Couch City: Socrates Against Simonides

By Harry Berger and Jill Frank

Crowning six decades of literary, rhetorical, and historical scholarship, Harry Berger, Jr., offers readers another trenchant reading. Berger subverts the usual interpretations of Plato’s kalos kagathos, showing Socrates to be trapped in a double ventriloquism, tethered to his interlocutors’ speech acts even as they are tethered to his.

Plato’s Republic and Protagoras both reserve a small but significant place for a poet who differs from Homer and Hesiod: the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos. In the Protagoras, Socrates takes apart a poem attributed to Simonides and uses this to finish off the famous and supposedly dangerous sophist, Protagoras. Couch City is a close reading of the comic procedures Socrates deploys against Protagoras as he reduces him to silence. But it also shows that Socrates takes the danger posed by Protagoras and his fellow sophists seriously. Even if they are represented as buffoons, sophists are among the charismatic authority figures—poets, rhapsodes, seers, orators, and lawgivers—who promote views harmful to Athenian democracy. Socrates uses Simonides’s poem to show how sophists not only practice misinterpretation but are unable to defend against it.

Berger ports his roots as a pioneering literary theorist into this rhetorical discussion, balancing ideas such as speech-act theory with hard-nosed philology. The result is a provocative and counterintuitive reassessment of Plato’s engagement with democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9780823294244

Harry Berger

Harry Berger, Jr., was Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books are Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser's ‘Faerie Queene’; Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare's Henriad; and The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt.

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Introduction: Speech Bonds

Jill Frank

I

In the Perils of Uglytown (2015), Harry Berger, Jr., shows that the allegedly ideal city of Plato’s Republic, its kallipolis or beautiful city, is more truly an aischropolis, an Uglytown. Couch City: Socrates against Simonides opens with the prehistory of Uglytown in what Berger dubs Klinopolis or Couch City, introduced in Republic 2. In this luxurious, soft, and feverish city (372e), couches are associated with pleonexia, having more, wanting to have more, wanting to be superior and get the better of others, to do unto them before they do unto you.¹ As Berger writes in Couch City, the idea of the couch, which appears in Republic 10, transcendentalizes the culture of Klinopolis, idealizing its way of life. Symbolizing the desire for more honor, money, power, and pleasure, as well as the arguments that rationalize these desires, the idea of the couch exemplifies and justifies Klinopolis’s pleonectic ethics, its instrumental rhetoric, and the power politics its morality and discourses underwrite and produce.

A depiction of fifth-century BCE Athens—the Athens of the new agathoi—Klinopolis is the sociopolitical backdrop of the dialogue that is the focus of Couch City, Plato’s Protagoras. In this dialogue, Socrates tells the story of a gathering of famous sophists, at which he and Protagoras discuss a central topic of Athenian culture and Greek philosophy, namely, aretē, excellence or virtue. The stakes are high. The conversation takes place before an eager group of students and admirers, including Critias and Alcibiades, up-and-comers in Athens’s political scene, as well as the young and impressionable Hippocrates, a political hopeful, who, desiring to learn from the venerable Protagoras, brings Socrates to the gathering to hold the great sage to account.

When asked by Socrates what he teaches, Protagoras answers: how to make good decisions about one’s own affairs and the affairs of one’s city so that one can be the most powerful in the city in both acting and speaking. With Protagoras’s assent, Socrates glosses this as teaching "the political art [technē] of good citizenship, or the excellence or virtue of citizens (318e–319a). Having introduced virtue into the discussion, Socrates expresses skepticism about its teachability (319a–320c). Picking up Socrates’s thread, Protagoras explains why virtue is necessary in a long myth about the origins of human society (320c–328d). On Berger’s reading, Protagoras’s great speech brings to light that, for Protagoras, virtue is a matter of forethought for appearances (self-presentation), a skill that involves teaching oneself and others the art of adjusting one’s public image to conform to public expectations" so as to avoid being overthrown.

