrates is supposed to be smarter. We could simply say that Socrates is pointing to the danger of akreibia- i.e. a precision greater than the subject matter can bear- in giving definitions of 'Tarskian primitives'.
For Meno’s original contention, against which Socrates is (purportedly) arguing, is that we can distinguish between two kinds of people, those who desire bad things and those who desire good things.
We do make this distinction and it is useful enough. I let the plumber into my house because he intends to do me some good. I don't let an axe wielding maniac into the house because he means to chop off my head. That's perfectly sensible. What isn't is giving a definition of 'good' and 'evil'.
This is a point with which Socrates, on the two-descriptions account, agrees: “it is important to realize that Socrates is not denying (he certainly does not have to) that the actual objects of these people's desires are indeed bad things.” (Santas, p.156) It is true that Socrates thinks that Meno’s two kinds of people do not disagree in respect of their intended object, but once one has this distinction in place it is clear that Meno’s claim is better read as a claim about the actual than the intended object.
Actually, it is a rough and ready claim about inferred objects. The guy seeking to get the prostitute into his car may want to give her money so she can return to a virtuous way of life.
Meno’s thought was that virtuous people can be distinguished from vicious ones by attending to the differing quality of the (actual!) objects desired by each group. If Santas were right, it would border on sophistry for Socrates to conclude the argument by saying, of Meno’s definition of virtue as “the desire for good things and the power to secure them” that “The desiring part of this statement is common to everybody, and one man is no better than another in this.”
In other words, it is over-broad.
For Socrates to respond to Meno’s claim that people differ in respect of the actual objects of desire by insisting that they all have the same intended object is, at best, a non sequitur.
Not really. Greek oikeiosis is like Spinoza's conatus. All things seek to remain as they are- the wicked to remain wicked and the virtuous to remain virtuous and, it may be, the one can't survive without the other.
By contrast, on the two objects view, Socrates’ point is that people do not desire the actual object when it differs from the intended one. This conception of Socrates’ point allows him to contend, against Meno, that people do not desire (actually) bad things
Socrates's sleight of hand involves substituting one intension, which being epistemic, has no well defined extension, for another which (by revealed preference) has a good enough rough and ready extension. This may seem a shabby trick, but if Meno couldn't spot it then maybe it's a good thing he became a trifle less cock-sure after having had a chance to converse with a witty gentleman.
If I am right, Socrates is claiming that in order to be an object of desire, the item in question must make an appearance in the mental life of the desirer.
No. Socrates wasn't saying that one might not have a daemon or tutelary genius such that desire only appeared in one's 'mental life' after the object had been attained. Indeed, much conjugal love- at that time- must have been of that sort. Philosophy might be a 'practicing' of Death but Death comes to all and, it may be, its embrace is the more desirable if its possibility had never crossed one's mind. The poetic line in the Meno is '“For what else is being miserable but to desire bad things and secure them?' - i.e. seeking to continue living and then, at the last moment, being spared a generous libation of hemlock.
And this cannot be squared with the externalist’s contention that we desire that which is, in fact, good, irrespective of whether we take it to be good.
Sure it can, if God is the only efficient cause or there really is a form of the Good.
The claim that people cannot desire things of which they are unaware is the backbone of Socrates’ argument
It is a proposition he uses. It isn't a claim unless he truly was as stupid as shit.
that those who are ignorant of evils cannot desire them. I do, therefore, reject externalism. But I do not quite get all the way to endorsing apparentism. What Socrates asserts in the Meno is that in order for me to want something, it must seem best to me.
That is a proposition which Meno accepts because he thinks the 'extension' of the intension he is using is well ordered. True, at a later point, there is a shabby trick or sleight of hand but we could find a way of avoiding this. The fact is, though 'revealed preferences' do have good enough extensions, the moment you try to get to Preferences in themselves you crash into the intensional fallacy.
He does not assert the converse. Socrates’ claim that people desire what they believe good (ἃ ᾤοντο ἀγαθὰ εἶναι) as opposed to what is, unbeknownst to them, bad (ἔστιν δὲ ταῦτά γε κακά) doesn’t commit him to the apparentistic principle that people desire whatever appears good to them.
