Philosophical
Background of the Fifth Century B.C.
From as
early as the sixth century B.C., thinkers in Ionia and elsewhere
in the Greek world were speculating about what the universe was
made of and how it came to assume its present form. These thinkers
are conventionally called Presocratics.1
This was the beginning of Greek philosophy ('the love of wisdom'),
which first took root in Ionian Miletus, a prosperous city on
the coast of Asia Minor. The names of three Milesian philosophers
are known to us: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, who are
generally called 'the Milesians'. We know of their teachings
not first hand from their own works, which have not survived,
but only from references to them in the works of Aristotle
and other authors. Their main interest as philosophers is indicated
by the term commonly applied to the Milesians and later Presocratics
in Greek literature: hoi physikoi 'those concerned with
nature (physis)'. The physikoi sought the basic
substance of the universe, but in addition to science they were
also interested in ethics and the criticism of contemporary religion.
This kind of speculation was continued in Ionia, Italy, Sicily
and elsewhere by Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus
and finally by Anaxagoras, who came to Athens in the middle of
the fifth century. The greatest contribution of these philosophers
was their application of rational analysis to the world, which
earlier had been viewed only in mythical terms.
1Socrates
is commonly accepted as a turning point in Greek philosophy.
As Cicero explains in his Tusculan Disputations:
"Socrates was the first to summon philosophy down from the
skies ... and compelled her to engage in the investigation of
... moral questions of good and evil" (5.10).
The traveling
teachers called Sophists,
whose teachings had an enormous influence on the thought of the
fifth century B.C., were in general intellectual descendants
of the Presocratic philosophers. Perhaps because of the mutually
contradictory answers offered by the Presocratics as to the nature
of the universe, the Sophists turned from theoretical natural
science to the rational examination of human affairs for the
practical betterment of human life. This approach to life began
to undermine the mythological view of the world evident in poetry
with its emphasis on the involvement of anthropomorphic deities
in the natural world and in human action. Divine causation was
no longer the only explanation of natural phenomena and human
action.
Most Sophists
were non-Athenians who attracted enthusiastic followings among
the Athenian youth and received large fees for their services.
Sophists flocked to Athens no doubt due to the favorable attitude
of Pericles towards intellectuals. Pericles was a staunch rationalist;
he had been trained in music and political affairs by Sophists.
He was associated with the great sophist Protagoras of Abdera
and two important Presocratics: Zeno of Elea and Anaxagoras of
Clazomenae. The latter taught that the universe was governed
by pure intelligence and his assertion that the sun, moon and
stars are red hot stones and not gods led to his prosecution
for impiety. Perhaps the best illustration of Pericles's rationalism
is a story told by Plutarch of how Pericles, when an eclipse
of the sun (generally considered a bad omen) frightened the helmsman
of his ship, held up his cloak before the helmsman's eyes and
asked him if he thought that this was a bad omen. Upon receiving
a negative answer, Pericles then asked the helmsman whether there
was any difference between his holding up of the cloak before
his eyes and the eclipse of the sun except that the eclipse was
brought about by an object larger than the cloak (i.e., the moon).
Pericles was no doubt applying knowledge he had obtained from
Anaxagoras, who is generally credited with being the first to
explain the true cause of solar eclipses. Pericles's rational
approach to life and that of his circle of friends was as unpopular
as his democratic politics among conservative groups in Athens,
but it must have encouraged Sophists from all over the Greek
world to flock to Athens as a potentially fertile ground for
their teachings.
Most Sophists
claimed to teach arete 'excellence' in the management
of one's own affairs and especially in the administration of
the affairs of the city. Up to the fifth century B.C. it was
the common belief that arete was inborn and that aristocratic
birth alone qualified a person for politics, but Protagoras taught
that arete is the result of training and not innate. The Sophists
claimed to be able to help their students better themselves through
the acquisition of certain practical skills, especially rhetoric
(the art of persuasion). Advancement in politics was almost entirely
dependent upon rhetorical skills. The Athenian democracy with
its assembly (ekklesia),
in which any citizen could speak on domestic and foreign affairs,
and the council of five hundred (boule),
on which every Athenian citizen got a chance to serve, required
an ability to speak persuasively. The Sophists filled this need
for rhetorical training and by their teaching proved that education
could make an individual a more effective citizen and improve
his status in Athenian society.
