Abstract
The antilogical theory of argumentation originates with Protagoras of Abdera, the preeminent Sophist of Periclean Athens Protagoras was the first Sophist to hold public debates, the first professional teacher of advanced studies, a major philosophical and rhetorical influence, a friend and ally of Pericles, and, according to many, the founder of humanistic education (see Schiller, B Smith, Bouwsma) Despite his stature, however, any effort to reconstruct a Protagorean approach to rhetoric and argumentation begins basically from scratch As Edward Schiappa notes, the investigation of Protagoras by communication scholars has been “virtually non-existent” (16) That is, while we have a growing volume of commentary on Protagoras, little of this scholarship directly addresses the relation between Protagorean ideas and the rhetorical tradition, and even less attention has been paid to the potential contribution of Protagorean thought to the theory, practice, and pedagogy of contemporary discourse.
“For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how.“
Montaigne, “Of Democritus and Heraclitus”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Throughout this book, I have followed Friedrich Solmsen’s practice and eliminated all diacritical marks from the English transcription of Greek words (1975).
Diels/Kranz is the standard source of all Presocratic writing (cited in text as DK). The standard English translation of DK is edited by Rosamund Kent Sprague; see also Freeman. The Protagorean canon itself, however, exists only in a few, isolated fragments, all of which are subject to what Donovan calls “a prodigious number of interpretations” (34). The most thorough review of the fragments and their interpretations is to be found in Schiappa. For critical commentary on Protagoras, the reader can begin with Billig, de Romilly 1992, Donovan, Kerferd, Payne, Rankin, Schiller, Smith, Untersteiner, and Versenyi. Of this group, de Romilly provides the most substantive commentary on Protagoras’ cultural context. For additional bibliographic materials dealing with Protagoras, see McComiskey 32–34 and Schiappa 218–34.
Freeman reduces the number of Protagoras’ books by claiming that many of the titles are actually sections of longer works (346–48) and Untersteiner collapses the entire corpus into two: Antilogiae and Aletheia [or Truth] (10–16).
Protagoras’ stature in the ancient world is indicated by the inclusion of his statue—along with those of Thales, Heraclitus, and Plato—in a monument at Memphis in Egypt that was uncovered in the mid-19C (see Kerferd 1981, 43–44). His present relevance is hinted at in Paul Feyerabend’s dialogue in which Protagorean ideas are the point of departure for a discussion of the status of contemporary scientific and practical knowledge (1991, 1–45).
As a measure of the statement’s impact, consider the following: Plato devotes his dialogue Theaetetus, his most sustained inquiry into the nature of knowledge, to the human-measure fragment (see also Cratylus 385e–386a); and Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, refers to the issues raised by Protagoras in this fragment as “the hardest and most urgent of all problems” (999a, 24–9). More recently, Jacqueline de Romilly calls the human-measure fragment “the keystone to Sophists’ thought” that “dictates” all the rest of their doctrine (1992, 98), while David Payne comments that the ideas implicit in the human-measure fragment, and in the “great speech” of the Protagoras, reveal Protagoras as “the first great Humanist” (192). Kerferd writes that the human-measure fragment “will take us directly to the heart of the whole fifth-century sophistic movement” (1981, 85–86); cf. Schiappa, 117–21.
The human-measure fragment is the locus classicus of philosophical relativism. Consequently, the territory traversed in the rest of this chapter has been well-mapped by others (see Brett, Cornford, de Romilly, Feyerabend [1987 19–89], Kerferd, Maguire, Margolis, Untersteiner, Versenyi). To reiterate my own intentions: I would represent the bedrock concepts implicit in the human-measure doctrine from a distinctly rhetorical perspective and for an audience of teachers, students, and scholars of rhetoric, composition, and argumentation. I would urge my readers to be patient with these forays into philosophy; my motives are neither antiquarian nor purely theoretical. Rather, I would locate the philosophical principles that inform antilogic as an argumentative praxis and so establish a base for our ensuing rhetorical inquiry.