Virtue so understood Berger calls face or "the aretē of public performance. This is the virtue of Protagoras’s myth. It is the virtue Protagoras teaches and preaches. And it is also the virtue he practices. Adjusting his own image to conform to public expectations, Protagoras prefers holding his discussion with Socrates not in private but before the gathering as a whole (316b–317e) so that he can burnish his reputation at Athens. Protagorean virtue as face, Berger writes, is a weapon … of defense and offense, a performative skill in eristics" or verbal warfare. In the terms of Protagoras’s myth about the origins of human society, virtue is Promethean aggression seeded by Epimethean fear, by which avoiding being overthrown also means overthrowing others. A technē of attaining power through discursive means, Protagorean virtue reflects and sets in motion the pleonectic ethics, rhetoric, and politics of Klinopolis.

Protagorean virtue stands as a rival to the do-no-harm ethics generally associated with Plato’s Socrates. And, across divergent traditions of scholarship, the prevailing view is that the Protagoras sides with Socrates over its namesake, upholding, against Protagoras’s Klinopolitan morality, the ethics Socrates advocates in other dialogues, namely that, in Berger’s words, one should always try to do good, to be and stay good, and should never harm anyone, no matter what the cost. Socrates may engage with Protagoras in all sorts of sophistic ways: deploy argument by antilogy; switch tactics from questioning whether virtue can be taught to asking whether the so-called cardinal virtues—moderation, justice, wisdom, courage—are all one thing or different; defend a kind of hedonism when he maintains that salvation in life depends on an art of measurement that ensures right action by enabling the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain (351b–358d). Still, in defending the unity of the virtues and insisting that acting against one’s own convictions—weakness of will—is impossible, Socrates, it is said, wins by beating Protagoras at his own game, no holds barred. Although not unscathed, Socrates emerges victorious.

Berger sees things otherwise. Through close readings of the scenes of debate between Socrates and Protagoras about the unity of virtue, courage, weakness of will, measure, and pleasure, Couch City makes the case that, despite important appearances of Socratic ethics in the Protagoras, the dialogue privileges overall the ethics of its namesake. Taking his cue from Socrates’s words at the end of the dialogue, according to which neither he nor Protagoras wins and the two speakers have exchanged places (361a–d), Berger demonstrates that by beating Protagoras at his own game, which includes committing himself to Protagoras’s tactics, Socrates acts against his own convictions and defeats himself. As Berger puts it in an earlier essay on the Protagoras, by [d]efacing Protagoras, [Socrates] effaces himself (Facing Sophists, 406). Maintaining that he finds the Prometheus in Protagoras’s great speech more to [his] liking than the Epimetheus (361d), Socrates indicates that he opts for aggression over fear. Siding with virtue as the forethought that enables humans to protect themselves against pain, danger, defeat, Socrates affirms the Promethean ethos that Protagoras lives by, thereby strengthening the very interests he [Socrates] opposes (FS, 405–6).

Despite their competing ethics, then, Protagoras and Socrates, on Berger’s reading, collaborate to produce an argument that binds each to the other and divides each from himself. In their joined performative eristics, they jointly exercise Protagorean virtue in their agon over virtue. This inflects how they speak and the meaning of what they say. Thus, as per Protagoras’s initial account of what he teaches, namely acting and speaking as technai of power, the speeches of both Protagoras and Socrates produce Protagorean virtue as the virtue of the dialogue as a whole.

Protagorean virtue reigns in the Protagoras because of what, in the Theaetetus (as modified by Berger), Socrates calls the inevitable law of our [interlocutory] being (160b), which is that the I [in speech] is always the I-that-I-am-in-relation-to-my-auditors. In a succinct encapsulation of this law, Socrates says (also in the Theaetetus): The arguments never come from me; they always come from the person with whom I’m speaking (161b). Interested in the question of when and how the unavoidable bond of speech gives rise to bondage, Berger is on the lookout, here in Couch City as in earlier work, for the subversive dynamic he sees across Plato’s dialogues and names charismatic bondage. Exemplified by "[t]he power by which the sophist masters the audience [hoi polloi] [that] derives from the power by which the audience masters him," charismatic bondage circulates, too, between politicians and their demotic audiences (Republic 493a–d; Gorgias 481e).

