With such reasoning men can easily get so far as to know (where they do not, it is owing to the want of education—but the Sophists were very well educated) that if arguments are relied upon, everything can be proved by argument, and arguments for and against can be found for everything; as particular, however, they throw no light upon the universal, the Notion. Thus what has been considered the sin of the Sophists is that they taught men to deduce any conclusion required by others or by themselves; but that is not due to any special quality in the Sophists, but to reflective reasoning. In the worst action there exists a point of view which is essentially real; if this is brought to the front, men excuse and vindicate the action. In the crime of desertion in time of war, there is, for example, the duty of self-preservation. Similarly in more modern times the greatest crimes, assassination, treachery, &c., have been justified, because in the purpose there lay a determination which was actually essential, such as that men must resist the evil and promote the good. The educated man knows how to regard everything from the point of view of the good, to maintain in everything a real point of view. A man does not require to make great progress in his education to have good reasons ready for the worst action; all that has happened in the world since the time of Adam has been justified by some good reason.
It appears that the Sophists were conscious of this reasoning, and knew, as educated men, that everything could be proved. Hence in Plato’s Gorgias it is said that the art of the Sophists is a greater gift than any other; they could convince the people, the senate, the judges, of what they liked.[93] The advocate has similarly to inquire what arguments there are in favour of the party which claims his help, even if it be the opposite one to that which he wished to support. That knowledge is no defect, but is part of the higher culture of the Sophists; and if uneducated men naturally form conclusions from external grounds which are those alone coming to their knowledge, they may perhaps be mainly determined by something besides what they know (by their integrity, for instance). The Sophists thus knew that on this basis nothing was secure, because the power of thought treated everything dialectically. That is the formal culture which they had and imparted, for their acquaintanceship with so many points of view shook what was morality in Greece (the religion, duties, and laws, unconsciously exercised), since through its limited content, that came into collision with what was different. Once it was highest and ultimate, then it was deposed. Ordinary knowledge thus becomes confused, as we shall see very clearly in Socrates, for something is held to be certain to consciousness, and then other points of view which are also present and recognized, have similarly to be allowed; hence the first has no further value, or at least loses its supremacy. We saw in the same way, how bravery, which lies in the hazarding of one’s life, is made dubious by the duty of preserving life, if put forward unconditionally. Plato quotes several examples of this unsettling tendency, as when he makes Dionysodorus maintain: “Whoever gives culture to one who does not possess knowledge, desires that he should no longer remain what he is. He desires to direct him to reason, and this is to make him not the same as he is.” And Euthydemus, when the others say that he lies, answers, “Who lies, says what is not; men cannot say what is not, and thus no one can lie.”[94] And again Dionysodorus says, “You have a dog, this dog has young, and is a father; thus a dog is your father, and you are brother to its young.”[95] Sequences put together thus are constantly found in critical treatises.
With this comes the question which the nature of thought brings along with it. If the field of argument, that which consciousness holds to be firmly established, is shaken by reflection, what is man now to take as his ultimate basis? For something fixed there must be. This is either the good, the universal, or the individuality, the arbitrary will of the subject; and both may be united, as is shown later on in Socrates. To the Sophists the satisfaction of the individual himself was now made ultimate, and since they made everything uncertain, the fixed point was in the assertion, “it is my desire, my pride, glory, and honour, particular subjectivity, which I make my end.” Thus the Sophists are reproached for countenancing personal affections, private interests, &c. This proceeds directly from the nature of their culture, which, because it places ready various points of view, makes it depend on the pleasure of the subject alone which shall prevail, that is, if fixed principles do not determine. Here the danger lies. This takes place also in the present day where the right and the true in our actions is made to depend on good intention and on my own conviction. The real end of the State, the best administration and constitution, is likewise to demagogues very vague.
