Chapter 13 Chapter Ten Protagoras

The great systems of the pre-Socratic period we have been examining were opposed in the second half of the fifth century B.C. by a movement of skepticism, whose most important figure was Protagoras, the leader of the Sophists. The word "sage" doesn't mean anything bad in the first place; it refers more or less to what we call a "professor."A wise man is one who makes his living teaching young people things which are supposed to be useful to young people in practical life.Since there were no public facilities for this kind of education at that time, the wise men only taught those who had their own training or those who had their training provided by their parents.This tended to give them a certain class prejudice, which was reinforced by the political situation of the time.In Athens, and in many other cities, political democracy triumphed, but it did nothing to reduce the wealth of those who belonged to the old aristocratic families.Those who embody the so-called Greek culture in our minds are generally rich people: they have education and leisure, travel has worn away the edges and corners of their traditional prejudices, and the time they have spent in debate has sharpened their wit .What is called democracy leaves untouched the system of slavery which enables the rich to enjoy their wealth without oppressing free citizens.

Yet in many cities, especially in Athens, the poorer citizens had a double hatred for the rich, one of envy and the other of tradition.The rich are - often justly - considered impious and immoral; they are subverting ancient beliefs and perhaps trying to destroy democracy.Thus formed a combination of political democracy and cultural conservatism, while cultural innovators tended to be politically reactionary.Much the same situation existed in modern America. As the main Catholic organization in the United States, the Tammanites tried hard to defend the traditional theological and ethical dogmas against the attacks of the Enlightenment.But the American Enlightenment was much weaker politically than the Athenian Enlightenment, because they failed to establish a common goal with the plutocracy.However, there is an important higher intellectual class engaged in defending the plutocracy, that is, the class of corporate counsel.In some respects, their role was very similar to that played by the Sophists in Athens.

Athenian democracy, though severely limited by its exclusion of slaves and women, was in some respects more democratic than any modern system.The judges, and most of the magistrates, are chosen by lot, and hold office for a short period; they are therefore ordinary citizens, like our jurors, with the prejudices peculiar to ordinary citizens, and lack of professionalism. The smell of sex.Generally speaking, there are always many judges listening to cases.Plaintiff and defender, or prosecutor and defendant, are present in person, not by professional lawyers.Quite naturally, victory or defeat depends largely on that skill in oratory which appeals to the prejudices of the crowd.Although one must speak in person, one can hire an expert to write it for him, or, as many prefer, can pay to learn the techniques necessary to win in court.The sages are known to have taught this technique.

The Pericles era in the history of Athens is very similar to the Victorian era in the history of Britain.Athens was rich and powerful, not much disturbed by war, and had a democratic constitution enforced by the nobility.We have already seen, in the case of Anaxagoras, that a democratic opposition against Pericles gradually gathered strength, and attacked his friends one by one.The Peloponnesian War broke out in 431 BC; Athens (along with many others) was hit by a plague; the population, once about 230,000, was greatly reduced and never recovered to Its original level (Berry: "History of Greece" Volume I, p. 444).Pericles himself was dismissed as general in 430 BC and fined by a court of 150 judges for embezzlement.Both of his sons died of the plague, and he himself died the following year (429).Phidias and Anaxagoras were both convicted; Asbacia was charged with impiety and mismanagement, but was pardoned.

In such a society it is natural that those who are liable to be hated by democratic politicians wish to master the art of debate.Though the Athenians were accustomed to persecution, they were far less narrow-minded than modern Americans in one respect, for those accused of impiety and depraved youth could attend to defend themselves.This explains why wise men are popular with one class and not with another; but in their own minds they are always thought to serve no personal ends, and many of them are indeed genuine. engaged in philosophy.Plato tried his best to slander and abuse them, but we cannot judge them by Plato's polemics.In his lighter tone, let us quote the following passage from the Eudidymus, in which two wise men, Dionysodorus and Eudidymus, deliberately played tricks on a man named Chrisips' simple mind.Dionysodorus said:

Did you say you have a dog? Yes, said Chrisips, there is a vicious dog. Does he have a puppy? Yes, the puppies are just like him. Is the dog their father? Yes, he said, I saw him with the puppy's mother. Is he not yours? He is indeed mine. He is a father, and he is yours; so he is your father, and the dog is your brother. From the more serious tone, we can quote a dialogue entitled "The Wise Men".This is a dialogue where a logical discussion of definitions takes a wise man as an example.We will not discuss the logic of this piece for now, the only thing I want to mention about this dialogue is his final conclusion.