For a comprehensive account of Presocratic philosophy, see Barnes 1972, 1–151; see also Kirk et al.; and Guthrie v. 3. On Parmenides, see Barnes 155–230; Encyc. of Philosophy v.6, 49; Kirk 263–85; Oxford History 137. In the Phaedrus, Plato reflects the Parmenidean tradition when, in the palinode, he writes of the “colorless, formless, and intangible truly existing essence with which all true knowledge is concerned” (247c; Fowler trans.).
“The Way of Truth” (11. 344–46), in Kirk 270–72; DK 28 B6.
Diogenes Laertius adds this second sentence to the fragment: “For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life” (9.51). See also DK 80 A2, A3, A12, A23.
Among the issues raised by this statement is the (presumably) fictional, though long-believed account that this heretical notion lead to Protagoras’ banishment from Athens (see Philostratus 1.10.1, DK 80 A2). In addition, recent historians have challenged the standard agnostic interpretation of the statement with an anthropological one; i.e., did Protagoras simply disclaim any ability to comprehend the ontology of the gods, or did he initiate a humanistic approach to the gods as social, anthropological phenomena (see Schiappa 143–48)?
The Theaetetus does appear to authorize this expansion of “perception” to include additional cognitive activity beyond simple sensation (see the discussion of values and customs, 166d–172b). Cornford argues that Plato’s objections to Protagorean epistemology “do not touch Protagoras, who did not limit knowledge to perception” and that Protagorean perception itself should be “stretched” to include a wider field of cognitive activity (65–68) (see also Jordan; Kerferd 1981, 85–87). For an alternative view, see Kaufman (17, n. 3).
For additional commentary by Plato on matters connected with the human-measure fragment and the subject of knowledge, see the Sophist (which is a continuation of the dramatic conversation begun in the Theaetetus), as well as the Laws 4.716c; Cratylus 385 and 391b-c; and Meno 98a. On Plato’s epistemology, see Guthrie v. 4–5; Cornford.
I should note that despite the sarcasm of 161c, Socrates is consistently respectful of Protagoras, both in the Protagoras itself and in the Theaetetus, where he calls the great Sophist “the wisest of men” (160d).
Early in the Theaetetus, Plato does concede that perception exists in relation “to someone” (160b), and he does allow Protagoras, in a famous apologia, to defend the viability of his perspectivism (166–168c). But once the discussion moves from sense perception to reflection, Plato conveniently replaces perception “for someone” with the knowledge of the “truth.”
Of course, perspectivism has a long and detailed philosophical history; e.g., in Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” the “possible worlds” of Leibniz, the mentalism of Berkeley, and of course in the American pragmatic tradition of Emerson, Peirce, and Dewey; see Parker; see also Cherwitz and Hikins 1983, 250.
It is interesting to note that Nietzsche lectured on classical rhetoric in 1872–73, the same year that he was preparing “On Truth and Lies.” See Scott Consigny on Nietzsche’s approach to the Sophists (1994).
Discussions of Nietzsche’s perspectivism and his theories of language can be found in the “Introduction” by Sander Gilman et al. to Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, in Usseling (Ch. 13), and in De Man (Chs. 4–6). Nietzsche himself writes, “What is truth? a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation .... Everything that sets man off from the animal depends upon this capacity to dilute the concrete metaphors into a schema ... [to build up] a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, boundary determinations, which now stands opposite the other, concrete world of primary impressions, as the more solid, more universal, more familiar, more human, and therefore as the regulatory and imperative world” (250). From the Nietzschean point of view, knowledge is inherently rhetorical (hence contingent and perspectival) because any assessment of the world, including the “concrete world of primary impressions,” must be carried out with the aid of schemes initiated and organized by rhetoric.