Because they don't.
His point is not that people desire everything they believe good, but that people desire only what they believe good.
That is a proposition which Meno might be inclined to accept because of his naive belief that there is a well ordered extension to the intension he defines.
For he is engaged in refuting the idea that the difference one observes in people when one calls some of them “good” and others “bad” corresponds to a difference in the ethical quality of the objects they desire.
He fails. But we might say what he is really engaging in is showing the fault of akreibia arises in being too cocksure about the well ordering of extensions corresponding to rigidly defined intensions. Economia is what is called for.
Callard gives other examples where Socrates says that the 'good enough' extension for an intension- e.g. what the tyrant wants done- fails once the intension is made epistemic by reason of the intensional fallacy. Some have a flavor of the 'Wisdom literature' of ancient Sumeria and the Levant. Artistically, they are quite successful but once one understands the intensional fallacy, there is no 'thesis' or philosophical commitment behind Socrates's elegant enough persiflage.
Callard quotes this passage from the Republic which is interesting because it is a bit like the ontological proof.
“In the case of just and beautiful things, many people are content with what are believed (τὰ δοκοῦντα) to be so, even if they aren’t really so, and they act, acquire, and form their own beliefs on that basis.
One may say that there is a 'derived demand' for such things and that demand would still exist even if nothing was just or beautiful.
Nobody is satisfied (ἀρκεῖ) to acquire things that are merely believed (τὰ δοκοῦντα) to be good, however, but everyone wants the things that really are good and disdains mere belief (δόξαν) here.”
So demand for the good is not 'derived' from something else. Moreover, the supremum of the Good is the Good and, by something like the ontological argument, that supremum must exist and not be notional simply.
In this passage, Socrates distinguishes our attitude towards just and beautiful things from our attitude to good ones.
Because there is a reputational reason why demand for the just and beautiful might be 'derived'. Obviously, this isn't necessarily true.
He says we want the things that really are good, rather than those that are merely thought to be good.
Just as, when it comes to chrematistics, we may acquire various types of wealth for which we have no special affection, whereas when consuming things we consider hedonic utility. Again, not necessarily true.
In making this claim about our attitude to good things, he does not suggest that belief/appearance (δοκοῦντα/δόξα) is unnecessary, only that it is insufficient for desire.
For real, true, desire- i.e. whatever he chooses that to be.
Likewise, T2, I suggest, tells us that the fact that something appears good to someone (ἃ δοκεῖ αὐτῷ) is an insufficient basis for thinking that he desires that thing.
It is unrelated. Everybody knows a good person whom they don't desire at all.
In Gorgias 466b-468e, Socrates is engaged in refuting Polus’ conception of tyrants as all-powerful.
In other words, the tyrant is not subject to any countervailing power or oversight.
Having defined power as the ability to do what one wants,
but power is no such thing. Keeping power tends to require doing all sorts of boring or repugnant things.
Socrates points out that a tyrant does not necessarily do what he wants when he, e.g., exiles someone from his country.
yet it is his will which is done. Volition is different from desire.
For the tyrant only wants to exile someone when doing so benefits himself.
No. A tyrant might have to exile his best chum because the mob thinks he is an enemy spy.
If, unbeknownst to him, the exiled person was the tyrant’s greatest supporter, then the tyrant did not do what he wanted in exiling her.
Did not truly want what he wanted. But then we could suggest that what he truly wants is to give beejays at a truck-stop.
Socrates concludes that it doesn’t follow from the fact that the tyrant always does what seems best to him that he always does what he wants. The crux of Socrates’ argument lies in his observation that the tyrant’s desire to exile is conditional: T2: Hence, we don’t simply want to slaughter people, or exile them from their cities and confiscate their property as such; we want to do these things if they are beneficial, (ἐὰν μὲν ὠφέλιμα ᾖ ταῦτα, βουλόμεθα πράττειν αὐτά) but if they’re harmful we don’t.