"The technique of creating contradictions comes from an insincere, exaggerated imitation, of the kind of illusion-making that is produced by image-making, and is characterized by being part of human rather than divine creation, which appears as An ambiguous game of words;--that, indeed, may point to the lineage of true wise men." (Comfort's translation) There is a story about Protagoras, which is undoubtedly invented, but which illustrates the relationship between the wise man and the court in the people's mind.It is said that Protagoras taught a young man that he would only pay the tuition fee if he won the first lawsuit, otherwise he would not pay.And the young man's first lawsuit was that Protagoras sued him, asking him to pay his school fees.

For now, however, let's put these prologue aside and look at what we really know about Protagoras. Protagoras was born in 500 BC in Abdera, the city from which Democritus came.He visited Athens twice, the second not later than 432 BC.In 444-3 BC he compiled a law code for the city of Tully.There is a legend that he was accused of impiety, but this seems implausible, although he wrote a book, On the Gods, which begins: "As for the gods, I am not sure that they exist or They do not exist, and dare not say what they are; for there are many things which prevent us from exact knowledge, such as the obscurity of matters and the brevity of life." On his second visit to Athens, Plato wrote in Protag Described more or less ironically in the "Theaetetus" and discussing his doctrine seriously in the "Theaetetus". His fame is mainly due to his doctrine that "man is the root of all The measure is the measure of the existence of things that exist, and the measure of the non-existence of things that do not exist". This doctrine is understood to mean that each person is the measure of all things, so that when people disagree, there is no basis for Objective truth can say which is right and which is wrong. This doctrine is inherently skeptical and based on the "deceptiveness" of perception.

One of the three founders of pragmatism, F. K. Schiller, used to call himself a disciple of Protagoras.I think this is because Plato hinted in Theaetetus (as an interpretation of Protagoras) that one opinion may be better than another, but not necessarily truer Some.For example, when a person has jaundice, everything looks yellow.It is meaningless to say that these things are not actually yellow but the color that a healthy person sees; but we may say that since health is better than disease, the opinion of a healthy person It is better than the opinions of jaundice patients.This view is obviously very similar to pragmatism.

Not believing that there is objective truth makes most people, for practical purposes, the arbiter of what they should believe.So Protagoras embarked on the road of defending laws, customs and traditional morals.Although, as we have already mentioned, he did not know whether gods existed, he was still convinced that gods should be worshipped.For a man whose theoretical skepticism is both thorough and logical, this view is clearly the correct one. In his prime, Protagoras lived a life of traveling around the Greek city-states and constantly lecturing, and he taught for a fee "anyone who wants to obtain practical efficiency and higher spiritual education." (Book of Zeller, p. 1299).Plato objected—and, in modern terms, somewhat puts on airs—that the Sophists should be paid for their teaching.Plato, who had considerable private property himself, was clearly unable to empathize with the needs of those who were not as fortunate as he was.The strange thing is that modern professors, although they can't find a reason for refusing salary, repeat Plato's pickiness again and again.