Burke provides this summary: “To live is to have a vocation, and to have a vocation is to have an ethics or scheme of values [orientation], and to have a scheme of values is to have a point of view, and to have a point of view is to have a prejudice or bias which will motivate and color our choice of means” (1984, 256).
One typically Burkean method of reorientation is to be found in the dis-orientation of “perspectives by incongruity,” a technique Burke claims to have found in Nietzsche (1984, 88; see Permanence and Change, Part II). I should also note that Burke’s concept of the “terministic screen” is, to a large extent, a linguistic extension of the theory of orientation (see Language as Symbolic Action 44–62).
Perspectivism is certainly not limited to humanistic studies. See Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty (in Physics and Philosophy) or Niels Bohr’s theory of “complementarity,” the latter of which is summarized by Richard Rhodes as follows: ‘“Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ And the best we can say, [Bohr] realized, is always partial and incomplete; only by entertaining multiple and mutually limiting points of view, building up a composite picture, can we approach the real richness of the world” (Rhodes 3, italics mine).
Readers primarily interested in rhetorical issues may prefer to avoid the admittedly technical matters of this section and move directly to the discussion of relativism (sec. 3), a topic more directly linked to issues of argumentation.
For Aristotle, the law of non-contradiction is the axiom on which apodeictic, or demonstrative (scientific) proof rests (see Metaphysics 1005b 5–34, esp. 23, and 1011b 13–14). For an interesting deconstruction of this principle, see De Man’s Ch. 6 on Nietzsche and non-contradiction (119–131), which quotes Nietzsche as follows: the law of noncontradiction, “contains no criterion of truth, but an imperative concerning that which should count as true .... The conceptual ban on contradictions proceeds from the belief that we can form concepts, and that the concept not only designates the essence of the thing but comprehends it .... In fact, logic applies only to fictitious truths that we have created. Logic is the attempt to understand the actual world by means of a scheme of being posited by ourselves, more correctly: to make it easier to formalize and to compute” (120–21).
I realize that in positing the tradition of Plato and Aristotle as the antithetical opposite of Protagoreanism I run the risk of replicating the appeal to binaries that the Protagorean program would disrupt. In this case, however, the juxtaposition of these alternative schemata is inscribed in philosophical history. In the next few pages, I will employ antithesis to identify the principal features of a controversy, the terms of which were established by Protagoras’ opponents at the outset.
Maguire notes that Plato’s discussion of Protagoras and contradiction assumes that Protagoras is “making a statement about the nature of reality, or being, or ‘what is’“ that is incompatible with Protagoras’ actual position (136). Similarly, Brett notes that the lack of contradiction does not “entail the impossibility of falsehood without the assumption that there are some true statements” (158, n. 34). Consider also this comment by Guthrie regarding Aristotle’s response to opposing views (such as those of Protagoras): “although he assumes the mantle of impartiality and claims to be only introducing clarity and order into his predecessors’ accounts and bringing out their real intentions, in fact he is distorting their views to force them into his own different scheme” (6.96–97).
Cherwitz and Hikins remark that “contradictory judgments are not really contradictions at all, since they are judgments about different aspects of the same object” (1984, 264).
Shia Moser writes: “When, in Greece of the Fifth century, the force of customs was weakened and ethical dogmatism was attacked by the Sophists, a new foundation for moral action was sought and the philosophic ethics of Socrates came into being .... Not only ethics, but the whole philosophic system of Socrates and Plato was profoundly influenced by the desire to meet the challenge of ethical relativism” (3).
In fairness to Hegel, he is more attentive to the Sophists as philosophers than most of his predecessors or contemporaries. See Schiappa and Kerferd (1981).
Harvey Siegel’s critique stands as representative of much contemporary response: “ I will argue that, like Protagoras, the recent defenders [of relativism] fail to meet the challenge posed by the incoherence charge, and that the doctrine of epistemological relativism remains untenable because incoherent” (in Relativism Refuted, 1987, 3). For reviews of the contemporary debate over relativism, see Bernstein 1983, Feyerabend 1987, Krausz, and Margolis.
