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Protagoras. Is it not curious moreover that the argument of the Speech is never really answered? Either, therefore, Plato is made into a dishonest controversialist who suppresses his opponent’s case and substitutes for it figments of his own, or into so incoherent a thinker that he cannot see the scope of an argument he has himself invented.
The alternative theory I venture to suggest will be found to cast no such slur upon the moral and intellectual character of Plato. It credits Plato with an honest desire to state his opponent’s case and assumes merely that he has not fully grasped an alien point of view for the appreciation of which his whole type of mind unfitted him, and which even so he has grasped much better than the generality of intellectualists have done down to the present day. It proceeds therefore from two very reasonable presuppositions, (1) that Plato did know the authentic doctrine of Protagoras, and (2) that he did not know it perfectly. As to the reason, we may please ourselves. He may not have actually possessed the suppressed book of Protagoras on ‘Truth’ and have been forced to rely on incomplete memories of its contents. Or again he may have felt that he had not completely made it out.
The reasonableness, however, of these presuppositions will best appear from an analysis of the ‘Protagoras’ Speech and the reply to it as it stands in Plato. The conclusions I shall try to establish are (I) that the Speech is intended to give, and probably to a large extent succeeds in giving, the authentic argumentation by which Protagoras defended his great discovery of the relativity of the object of knowledge to the subject (so far as Plato understood it), because (II), if it is taken to be a figment of Plato’s the great absurdity results, that Plato did not notice that he was refuting himself, and (III), it contains internal evidence showing that Plato never understood it. (IV) It yields, therefore, trustworthy evidence for the reconstitution of the actual doctrine of the historic Protagoras, and (V) this is confirmed by the fact that it actually contains the solution of the problem with which Plato wrestles vainly in the same dialogue, that of Truth and Error.