The obvious answer was that grim Necessity requires us to will what we don't want.
The externalist and the apparentist have different ways of interpreting the conditional desire described in this passage.
They are irrelevant.
The apparentist thinks that Socrates is saying that we desire to kill, exile, etc. because we believe that these things are beneficial for us (irrespectively of whether they actually are). The externalist thinks that Socrates is saying that we desire to kill, exile, etc. because these things actually are beneficial for us (irrespectively of whether we believe they are).
But what Socrates is saying is what we truly want isn't what we actually want. He also elides the distinction between the tyrant's will and what the tyrant wants.
Each interpretation has advantages
Both are foolish. Socrates is not subscribing to either thesis. He is merely talking in a well bred, entertaining enough manner.
The apparentist rightly emphasizes the fact that Socrates grounds the conditionalization in the agent’s own attitudes. Socrates’ argument for T2 relied on the observation that no one simply pursues killing/exiling;
Yet some do. Athenians killed and exiled their fair share. What he is saying is that they wouldn't want to do so if they were better advised.
rather we pursue these actions with a view to the benefit we will thereby obtain:
sometimes yes. Sometimes no.
T3: we put a person to death, if we do, or exile him and confiscate his property because we suppose (οἰόμενοι) that doing these things is better for us than not doing them.
This is like 'revealed preference' which says what you preferred is what you chose even if you are known to choose what you fucking hate so as to mortify yourself.
The externalist cannot explain the relevance of the fact that the tyrant represented killing as the means to self-benefit.
It is easily done. Just say that was God's plan or that of inexorable Fate.
As a result, the externalist cannot explain why Socrates spells out the specific benefit on which the desire is conditioned.
it is merely to add a bit of psychological plausibility. But not very much.
Socrates began the argument by offering the following two exemplars of conditional desire: SOCRATES: Do you think that people who take medicines prescribed by their doctors, for instance, want what they’re doing, the act of taking the medicine, with all its discomfort, or do they want to be healthy, the thing for the sake of which they’re taking it?
Demand for medicine is derived from the desire to be free of a malady.
POLUS: Obviously they want their being healthy.
Apparently, hypochondriacs were rarer in those times.
SOCRATES: With seafarers, too, and those who make money in other ways, the thing they’re doing at the time is not the thing they want—for who wants to make dangerous and troublesome sea voyages?
Those for whom sailing is a hobby.
What they want is their being wealthy, the thing for the sake of which, I suppose, they make their voyages. It’s for the sake of wealth that they make them.
But why do they want wealth? In order to be happier. But why do they want to be happier? Because of the Good. But why... Just fucking drink your hemlock already, you verbose cunt!
If Socrates were an externalist, he would not make the desire to, e.g., take a sea voyage depend on the production of wealth specifically.
No. He could be an externalist who believes God is the only efficient cause or all things are in the hands of inexorable Fate etc and it is God or Fate which implants the desire and the thing the person thinks dictates the desire.
He would, instead say that someone wants to take a sea voyage if it is in fact good for him.
No he wouldn't because nobody knows the mind of God or inexorable Fate or why a particular impulse was implanted in him.
Suppose two people take sea voyages in the belief that they will thereby become wealthy; one of them does, whereas the other is benefitted in some other way (e.g., he becomes healthy). The externalist sees no difference between these two people’s desire to take the sea voyage: both wanted to take the sea voyage because both were benefited by it.
But, an externalist could believe in God or Fate and may have some complicated account of why one had one desire or outcome and the other had a different desire or outcome.
The externalist bypasses the tyrant’s own conception of his action in such a way as to miss out on the argumentative force of the fact that the tyrant is failing by his own lights.
But the externalist could say that was preordained.
As a result, the externalist seems to race past Socrates’ argumentation, and to help himself to the conclusion that the tyrant cannot desire what is actually bad.
cannot 'truly' desire- which is a different intension from plain desire. We don't know what Socrates believed about God or Fate or the existence of a well defined extension for 'the Good' or anything else. Plato was a 'realist' when it came to 'Forms'. Aristotle was a Nominalist. The latter takes the 'third man argument' from Plato's Socrates.
