Protagoras and the Challenge of Relativism

Plato's Subtlest Enemy

Ugo Zilioli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317074465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Protagoras was an important Greek thinker of the fifth century BC, the most famous of the so called Sophists, though most of what we know of him and his thought comes to us mainly through the dialogues of his strenuous opponent Plato. In this book, Ugo Zilioli offers a sustained and philosophically sophisticated examination of what is, in philosophical terms, the most interesting feature of Protagoras' thought for modern readers: his role as the first Western thinker to argue for relativism. Zilioli relates Protagoras' relativism with modern forms of relativism, in particular the 'robust relativism' of Joseph Margolis, gives an integrated account both of the perceptual relativism examined in Plato's Theaetetus and the ethical or social relativism presented in the first part of Plato's Protagoras and offers an integrated and positive analysis of Protagoras' thought, rather than focusing on ancient criticisms and responses to his thought. This is a deeply scholarly work which brings much argument to bear to the claim that Protagoras was and remains Plato's subtlest philosophical enemy.

Chapter 1

Perceptions and Indeterminacy

The Historical Protagoras

Before we enter into the details of Protagoras’ philosophical doctrines or of the kind of doctrines Plato attributes to him in his dialogues, I give some biographical information on the historical Protagoras. In Diogenes’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Protagoras is said to have been born in Abdera (although Eupolis makes him a native of Teos, whose Abdera was a colony)1 and to have been the lawgiver of Thurii, a city in the south of Italy founded by the Athenians during the golden age of Pericles. Protagoras’ agnosticism caused him to be exiled from Athens and his books to be burned.2 It is not clear if it was the exile itself that caused his emigration to Sicily: Diogenes does not explicitly correlate the condemnation of Protagoras with his travel to Sicily, but Philostratus does.3 As for his death, Diogenes (following Philochorus)4 says that, while Protagoras was travelling to Sicily, his ship sank and he drowned, aged ninety; on the other hand, Apollodorus5 (Diogenes adds) reports that Protagoras died at seventy, after teaching successfully for forty years.6 Except for a little other information (for instance he was the first to exact fees for teaching), this is all that we know about Protagoras’ life. Relying upon Diogenes’ account, Morrison gives the following outline:7

Born at Abdera	not before 490 or later than 484.
Set up as public teacher at Athens	not before 460 or later than 454.
Left Athens for Thurii	444, his acme: Protagoras is 40–46.
(From Thurii to Sicily?)
Returned to Athens (dramatic date of Protagoras)	433 (Protagoras is 51–57).
Left Athens (decree of Diopeithes)	430 (Protagoras is 54–60).
(Sicily again?)
Returned to Athens	422 (Protagoras is 62–68).
Died on the way to Sicily	not before 421 or later than 415.8

In the light of what is said in the Protagoras (317c),9 Protagoras should have been around fifty in 433, the most probable dramatic date in which the Platonic dialogue is thought to be temporally set; in the Meno, Plato says that Protagoras’ teaching lasted for forty years and that he lived for seventy years (the tradition of a life of ninety years reported by Diogenes seeming to be false).10 On this basis, Protagoras should have been nearly thirty in 460–454, and this may have been a good age for him to go to Athens for the first time and start teaching there. Were this dating right, he would have had enough time to build up a reputation sufficiently strong for him to be asked to be the lawgiver of Thurii (around 444). The relationship between Pericles, the man who led Athens in its most powerful days, and Protagoras is well established. There are hints of it in the Protagoras11 and in Plutarch, who speaks of a day-long conversation between the two as well as reporting Protagoras’ comment about Pericles’ attitude toward the death of his sons.12 If Pericles and Protagoras were actually close, it would be quite likely that Pericles should have asked Protagoras, in many respects the leader of the emerging movement of the Sophists, to write the laws of the new and most important colony of Athens, a symbol of the immense power gained by Athens in the Greece of the fifth century BC.13

