by A. A. Long
Gorgias’ style brought to prose some of the power he associates with poetry to move the feelings of an audience (Helen 9). Rhythm, balance, and internal rhyme are contrived to make passages memorable (as in poetry), and thoughts are expressed through language that is ornamented with metaphor (B5a) and compound expressions (B15). Balance and rhyme are achieved together through the aid of antithesis, only partly captured by the English: “If she was by force abducted and lawlessly forced and unjustly violated, clearly he who abducted was unjust in violating, and she who was abducted was unfortunate in being violated” (Helen 7). We are told that Gorgias’ art of words depends on the concept of kairos – saying the appropriate thing at the right time – but we do not know exactly what he meant by this (B13), and, in the surviving speeches, Gorgias does not select just the right argument for the moment but piles argument on argument in an attempt to make the audience think he has covered every possibility.
The Defence of Palamedes is probably meant as a paradigm defendant’s speech for a court of law, although the case is drawn from myths passed down about the Trojan War. A Greek hero famous for his inventiveness, Palamedes has been accused by Odysseus of having accepted a bribe from the Trojans to betray the Greeks. The matter must rest on eikos because there is no evidence. (In the fourth century B.C., however, Alcidamas wrote a prosecution speech for the case, evidently as a response to Gorgias, in which Odysseus appeals to evidence no longer available – an arrow that concealed a message from a Trojan to Palamedes.) Gorgias’ defence follows a path familiar to readers of Plato’s Apology, from the opening disclaimer of rhetorical art (4) to the closing appeal and warning to the judges (33–35). The arguments within the speech are organized in a way that is Gorgias’ trademark: every possibility is considered, even those that could only follow ones he has rejected. How, for example, could Palamedes have met secretly and privately with the Trojans when they have no common language? But suppose they had met, how would they have exchanged pledges in secret? And so he proceeds down a long list of rhetorical questions linked by “grant that this happened, even though it did not, how could the next have occurred?”8
The Encomium of Helen argues that Helen is not to blame for the Trojan War; it is not her fault that she was taken from her husband to Troy. This speech also depends on eikos. Only four possible explanations for Helen’s journey to Troy are reasonable, says Gorgias: the gods planned it; she was physically forced to go; she was compelled by the power of a speech; or she was affected by love. Gorgias shows, exhaustively again, that on each of the possibilities Helen is not to blame. His argument in the case of speech celebrates the power of language to affect the mind by comparing it to the power of a drug to affect the body (Helen 14). We also find a tribute to the deceptive power of language in a surviving sentence about theatre: “Tragedy produces a deception in which the one who deceives is more just than the one who does not, and the one who is deceived is wiser than the one who is not” (B23). But in his essay On not being, Gorgias appears to assert that we cannot communicate at all by means of language, and this creates a problem to which we shall return. The last words of the Helen tell us that the speech has been written for the author’s amusement, and we cannot be certain how seriously Gorgias intended such arguments as he gives there. Playfulness abounds in early Greek oratory. The use of absurd fallacies, such as the ones that made Euthydemus famous, is more suited to dazzle an audience than to hoodwink or persuade it against its will. On the whole, however, the art of words was intended for serious purposes and commanded serious fees.
RELATIVISM
Relativism, broadly defined, is any view that allows apparently conflicting judgments to be equal in some respect for the people who believe them – equally arbitrary, equally reasonable, equally useful, or equally true. Extreme relativism is any view that denies the possibility of absolute truth by insisting that nothing could be true without relativistic qualification; its moral correlate insists that nothing could be good without qualification. Extreme relativism interests philosophers because it makes contradiction (or contradiction on moral topics) impossible, but it cannot be attributed to any of the sophists, with the possible exception of Protagoras.9
Early Greek travellers readily came to the idea that the different moral traditions they discovered were equally arbitrary, since they rested only on custom. The power of custom (nomos) was recognized before the sophists and celebrated in the often-quoted line of Pindar, “Nomos is king” (to be found, for example, at Plato’s Gorgias 484b). Herodotus observes how customary notions of right and wrong vary across cultural boundaries (III.38), and, as travelling teachers, some sophists developed an interest in comparing ethical, political, and religious ideas in various cultures. Research of this kind tends to make traditional values seem arbitrary, and defenders even of newly spawned traditions had reason to feel threatened by the new learning in the later fifth century, because it appealed to the conservatives who were critical of the new customs of democratic Athens. Such research might have led to extreme relativism had it not involved a commitment to natural values, such as the passion for nature that guides Callicles in his radical attack on custom (Plato Gorg. 483a-484c).