The apparentist can make use of those premises—but the conclusion he derives from them is not the right one. Socrates wants to drive Polus to the admission that they tyrant “does not do what he wants” when he exiles his greatest supporter.
A silly thing to do since the will of the tyrant must constantly conflict with 'what he wants'- or so the fellow often says in the spirit of 'this hurts me more than you'.
On the apparentist reading of the conditional, such a tyrant does do what he wants, because he does want to exile that person, on the basis of his (false) belief that exiling that person is beneficial to himself.
Which is fine if the tyrant says so or the thing could be reasonably inferred. But the Greeks knew plenty of instances where a tyrant had to get rid of his best chum for some reason of state.
Apparentism can only secure the weaker conclusion that the tyrant would not desire to kill (exile, torture) if he were to learn that these actions do not produce the results he anticipates.
That is a stronger conclusion. It suggests that the tyrant's own lights could be such as, the Bible tell us, we can see only in a glass darkly.
Callard, for some reason of her own, wants to preserve desire as a motivation for action. That is simplistic. Mimesis or FOMO may motivate action as may the desire for novelty.
action-explanation divides asymmetrically into the explanation of good actions, which are motivated by the desire to do them, and bad actions, which are motivated by the desire for something else. This is just the asymmetry Socrates relies on when he claims that bad actions, unlike good ones, are not done willingly.
not truly willingly- because if people were better advised they would only will what is Good or some such shite.
At 509e4-7, Socrates summarizes (to Callicles) the conclusion of the relevant section of his discussion with Polus: “we agreed that no one does what’s unjust because he wants to, but that all who do so do it unwillingly (ἄκοντας)?”
The thing is 'involuntary' but this could also mean because God or the strong hand of Fate constrained you.
Desire can figure in the explanation of bad actions only when conjoined with ignorance, because all desires are directed at what is (in fact) good.
No this is merely one among an infinity of possibilities. That's how agreeable conversation proceeds.
No one wrongs willingly, because no one wants to wrong; hence wrongdoing is caused by ignorance.
No. Socrates is merely showing that a cocksure type of akreibia which places faith in 'good enough' working definitions can be very misleading once 'intensions' are rendered epistemic. Wrongdoing may be caused by ignorance or it may be caused by God or Fate or even the attainment of omniscience.
I do not deny that these are counterintuitive claims, but they are counterintuitive in quite a different way from a non-motivating theory of desire.
Desire may or may not motivate. As for 'theories of desire'- they are shit if produced by shitheads.
They allow us to locate Socrates’ innovation in its rightful place: in ethics, not in moral psychology.
There is no innovation. There is merely some chatter which was pleasant enough because Plato wrote well.
Protreptic Function. The apparent tension between the Meno and the Gorgias
only exists in the minds of shitheads who have no feel for literature
comes from the fact that Socrates is correcting Meno and Polus in complementary ways.
He is a one trick pony, but he has charm.
Meno is in danger of missing the fact that we desire what seems good to us;
Nobody is in any such danger.
Polus, by contrast, needs to be reminded that we desire what really is good.
We may desire to have that desire.
Consider the opening exchanges of the two discussions: Socrates to Meno: Do you mean that they believe the bad things to be good, or that they know they are bad and nevertheless desire them? Here, Socrates is calling Meno’s attention to the fact that, in addition to the question of whether something is fact good or bad, there is another question to which Meno has given insufficient thought: whether someone takes it to be good.
This isn't the case. Meno was speaking of things which were obvious enough. Don't desire your neighbor's wife. Do fuck your own so you may beget a son and heir. What is taken to be good, ceteris paribus, generally is good enough.
In Polus’ case, Socrates distinguishes the same two questions, but with the opposite emphasis. Socrates to Polus: In that case, are you asking me two questions at once?...Weren’t you just now saying something like “Don’t orators, like tyrants, put to death anyone they want, don’t they confiscate the property of anyone they see fit, and don’t they exile them from their cities?” ….I say that these are two questions, and I’ll answer you both of them. I say, Polus, that both orators and tyrants have the least power in their cities, as I was saying just now. For they do just about nothing they want to, though they certainly do whatever they see most fit to do.