On account of their formal culture, the Sophists have a place in Philosophy; on account of their reflection they have not. They are associated with Philosophy in that they do not remain at concrete reasoning, but go on, at least in part, to ultimate determinations. A chief part of their culture was the generalization of the Eleatic mode of thought and its extension to the whole content of knowledge and of action; the positive thus comes in as, and has become, utility. To go into particulars respecting the Sophists would lead us too far; individual Sophists have their place in the general history of culture. The celebrated Sophists are very numerous; the most celebrated amongst them are Protagoras, Gorgias, and also Prodicus, the teacher of Socrates, to whom Socrates ascribes the well-known myth of “The choice of Hercules”[96]—an allegory, beautiful in its own way, which has been repeated hundreds and thousands of times. I will deal only with Protagoras and Gorgias, not from the point of view of culture, but in respect of proving further how the general knowledge which they extended to everything, has, with one of them, the universal form which makes it pure science. Plato is the chief source of our acquaintanceship with the Sophists, for he occupied himself largely with them; then we have Aristotle’s own little treatise on Gorgias; and Sextus Empiricus, who preserved for us much of the philosophy of Protagoras.
[1. Protagoras.]
Protagoras, born at Abdera,[97] was somewhat older than Socrates; little more is known of him, nor, indeed, could there be much known. For he led a uniform life, since he spent it in the study of the sciences; he appeared in Greece proper as the first public teacher. He read his writings[98] like the rhapsodists and poets, the former of whom sang the verses of others, and the latter their own. There were then no places of learning, no books from which men could be taught, for to the ancients, as Plato says,[99] “the chief part of culture” (ραιδείας) “consisted in being skilled” (δεινόν) “in poetry,” just as with us fifty years ago the principal instruction of the people consisted of Bible History and Biblical precepts. The Sophists now gave, in place of a knowledge of the poets, an acquaintanceship with thought. Protagoras also came to Athens and there lived for long, principally with the great Pericles, who also entered into this culture. Indeed, the two once argued for a whole day as to whether the dart or the thrower or he who arranged the contest was guilty of the death of a man who thus met his death.[100] The dispute is over the great and important question of the possibility of imputation; guilt is a general expression, the analysis of which may undoubtedly become a difficult and extensive undertaking. In his intercourse with such men, Pericles developed his genius for eloquence; for whatever kind of mental occupation may be in question, a cultivated mind can alone excel in it; and true culture is only possible through pure science. Pericles was a powerful orator, and we see from Thucydides how deep a knowledge he had of the State and of his people. Protagoras had the same fate as Anaxagoras, in being afterwards banished from Athens. The cause of this sentence was a work written by him beginning, “As to the gods, I am not able to say whether they are or are not; for there is much which prevents this knowledge, both in the obscurity of the matter, and in the life of man which is so short.” This book was also publicly burned in Athens by command of the State, and, so far as we know, it was the first to be treated so. At the age of seventy or ninety years Protagoras was drowned while on a voyage to Sicily.[101]
Protagoras was not, like other Sophists, merely a teacher of culture, but likewise a deep and solid thinker, a philosopher who reflected on fundamental determinations of an altogether universal kind. The main point in his system of knowledge he expressed thus: “Man is the measure of all things; of that which is, that it is; of that which is not, that it is not.”[102] On the one hand, therefore, what had to be done was to grasp thought as determined and as having content; but, on the other, to find the determining and content-giving; this universal determination then becomes the standard by which everything is judged. Now Protagoras’ assertion is in its real meaning a great truth, but at the same time it has a certain ambiguity, in that as man is the undetermined and many-sided, either he may in his individual particularity, as this contingent man, be the measure, or else self-conscious reason in man, man in his rational nature and his universal substantiality, is the absolute measure. If the statement is taken in the former sense, all is self-seeking, all self-interest, the subject with his interests forms the central point; and if man has a rational side, reason is still something subjective, it is “he.” But this is just the wrong and perverted way of looking at things which necessarily forms the main reproach made against the Sophists—that they put forward man in his contingent aims as determining; thus with them the interest of the subject in its particularity, and the interest of the same in its substantial reason are not distinguished.