Charismatic bondage can also characterize the relation between interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues and their audiences, as well as relations between the interlocutors themselves. Calling the subversive dynamic of charismatic bondage a contagion, Berger describes it as something from which no one and nothing is immune. Not even Socrates. Symptoms of contagion spread in all directions in the Protagoras. They are manifest in the reversals that punctuate the interlocutory warfare between Socrates and Protagoras, in their joint performative eristics, in their shared ethics of apprehensive defensiveness, and in their weaponization of virtue. Protagoras may be the first to prefer that his discussion with Socrates take place in public, but it is Socrates who goes about gathering the scattered groupings together to assemble them in one place as an audience (317d). For Socrates, no less than for Protagoras, virtue is face. Enchained to Protagoras through charismatic bondage, Socrates, as Berger writes, becomes his double.

II

Couch City generates its new reading of the Protagoras by shining an especially brilliant light on one particular scene of debate between Socrates and Protagoras, namely their competition over the meaning of a poem about virtue (338e–348c). A centerpiece of Berger’s interpretation, this poetic interlude is not always analyzed by commentators, and when it is, they tend to mention in passing but then ignore that the poem, which both Protagoras and Socrates attribute to Simonides, is not attested to outside the Protagoras. This feature is important to Berger, however, for, if the poem exists only in the Protagoras, then how can we be sure that Simonides rather than, say, Plato, is its author?

Taking seriously the undecidability of the poem’s authorship, Berger refers to its appearances in the dialogue as poetic speech to reflect that it is sourced to the speeches of Protagoras and Socrates (338a–347a). Berger pays critical attention to the interpretative practices Protagoras and Socrates deploy as they compete by way of their poetic speeches over the meaning of the poem, for which he invents a playful vocabulary, which includes snippetotomy, that is, their interrupted, broken, and selective citation and, in Socrates’s case, etymological synapses, proof by etceteration (his practice of induction, epagōgē), and, especially, citational and paraphrastic mimicry.

Intent on overthrowing Simonides by showing him to be inconsistent in his understanding of virtue, Protagoras’s poetic speech is an(other) occasion for the sophist to reduce talk about virtue to a weapon in a political contest. Although Socrates tees up to defend Simonides against Protagoras’s charge, Berger demonstrates that Socrates, too, is intent on overthrowing poor Simonides by making him speak against himself, not logically or rhetorically, but ethically. Through deceleration—a slowing down that makes visible small changes that substantially affect meaning, and are, in Socrates’s description in the Phaedrus, most apt to deceive (261e–262b)—Berger shows that considerable shifts in the meaning of key virtue terms take place over the course of Socrates’s poetic speech, including of good (from agathos to esthlos to eumēchanos) and bad (from kakos to aischros to amēchanos). This shiftiness, part of Socrates’s mimicry of sophistical procedure, changes what it means to be and/or become good and to do and/or suffer bad. It also, Berger shows, produces Simonidean virtue as Protagorean virtue, that is, as avoiding being overthrown through the skill and good luck necessary to weather misfortune and successfully avoid injury and shameful behavior.

In making the meaning they claim to be merely interpreting, Protagoras and Socrates, Berger writes, become Simonides’s doubles. In the case of Protagoras, this is anticipated early in the dialogue when Protagoras claims poets as the disguised predecessors of sophists (316d) and narrates the great myth in their manner. Socrates, for his part, appears to dismiss the value of poetry and its interpretation for ethics and philosophy: Because poetic interpretation is indeterminate, he says, he and Protagoras should leave the poets to one side and refrain from imitating poets in their speeches (347a–348a). Socrates says this directly after the poetic interlude, so it could be that he is simply sharing the lesson he has just learned from his inconclusive competition with Protagoras over the meaning of Simonides’s poem. But Socrates doesn’t just say that the poets should be left to one side and leave it at that. He also insists that they should not be imitated and, in so saying, reminds his audience that imitating Simonides was exactly what he did in his poetic speeches, both in his initial citation of the poem against Protagoras’s attack and also when he played Simonides in the debate he staged between the poet and Pittacus. Why call attention to that?