From A Treatise on Nature, Bk. I; cited in Feyerabend (1987) 78, n. 47.
See de Romilly, Havelock, Kerferd, Untersteiner, and Versenyi. For a bibliography of sources on Sophism and relativism, see Brett 139, n. 1 and Schiappa 19, n. 63.
This ameliorative approach has an early precedent in the work of F. C. S. Schiller.
Recall that in the standard translation of the human-measure fragment, “humanity” (anthropos) is equated with the individual. See sec. 1 above.
On the topic of subjectivity, Richard Brett makes the following distinctions: the term relativism (which he notes is of 19C coinage) applies to perceptions, ideas, beliefs that are interpreted “relative to some framework.” Often, this framework is “the one prevalent in the speaker’s culture”; alternatively, however, the framework can be “specific to the individual speaker.” Brett refers to the latter, more radical position as “Subjectivism” (141–42). Occasionally, this radical form is referred to as solipsism, or the complete isolation of the individual within the self-enclosed orbit of one’s own perceptual orientation. See also Jonathan Harrison’s entry on “Ethical Relativism” in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (v. 3. 78–81). More on these topics in the next section.
Naive or popular relativism is captured in such additional phrases as “when in Rome . . .” and “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” The distinguishing feature of naive relativism is, as Rorty puts it, the assumption that “every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other” (1982, 1966). For a description of relativism which conforms to this popular definition, see N. L. Gifford’s When in Rome: An Introduction to Relativism and Knowledge.
35 Proclus attributes the following position to Gorgias: “[being] is not manifest if it does not involve opinion” (DK 82B 26). That is, doxa, or the opinion of the community, is the necessary vehicle for the appearance of knowledge about the real and true.
For discussions of historical relativism, see Code 1982, Kaufman, Feyerabend 1987, Rorty 1979.
Such a description, with its emphasis on cultural norms, naturally raises the issue of individual initiative. Modern relativism does indeed assume that the diverse worldviews revealed by historical (and anthropological) study are fully contingent upon their unique place and moment in the process of cultural development. However, as individuals develop within these specific traditions, they are conditioned by but not confined to their culture’s norms, customs, values, practices. Given a certain measure of freedom, individuals are capable of modifying, extending, “surprising” the standards at work in culture. And, to a significant extent, this effort at modification is the work of discourse.
Of course, this picture of the knowing subject in relief against a backdrop of cultural norms and historical currents is much too static. For the contemporary relativist, the past is an active presence in the thinking process. That is, the ideas and procedures that characterize our response to present experience emerge from a background of prior relations and persistent memories, out of a history (even a pre-history) of contacts with personal, cultural, and historical forces reconstructed by the subject as the constitutive elements of one’s personal orientation. Accordingly, the knowing subject is never a tabula rasa: when we think about something, we customarily begin in medias res, as though consciousness is a Burkean parlor and the “unending conversation” of human history has been going on in mind long before we are prepared to speak (1941, 110–111; cf. Bakhtin). So while rhetoricians rightly insist that the effective rhetor is always responsive to the kairotic demands of the present (see Thomas Kent’s Paralogic Rhetoric), the relativist will argue that the past too is always present and makes its presence known in the way we orient ourselves in response to particular experiences.
We can put the Protagorean position in a way more conducive to scepticism: if all thoughts are bound to their distinctive orientation, and if no individual can assume an omniscient/objective position beyond the limits of personal perception, then no particular knowledge claim possesses the requisite justification to allow it the status of indubitable, absolute truth (cf. Encyc. of Philosophy 7:449). This potential scepticism is the very point about the human-measure doctrine that so troubled Plato, who makes the distinction in the Republic between “doxophilists” (lovers of opinion) and philosophers (lovers of knowledge). The business of the latter is to attend to just those universal, immutable truths that lay beyond the reach of fallible opinion (479b–480a). Gorgias has been claimed as a sceptic on the basis of his three-part proposition that nothing exists; that even if it did exist, it could not be known; and even if knowable, it could not be communicated (DK 82 B3). I would agree with Sextus that the second proposition seems clearly sceptical, but the characterization of Protagoras as a sceptic—doubting our ability to know anything—seems to me dependent on the alien standards of the master tradition.
