mail: Bill Thayer	Italiano	Help	Up	Home
previous: Chapter 12 This webpage reproduces a chapter of A History of Philosophy by Frederick Copleston, S. J. as reprinted by Image Books — Doubleday New York • London • Toronto • Sydney • Auckland 1993 The text, and illustrations except as noted, are in the public domain. next: Chapter 14

Part II: The Socratic Period

 p87  Chapter XIII
Some Individual Sophists

I. Protagoras

Protagoras was born, according to most authors, about 481 B.C., a native of Abdera in Thrace,​1 and seems to have come to Athens about the middle of the century. He enjoyed the favour of Pericles, and we are told that he was entrusted by that statesman with the task of drawing up a constitution for the Panhellenic colony of Thurii, which was founded in 444 B.C. He was again in Athens at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 and during the plague in 430, which carried off two of Pericles' sons. Diogenes Laërtius relates the story that Protagoras was indicted for blasphemy because of his book on the gods, but that he escaped from the city before trial and was drowned on the crossing to Sicily, his book being burnt in the market-place. This would have taken place at the time of the oligarchic revolt of the Four Hundred in 411 B.C. Burnet is inclined to regard the story as dubious, and holds that if the indictment did take place, then it must have taken place before 411. Professor Taylor agrees with Burnet in rejecting the prosecution story, but he does so because he also agrees with Burnet in accepting a much earlier date for the birth of Protagoras, namely 500 B.C. The two writers rely on Plato's representation of Protagoras in the dialogue of that name as an elderly man, at least approaching 65, in about the year 435. Plato "must have known whether Protagoras really belonged to the generation before Socrates, and could have no motive for misrepresentation on such a point."​2 If this is correct, then we ought also to accept the statement in the Meno that Protagoras died in high repute.

The best-known statement of Protagoras is that contained in his work, Ἀλήθεια ἥ Καταβάλλοντες (λόγοι), to the effect that "man is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are, of those that are not that they are not."​3 There has been a considerable controversy as to the interpretation which should be put on this famous saying, some writers maintaining the view that by "man" Protagoras does not mean the individual man,  p88 but man in the specific sense. If this were so, then the meaning of the dictum would not be "what appears to you to be true is true for you, and what appears to me to be true is true for me," but rather that the community or group or the whole human specie is the criterion and standard of truth. Controversy has also turned round the question whether things — Χρήματα — should be understood exclusively of the objects of sense-perception or should be extended to cover the field of values as well.

This is a difficult question and it cannot be discussed at length here, but the present writer is not prepared to disregard the testimony of Plato in the Theaetetus, where the Protagorean dictum, developed it is true, as Plato himself admits, is certainly interpreted in the individualistic sense in regard to sense-perception.​4 Socrates observes that when the same wind is blowing, one of us may feel chilly and the other not, or one may feel slightly chilly and the other quite cold, and asks if we should agree with Protagoras that the wind is cold to the one who feels chilly and not to the other. It is quite clear that in this passage Protagoras is interpreted as referring to the individual man, and not at all to man in the specific sense. Moreover, it is to be noted that the Sophist is not depicted as saying that the wind merely appears chilly to the one and not to the other. Thus if I have come in from a run in the rain on a cold day, and say that the water is warm; while you, coming from a warm room, feel the same water as cold, Protagoras would remark that neither of us is mistaken — the water is warm in reference to my sense-organ, and is cold in reference to your sense-organ. (When it was objected to the Sophist that geometrical propositions are constant for all, Protagoras replied that in actual concrete reality there are no geometrical lines or circles, so that the difficulty does not arise.)5