The obvious rejoinder is 'power has nothing to do with desire for anything other than retaining or enhancing itself just as ice cream has nothing to do with wanting to eat a fucking turnip.'
There is no logic here. There is only literary craftsmanship of a gentlemanly type.
Socrates tells Polus that in addition to the question of whether something seems good to someone, there is the question of whether he wants it.
There are an infinite number of such additional questions- e.g. whether the person has a radish up his bum at that particular time.
Polus is perplexed that there could be anything to wanting other than seeming good. Socrates will have to explain to him that there is more, because we only want what really is good.
Also we only want what really isn't a radish up our bum which is pretending to be the good and the beautiful and the true. One can add much more in a similar vein.
These dialogues, taken together, articulate the two faces of desire: the inner face championed by the apparentist (what seems good), and the outer face championed by externalists (what is good).
No. They turn their back on actual desire in order to speak of some epistemic type of desire whose extension is unknowable. This is a convenient way to generate paradoxes based on the intensional fallacy.
The hybrid account of the desire thesis for which I have been arguing has put us in a position to spell out the way in which the two dialogues work together to constitute a theory of desire.
Which is what? Our motivations are defined as desires in some cases but not others because Callard thinks so? But Callard is easily refuted by Mallard or any other daffy duck.
I want to offer a final argument for this interpretation by way of the role of the desire thesis in Socratic protrepsis.
Socrates was part and parcel of a clique held together by pseudo-amatory ties. One might say he was the Sappho of Periclean politics before becoming its pharmakos or scape-goat.
One can represent the disagreement between apparentism and externalism in terms a shared agreement as to the importance of the distinction between what seems good to a person and what is, in fact, good.
This is just the distinction between ex ante and ex post. However, externalism could be theistic or fatalistic or karmic or 'perfectibilist' (i.e. at some point all intensions will have well defined extensions). Apparentism is potentially more interesting. It may be that a person's 'own lights' may outshine all else and yet be part and parcel of an equal, universal, conflagration. I suppose Erigena could be read in that manner. Indeed, there may well have been a lot of similar Illuminationist mystics around the globe at that time.
(We may) distinguish apparentism, as the theory that identifies desire with what is contained in the left-hand circle (what seems good), from externalism, as the theory that identifies desire with what is contained in the righthand circle (what is good).
This assumes both have well defined extensions. They don't because they are epistemic. This fact vitiates Callard's enterprise.
The view I have been proposing identifies desire with their intersection.
Which is unknowable though, no doubt, an arbitrary stipulation could be made usefully enough for any particular purpose.
To understand the protreptic bearing of this dispute, it will be helpful to compare fig. 2 with the picture of desire assumed by Socrates’ two interlocutors before his intervention. Or rather, let us restrict ourselves to the part of that question that has educational relevance: the picture each interlocutor has of his own desires. For, though Meno and Polus disagree on the question of what people, in general, desire—Meno (initially) thinks some of them desire bad things—they have quite a similar picture of their own desires as directed at, simply, what is good.
& this may be good enough for practical purposes. Pragmatics doesn't have to worry too much about intensions. Words solve a coordination or discoordination problem. That is all.
The right way to understand Meno and Polus’ pre-Socratic conceptions of desire is as undifferentiated in respect of the appearance/reality distinction.
They are undifferentiated if there is an equilibrium- i.e. ex ante equals ex post.
It is upon meeting Socrates that each of them realizes, “what I take to be good can come apart from what really is good!”
Only in disequilibrium. But being far from equilibrium can drive epistemic endeavor and thus may be dynamically efficient. Allocative efficiency isn't the be all and end all, you know.
Why should Meno, of all people, accept a theory of desire on which what makes something a desire is (only) how it seems; how will Polus be brought to ignore seeming altogether?
Why shouldn't the author put any words he likes into their mouths?
