Philosophy in Seven Sentences

A Small Introduction to a Vast Topic

Douglas Groothuis

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830899272
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

Philosophy is not a closed club or a secret society. It's for anyone who thinks big questions are worth talking about. To get us started, Douglas Groothuis unpacks seven pivotal sentences from the history of western philosophy—a few famous, all short, none trivial. Included are: - Socrates—The unexamined life is not worth living.- Augustine—You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.- Descartes—I think, therefore I am.- Pascal—The heart has reasons, that reason knows nothing of.Protagoras, Aristotle and Kierkegaard round out this quick tour. Since every philosopher has a story, not just a series of ideas, Groothuis also offers a bit of each one's life to set the stage. The seven sterling sentences themselves, while they can't tell us all there is to know, offer bridges into other lands of thought which can spark new ideas and adventures. And who knows where they might lead?The accessible primers in the Introductions in Seven Sentences collection act as brief introductions to an academic field, with simple organization: seven key sentences that give readers a birds-eye view of an entire discipline.

- one -

Protagoras

Man is the measure of all things.

Protagoras, quoted in Theaetetus

Greeks could do philosophy! The basic questions of existence have never been far from the human mind, but the ancient Greeks excelled at this, and their musings—some fragmentary or secondhand—have been preserved in written texts. However much philosophy occurred in exclusively oral cultures, the Greeks valued writing in addition to oral memory and tradition. Socrates, you remember, wrote nothing, but generated a vast literature though his dialogues. A lesser-known figure who came after him did write a few things, and his famous adage is worth considering.

Protagoras (fifth century BC) is not to be confused with like-sounding ancient Greek thinkers named Pythagoras or Parmenides, who along with others were pre-Socratic thinkers. (This shows the significance of Socrates, since philosophy is dated with respect to his life.) These thinkers are worth interrogating as well, and I studied them with profit in a year-long course in ancient philosophy forty years ago. Protagoras stands out to us, though, because of his adage about absolute assessment:

Man is the measure of all things: of the things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not.1

His claim is not simply that people measure things—such as character, chariots, boats and fish—but that each human is the measure. Each person is the assessment or judgment. What could this mean? No person is a slide ruler or scale or Geiger counter, although we avail ourselves of such things.

What Is the Measure?

We tend to think that people use a standard of measurement outside of themselves. Even inadequate and one-dimensional measures such as one’s IQ score are not determined by how we feel about them—and Mensa is very picky about this.

On the other hand, Protagoras has Shakespeare’s Hamlet on his side, at least concerning morality: “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”2 That is, morals do not have objective standing; rather, they are judged differently by different people. This quote is from a discussion about Denmark, which Hamlet, unlike his interlocutor, Rosencrantz, said was “a prison.” If Hamlet is right, then both Hamlet and Rosencrantz are right about Denmark.

What then was Protagoras’s point? (We’ll put serious Shakespearian interpretation aside.) To find out we need to take a step back into the Greek philosophical scene and not rush to judgment—or rush to endorsement either. Protagoras would approve of this deliberation.

Protagoras was considered the chief of the Sophists, intellectuals who were paid to defend the views of their sponsors. They were accomplished orators as well as thinkers. Originally, the term sophist meant something like our “professor,” but later a Sophist was deemed a hired gun, a philosopher for hire and one having no principles of his own. Their arguments, supposedly, were merely the instruments of the will of their bosses. One may argue over the virtues of the Sophists, but it is certainly not true that being paid for philosophizing necessarily disqualifies the employee’s arguments. On the other hand, if we think of a Sophist as something like a political speech writer or the like, our judgment will change. Whatever the intellectual rectitude of Protagoras, he was a perpetual lecturer who articulated and debated ideas in the marketplace, a marketplace of ideas that yet exists. We may join in the discussion.