Against this interpretation appeal is made to the Protagoras of Plato, where Protagoras is not depicted as applying the dictum in an individualistic sense to ethical values. But even granting that Protagoras must be made consistent with himself, it is surely not necessary to suppose that what is true of the objects of sense-perception is ipso facto true of ethical values. It may be pointed out that Protagoras declares that man is the measure of πάντων χρημάτων (all things), so that if the individualistic interpretation be accepted in regard to the objects of sense-perception, it should also be extended to ethical values and judgments, and  p89 that, conversely, if it is not accepted in regard to ethical values and judgments, it should not be accepted in regard to the objects of sense-perception: in other words, we are forced to choose between the Theaetetus and Protagoras, relying on the one and rejecting the other. But in the first place it is not certain that πάντων χρημάτων is meant to include ethical values, and in the second place it might be well that the objects of the special senses are of such character that they cannot become the subject of true and universal knowledge, while on the other hand ethical values are of such a kind that they can become the subject of true and universal knowledge. This was the view of Plato himself, who connected the Protagorean saying with the Heraclitean doctrine of flux, and held that true and certain knowledge can only be had of the supersensible. We are not trying to make out that Protagoras held the Platonic view on ethical values, which he did not, but to point out that sense-perception and intuition of values do not necessarily stand or fall together in relation to certain knowledge and truth for all.

What, then, was Protagoras' actual teaching in regard to ethical judgments and values? In the Theaetetus he is depicted as saying both that ethical judgments are relative ("For I hold that whatever practices seem right and laudable to any particular State are so for that State, so long as it holds by them") and that the wise man should attempt to substitute sound practices for unsound.​6 In other words, there is no question of one ethical view being true and another false, but there is question of one view being "sounder," i.e. more useful or expedient, than another. "In this way it is true both that some men are wiser than others and that no one thinks falsely." (A man who thinks that there is no absolute truth, is hardly entitled to declare absolutely that "no one thinks falsely.") Now, in the Protagoras, Plato depicts the Sophist as maintaining that αἰδώς and δίκη, have been bestowed on all men by the gods, "because cities could not exist if, as in the case of other arts, few men only were partakers of them." Is this at variance with what is said in the Theaetetus? It would appear that what Protagoras meant is this: that Law in general is founded on certain ethical tendencies implanted in all men, but that individual varieties of Law, as found in particular States, are relative, the law of one State, without being "truer" than that of another State, being perhaps "sounder" in the sense  p90 of more useful or expedient. The State or city-community would be the determiner of law in this case and not the individual, for the relative character of concrete ethical judgments and concrete determinations of Nomos would be maintained. As an upholder of tradition and social convention, Protagoras stresses the importance of education, of imbibing the ethical traditions of the State, while admitting that the wise man may lead the State to "better" laws. As far as the individual citizen is concerned, he should cleave to tradition, to the accepted code of the community — and that all the more because no one "way" is truer than another. αἰδώς and δίκη incline him to this, and if he has to share in these gifts of the gods and refuses to hearken to the State, the State must get rid of him. While at first sight, therefore, the "relativistic" doctrine of Protagoras might seem intentionally revolutionary, it turns out to be used in support of tradition and authority. No one code is "truer" than another, therefore do not set up your private judgment against the law of the State. Moreover, through his conception of αἰδώς and δίκη Protagoras gives at least some hints of the unwritten or natural law, and in this respect contributed to the broadening of the Greek outlook.

In a work, Περὶ θεῶν, Protagoras said: With regard to the gods, I cannot feel sure either that they are or that they are not, nor what they are like in figure; for there are many things that hinder sure knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life."​7 This is the only fragment of the work that we possess. Such a sentence might seem to lend colour to the picture of Protagoras as a sceptical and destructive thinker, who turned his critical powers against all established tradition in ethics and religion; but such a view does not agree with the impression of Protagoras which we receive from Plato's dialogue of that name, and would doubtless be mistaken. Just as the moral to be drawn from the relativity of particular codes of law is that the individual should submit himself to the traditional education, so the moral to be drawn from our uncertainty concerning the gods and their nature is that we should abide by the religion of the city. If we cannot be certain of absolute truth, why throw overboard the religion that we inherit from our fathers? Moreover, Protagoras' attitude is not so extraordinary or destructive as the adherents of a dogmatic religion might naturally suppose, since, as Burnet remarks, Greek religion did not consist  p91 "in theological affirmations or negations" but in worship.​8 The effect of the Sophists, it is true, would have been to weaken men's trust in tradition, but it would appear that Protagoras personally was conservative in temper and had no intention of educating revolutionaries; on the contrary, he professed to educate the good citizen. There are ethical tendencies in all men, but these can develop only in the organised community: if a man is to be a good citizen, therefore, he must absorb the whole social tradition of the community of which he is a member. The social tradition is not absolute truth, but it is the norm for a good citizen.