We have already seen how opposing views can be made equally reasonable through the selection of different information as relevant by different orators for judgments of eikos. Though disturbing, this result does not entail extreme relativism: contrary views may be equally reasonable in a world of unqualified truths, just as it may be equally probable for a coin to fall heads or tails. Moreover, extreme relativism would wipe out eikos by rejecting unqualified truth, which is its conceptual parent.
Conflicting views may be equally useful, depending on circumstances. Like Heraclitus, Protagoras probably held that the same thing could be good for one species and bad for another (Plato, Prot. 334a-c, cf. DK22 B61). On this view, conflicting opinions about the healthfulness of a certain oil would be equally useful, depending on whether the oil was to be taken internally or externally. Such relativism may have furthered in some minds the independent idea that there is no such thing as an absolute good or an absolute evil, but it does not in itself entail extreme relativism.
Equality in point of truth is a more radical claim, and this, probably, is Protagoras’ teaching: “A human being is the measure of all things, of those things that are that they are, and of those things that are not that they are not” (DK 80 B1). According to Plato, this sentence (probably from a book called Truth) implies that my judgments are true for me at any time, and yours for you (Tht. 152a). In its initial context this seems to apply only to perception, but Plato extends it to opinion in general. On Plato’s understanding, Protagoras means to claim that no opinion is ever false, and that every opinion is true for the person whose opinion it is. Relativism regarding truth implies that conflicting views are equally true. This raises a problem in logic. If the conflicting views are contrary, they cannot both be true; that is what contrary means. If they are not contrary, then in what sense do they conflict? It cannot be a truth-functional conflict if there is no common truth, and it cannot be a conflict over action if there is no common reality in which to act.
Protagoras and truth
Ancient philosophers recognized the difficulty in Protagoras’ relativism regarding truth. Four solutions were considered in ancient times, none entirely satisfactory. We cannot be sure which of these, if any, would sit well with Protagoras. We must keep in mind that the human-measure sentence comes to us without a context that would enable us to reach a definite interpretation. As to whether “human being” refers to an individual or to the species, scholars generally follow Plato’s individualist reading, but with caution. Plato’s testimony is not authoritative, since it is woven into a dialogue that carries on Plato’s own philosophical work. The evidence of later writers, such as Aristotle and, much later, Sextus Empiricus, is derived from Academic sources that are themselves contaminated by Plato.10 What follows is a summary of the principal attempts to
reconstruct Protagoras’ teaching.
First, Aristotle thought Protagoras meant to dispense with the law of noncontradiction altogether, and to insist that conflicting opinions are simply true, even if they are contradictory. He says Protagoras’ human-measure follows from, and entails, the position that the same judgment may be true and false at the same time (Metaph. IV.5 1009a6-15 and IV.4 1007b18-25). But the cost of giving up that law is high, and Protagoras seems to have invoked the law in other contexts: Protagoras 339b9 shows that Plato thought Protagoras objected to contradictions in poetry, and Plato’s own attempts to solve the problem do not dispense with the law.
Second, a solution implied by Plato’s Theaetetus (without his infusion of Heracliteanism): If “the wind is warm” and “the wind is cold” are contrary without qualification, they are opposed enough to be conflicting; if each is true under a qualification (“for me,” “for you”) then they are equal enough in respect of truth, although neither is simply true, and the qualifiers (“to me” and “to you”) eliminate real conflict. If this is Protagoras’ solution, he must deny that one speaker can really contradict another, and this too is attested (Plato, Euthydemus 286ab, D.L. IX.53.). Each opposed speaker would be reporting on a private truth; and there would be no conflict between them. This too carries a high cost: it is hard to understand what could be meant by private truths, especially since scholars agree that Protagoras could not have been an idealist and did not mean that the content of my mind simply constitutes my private truth.11 It is hard anyway to dispense with the idea – fundamental to Protagoras’ teaching – that speakers can take contrary positions. But Plato’s solution rules out even practical (as opposed to logical) conflict. For example, you, finding the wind cold, may wish for shelter from it, while I, finding it warm, may wish to stay out in it; but we are not speaking of the same wind, so there is no conflict.