This is, I believe, the underlying explanation of the problematic status of both apparentism in relation to the Meno and externalism in relation to the Gorgias.
There is no problematic status. What seems to be the case only seems to seem to be the case etc. Equally what is really really good must also be really really really good. There are infinite regresses in both cases which can be linked, or tethered by the right 'aitias logismos' or chain of explanation such that by the notion that what is really really...really good would be even better if it seemed to seem... to seem to be good. . This is a bit like transfinite induction and recursion. Prior to the Lowenheim-Skolem theorem, I suppose people might have thought the 'aitias logismos' could have a categorical first order representation. It can't. The model would be infinite and maybe Erigena type mystical. But that too is cool. My point is, knowing a bit of logic and having a fairly broad literary culture is enough to make the dialogues worth re-reading from time to time. Socrates's mathos is his pathos and, after all, he does shine by the peripety of his own dotty but charming lights.
Each interpretation provides us with a good reading of Socrates’ conclusion
there is no conclusion. There is aporia. The aitias logismos was like a chain of reasoning in a court of law. But, it is fallible so far as we can know but may not be so in so far as we don't know shit coz everything is in the hands of inexorable Fate or Zeus is in all things.
but a bad reading of how he gets there, distorting the rhetorical force of his argument in such a way to make Socrates come off as unfair to his interlocutor.
The point about Socrates is that he can do sophistry but chooses not to gain wealth or power by that means. Nothing wrong with taking cocksure cunts down a peg or two. But, given Socrates's fate, at the hands of 'Justice', there is pathos in his mathos.
It is more plausible that Socrates is attuning each of the two interlocutors to also acknowledging the face to which they have given less attention.
If that were the case, why did Plato not get some character to say so?
Thus, on the interpretation I propose, Meno is brought to recognize that in addition to the outer face, desire has an inner face, whereas Polus awakens to the outer one.
Both 'awaken' to a notion of desires, preferences, etc. as epistemic and thus as lacking well defined extensions. They may be wholly impredicative. Reality may be the formal cause for the mutability of Appearance. But, equally, the reverse may be the cause or else there is some more 'perfect' cause lurking somewhere else. We really can't say save by saying things we know must be wrong.
Socrates’ message to Polus and Meno is that, insofar as what seems good and what is good come apart, their desiring is awry.
No. Their notion of desiring (according to Socrates) involves the intensional fallacy once meta-preferences or epistemic considerations are introduced.
It is precisely Meno’s failure to factor in the inner face of desire that gives rise to his arrogant self-conception as someone who belongs to the privileged group of right-desirers.
No. Meno thinks he's good because he chooses good courses of action not those which everybody knows are wicked or evil. The fact that he is shit at philosophy does not change this.
“That’s how it looks to everyone from the inside, Meno,” chides Socrates. The purpose of the argument at Meno is to destabilize Meno’s sense that he belongs to any privileged class.
Meno is a free man. His conception of freedom may be wrong but he still belongs to a privileged class. True a particular slave may feel, internally, that he is freer 'inside' but that is not a matter of privilege
The message to Polus is that he should pay less attention to pursuing what he wants and more attention to knowing what he wants
If you want to catch a fish, you must first become the fish.
Polus’ ambitious thirst for tyrannical power is predicated on ignoring the outer face of desire.
NO! As I have repeatedly proved, it was predicated on his ignoring the inward face of an imaginary radish placed up his bum!
Socrates’ message to Polus is, in effect, “be careful what you wish for.”
But the reader knows that it was Socrates who fucked up in Court. Instead of getting a reward, he was sentenced to death. Had Socrates acquired experience of public rhetoric, as practiced by Polus, he would have been acquitted. Gentlemanly persiflage is all very well at the Symposium. It buys you hemlock at the Ecclesia.
Socrates’ intention is to arrest Polus and Meno’s agency in favor of self-scrutiny.
Which goes nowhere fast but is a good enough way to while away the afternoon.
His corrections encourage them to spend some time thinking about what they want, so that they can stop taking themselves to desire what they don’t, as well as to start desiring the actually good things they do not yet desire.