In imitating Simonides through impersonation and representation, Socrates does what he did (and will do again) with Protagoras: As Berger puts it, he "speaks through [the poet and sophist] and represents their motives, their anti-Socratic logoi. In return, they speak through his imitation and make him speak against himself. Functioning as a field of displacement for the continuation of the struggle in which Socrates gets the better of the sophist and thereby defeats himself," Socrates’s poetic speeches bind him to Protagoras and also to Simonides. And, as with Protagoras, so too with Simonides: By defacing Simonides, Socrates effaces himself. Socrates’s poetic speeches make visible a further feature of Protagorean virtue that Berger takes to supervene upon its weaponization in the service of power, namely, its evasion of responsibility. By claiming to be merely interpreting Simonides, and by, moreover, making the sophist Prodicus responsible for his interpretation (340a–342a), Socrates disavows his complicity in the reproduction of Protagorean ethics.

III

Berger’s provocative interpretation of the Protagoras is guided by his immensely capacious reading practice, which trains his inimitable historical, literary, and sensorial energies on the implicities and complicities of the dialogue’s language, on what he calls its agonistic surfaces and mnemonic triggers. Attending to the Protagoras’s preoccupation with face, Berger gives face to ainigma, allusion, ambivalence, ambiguity, amphiboly, and analogy (staying, in the interest of space, with the letter a), taking these sites of instability as prompts to shift from logic to ethics and rhetoric, and as occasions for heightened philosophic and dramatic scrutiny. Berger subjects to similar scrutiny the invalid arguments and rhetorical misfires that punctuate the Protagoras but that Socrates’s interlocutors often fail to mark.

Berger scrutinizes by, among other things, redeeming the startle-value of features of the Protagoras that other scholars apologize for, dismiss, or explain away. Reading with suspicion and wonder, Berger refuses to allow claims about the chronology of the dialogues or their development, or disciplinary distinctions between philosophy and rhetoric, say, or philosophy and poetry, prejudge what he sees. Marking a distinction between reading a Platonic dialogue logocentrically (as conversation to be overheard) and reading grammatologically (as a written text), and insisting on both, Berger reads with and against both the propositional logics characteristic of Anglo-American approaches to ancient philosophy and the dramatics of ascriptive intention characteristic of Straussianisms.

Zooming out to a broad range of Plato’s dialogues to round out his reading of the Protagoras, while opting at the same time for close surveillance of discursive complexities and rhetorical tropes specific to the dialogue, Berger gleefully brackets nothing. He thus avoids the misanthropy that can threaten propositional approaches when they neglect the ways in which the Protagoras mediates its characters’ speeches through the drama of the text or when they abstract moral statements from the text. He avoids, too, the misologic esotericism that can underwrite quests for veiled truths beneath or behind the text’s drama. Allying with and supplementing ongoing and emergent interdisciplinary political theoretical approaches to Plato, Berger implicates readers in the dynamics of the text, thus opening the question of when and how, between readers and texts, the bond of interlocution can become charismatic bondage.

IV

The world of Berger’s Protagoras is dramatically and literarily capacious as well as charismatically bounded and contagious. With no possibility of immunity from its subversive speech dynamics, not even for Socrates, the dialogue appears to offer no way out. In the registers of sophistic, interlocutory, and poetic speech, as these are depicted in the dialogue, this is true. Socrates’s and Protagoras’s performances at the gathering of sophists charismatically bind them to each other and also to their audience. In the Protagoras, however, Socrates speaks not only as a participant at the gathering (interlocutor to Protagoras, performer for the audience, interpreter/producer of poetic speech). He is also the dialogue’s narrator. What happens, Berger asks, when we pay attention to narratorial speech?

Socrates’s role as narrator is in evidence at the beginning of the Protagoras. Ahead of his account of the gathering, Socrates is depicted in an exchange with what most translators call a friend or companion, but, as hetairos, is probably better translated as comrade (309a–310a). When the comrade learns that Socrates has just been in a long conversation with Protagoras, he asks Socrates to recount it, if he is free. Socrates replies that he would "look on it as a favor [charis]" if the comrade would listen. The comrade answers that he would see it as an act of charis if Socrates spoke. Sealing and mutualizing their charis bond, Socrates calls it a "double favor [diplou charis]." With the exception of one comment that Socrates makes to the comrade at the end of his first description of the gathering (316a), the Protagoras never explicitly returns to its frame.

But, as always, the frame is crucial. For Berger, Socrates’s framing narration enables him to appear as not only trapped in the role of sophistical parodist and entertainer but also as aware of his plight. Similarly, as Berger notes in Facing Sophists, Socrates’s statement—The arguments never come from me; they always come from the person with whom I’m speaking—may be read not only as a disclaimer of responsibility but also as a rueful confession of failure (381). Socrates’s awareness that the I, in speech, is inevitably an I-in-relation-to-my-audience does not break the bond of speech or undo the law of interlocution. But it does open the possibility that the charis bond of speech need not always and necessarily result in charismatic bondage. And this opens the possibility that the Protagoras is not only depicting, describing, and performing its charismatic bondages, but also targeting them.

Consider again Socrates’s framing narration. When the comrade invites Socrates to sit down here and tell the story of the gathering, he directs Socrates to the place occupied by his boy or slave. Socrates complies, and, in taking the slave’s place, casts a shadow over his freedom. Socrates, in turn, tells the comrade to Just listen (310a) and the comrade does as he is told, speaking no more for the remainder of the dialogue. Charis bond or charismatic bondage? Socrates sets up the double and reversible bond of interlocution in a way that makes it hard to tell. The dialogue’s frame thereby puts us on the lookout for the proximities and differences between the charis bond of interlocution and charismatic bondage, which rematerialize just a few lines later when, in a mirror of the opening, Hippocrates sits down by Socrates’s feet (310c), as well as when Socrates and the sophists first make their own charis exchanges (328d–e, 335d). The dialogue’s frame also puts both of these speech bonds in their place. When Hippocrates sits by Socrates’s feet, the very first thing he tells Socrates is about his runaway slave, Satyrus, whom he has spent the last two days trying to recapture (310c). With Socrates’s displacement of the comrade’s slave and Satyrus, it is implied, still at large, Plato excludes slaves from the dialogue’s depictions of the transformations of the charis bond and its assumptions of reciprocity and reversibility—doubling and symmetry—into bondage. And this suggests that he may not have been blind to the significant and substantial differences between the bondages of enslavement and those of interlocution.

Under what conditions might the charis bond of speech not become charismatic bondage? Perhaps if confessions of failure stop being, as they are in the Protagoras, occasions for weaponizing virtue or speaking in the name of another to evade responsibility, and become instead occasions for avowals of responsibility. Those avowals, which Berger calls assuming the middle voice of shared responsibility, depend first and foremost on acknowledging the power of words as deeds to affect the ethical capacities of speakers and auditors. The main characters of the Protagoras fail to assume that voice. But their failures, as these are explored in Couch City, may, in prompting readers of the dialogue to do otherwise, open a different ethics, rhetoric, and politics of responsibility.

PART I

The Republic

1 / Couch City, or, The Discourse of the Couch

The discussion of the Form of the so-called bed in Book 10 of the Republic has exercised Plato’s commentators. It has raised their eyebrows and lowered their esteem for his logic. Many of the problems in the passage have been concisely summarized in Julia Annas’s excellent An Introduction to Plato’s Republic.¹ Annas discusses not only the logical inadequacies of Plato’s conceptualization of the theory of Forms but also the flaws in his unsuccessful attempt to assimilate poetry to a debased form of painting.² Her discussion makes it impossible not to wonder why Plato should have opened himself to such obvious criticism. Why pick an artifact to instantiate the function of Forms, and why this particular artifact?

I think Annas and the tradition of commentary in which she writes give the wrong kind of answer. The focus on Plato’s logic is misplaced for three reasons. First, the bed is not a bed: It is a klinē—a couch, as Paul Shorey and Allan Bloom more accurately translate it. Second, when Socrates introduces this object, he associates it three times with another, trapeza, or table (596b), before singling it our for special attention. One meaning of klinē is a banqueting couch (a triclinium), and one meaning of trapeza is a dining table, and when the two appear together, this set of meanings tends to be privileged. Trapeza appears by itself three times, always in connection with gormandizing. Third, the couch and table have appeared together before, and it’s this prior incidence to which I now turn.

About three-fifths of the way through the second book, Glaucon scornfully dismisses the idyllic peasant frugality Socrates has been depicting with Adeimantus’s approval. Calling this a city of Sows (huōn polin, 372d), he demands instead a setting more appropriate to the tastes and desires of wealthier citizens like himself.