Although
there were many differences among the Sophists in terms of their
specific teachings, it is safe to say that there was a common
philosophy which many Sophists shared and which permeated their
teachings. The most prominent element in this philosophy was
skepticism ('a doubting state of mind'). The skepticism of the
Sophists took various forms: phenomenalism, the belief that we
can only know ideas present in our mind, but not the objects
of perception outside our mind (so that it is useless to make
a definitive statement about anything outside our own mind);
empiricism, the doctrine that experience, particularly of the
senses, is our only source of knowledge; and above all, relativism,
the theory that truth has no independent absolute existence,
but is dependent upon the individual and the particular situation
in which one finds oneself.
The relativity
of truth was the basis of Protagoras's rhetorical teaching. He
trained his students to argue on both sides of a question because
he believed that the whole truth could not be limited to just
one side of a question. Therefore, he taught his students to
praise and blame the same things and to strengthen the weaker
argument so that it might appear the stronger. These techniques
are based on the belief that truth is relative to the individual.
Arguments on both sides of a question are equally true because
those debating a question can only truly know those things which
exist in their own mind and therefore cannot make a definitely
true statement about objective realities outside the mind (phenomenalism).
Truth is what it appears to be to the individual. As Protagoras
said: "Man is the measure of all things, of the things that
are, that they are and of things that are not, that they are
not". Since it is not possible to know what is absolutely
true, there is only one standard left by which to determine correct
action: the standard of advantage (interest, expediency). If
an action is advantageous to the individual, then it is good.
This idea was sometimes employed by the unscrupulous to justify
morally questionable behavior, but Protagoras apparently was
opposed to an indiscriminate use of this principle. His belief
in the relativity of truth did not prevent him from believing
that in making moral decisions one can still distinguish between
an action which is morally better and one that is morally worse.
The Sophists
were also interested in the cultural development of man as a
member of society. The Sophists saw man himself as a product
of nature, but society and civilization as artificial human products.
On one hand, man is a natural creature subject to certain laws
of nature which he cannot help but obey. On the other hand, he
lives in a society, the rules and structure of which have no
roots in nature and are based only on custom. The distinction
here apparent is one between nature (physis) and custom
or convention (nomos), a commonplace antithesis in fifth
century literature popularized by the Sophists. One of the great
controversies of the fifth century was whether the gods, human
society and distinctions among human beings such as Greek and
Barbarian, master and slave, were the result of physis
or nomos, nature or custom. Before the fifth century,
human institutions and customs were generally seen as handed
down by the gods and part of the natural order of things, but
contact with other civilizations began to make it evident that
institutions and customs were different among different peoples
and introduced the idea of cultural relativism. According to
this theory, societies create their own customs and institutions
to suit their own peculiar needs and conditions. A graphic example
of cultural relativism occurs in Herodotus's
Histories (3.38). In order to illustrate the point that
everyone thinks his own customs and religion are the best, Herodotus
tells the story of certain Greeks at the court of the Persian
king who are shocked and disgusted when he asks them how much
money they would require as an inducement to eat the dead bodies
of their fathers. On another occasion with Greeks present, the
king asked some Indians, who in fact did eat their fathers' corpses,
what they would take to burn their dead as the Greeks do. The
Indians' horror at this suggestion equaled that of the Greeks
on the earlier occasion. Herodotus concludes this anecdote with
a quotation from the poet Pindar: "Custom is the king of
all". This was also the attitude of most Sophists with regard
to the origins of the gods, human society and distinctions among
human beings. All these were considered by the Sophists as human
creations designed to serve specific needs. Thus, there began
to grow up the antithesis between man-made law (nomos)
and natural law which has its origins in unchanging nature (physis).
A modern example of a nomos is the agreement that a red
traffic light means 'stop' while a green one means 'go', while
an instance of a natural law is the law of gravity. If a legislative
body so ordained, red could mean 'go' and green, 'stop'. Under
the right circumstances, the traffic light can be ignored with
impunity. On the other hand, the law of gravity cannot be repealed
by man and compels obedience to itself.