Third is the Heraclitean interpretation also given in the Theaetetus. There, the Platonic Socrates attributes to Protagoras, as to Heraclitus, the idea that opposites are always shifting into and out of the things we perceive (and everything else is changing as well). This he calls the “secret teaching” of Protagoras, implying that he had no evidence for this interpretation, either from the written record or from oral reports. We must suppose this is entirely Plato’s contribution and has no direct relevance to Protagoras, except that we need to explain why Plato thought the hypothesis of change explained the human-measure. His solution to the problem of contradiction is this: what I perceive obtains only at the moment at which I perceive it, and similarly for you (on the assumptions that no two of us perceive the same object at the same moment, and we each change the object by perceiving it). Plato insists that in this view “is” would have to be replaced everywhere by “becomes”; but if “is” drops out of the picture, so too must truth and knowledge as Plato understands them. Nevertheless, each person’s changing perceptions infallibly correspond to the changing objects with which he or she is in perceptual contact, so that something like relativity of truth would be preserved in the secret doctrine.
The fourth solution is the most benign. Suppose there is one truth for all of us, but that it is complex enough to support our different views of it. Things might be constituted out of the opposites, for example, as early Greek philosophers believed; and if there is both hot and cold in the wind, then I might feel more of the hot (owing to some peculiar feature of my perceptual apparatus) while you feel more of the cold, but each of us feels something that is truly in the wind. The wind really is both hot and cold, and this is logically possible if opposites can be copresent, as sweet and sour can be stirred into the same soup. This leaves logic intact, but in what sense does it allow our views to conflict? They conflict in that they single out polar opposites from among the wind’s qualities; they might also conflict if they recommend opposite courses of action (go indoors, stay outside), since it is the same wind for both of us. The only ancient authority for this fourth view is Sextus Empiricus in Outlines of Pyrrhonism I.216, but his account may be derived from a misreading of Plato’s Theaetetus, which in itself requires either the second sort of interpretation or the third.12 The case for the fourth reading must rest on eikos: it is the most reasonable in view of what we know of Protagoras and his time.13 On this reading, Protagoras does not deny absolute truth and is not an extreme relativist. That is a happy result, because extreme relativism is incompatible with a number of claims made by Protagoras and other sophists.
Nature and the new learning
“Whatever we see has a nature (physis),” says Gorgias, “not the nature we wish, but the one each thing turns out to have” (Helen 15). Appeals to nature or to the natures of things are endemic to the new learning and rule out extreme relativism or scepticism. Nature is independent of what anyone thinks it to be, so if a thinker wishes to attack popular or conventional views, what is more appropriate or natural than to appeal to nature itself as a witness against tradition? Nature lies behind knowledge in the way convention (nomos) lies behind opinion, and the appeal to nature typically tries to pit the knowledge of the appellant against common opinion. Since nature is the same for all, the appeal to nature defies relativism; and since the appeal presupposes knowledge, it excludes scepticism.
Hippias, according to Plato, appeals to physis to defend his view of the natural kinship of humankind (or at least of the wise), who are divided by the mere conventions of national difference (Prot. 337d-338b). Plato’s Callicles attacks conventional justice on the ground that it tries to block the law of nature that the strong should be free to satisfy their greatest desires (Gorg. 482c ff.). Gorgias is too playful for us to be sure he believes what he says on behalf of nature in the Helen, but the case is clear for Protagoras’ standard for “correctness of words.” This he applies against the conventions of language as if it were an appeal to nature – to natural gender, for example.14 Moreover, Plato shows Protagoras defending justice as universal to human societies by putting it among the necessities of human life. Although acquired by learning, justice is nevertheless parallel to the natural abilities of animals to survive (Prot. 322). As a necessary tool of survival, justice cannot be whatever a group might say it is; it could not, for example, be the law of tooth and fang (which would not support survival), and there must be natural limits on what it could be. An adequate account of Protagoras’ relativism must be tempered by a recognition of this tendency towards naturalism. The combination is not as odd as it may seem: Nietzsche combines his well-known perspectival relativism with psychological naturalism. For both the ancient and the modern relativist, however, naturalism is rooted not in metaphysics, but in human experience.15 Generally, the new learning’s attack on tradition was founded not on relativism but on views about the fixed natures of things. The traditional views that sophists are relativists16 must give way to the recognition that what most characterizes the sophists as a group is their commitment to human nature as a subject of study. We must also give up the idea that sophists are sceptics.
