Protagoras

Socrates Wins the Argument and Loses the Soul

The Protagoras is routinely taught as an early dialogue about whether virtue can be taught. This framing obscures what actually happens in the text. The dialogue dramatizes two incommensurable psychologies — Protagoras’ pluralistic, mythologically grounded account of human capacity, and Socrates’ drive to unify all virtue under the sovereignty of knowledge — and lets the reader watch one devour the other. Protagoras opens with a magnificent myth: Epimetheus distributes animal capacities but forgets humans; Prometheus steals fire and technē; Zeus, fearing mutual destruction, sends Hermes to distribute aidōs (shame/reverence) and dikē (justice) to all people, not to specialists. This is a distribution narrative, an archetypal image of psychic endowment that resonates with what Hillman calls the “Pandora fantasy of the Platonic soul who comes into the world filled with gifts of all the Gods.” The virtues are plural, divinely bestowed, universally distributed yet individually variable — precisely the picture of an ensouled, polytheistic psyche. Socrates’ counter-move is to insist that courage, temperance, justice, piety, and wisdom are either identical or reducible to a single thing: knowledge. By the dialogue’s end, the positions have famously reversed — Socrates, who denied virtue was teachable, now argues it is knowledge (which is teachable); Protagoras, who claimed to teach it, resists the reduction. But the real reversal is psychological: Socrates has performed the first act of that “catastrophic misreading” Cody Peterson identifies in the Republic, the subordination of all psychic faculties to a single rational principle. The thūmos, aidōs, the felt sense of moral weight — all are dissolved into epistēmē. What the dialogue stages is the birth of ego-psychology out of the murder of imaginal multiplicity.

The Hedonist Calculus as the Prototype of Psychic Rationalization

The most psychologically revealing — and disturbing — passage in the Protagoras is Socrates’ argument that no one does wrong willingly, because all apparent failures of courage or temperance are really failures of measurement. People choose lesser goods because they miscalculate pleasure and pain across time. The remedy is a metretikē technē, an art of measurement that would weigh hedonic quantities with the precision of a scale. This is not simply proto-utilitarianism. It is the founding gesture of a psychology that treats the soul as a computational engine, the ancestor of every cognitive-behavioral model that reframes suffering as “distorted thinking.” What Socrates proposes here is that the experience of being overwhelmed by passion — what the Greeks called being kratētheis hypo hēdonēs, “overcome by pleasure” — is literally impossible for a properly calibrated mind. The soul cannot be overcome; it can only miscalculate. This is precisely the erasure of the middle voice that Peterson’s forensic analysis of Homeric paschō and tlaō reveals: the capacity to be constituted by what one undergoes, to be forged in the endurance of tension, is rendered incoherent by Socrates’ model. If all vice is ignorance and all virtue is knowledge, then the thūmos has no work to do. The vessel need not contain anything; the mind need only compute correctly. Hillman’s identification of Ananke — Necessity, the Errant Cause — as an irreducible archē of psychic life stands as the deepest refutation of this Socratic program. Necessity “is perpetually producing undesirable results,” it “is never brought fully into order” by reason, and it operates precisely through the deviations, the irrational eruptions, the errors that Socrates’ measuring art would eliminate. The Protagoras is the text where Plato first attempts to banish Ananke from the soul. He will never fully succeed — the Timaeus and Laws restore her — but the attempt itself inaugurates a tradition of psychic rationalism that depth psychology exists to undo.

Protagoras as the Unacknowledged Depth Psychologist

The great irony the dialogue conceals is that Protagoras — the historical target, the man Plato wants to discredit — offers the more psychologically adequate account. His Great Speech treats virtue not as a unity but as a constellation: courage is not justice, temperance is not piety, and a person can possess one without another, just as a face has distinct features that compose a whole without being reducible to it. This is precisely the polytheistic psychology Hillman champions, where “Gods are relations and always imply each other” and no single archetype can be extracted from its constellation. Protagoras’ insistence that virtue is acquired through long socialization — through punishment, habituation, cultural immersion — anticipates what Murray Stein, drawing on Jung, describes as the transformation driven by numinous images and relational engagement rather than by rational instruction. The Promethean myth Protagoras tells even preserves the structure Edinger identifies in the axiom of Maria Prophetissa: a triad (fire, technē, survival) that requires a fourth element (Zeus’ bestowal of aidōs and dikē) to produce psychic wholeness. Without that fourth, divine, relational distribution, humanity destroys itself. This is the quaternity logic Edinger traces through Plato’s Timaeus — “One, two, three — but where is the fourth?” — and it appears here, in the Protagoras, embedded in the sophist’s myth, unrecognized by Socrates.

Why This Dialogue Is Indispensable for Depth Psychology

The Protagoras matters today not as a museum piece of ancient ethics but as the crime scene where Western psychology first chose rationalism over soul. Every clinician who has watched a patient’s suffering metabolized through endurance rather than corrected through insight is working against the legacy Socrates inaugurates here. Every therapeutic model that treats the irrational as mere error — cognitive distortion, maladaptive schema, faulty appraisal — descends from the metretikē technē. To read this dialogue with a psychological eye, as Hillman urges us to read all Platonic texts, is to see that Protagoras’ defeat is the soul’s defeat: the moment when the plurality of psychic life was first subordinated to the tyranny of a single function. The Protagoras does not tell us what virtue is. It shows us what happens to the psyche when we demand that it be only one thing.