Mythology and Philosophy

Protagoras was one of a spirited group of fastidious thinkers who tired, or at least grew skeptical, of Greek mythology, with its pantheon of gods. Yes, the stories of the gods were often riveting and worth repeating. A recent volume by Luc Ferry is called The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life.3 There was always a moral to the story. Hercules, the last son of Zeus, was a dashing and dramatic character who started as a mighty mortal and became a god upon death. Although a bit impetuous and lacking in sobriety, he plays well as a hero. Zeus himself is the apotheosis of power, but acts largely without moral authority. Even the might of Zeus does not support the idea that “might makes right,” since might may make for divine mischief. My point is not to survey or psychoanalyze the denizens of Greek mythology but to make a general point. Mythologies may inspire and guide, to some extent, our relation to the hard facts of family, life, death and sexuality (and some of the gods tended to be naughty in this way).

Nevertheless, the problem with Greek mythology (or any mytho­­­logy, Eastern or Western) is simply that it is mythology; it is neither history nor clearly articulated philosophy. In too many ways the gods, despite their thespian résumés and magical powers, were not much more than semi-glorified mortals. This was the objection of a growing group of Greeks who were mere mortals—mortals with meaning, metaphysics and morality on their minds. And what might the mind do when free to explore life and its questions apart from the venerable stories of Greek fascination? It might philosophize, and so it did.

Protagoras and his cohorts quested for explanations of a more abstract but also compelling sort than the old tales could afford. They sought principles to explain facts in a universal and logically coherent manner. To be a little unfair to the mythologies, consider the tooth fairy. She adds some magical benevolence to the loss and placement of a baby tooth for children, but the fairy story adds nothing about the nature of benevolence, the significance of teeth or the significance of the humans who grow and lose these teeth, whether through development (teething) or decay (the toothless).

Thus, to give one example, Thales of Miletus tried to find a cosmic commonality to all things. He divined it as water. Yes, water, which was more than rain, oceans, lakes and puddles. It was everywhere, so perhaps it was the root and branch of everything. Water, or moisture in general, lives in the clouds, in plants, in animals (aquatic, land or amphibious) and in thirsty mortals. It condenses and evaporates, but never leaves the planet. Considering the presence and power of water, Thales extrapolated that water was more than one more thing on earth, however necessary for life. It was, rather, the unifying principle for existence. Whatever we think of Thales, his thinking is not absurd, and it indicates a thirst for philosophical explanation as opposed to mythological meanderings. At least he was trying.

Do We Determine Reality?

But it is Protagoras who calls for our attention. Instead of arguing for something at the heart of everything (water for Thales), a principle found in nature, Protagoras moved back from nature to the self. After all, skeptics had questioned mere mortals’ ability to know with any confidence what is out there, independent of themselves. The jaundiced eye sees things differently from the nonjaundiced eye. Children perceive entities invisible to adults. Adults sometimes hallucinate—but perhaps they are seeing what most miss. One woman feels cold in a room of 70°F and another feels hot. Age alters hearing, seeing, memory and may jangle judgments. The upshot is that we cannot find a place to stand to see the world as it is. We are simply ill-equipped to do so. Objective truth, what is independent of our perceptions, endlessly and mercilessly eludes us.

We will return to skepticism when discussing Descartes and Pascal, but Protagoras was not a skeptic. He did not withhold judgments about facts in themselves because we do not have the ability to know them. While recognizing that the skeptics had dethroned our intellectual confidence in capturing objective reality, his point of departure was this: we do know our own viewpoints, judgments and beliefs. That is, we measure things; they do not measure themselves. So, I take most of Francis Bacon’s paintings to be ugly and thus unattractive. I am repulsed. This is the end of the story, or my story. This is my measurement. You, on the contrary, may find delight in Bacon’s tortured figures and color schemes. That is your measurement, and the end of your story.

Now reconsider the skeptical point made earlier. One person can deem the room cold and another hot. The skeptic might say we cannot know, then, what the room is, given the variability in perception. But Protagoras claims that the room is hot for person A and not hot for person B. There is no contradiction, since we are considering individual perceptions. There are two measurements, each of which is valid. Thus, Bacon is barbaric to me and beautiful to you—and that is the level best we can do. Or perhaps I will come to adore Bacon’s paintings and heap scorn on my former judgment. If so, then that is my measurement.

This is rather attractive at first blush. After all, there is no dispute in matters of taste, or, to be more snobby, De gustibus non est disputandum. The avant-garde saxophone playing of Peter Brötzmann can send me into the upper reaches of aesthetic delight, while sending others scurrying from the room while covering their ears. But Protagoras took this insight far beyond artistic judgments. Notice the reference range (or extent) of Protagoras’s statement, “Man is the measure of all things”—matters of taste as well as matters of fact, matters of principle and matters of matter. Nothing is excluded.