From the relativistic theory it follows that on every subject more than one opinion is possible, and Protagoras seems to have developed this point in his Ἀντιλογίαι. The dialectician and rhetorician will practise himself in the art of developing different opinions and arguments, and he will shine most brightly when he succeeds τὸν ἥττω λόγον κρείττω ποιεῖν. The enemies of the Sophists interpreted this in the sense of making the morally worse cause to prevail,​9 but it does not necessarily possess this morally destructive sense. A lawyer, for example, who pleaded with success the just cause of a client who was too weak to protect himself or the justice of whose cause it was difficult to substantiate, might be said to be making the "weaker argument" prevail, though he would be doing nothing immoral. In the hands of unscrupulous rhetoricians and devotees of eristic, the maxim easily acquired an unsavoury flavour, but there is no reason to father on Protagoras himself a desire to promote unscrupulous dealing. Still, it cannot be denied that the doctrine of relativism, when linked up with the practice of dialectic and eristic, very naturally produces a desire to succeed, without much regard for truth or justice.

Protagoras was a pioneer in the study and science of grammar. He is said to have classified the different kinds of sentence​10 and to have distinguished terminologically the genders of nouns.​11 In an amusing passage of the Clouds Aristophanes depicts the Sophist as coining the feminine ἀλεκτρύαινα from the masculine ἀλεκτρυών (cock).12

II. Prodicus

Prodicus came from the island of Ceos in the Aegean. The  p92 inhabitants of this island were said to be pessimistically inclined, and Prodicus was credited with the tendencies of his countrymen, for in the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus he is credited with holding that death is desirable in order to escape the evils of life. Fear of death is irrational, since death concerns neither the living nor the dead — the first, because they are still living, the second, because they are not living any more.​13 The authenticity of the quotation is not easy to establish.

Prodicus is perhaps chiefly remarkable for his theory on the origin of religion. He held that in the beginning men worshipped as gods the sun, moon, rivers, lakes, fruits, etc. — in other words, the things which were useful to them and gave them food. And he gives as an example the cult of the Nile in Egypt. This primitive stage was followed by another, in which the inventors of various arts — agriculture, viniculture, metal work, and so on — were worshipped as the gods Demeter, Dionysus, Hephaestus, etc. On this view of religion prayer would, he thought, be superfluous, and he seems to have got into trouble with the authorities at Athens.​14 Prodicus, like Protagoras, was noted for linguistic studies,​15 and he wrote a treatise on synonyms. He seems to have been very pedantic in his forms of expression.16

(Professor Zeller says:​17 "Although Plato usually treats him with irony, it nevertheless speaks well for him that Socrates occasionally recommended pupils to him (Theaet., 151B), and that his native city repeatedly entrusted him with diplomatic missions (Hipp. Maj., 282C)." As a matter of fact, Zeller seems to have missed the point in the Theaetetus passage, since the young men that Socrates has sent to Prodicus are those who, he has found, have not been "pregnant" with thoughts when in his company. He has accordingly sent them off to Prodicus, in whose company they have ceased to be "barren.")