For a more extensive discussion of scepticism in relation to Cicero, see Ch. 5, sec. 1. Cf. Epilogue, sec. 2.
E.g., Karl Popper suggests that when knowledge is conceived of as following from disctinct perceptual orientations we become “prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our languages” (in Bernstein 1982, 44).
To a significant extent, the Protagorean subject can be identified with the Aristotelian phronemos, the wise person capable of acting in behalf of goodness (Nic. Ethics 1140b).
The linkage of Protagorean ideas and American pragmatism will be developed in Ch. 3. Cf. Paolo Freire: “World and man do not exist apart from each other, they exist in constant interaction” (36).
Cf. Laszlo Versenyi’s commentary on the human-measure doctrine: “there is no point in speaking in a grand manner about what things may or may not be in themselves; what we have to take into account and concentrate on is what they are for us, in the world we live in, in a world in which our relationship to things, our living in the world is decisive” (1962, 182). Cf. also Polanyi’s claim that “into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is being known” (viii).
I am indebted throughout the following paragraph to the lexical distinctions made by philosopher Richard Bernstein in his discussion of incommensurability (1983, 82f).
Feyerabend argues throughout Against Method that the concept of incommensurability is only vaguely understood (205–7, 211–13).
Cf. Feyerabend 1975, 211–13, 262–63; see also Margolis’ chapter on “Protagoras and Incommensurability,” 1991, 87–118.
According to Kuhn, contesting paradigms may initially seem as though “they practice their trade in different worlds,” especially with regard to their definition of problems and their standards of evaluation (148–50). And yet, communication across such a “revolutionary divide,” while it cannot be “forced by logic,” is “partial” rather than absent (150–51). For practical rather than theoretical purposes, such “partiality” allows for some relationship between incommensurables, some point of contact on which comparison can be founded.
In the Nic. Ethics, Aristotle writes that “it is the mark of an educated [person] to look for precision in each class of thing just so far as the nature of the subject admits. It is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs” (1094b 34–27). On the Aristotelian division of knowledge into kinds, see Consigny 1989; Guthrie 6. 130ff; and Gadamer 1994, 312–14. On the German disciplines, see Bernstein 1983, 30–37.
Such propositions are routinely expressed in bivalent terms: X is or is not the case with regard to Y.
A note of caution is in order here. The force of the “categorical” division of knowledge is that it tempers the notion that truth is inherently a function of human invention and so avoids the fear that all constraints placed by the world on human belief can be ignored (see Brinton 159). The weakness of the position is that distinctions in knowledge-types easily slide into hierarchy. As long as one holds (at least in part) the notion that in the category of the physical sciences meanings are dependent on self-substantiated facts or data, that the data are verifiable by systematic, formal analysis, and that this analysis will, in turn, guarantee the “truth” of an inductively-generated proposition, it is not hard to understand how one’s faith in the determinate, verifiable nature of scientific knowledge would prompt the elevation of this “category” to paradigmatic status. Rorty writes that “there is nothing wrong with science, there is only something wrong with the attempt to divinize it”: i.e., there is only something wrong with scientism, the effort to make the standards of technical knowledge the criteria for all knowing (1991, 34).
Kerferd’s translation, 1949, 23. Cf. Cornford 81–83.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mendelson, M. (2002). Protagoras and the Philosophic Origins of Antilogic. In: Many Sides: A Protagorean Approach to the Theory, Practice and Pedagogy of Argument. Argumentation Library, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9890-3_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9890-3_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5935-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9890-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive