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Hi, welcome to Notions of Progress, the show that traces ideas

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of progress from antiquity to the age of AI. Here is a

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question worth sitting with before we begin. In the last episode, 5 was

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about thinkers who believed in civilization advance.

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That human beings are capable of genuine cumulative improvement and

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that with the right kind of education we can accelerate.

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Their names were associated with democratic Athens at its most ambitious.

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The question was not whether progress was possible, but how to teach

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it. This episode is about the philosopher who looked at that project

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and called it dangerous. For the Sophists, progress meant

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the gradual collective improvement of human civilization. Through the accumulation

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and teaching of skills, techne, as we've discussed before,

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generation after generation, with rhetoric as the engine

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that made it civic. For Plato,

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progress meant something the Sophists had no framework for: the

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ascent of the individual soul toward what is permanently true,

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not outward, not cumulative, and not teachable

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in any classroom, but vertical, solitary,

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and available only to those rare few, as we will see

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in the allegory of the cave, to turn away from the wall.

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To navigate Plato's response, we'll be working with four scholarly

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guides: W.K.C. Guthrie, whose History of Greek Philosophy remains

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the standard reference on this period; Joshua Billings,

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whose work on the 5th century Enlightenment recovers the Sophists on their

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own terms; Professor Rachel Barney,

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who brings particular precision to what Protagoras actually claimed

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to teach and what was genuinely at stake in that claim.

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And Julia Annas, whose introduction to Plato's Republic

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is among the most rigorous accounts we have of what Plato was actually arguing.

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In the last episode, we established what made the Sophist

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framework genuinely progressive. And before we move forward, I want to revisit it

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briefly, because what Plato does next only makes sense if you understand precisely

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what he was pushing back against. The sophists,

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as, as Guthrie reconstructs them, built something coherent. It rested

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on 4 interlocking pillars, as we will see. Plato had

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a precise answer to every one of them. The first,

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that progress is collective, political-virtual,

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universally distributed, available to all. Not a specialist

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skill. The second pillar, that progress is cumulative,

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knowledge accumulating across every domain, each generation building

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on the last. The third, that virtue is

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teachable, open to achievement by all, as Professor Barney

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reads Protagoras. And the last, that rhetoric is the engine

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binding all three together. The art, as Professor Guthrie

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reads Gorgias, that makes collective, cumulative teaching

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virtual, operational, and democratic life. That was the framework,

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the Sophist theory of progress, as we discussed in the previous episode.

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In short, it was horizontal, outward,

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cumulative, and democratic, advancing across time

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through human effort and shared knowledge. Well, what was Plato's counter-proposal?

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Guthrie identifies where it was vulnerable.

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If justice is simply a human agreement, nomos,

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without any deeper foundation, as he perceived the sophists were arguing,

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then anyone can argue that agreement is just another word for power.

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In Plato's Republic, Thrasymachus makes exactly

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that move by arguing that justice is simply whatever benefits the stronger party.

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In the Gorgias, Callicles goes further by

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claiming that nature itself vindicates the rule of the strong over

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the weak. Scholars debate whether these figures

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represent the actual sophist position taken to its logical conclusion,

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or whether they represent a deliberate distortion

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by Plato. What is not disputed by Guthrie

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and Curford, for example, is that Plato read the vulnerability and responded

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to it. His response, as Guthrie,

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Annas, and Professor Jaeger together establish, was to replace

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the sophist's horizontal account of progress—outward,

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cumulative, democratic—with a vertical one: the

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ascent of the individual soul toward what is permanently real.

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The city does not progress, but the soul can.

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Plato's counterattack operates on four precise fronts, each targeting

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one of the pillars that Episode Five established.

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1. Against collectivity: The allegory

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of the cave, as Sedley reads it, is Plato's argument that the ascent towards

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knowledge is necessarily individual and cannot be transferred by teaching.

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In other words, it is not a collective. Against cumulativity:

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This is drawn from Meno, an early Platonic dialogue in which Socrates

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questions an enslaved boy about geometry to show that knowledge is not learned

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from the outside but recovered from within the soul.

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Professor Burnyeat argues that this move dismantles the sophist

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model of cumulative instruction.

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Against teachability: De Meno's

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conclusion, Guthrie's reading that the absence of reliable teachers of virtue proves

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it cannot be straightforward knowledge, and against rhetoric as the civic

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engine. Through The Gorgias, a dialogue in which Plato stages

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a direct confrontation between Socrates and the most powerful rhetorical figures

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of his day, where Guthrie traces Plato's argument that rhetoric

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is not the art of making communities wise, simply the art

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of flattery. This episode will cover

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Plato's counterattack, as we will see, begins with what we know and from where it

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comes from. In the allegory of the cave, he argues that the

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ascent towards knowledge cannot be collective. The soul

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must turn itself. In the doctrine of recollection

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drawn from the Meno, he goes further.

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Knowledge is not built up across generations at all, Plato argues.

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It is already inside us, just waiting to be

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recovered. Together, these two moves dismantle the

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first two pillars of the sophist framework: collectivity and cumulativity

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at their foundations. The third

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and fourth pillars, teachability and rhetoric, we will discuss in Episode

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7. The question that runs through both episodes,

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however, is one that Plato opens and never fully closes. And that goes

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as follows: If the sophists were wrong about how

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progress works, then what are we left with from the sophists?

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Let's discuss Section 1, the allegory of the cave.

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This is the argument against collectivity.

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The first of Plato's countermoves against the sophists' claim that progress

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is collective operates at the level of a story, of an allegory.

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Many of us are familiar with Plato's allegory of the cave.

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In this story within the Republic,

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Socrates asks Glaucon to imagine an underground

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chamber Inside it, a group of prisoners have been chained since childhood,

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unable to move, unable to turn their heads. Behind them,

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unseen, a fire burns. Between the fire and the prisoners,

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figures pass carrying objects, casting shadows on the

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wall ahead. The prisoners can see nothing

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but those shadows. That's all they can see. They have no experience

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of the objects, no experience of the fire,

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no experience of the world above. The shadows

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are all they have ever been shown, and so the shadows are for them the

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whole of reality, the whole of their reality.

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Now suppose, Socrates continues, that one prisoner

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is unchained and forced to run around for the first time.

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He turns painfully, disorientingly, and sees the fire,

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and it blinds him. He is dragged upward by

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an unseen hand. Plato never tells us whose hand that is,

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but he is dragged nonetheless out of the cave and into the sunlight.

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He cannot see at first. Gradually his eyes adjust.

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He begins to make out the shadows on the ground, and then reflects

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in water and objects directly, and then finally the sun

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itself. The source of everything is now visible outside

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of the cave. And then Socrates asks,

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what happens if this man goes back to the cave. So he does.

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He descends again into the darkness. His eyes,

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now accustomed to the light, are useless in the cave. He stumbles around.

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He cannot see the shadows he once named with such confidence.

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The other prisoners, who have never left the cave,

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never turned, never doubted what they had seen,

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regard him now as damaged. If he tries

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to explain what he has seen outside of the cave, They don't believe

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him. And if he tries to free them,

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Plato tells us, they would rather kill him than follow him.

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This, the next argument, is the argument against collectivity.

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This is Plato's direct response to the first pillar,

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the sophist claim that progress is collective, available to

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all, and transmissible through education and rhetoric.

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Professor David Sedley, reading the Cave Allegory,

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identifies Plato's countermove precisely.

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The man's ascent towards knowledge, on Plato's account, is necessarily

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individual and not collective. The image of the

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prisoners unable to escape simply because someone points to the light is

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a deliberate refutation of the idea that collective

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emancipation is philosophically available.

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The philosopher who has made the ascent cannot

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transfer what he has seen by teaching a curriculum or trying to win an argument.

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The soul itself, for the individual—and not

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every soul will. Guthrie, working through the cave's imagery

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section by section, identifies an even deeper claim.

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He states that the prisoners are not ignorant because they lack information;

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they are ignorant because they are oriented towards the wrong things.

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And reorientation, unlike instruction, is not something

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that one person can do for another. It is an individual experience.

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This is the structural heart of Plato's counterattack on

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collectivity. The Sophists' framework required progress to

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be shareable, passed among people through teaching, rhetoric,

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and deliberation. But Plato's cave argues that the most

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important form of progress cannot be shared in that way at all. This is

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Plato's key argument. Well, what do the other

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scholars make of the allegory in modern times?

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Julianus, for example, insists on a point that is easy to miss.

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When Socrates says the prisoners are like us in the Republic,

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he is not describing a corrupt society. On her

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read, he's describing the human condition in general.

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Even in an ideally just society, we all start in

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the cave, he argues. Philosophical thinking, she writes, is what breaks

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down the bonds of conformity to ordinary experience and received opinion,

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a journey from darkness into light available only

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to the few who do the work of ascending. But Anas

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also observes that the allegory is more than a philosophical argument about knowledge.

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There are people in the cave who are not prisoners. They are

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the puppeteers actually managing what the prisoners see.

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And Annas reads this as an important portrait of the kind of

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society Plato had in mind, from the puppeteers with every

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interest in keeping its citizens, the people in the cave,

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fixed solely on the shadows that they are shown.

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Guthrie goes even further. His reading is direct.

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The returning philosopher, he claims,

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represents the real Socrates in real life,

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not just the character that Plato uses.

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The hostile crowd represents democratic Athens,

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and the cave is the world that the sophists educated.

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When Plato writes that the returning philosopher will risk being killed

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by those who only know the shadows of justice, Guthrie writes, He is

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not describing some hypothetical situation. He's describing something that actually

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happened 15 years before he wrote it.

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Guthrie captures this in a 3-word editorial that carries

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and says everything: Plato never forgets.

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This is a key point, because Professor Guthrie is making the

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argument that Plato is actually referencing the

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real-life situation of the death of Socrates. Through this dialogue.

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So for Annas, the cave is the human condition, but for Guthrie,

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it is a specific historical wound. The power of the

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allegory is that it contains both at the same time.

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Now Annas and Guthrie converge on what this means.

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For Plato, progress is not the accumulation of

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skills or knowledge. It is the reorientation of the soul.

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And the sun the prisoner finally reaches is, for Plato,

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the good itself. So what does any of this mean for

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the concept of progress? The Sophist framework was horizontal.

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Progress moved outward through teaching, rhetoric,

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shared deliberation, the accumulation of skill across

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generations. Each generation built on the last.

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So the mechanism was social, cumulative, and in principle

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available to all. It was universal. Plato's cave,

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however, proposes something vertical instead. Movement towards what is

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real is upward, not outward and horizontal.

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It is the individual and not the collective.

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It is a reorientation of the soul, and it cannot be transferred

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by the mechanisms the sophists offered, such as teaching.

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Rhetoric, on this account, does not bring anyone closer to

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the light; it makes the shadows more convincing.

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This is the attack on collectivity. The attack on cumulativity,

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on the claim that knowledge builds and compounds across generations,

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is Plato's next move, his next attack.

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The second of Plato's counter-moves against the sophists' claim that progress

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is cumulative begins not with an allegory such as the cave, but with

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a problem. In the Meno, one of Plato's

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early dialogues, The title character poses what looks like a simple challenge

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to Socrates. How, he asks, can you inquire into something

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you don't already know? If you don't know it, you won't recognize

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it when you find it. And if you already know it, then what are you

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looking for? This is known as Meno's Paradox,

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and it is Plato's way of forcing a question the sophists had never seriously

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asked: What exactly happens when a person

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learns something? What is the learning process all about?

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For the Sophists, the answer was straightforward: learning

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is transmission. A teacher possesses knowledge and passes it

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on to a student. Techne, as we have discussed in previous

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episodes, or skills, accumulates. Each generation

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inherits what the last discovered and builds on it.

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That is the second pillar: that progress is

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cumulative and education is its mechanism for growth.

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Plato's answer is that the sophists have it exactly backwards,

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and he attempts to show why.

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Socrates turns to an enslaved boy in the household with no education,

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no mathematical training whatsoever. Through questioning

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alone, Socrates leads him to solve a geometry problem that the

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boy has never seen before. The boy is not taught

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the answer, but yet he arrives at it somehow. He finds it himself,

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and he finds it by being asked the right questions by Socrates.

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So the conclusion Socrates draws is stark.

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He said the boy did not learn anything from him. He already knew it.

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The questioning did not transmit knowledge, merely recovered

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it. The soul already possesses what it knows.

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This is the claim. And what we call learning, and what

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the sophists call learning, is in fact just a process of remembering.

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A process of recollection through dialogue. So this

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is Plato's doctrine of recollection. For Professor

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Burnyeat, the slave boy demonstration is not just a curiosity about the

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topic of geometry; it is an actual demolition of the sophist

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educational model. If knowledge cannot be transmitted or accumulated

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across generations, then the idea of cumulative progress collapses.

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You cannot pass on what the listener must in the end recover for

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himself or herself. Guthrie connects this directly to the cave.

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In both dialogues, the direction of genuine knowledge

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is the same: inward and upward, not outward and forward

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as the Sophists had argued.

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Alternatively, Heraclitus, from the 5th century,

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famously argued that you could not step into the same river twice,

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that reality is in constant flux and always changing.

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Well, alternatively, for Plato, that restless, ever-moving world

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is precisely the cave. Progress on his account is not

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a river running through time; it is something closer to excavation,

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the slow uncovering of what was always and

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unchangingly there to begin with. So today we

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traced Plato's attack on the first two pillars of the sophist framework: collectivity

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and cumulativity, the cave and the doctrine

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of recollection, of memory. In their place, he offers

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something more demanding: that the solitary ascent of the individual

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towards what is permanently true. In the next episode,

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we take on the third and the fourth pillars, teachability,

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and the art of rhetoric. If virtue cannot

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be taught, and rhetoric is merely flattery, as Plato

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asserts, then the Sophist engine of progress was

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never an engine at all. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe

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and leave a review. It makes an enormous difference to how the

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show reaches new listeners. The Curator's Frame, the companion

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00:19:25,520 --> 00:19:28,940
blog to this episode, goes on Wednesday, and the Substack newsletter

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follows on Friday. Links to everything, as always, are in

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the show notes. Thank you for listening to Notions of Progress. I hope

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to see you again soon. Thanks again.