Although
the physis - nomos antithesis was common in the
teachings of most Sophists, their views of physis with
regard to human nature could differ widely. To some Sophists,
the realization that all men have much the same human nature
required the abolishment of all artificial distinctions among
men, such as Hellene and Barbarian, master and slave. Other Sophists
saw human nature as an aggregate of man's animalistic inclinations
to aggression and domination by physical strength. Human law
(nomos) which restricted those inclinations was seen as
an artificial constraint contrary to the natural order of things,
created by the weaker members of society. This view was the philosophical
basis of the rhetorical argument of "the right of the stronger"
("might makes right") which is used by a number of
speakers in Thucydides's
History and which you will see advanced by the sophist
Thrasymachus in Plato's
Republic. The Sophists who advocated this argument saw
men in the image of animals in the wild and often recommended
the animal world as a model for the human. According to this
view, any attempt to constrain the natural human tendency of
aggression is not only wrong, but useless. Nature overrides any
artificial constraints set up by man. Just as in the animal world,
the strong will always be victorious over and dominate the weak.
Not all Sophists, however, subscribed to this theory. Protagoras
believed that men, left to their own natural savage instincts,
would destroy each other. In his view nomos, although
only an artificial creation of man, enables men to survive and
makes possible civilized communal life.2
2In
addition to the arguments of advantage and the right of the stronger,
a third line of argumentation popularized by the Sophists was
that of probability. This argument was especially useful in the
court room where the lack of evidence and/or witnesses made a
charge difficult to refute. For example, a man charged with assault
against a larger and stronger man could argue that it is not
likely that he would have attacked such a person. On the other
hand, if the man accused of assault were very large, he could
argue that a man whose very size would make him a suspect would
not be likely to have committed such a crime.
The intellectual
revolution fomented by the Sophists also reached into the area
of religion. Most Sophists saw the gods as creations of men.
In general, Sophists were either agnostic or atheistic and saw
the world as operating on the principle of natural rather than
divine causation. There was very little room in Sophistic thought
for the old anthropomorphic gods. This, of course, is not to
say that the gods disappeared from ancient Greek life because
of Sophistic skepticism. The Sophists and their students represented
an intellectual minority. The average man, who could not care
less about these avant-garde theories, distrusted intellectuals
and regarded the agnosticism and atheism of the Sophists as irreligious
and impious.
Protagoras
was an agnostic who claimed not to know whether the gods existed
or not or anything about their appearance. Many other Sophists
tended toward atheism. The sophist Prodicus taught that men deify
those things which are important to human life such as the sun,
moon, rivers, springs, bread (Demeter),
wine (Dionysus),
fire (Hephaistos)
and water (Poseidon)
and at the same time (somewhat inconsistently from the modern
point of view) the discoverers and providers of bread, wine and
fire (also called Demeter, Dionysus and Hephaistos). Thus the
goddess Demeter was considered simultaneously to be bread and
the provider of bread just as Dionysus and Hephaistos were similarly
viewed with regard to wine and fire. Another atheistic theory
about the origin of the gods is attributed to a certain Critias,
an associate of Plato, who was not himself a professional sophist,
but whose views were closely allied with those of the Sophists.
Critias asserted that the gods were a contrivance of governments
to insure that men would believe that everything done on earth
whether openly or secretly was seen by the gods and would consequently
be discouraged from violating the laws of the state. Otherwise,
men, if not detected by other men, could break the laws of the
state without fear of punishment. In this theory, belief in the
gods brought stability to the state by providing sanction for
its laws.
The ideas
presented in this brief review of Sophistic teachings are commonplace
in the late fifth and fourth century literature. Authors in this
course, such as Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes,
and Plato, give frequent evidence of the influence of the Sophists.
The Sophistic movement represents an intellectual revolution
which made educated men look at the world in a very different
way. The Homeric view of the world and human events was no longer
the only possible one.
|
To learn
more about the ancient authors mentioned in the text above from
the Perseus Encyclopedia, click on their names below.
Anaximenes, Aristotle,
Aristophanes,
Euripides,
Herodotus,
Pindar,
Plato,
Plutarch,
Pythagoras
(5), Sophocles,
Thales,
Thucydides |