A puerile view. Socrates was speaking to men with a degree of savior faire and literary culture. I suppose he was a sort of prose Theognis but one who harked back to Periclean splendors.
A fuller picture the protreptic import of the desire thesis would require an extended discussion of the tenets of intellectualism that surface in the other parts of the Meno and Gorgias, as well as in other Socratic dialogues.
The charm of Socrates's maieutics is that he seems to be struggling to bring to birth something more than a 'wind egg'. Few would think the midwife's charge is at pains to be at her most attractive. Callard, it is true, may be an exception.
Without bringing in more text, I want to nonetheless end with a speculation as to how the piece on which I have been focusing fits into the larger puzzle.
It doesn't. This is a story about the intensional fallacy which arises where the knowledge base changes and thus the extension changes. As I said, it is a disequilibrium phenomenon. Periclean Athens was blessedly far from equilibrium.
Socrates does think that there is a condition a person can be in when all and only what is really good seems good to her. This condition is not desire, but virtue. This is the process by which I start to desire more and more of what is actually good, and I become less and less susceptible to being fooled by false appearances of goodness53. The shape of my desire—its growth—is, then, a record of my progress in desiring.
Callard thinks she can re-market her useless shite as some sort of Self-Help guide. Why not say that Hamlet isn't a work of great literary merit? It is a manual of instruction on how to fake a mental illness so as to gain affirmative action.
On my interpretation, Socrates tells his interlocutors that “you desire a subset of the things you take yourself to desire.”
Socrates wasn't that stupid. Clearly there are things we desire of which we have no awareness. Most people find they really desire to kiss and cuddle baby only after that personage has made his appearance.
It is important to see that there is a protreptic advantage to making this sort of an intervention,
there isn't. Stupidity isn't attractive. It is one thing to say 'you don't really want some of the things you think you want'. It is another to say 'what you really want is just a small part of what you currently think you want'. Why? It is obvious that if something new appears, you may decide you want it. You couldn't have wanted it before because you didn't know it existed.
as opposed to the kind that, e.g., Kamtekar would take him to be making. On her view, he would be telling his interlocutors that they desire many more things than they took themselves to desire.
Which is true. How do we know? The answer is, when we make a shopping list, we often find we omitted some things. Also, once we get to the shops, we buy other things which may be wholly novel to us.
If Socrates’ intervention amounted to enlarging Polus’ and Meno’s set of desires, then he would be giving them license to pursue what they currently took themselves to desire.
Coz Socrates was in charge of issuing such licenses- right?
They would be (at least subjectively) right to go off and try to secure any of the things they currently take themselves to want. If they got any of those things, they would be getting what they wanted.
They are welcome to discard them if they don't like them.
If, by contrast, Socrates is shrinking their set of desires, he holds them in check, suggesting that inquiry must precede action.
Very true. If some maniac lunges at you with a dagger you need to conduct a proper inquiry before running the fuck away.
The claim that there is a systematic connection between desiring more of what is actually good and being freed of false appearances of goodness requires an additional Socratic thesis, which is that virtue is knowledge.
but not that type of knowledge which disguises itself as a radish up your bum.
Socrates argues that those who have such knowledge are also freed from the deceptive power of appearances at in the Protagoras
God or Fate or whatever may endow you with some magical property which is also epistemic.
Callard thinks what makes it possible for Socrates to play the role of midwife is something pre-existing in the interlocutor. They may mislabel it as “desire;” and they may think they have it rather than needing to acquire it; nonetheless, each of his interlocutors comes to the discussion with an idea of virtue that needs only to be excavated, not implanted.
What happens next? Socrates was the Agnodice of a couvade. That's why he was killed for corrupting the male youth of Athens. Agnodice, an actual midwife, displayed her vagina to the court. This showed she could not be corrupting the female youth of Athens with her dick. Thus she was spared. Still, dicks do implant stuff. Being a dick- not so much. On the other hand, if you teach worthless shite, you may as well pretend that buying your book on Socrates can help cure baldness or constipation. This isn't nice work and if you can get it- shame on you.
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