III. Hippias

Hippias of Elis was a younger contemporary of Protagoras and was celebrated particularly for his versatility, being acquainted with mathematics, astronomy, grammar and rhetoric, rhythmics and harmony, history and literature and mythology — in short, he was a true Polymath. Not only that, but when present at a certain Olympiad, he boasted that he had made all his own  p93 clothes. His list of the Olympic victors laid the foundation for the later Greek system of dating by means of the Olympiads (first introduced by the historian Timaeus).​18 Plato, in the Protagoras, makes him say that "law being the tyrant of men, forces them to do many things contrary to nature."​19 The point seems to be that the law of the city-state is often narrow and tyrannical and at variance with the natural laws (ἄγραφοι νόμοι).

IV. Gorgias

Gorgias of Leontini, in Sicily, lived from about 483 to 375 B.C., and in the year 427 he came to Athens as ambassador of Leontini, in order to ask for help against Syracuse. On his travels he did what he could to spread the spirit of Panhellenism.

Gorgias seems to have been at first a pupil of Empedocles, and to have busied himself with questions of natural science, and may have written a book on Optics. He was led, however, to scepticism by the dialectic of Zeno and published a work entitled On Not‑being or Nature (Περὶ τοῦ μὴ ὄντος ἢ περὶ Φύσεως), the chief ideas of which can be gathered from Sextus Empiricus and from the pseudo-Aristotelian writing On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias. From these accounts of the contents of Gorgias' work it is clear that he reacted to the Eleatic dialectic somewhat differently to Protagoras, since while the latter might be seem to hold that everything is true, Gorgias maintained the very opposite. According to Gorgias, (i) Nothing exists, for if there were anything, then it would have either to be eternal or to have come into being. But it cannot have come into being, for neither out of Being nor out of Not‑being can anything come to be. Nor can it be eternal, for if it were eternal, then it would have to be infinite. But the infinite is impossible for the following reason. It could not be in another, nor could it be in itself, therefore it would be nowhere. But what is nowhere, is nothing. (ii) If there were anything, then it could not be known. For if there is knowledge of being, then what is thought must be, and Not‑being could not be thought at all. In which case there could be no error, which is absurd. (iii) Even if there were knowledge of being, this knowledge could not be imparted. Every sign is different from the thing signified; e.g., how could we impart knowledge of colours by word, since the ears hears tones and not colours? And how could the same representation of being  p94 be in the two persons at once, since they are different from one another?20

While some have regarded these astonishing ideas as expressing a seriously meant philosophical Nihilism, others have thought that the doctrine constitutes a joke on the part of Gorgias, or, rather, that the great rhetorician wanted to show that rhetoric or the skilful use of words was able to make plausible even the most absurd hypothesis. (Sic H. Gomperz.) But this latter view hardly agrees with the fact that Isocrates sets Gorgias' opinion besides those of Zeno and Melissus, nor with the writing Πρὸς τὰ Γοργίου, which treats Gorgias' opinions as worth a philosophical criticism.​21 In any case a treatise on Nature would scarcely be the place for such rhetorical tours de force. On the other hand, it is difficult to suppose that Gorgias held in all seriousness that nothing exists. It may be that he wished to employ the Eleatic dialectic in order to reduce the Eleatic philosophy to absurdity.​22 Afterwards, renouncing philosophy, he devoted himself to rhetoric.

Rhetorical art was regarded by Gorgias as the mastery of the art of persuasion, and this necessarily led him to a study of practical psychology. He deliberately practised the art of suggestion (ψυχαγωγία), which could be used both for practical ends, good and bad, and for artistic purposes. In connection with the latter Gorgias developed the art of justifiable deception (δίκαια ἀπάτη), calling a tragedy "a deception which is better to cause than not to cause; to succumb to it shows greater powers of artistic appreciation than not to."​23 Gorgias' comparison of the effects of tragedy to those of purgatives reminds us of Aristotle's much-discussed doctrine of the κάθαρσις.