The same statement is brought forward in Socrates and Plato, but with the further modification that here man, in that he is thinking and gives himself a universal content, is the measure. Thus here the great proposition is enunciated on which, from this time forward, everything turns, since the further progress of Philosophy only explains it further: it signifies that reason is the end of all things. This proposition further expresses a very remarkable change of position in asserting that all content, everything objective, is only in relation to consciousness; thought is thus in all truth expressed as the essential moment, and thereby the Absolute takes the form of the thinking subjectivity which comes before us principally in Socrates. Since man, as subject, is the measure of everything, the existent is not alone, but is for my knowledge. Consciousness is really the producer of the content in what is objective, and subjective thinking is thus really active. And this view extends even to the most modern philosophy, as when, for instance, Kant says that we only know phenomena, i.e. that what seems to us to be objective reality, is only to be considered in its relation to consciousness, and does not exist without this relation. The fact that the subject as active and determining brings forth the content, is the important matter, but now the question comes as to how the content is further determined—whether it is limited to the particularity of consciousness or is determined as the universal, the existent in and for itself. God, the Platonic Good, is certainly at first a product of thought, but in the second place He is just as really in and for Himself. Since I, as existent, fixed and eternal, only recognize what is in its content universal, this, posited as it is by me, is likewise the implicitly objective, not posited by me.
Protagoras himself shows us much more of what is implied in his theory, for he says, “Truth is a manifestation for consciousness. Nothing is in and for itself one, but everything has a relative truth only,” i.e. it is what it is but for another, which is man. This relativity is by Protagoras expressed in a way which seems to us in some measure trivial, and belongs to the first beginnings of reflective thought. The insignificant examples which he adduces (like Plato and Socrates when they follow out in them the point of view of reflection), by way of explanation, show that in Protagoras’ understanding what is determined is not grasped as the universal and identical with self. Hence the exemplifications are taken mostly from sensuous manifestation. “In a wind it may be that one person is cold and another is not; hence of this wind we cannot tell whether in itself it is cold or hot.”[103] Frost and heat are thus not anything which exist, but only are in their relation to a subject; were the wind cold in itself, it would always be so to the subject. Or again, “if we have here six dice, and place by them four others, we should say of the former that there are more of them. But, again, if we put twelve by them we say that these first six are the fewer.”[104] Because we say of the same number that it is more and fewer, the more and the less is merely a relative determination; thus what is the object, is so in the idea present to consciousness only. Plato, on the contrary, considered one and many, not like the Sophists in their distinction, but as being one and the same.
Plato says further on this point, that the white, warm, &c., or everything that we say of things, does not exist for itself, but that the eye, sensation, is necessary to make it for us. This reciprocal movement is what first creates the white, and in it the white is not a thing in itself, but what we have present is a seeing eye, or, to speak generally, sight, and particularly the seeing of white, the feeling of warmth, &c. Undoubtedly warmth, colour, &c., really are only in relation to another, but the conceiving mind divides itself into itself and into a world in which each also has its relation. This objective relativity is expressed better in the following way. If the white were in itself, it would be that which brought forth the sensation of it; it would be the action or the cause, and we, on the contrary, the passive and receptive. But the object which thus requires to be active, is not active until it enters into (ξυνέλθῃ) relation with the passive; similarly the passive is only in relation to the active. Thus what is said in defining anything never concerns the thing as in itself, but clearly only as being related to something else. Nothing is thus constituted in and for itself as it appears, but the truth is just this phenomenon to which our activity contributes. As things appear to the healthy man they are thus not in themselves, but for him; as they appear to the sick or deranged man, they are to him, without our being able to say that as they appear to him, they are not true.[105] We feel the awkwardness of calling any such thing true, for after all the existent, if related to consciousness, is yet not related to it as fixed, but to sensuous knowledge; and then this consciousness itself is a condition, i.e. something which passes away. Protagoras rightly recognized this double relativity when he says, “Matter is a pure flux, it is not anything fixed and determined in itself, for it can be everything, and it is different to different ages and to the various conditions of waking and sleep, &c.”[106] Kant separates himself from this standpoint only in that he places the relativity in the “I,” and not in objective existence. The phenomenon is, according to him, nothing but the fact of there being outside an impulse, an unknown x, which first receives these determinations through our feeling. Even if there were an objective ground for our calling one thing cold and another warm, we could indeed say that they must have diversity in themselves, but warmth and cold first become what they are in our feeling. Similarly it can only be in our conception that things are outside of us, etc. But if the experience is quite correctly called a “phenomenon,” i.e. something relative, because it does not come to pass without the determinations of the activity of our senses, nor without categories of thought, yet that one, all-pervading, universal, which permeates all experience, which to Heraclitus was necessity, has to be brought into consciousness.