There are two stories about Protagoras. In the hostile
account of his life written by Diogenes Laertius, it is said that he was a
porter, a relatively humble position, and that he invented a porter’s pad for
carrying things. But in Philostratas’s Lives of the Sophists he is given a much
grander birth, being the son of a wealthy citizen of Abdera who “amassed wealth
beyond most men in Thrace”, and who entertained King Xerxes in his house. Philostratus
claims that this Persian connection effected Protagoras’s thinking, since he
became versed, to an extent, in the doctrines of the Persian magi. Whereas
Diogenes Laertius (writing with all the snobbery of the ancient world at his
back) attributes Protagorus’s education to Democritus, who was impressed by
Protagoras’s invention of the porter’s pad. Somehow, this story rings with the
implication of slander – it gives Protagoras’s cunning all too menial a cast.
And yet Diogenes also casually attributes the invention of philosophy by
dialogue, or the Socratic method, to Protagoras – a rather big invention, the
invention of a form, which Diogenes, in his usual way, mentions and goes on.
The biographies of the Philosophers tumble
and jumble off the page like some inventory landslide, leaving us frustrated,
howling outside of the sacked walls for more.
One thing that is agreed between Philostratus and Diogenes
is that Protagorus, like Socrates, was accused in Athens of disbelief in the
Gods. In Philostratus, his person was condemned, and he fled from place to
place like a philosophical Flying Dutchman, seeking refuge, until he drowned in
a shipwreck. Diogenes L, however, maintains merely that his book, On the Gods,
was burned in Athens. He read this book, supposedly, at Euripides house. The
scandalous import of the book comes out in Diogenes quotation: “As to the Gods,
I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist.
For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the
question and the shortness of human life.”
This quotation, of course, doesn’t tell us much about the
argument that Protagoras develops about the gods; for after all, the argument
might show that most probably, they exist, and that their existence is bound up
in our not knowing. Or otherwise. Protagoras’s life – which is a bit
undecidable itself – might have provided a good context in which to ponder undecidablity
and the shortness of human life. Surely some echo of Protagoras’s phrase is
contained in the story, in Acts, that Paul discovered an altar in Athens
inscribed, to the unknown God.
I have always found Protagoras a sympathetic figure, whether
or not he came from the working class. He has been demonized for millenia as
the “founder” of relativism. One of Protagoras’s book, lost like all of them,
has the nice, Nietzschian title of “Truth, or The Overthrower” - (Kataballontes
Logoi). What we have from Protagoras (as though proving the shortness of man’s
life has an imminent effect on what he can know) is fragments, the most famous
of which, pondered wonderfully in the Theaetetus, is: ‘Of all things, the
measure is man, of things which are, that they are, of things which are not,
that they are not.’ What this means is elusive, of course. It is not that man
is the inventor of all things – nor does it say that things do not exist
outside of man. These are, of course, possible interpretations. But it puts man
in the position of “measurer”, and in one sense that goes well with the
Pythagorian viewpoint according to which number is at the ontological base of
things. Yet in another sense, it displaces number with the measurer – begging the
question of whether measure itself “depends” on man.
Myself, I think the measure fragment links up to what DL
claims about Protagoras’s invention of the socratic dialogue for doing
philosophy. DL writes that Protagoras was the first to say “that on everything
(pragmatos) there are two accounts (logous) opposed each other.” This would
seem to make “man” the measurer a more suspect unity; for if
pragmatos is the kind of thing that is subject to exponential account making,
it might be more reasonably said that of all things, the measureless is man.
Plato of course saw this, but he nevertheless decided that “man” meant an
aggregate of individuals, each person, instead of something like Dasein, or the
collectivity of the human, divided within itself. If we are seeking the geneology
of what Bakhtin calls “broadness” – the way many views, acts, desires and
beliefs can be attributed to persons, without there being a core coherence –
then we would have to start, I think, with Protagoras.
There is a story about Protagoras that is recounted in
Plutarch’s life of Pericles that exemplifies this theme. Pericles bratty son
published a “Daddy Dearest” book trying to mock Pericles for, among other
things, hanging with the sophists. “For instance, a certain athlete had hit
Epitimus the Pharsalian with a javelin, accidentally, and killed him, and
Pericles, Xanthippus said, squandered an entire day discussing with Protagoras
whether it was the javelin, or rather the one who hurled it, or the judges of
the contests, that "in the strictest sense" ought to be held
responsible for the disaster.” This was an entire waste of time for the son,
Xanthippus; but it is a moment of radical recognition that stands out in legal
history, with the sense that liability can be mediate as well as immediate. But
what we see, in this discussion with Pericles, is an effect of there being two
sides to each question, and two sides after that – two sides, indeed, to
whether the right question is being asked.
The interesting question to ask of those who oppose
relativism relates to this issue of measure and measurelessness, and it is the
question of the disposability of form, whether it can be discarded once we get
to substance, or whether it is, indeed, so tied to substance that our
abstraction of one from the other is a distortion. To put it another way, by
rejecting Protagoras, which happens in the Theaetetus, is Plato actually
rejecting the socratic method? Is he rejecting Socrates? For if Socrates is
taking up Protagoras’s technique, it would seem, from Plato’s non-relativist
view, that Socrates made a mistake, gave too much to the enemy. For Protagoras’s
invention would seem designed never to get us closer to what we want - the list
of imperatives in the realms of knowledge, ontology, ethics and aesthetics that
can tell us what is true and what is false, what is knowledge and what isn’t,
what exists and what doesn’t, what is right and what isn’t, what is beautiful
and what isn’t.
With Protagoras, don’t we begin, in earnest, the battle
between the dialogue and the list?
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