After Thurii and in the light of some allusions in the Greater Hippias (281a-b and 282d-e), Protagoras is likely to have spent time in Sicily before his attested visit to Athens in 433 BC, the dramatic date of the Protagoras. Because of the bad fortune of his friend Pericles just after the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, it is likely that Protagoras left Athens again;14 such a decision may have been hastened by the plague, which devastated the city around 430/429 and which caused Pericles’ death. We do not know where Protagoras went after this second departure and before his third visit to Athens but Morrison is probably right in thinking that he returned to Sicily, where he had stayed before 433 and where he went once he had to leave Athens for the third time.15 As for this third visit of Protagoras to Athens, there is a passage of Athenaeus that reports that Protagoras arrived in Athens not before 423 and not later than 421;16 Alcibiades had recently returned to the political stage and Protagoras may have gone back to Athens to help him and influence his strategy. While accusing Alcibiades of the mutilation of the Herms (415), the peace party may have attempted to get rid of Protagoras himself by accusing him of asebeia(impiety) and forcing him to escape again to Sicily (at that time he might have been around seventy). Diogenes reports (9.54) that Pythodorus, one of the Four Hundred, accused Protagoras of impiety but this does not mean that the sophist was under accusation during the time of the Four Hundred (that is, in 411). The most probable date of his last departure from Athens thus remains 415, such dating being consistent with what was said above about the duration of Protagoras’ life. Both Philochorus and Philostratus speak of Protagoras’ drowning and it is quite likely that he died that way.

From this historical picture it is evident that Protagoras was at the centre of the political and intellectual life of Athens in the crucial years of its splendour. Protagoras’ main activity during that period was to teach the young, those rich young who belonged to the elite of the polis. As Protagoras affirms in the Protagoras, ‘what I teach is sound deliberation (euboulia), both in domestic affairs – how best to manage one’s household, and in public affairs – how to realize one’s maximum potential for success in political debate and action’ (Prt. 318e5–319a2). But Protagoras was not alone in claiming to educate the young; there was another younger figure emerging on the intellectual scene of Athens in the last decades of the fifth century BC, namely Socrates. Like Protagoras, Socrates wanted to teach the young, but they fulfilled their pedagogic mission in quite different ways. Ordinary Athenians, those selling and buying in the streets and even those leading the city, did not grasp the difference between Socrates on the one hand, and Protagoras and the Sophists on the other, as the Apology of Socrates witnesses;17 in this latter dialogue in fact one of the charges brought against Socrates was to make the weaker into the stronger argument, indeed one of the slogans Aristotle attributed to Protagoras.18 But Plato was a much more perceptive mind than his fellow-citizens, a man ‘at the top’ (as Socrates would say)19 and he was well aware of the difference existing in many respects between his master and the Sophists. As is widely known, many Platonic dialogues represent a kind of philosophical dispute between Socrates and the Sophists. One of Plato’s historical purposes when he wrote some of his dialogues (mainly the Socratic ones, but also some of his later ones: see, significantly, the Theaetetus) was to make clear how different Socrates and the Sophists were, not only in the dissimilar scope of their philosophical speculations, but also in the diverse methods and aims of their educational activities. Plato wanted to make clear that Socrates taught philosophy to the young, the Sophists something else. This concern on Plato’s side is evident in one of the two dialogues that are centred on Protagoras, namely the Theaetetus.

Sophistic Training and Philosophical Education

In the Theaetetus, Plato attempts to answer the question what knowledge (epistêmê) is. The dialogue is 69 pages long, if we follow the standard Stephanus’ pagination, and it is divided as follows: there is a long introductory section, from p. 142 up to p. 151, where, among other things, an attempt to define knowledge by enumeration of its possible species is deemed as pointlessly unhelpful and improper.20 A lengthy section on the definition of knowledge as perception (aisthêsis) follows, from p. 152 to p. 186. This section may be labelled the Protagorean section of the dialogue, since it is in this part of the dialogue where Protagoras’ Measure Doctrine is put under severe scrutiny. Once they have rejected the thesis that knowledge is perception, Socrates and Theaetetus are faced, in the third section from p. 187 to p. 200, with the problem whether true judgement (alethês doxa) can be knowledge. But this definition of knowledge too is found to be faulty and thus a last section follows, from p. 201 to p. 210, where they evaluate the validity of their third and last definition of knowledge, namely ‘true judgement with an account’ (alethês doxa with logos). This definition is itself eventually rejected and the dialogue ends aporetically, without any answer to the question of what knowledge is, the three attempts on the part of Socrates and Theaetetus to define knowledge having provided an extraordinary amount of fascinating philosophical arguments that still nowadays trouble the reader with their complexity. But what concerns us at this point is the introductory section, where Socrates gives some details about his own peculiar method of teaching the young and about the way in which truth can be pursued.21

