Page:Plato or Protagoras.djvu/18

 all ‘truths’ are ‘values,’ and therefore ‘goods,’ even though an individual’s truths are good and satisfying only to him, and their value is very restricted, because their currency is small. Nor again can he have seen that the same ambiguity which pervades truth-values pervades also all the rest. Many things are judged ‘good,’ which are not really good, just as they are judged ‘true’ without being really true. Everywhere there is needed a bridge of validation by use to cross the gap between claim and validity. But it is also possible either that Plato has not here reproduced the full subtlety of Protagoras’s argument, or that Protagoras was hindered from expressing himself fully only by the poverty of Greek philosophic language, not yet enriched by the genius of Plato. Anyhow, the difference between Protagorean and modern Humanism concerns only a subordinate point of terminology.

What now, we may proceed to inquire, does Plato make of this important philosophic distinction he has attributed to Protagoras? It is astounding to find that he makes nothing of it whatsoever. He treats it almost as badly as the other three un-Platonic points made in the Protagoras Speech, (1) the repudiation of intellectualism and of the doctrine that badness is simply ignorance (166 E—167 A), (2) the demand for an alteration of reality by practical action and not by dialectics (166 D and 168 A), and (3) the declaration that the State may err morally like the individual, and may need the services of the moral expert (168 B). These three points the Platonic ‘Socrates’ totally ignores in the sequel.

The conception of truth-values he just refers to, but his reference to it is worse than none at all. For it only shows that Plato had no conception of the meaning and scope of the argument he had just stated. In 169 D, he starts again from the bare dictum as if the Speech had done nothing to explain its real meaning nor given it a philosophic context. And the reasons ‘Protagoras’ had given for the dictum are actually treated as concessions derogating from its validity and inconsistent with his original assertion! Nothing could