Yet there is another point in which the Sophists differed from most philosophers of the time.Aside from wise men, usually a teacher always founds a school which is more or less of a fraternal character, more or less of a communal life, often somewhat resembling a monastic order, and often of an undeclared kind. secret doctrine.This is all very natural where philosophy has its origins in Orphism.But among wise men there is none of these things.What they teach is, in their minds, irrelevant to religion or virtue.They teach forensics, and everything else that aids the art.On the whole, like modern lawyers, they are only set out to teach how to defend or oppose an opinion, they are not engaged in the promotion of their own conclusions.Those who regard philosophy as a way of life closely associated with religion are naturally shocked; wise men seem to them frivolous and immoral. To a certain extent—though it is impossible to say exactly how much—the distaste of the Sophists, not only to the general public but to Plato and subsequent philosophers, is really due to their intellectual quality. excellent.The pursuit of truth, if it is whole-hearted, must set aside moral considerations.We cannot know in advance whether truth will be considered constructive in a given society.Wise men are always ready to follow arguments to the conclusions to which they lead.And that often leads them to skepticism.One of them, Gorgias, suggested that nothing exists; and that if anything existed, it would be unknowable; It cannot be conveyed to others.We don't know what his arguments were, but I can well imagine that they had a logical force that forced their counterparts to take refuge in theoretical systems.Plato was always eager to promote views sufficient to make men what he thought virtuous; but he was almost never intellectually dishonest, for Plato allowed himself to judge doctrines by their social consequences.Even here he is dishonest; he pretends to be following the argument and judging by purely theoretical standards, when in fact he is distorting the discussion to bring it to a moral conclusion .He introduced this vice into philosophy, and it has been in philosophy ever since.Perhaps it is largely his hostility to wise men that gives his dialogues this character.One of the common shortcomings of all philosophers after Plato is that their studies of ethics start from the assumption that they already know what conclusions they want to reach. In Athens in the late fifth century B.C., political doctrines that seemed immoral to people at the time, and seem immoral in democracies today, seem to have been taught.In the first book of Plato's "The State", Thrasymachus demonstrated that there is no justice except in the interests of the strong; he also argued that laws are made by governments for their own interests; In this struggle, there are no objective criteria that can be invoked.According to Plato's record (see "Gorgias"), Calicris had advocated a similar doctrine.He says that the law of nature is the law of the strong; but for the sake of convenience, institutions and moral precepts are established to bind the strong.These doctrines have gained much wider agreement with us today than they did in antiquity.Whatever one may think of them, they are not characteristic of wise men. In the fifth century B.C.—whatever the position of the Sophists in this change—there was a transformation in Athens, which, in conflict with the crumbling clumsy but rather brutal defense of orthodoxy, There is a transition from rigid Puritan simplicity to witty and no less brutal cynicism.At the beginning of the century, it was the Athenians who led the Ionian city-states in the battle against Persia, and the victory of Marathon in 490 BC.At the end of the century it was the defeat of Athens by Sparta in 404 BC and the death sentence of Socrates in 399 BC.Henceforth Athens was of no more political importance, but it acquired an unquestionable cultural supremacy, which Athens maintained until the victory of Christianity. There are certain things in the history of Athens in the fifth century B.C. that are of the utmost importance for the understanding of Plato, and of all Greek thought afterward.At the time of the First Persian War, with the decisive victory at Marathon, the main glory went to Athens.Ten years later, in the Second War, the Athenians were still the strongest on the Greek side at sea; but on land, the victory was largely due to the Spartans, the acknowledged leaders of the Greek world.The Spartans' views, however, were narrowly localized, and when the Persians were expelled from the European part of Greece, they stopped resisting the Persians.The responsibility for defending the Greeks in Asia and liberating those islands that had been conquered by the Persians was undertaken by Athens with great success.Athens became the leading sea power and gained considerable imperialist control over the Ionian islands.Pericles was a moderate democrat and a moderate imperialist; under his leadership Athens prospered.The great temple--the remains of which are still the glory of Athens--was his initiative to replace the temple destroyed by Xexius.The wealth and culture of the city of Athens increased rapidly; and, as must happen in such times, especially when wealth increased through foreign trade, traditional morals and traditional beliefs declined. At this time, a particularly large number of geniuses appeared in Athens.The three great dramatists, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, all belong to the fifth century BC.Escillus fought at Marathon, and had seen the battle of Salamis.Sophocles remained religiously orthodox.But Euripides was influenced by Protagoras and the free-thinking spirit of his time, and his treatment of myth was skeptical and subversive.The comic poet Aristophanes ridiculed Socrates, the Sophists and philosophers, yet he himself belonged to their circle; Plato wrote his relationship with Socrates very We have seen that the sculptor Phidias also belonged to Pericles' circle. The superiority of Athens in this period was rather artistic than intellectual.None of the great mathematicians and philosophers of the fifth century was Athenian, except Socrates; Socrates was not a writer, but a man who confined himself to oral argument. The outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC and the death of Pericles in 429 BC began a dark period in the history of Athens.The Athenians had the upper hand at sea, but the Spartans held hegemony on land and repeatedly invaded Attica (except the city of Athens) during the summer.The result was that the city of Athens was overcrowded and suffered heavy losses from the plague.In 414 BC the Athenians sent a great expedition to Sicily, hoping to capture Syracuse, which was in alliance with Sparta; but this attempt failed.War made the Athenians fierce and tyrannical.In 406 BC they conquered the island of Melos, massacred all the males of military age, and took the rest of the inhabitants into slavery.Euripides' play The Women of Troy is a protest against this barbarity.There was also an ideological aspect to the struggle, since Sparta represented oligarchy and Athens represented democracy.The Athenians had reason to suspect treason among some of their own nobles, and it was believed that their treason was connected with the final defeat of the navy at the battle of Igus Podami in 405 BC. The end of the war was that the Spartans established an oligarchic government in Athens, known as the Thirty Tyrants in history.Some of the Thirty Tyrants, including their leader Clytia, had been students of Socrates.They were certainly unpopular and were overthrown within a year.Democracy was restored with Sparta's consent; but it was a democratization in decline, unable to take direct revenge on the enemies within itself owing to the amnesty, but which, outside the sphere of the amnesty, liked to find any pretext to accuse these enemies.It was in this atmosphere that Socrates' trial and execution (399 BC) took place.