In this introductory section Socrates says that in teaching the young his art is the same one that his mother practised, namely the art of midwifery. What his mother did with the bodies of expecting women, Socrates does with the pregnant souls of those young who want to learn and acquire the truth (Tht. 150b). He says that one of the features of the art of midwifery is not only to help women to give birth to their offspring but also to help those women to choose their partners first. In similar guise, Socrates chooses first those young whom he thinks are able to reach the truth; once he has chosen his students, he tries to help them to give birth to such truth. The most characteristic ability that is required from someone practising this intellectual midwifery is, according to Socrates, the capacity to ‘test whether it is an imitation and a falsehood that the young man’s intellect is giving birth to, or something genuine and true’ (Tht. 150c1–2). In the educational process that Socrates is proposing, it is the (learning) young person who has to give birth to something, be it true or false. Once the birth has taken place, Socrates has to test its quality. If we want to think of the process of Socratic midwifery in modern terms, we shall say that Socrates is able to help the learner to reach the truth by making him assess the coherence or incoherence of his own beliefs and check the correspondence of such beliefs with the reality the learner is faced with (however difficult to define such a reality may be).22 As is remarked in the Theaetetus (150c, 189e, 206d, 210c), Socrates does not possess any wisdom to impart; he is not, by his own admission, a wise man (sophos). The learner is the one who, strictly speaking, is able to discover the truth through the process of internal self-discovery and self-assessment that Socrates somehow leads from the external.23 In an etymological sense, Socrates is indeed a philosopher, philo-sophos, someone aspiring to reach the possession of a wisdom that he does not yet possess; this deficiency is exactly what makes him continue searching for the truth all his life, so that the latter becomes the kind of examined life of which he talks in the Apology.24 The same deficiency is what makes the whole educational process called ‘Socratic midwifery’ a shared search by both Socrates and the learner for the same objective, that is, the truth. It is exactly a shared search (although it does not openly lead anywhere in this particular case) that Socrates and Theaetetus take forward in the Theaetetus, which thus becomes a written document of the way in which the process of Socratic midwifery is carried out.25

But other people wanted to teach the young in fifth-century Athens; unlike Socrates, these people professed to be wise and made professional use of their alleged wisdom. Rather naturally, the Sophists were Socrates’ competitors in the market for the education of the young; the excitement of Hippocrates at the presence of Protagoras at the discussion on virtue described in the Protagoras is a clear signal of how successful they were in this respect.26 Socrates himself refers polemically to this educational rivalry in the Theaetetus, when he says that he is happy to assign those young who do not possess any philosophical attitude (or, in Socrates’ terms, who are not pregnant) to the care of the sophist Prodicus (Tht. 151b). In another passage, Socrates says that some young, whom he had helped to give birth to the truth, ‘have miscarried the rest of their offspring because of the bad company they kept; and they have lost the ones which had been delivered by me, through rearing them badly, having set more store by falsehoods (pseudê) and imitations (eidôla) than by what’s true’ (Tht. 150e5–9). There is no explicit reference in this passage to the Sophists but the allusion to ‘falsehoods’ and ‘imitations’ is a clear reference to what Plato thought was Protagoras’ deceptive wisdom, as we will see shortly.

The Theaetetus in fact, or at least its first half, up to the end of the Protagorean section, might be read as an attempt on Plato’s part to make evident how ungrounded Protagoras’ wisdom is and how unhelpful his teaching is. We do not have any historical evidence of the educational method that Protagoras employed (except for some reference, in two of his extant fragments, to the fact that ‘teaching requires natural endowment and practice’ and ‘they must learn starting young’ – 80BDK3, and that ‘art was nothing without practice and practice nothing without art’ – 80BDK10); little is also known about the type of education that the Sophists imparted.27 But...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction Protagoras, Plato and Relativism
• 1 Perceptions and Indeterminacy
• 2 Wisdom and Incommensurability
• 3 Ethics and Forms of Life
• 4 Inconsistency, Self-Refutation and the Heart of the Matter
• Conclusions The Tools of Relativism
• Bibliography
• Index