The fact that Plato places the might-is‑right doctrine in the mouth of Callicles,​24 while another disciple, Lycophron, asserted that nobility is a sham and that all men are equal, and that the law is a contract by which right is mutually guaranteed,​25 while yet another disciple demanded the liberation of slaves in the name of natural law,​26 we may ascribe with Zeller to Gorgias' renunciation of philosophy, which led him to decline to answer questions of truth and morality.27

Other Sophists whom one may briefly mention are Thrasymachus  p95 of Chalcedon, who is presented in the Republic as the brutal champion of the rights of the stronger,​28 and Antiphon of Athens, who asserts the equality of all men and denounces the distinction between nobles and commons, Greeks and barbarians, as itself a barbarism. He made education to be the most important thing in life, and created the literary genre of Τέχνη ἀλυπίας λόγοι παραμυθητικοί, declaring that he could free anyone from sorrow by oral means.29

V. Sophism

In conclusion I may observe again that there is no reason for ascribing to the great Sophists the intention of overthrowing religion and morality; men like Protagoras and Gorgias had no such end in view. Indeed, the great Sophists favoured the conception of a "natural law," and tended to broaden the outlook of the ordinary Greek citizen; they were an educative force in Hellas. At the same time it is true that "in a certain sense every opinion is true, according to Protagoras; every opinion is false, according to Gorgias."​30 This tendency to deny the absolute and objective character of truth easily leads to the consequence that, instead of trying to convince anyone, the Sophist will try to persuade him or talk him over. Indeed, in the hands of lesser men Sophism soon acquired an unpleasant connotation — that of "Sophistry." While one can only respect the cosmopolitanism and broad outlook of an Antiphon of Athens, one can only condemn the "Might-is‑Right" theory of a Thrasymachus on the one hand and the hair-splitting and quibbling of a Dionysodorus on the other. The great Sophists, as we have seen, were an educative force in Hellas; but one of the chief factors in the Greek education which they fostered was rhetoric, and rhetoric had its obvious dangers, inasmuch as the orator might easily tend to pay more attention to the rhetorical presentation of a subject than to the subject itself. Moreover, by questioning the absolute foundations of traditional institutions, beliefs and ways of life, Sophism tended to foster a relativistic attitude, though the evil latent in Sophism lay not so much in the fact that it raised problems, as in the fact that it could not offer any satisfactory intellectual solution to the problems it raised. Against this relativism Socrates and Plato reacted, endeavouring to establish the sure foundation of true knowledge and ethical judgments.

---

The Author's Notes:

1 Protag., 309C; Rep., 600C; Diog. Laërt., 9.50 ff.

❦

2 Plato, p236, note.

❦

3 Frag. 1.

❦

4 Theaet., 151E, 152A.

❦

5 Arist., Metaph., Β 2, 997b32–998a6.

❦

6 Theaet., 166 ff.

❦

7 Frag. 4.

❦

8 G. P., I, p117.

❦

9 Aristoph., Clouds, 112 ff., 656‑7.

❦

10 Diog. Laërt., 9.53 ff.

❦

11 Arist., Rhet., 5, 1407b6.

❦

12 Clouds, 658 ff., 847 ff.

❦

13 366C ff.

❦

14 Frag. 5.

❦

15 Cf. Crat., 384B.

❦

16 Cf. Protag., 337A‑F.

❦

17 Outlines, pp84‑5.

❦

18 Frag. 3.

❦

19 337D, 2‑3.

❦

20 Cf. Frags. 1, 3.

❦

21 Aristotle or Theophrastus?

❦

22 Cf. Zeller, Outlines, p87.

❦

23 Frag. 23 (Plut., de gloria Athen., 5, 348C).

❦

24 Gorgias, 482E ff.

❦

25 Frags. 3 and 4.

❦

26 Alcidamas of Elea. Cf. Aristot., Rhet., III.3, 1406B; 1406A. Schol. on I.13, 1373B.

❦

27 Outlines, p88.

❦

28 Rep., 338C.

❦

29 Cf. Plut., apud Diels. Frag. 44 and 87 A 6.

❦

30 Ueberweg-Praechter, p122.

◂ previous						next ▸
Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
UP TO:		A History of Philosophy	LacusCurtius	Home
A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.