Gorgias and scepticism
Gorgias’ three theses in On not being are, for anything you might mention: (1) that it is nothing; (2) that, even if it were something, it would be unknowable; and (3) that, even if it were knowable, it could not be made evident to others.17 This is neither scepticism nor relativism: it is not scepticism, because a true sceptic (in the ancient sense) holds back from all beliefs, even from negative ones such as the ones for which Gorgias argues here; it is not relativism, because Gorgias’ claims are global and negative (“it is unknowable to all of us”), whereas a relativist such as Protagoras makes claims that are positive and local (“my views are true for me”). It is not extreme relativism because that makes outright falsehood impossible and therefore eliminates contradiction and refutation; but Gorgias consistently allows that some positions are true, others false.18
Gorgias develops his argument here dialectically, using argument forms borrowed from the dogmatic philosophers to whom he is opposed –
mainly Zeno and Melissus. The work is a serious attempt to refute theirs and Parmenides’ views on being. The thesis is simply negative, so we cannot be sure what, if anything, Gorgias would have put in the place of the views he refutes.19 It seems most likely that he had no philosophical theory to propose at all – no alternative account of being, knowledge, or meaning – just the practice itself which he taught, of influencing human affairs through the effective use of words. In a modern context, he would perhaps call himself a behaviourist and a pragmatist.
Although scepticism and relativism are strictly speaking opposed, they nevertheless have certain affinities. Relativity became one of the principal tropes of sceptical argument in later antiquity, and ancient sources identify Aenesidemus – the thinker who probably revived Pyrrhonism in the first century B.C. – as a relativist. Although one of Sextus’ sources makes Protagoras a positive dogmatist (PH 1.216), another lists him among thinkers who abolish the criterion by appeal to relativism (M.VII.60). The road goes both ways, however: scepticism about the imperceptible leads to relativism.
Scepticism about the imperceptible
“Concerning the gods,” Protagoras wrote, “I am not in a position to know either that they exist or that they do not, nor can I know what they look like, for many things prevent my knowing – the subject is obscure (adêlon), and human life is short” (DK 80 B4). Protagoras probably means that we do not have any clear sightings of the gods, as we might if we had lived long enough to have been witnesses of events in which the gods are said to have intervened. On this as on other subjects, Protagoras eschews speculation outside the human sphere.20
Generally, Protagoras limits what we know to what we perceive, the rest being adêlon. Some evidence suggests that Protagoras holds that what is perceived at a given time is all that is really there.21 A strong empiricism of this kind leads to relativism regarding truth (with problems to be discussed in the following sections), since different people may perceive different things in similar circumstances. It is for such reasons that Democritus rejects perception as a source of knowledge for the way things are, and we can be fairly sure that Protagoras would abstain from talk about entities as obscure as Democritean atoms. Protagoras and Democritus came from the same city and were roughly contemporary (there was debate even in ancient times as to which was the elder). We have evidence that they disagree, in a way confusing to their ancient followers, as to the import of perceptual relativism. Democritus quarrels with Protagoras’ view that “each thing is no more (ou mallon) such than such,” though he says something similar himself. Presumably they would agree on the relativity of perceptible qualities but vigorously disagree about whether there are fixed structures beneath the level of perception (DK 68 B156.14). Even Plato will agree to the relativity of what is perceived; that is why he turns to the unperceived. Protagoras, however, turns away from the unperceived and so forces himself into some form of relativism.