Let us follow this out. As we think it through, the old Greek will sound much like modern man. If Protagoras is right, then there is no disputing matters of morality either. Man is the measure of what is right and what is wrong, what is virtuous and what is vicious, what should be loved and what should be hated—just as Hamlet claimed. Today, this thinking is usually put in the language of choice instead of measurement, but the idea is the same. If you chose to do X, that choice is the end of the matter. Or, to suit Protagoras, if you measure X as worth doing, then it is worth doing. This is true whether X refers to sailing, stealing or stampeding cattle in the direction of a Cub Scout outing.

But we might say, “Who is to judge?” Who of us can stand above him- or herself and others and become objective? Yes, we recoil from some ideas—such as torturing the innocent merely for pleasure or female genital mutilation. But what does that tell us about reality, if there really is such a thing as reality? The claim that “man is the measure of all things” is an all-encompassing judgment itself. The answer to “Who is to judge” is that we are the measure of all things. That is, there is nothing outside of human judgment by which it might be judged. But why would Protagoras (or anyone else) consider that to be reality itself?

Protagoras, Meet a Serial Killer

Besides being a serial killer, Ted Bundy was a philosophical thinker of the Protagorean type. Remarkably, his philosophy was caught on tape before he raped and killed a young woman. She was one of dozens of his prey. As reported in Louis Pojman’s text Moral Philosophy, Bundy said,

I learned that all moral judgments are “value judgments,” that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either “right” or “wrong.” I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments. Believe it or not, I figured out for myself—what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself—that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any “reason” to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring “the strength of character” to throw off its shackles. . . .

I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment” that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these “others”? Other human beings, with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as “moral” or “good” and others as “immoral” or “bad”?4

When teaching ethics to undergraduates at a secular school, I often hand out this Bundy quotation, but without identifying the speaker. I then ask them to write a paragraph on whether they agree with its basic idea. Most students approve of the unknown author’s sentiments. I then reveal that this statement was the philosophy of one of the most infamous serial killers in American history—the philosophy that allowed and even impelled his egregious crimes. Next, I ask them to reconsider their judgments. The results are usually mixed, but the majority of students show dismay and surprise that they were in agreement with a view that justified serial rape and murder.

Yet today, a television series—a comedy, nonetheless—is about a serial killer named Dexter. To top that off, there is even a book called Dexter and Philosophy: Mind over Spatter. Can such atrocities be lifted so easily from bloody reality and into a neutral realm of entertainment? For many it can, and so they seem to agree with Protagoras, at least implicitly: there is no objective good and evil, nothing sacrosanct or sacrilegious, nothing above us and nothing beneath us. It is all merely neutral, and we make the call—on everything. “Man is the measure of all things.”

So, then, what does this sentence tell us about philosophy and what philosophy means to us? Philosophical claims, if clearly articulated, give us significant matters to ponder logically and existentially. They often capture some truth, and so seduce us on this basis. But a statement cannot be true unless it accords with the way the world in fact is and the way we in fact are. Protagoras does capture some truths about perspective. For example, my tastes in food determine how I measure the goodness of the food. I am the measure of that, at least. It matters nothing whether a connoisseur thinks me an ignoramus. I can only measure it by what I experience at the moment. In that way I am the measure, but am I the expert? Am I the knower?

There is a strange implication for Protagoras’s view. In the Theaetetus, Protagoras even states that error is impossible.5 Although he was a teacher, he cannot, by his own lights, teach anyone. To this, Socrates inquires:

If whatever the individual judges by means of perception is true for him; if no man can assess another’s experience better than he, or can claim authority to examine another man’s judgment and see if it be right or wrong; if, as we have repeatedly said, only the individual himself can judge of his own world, and what he judges is always true and correct: how could it ever be, my friend, that Protagoras was a wise man, so wise as to think himself fit to be the teacher of other men and worth large fees; while we, in comparison with him the ignorant ones, needed to go and sit at his feet—we who are ourselves each the measure of his own wisdom? 6

The gadfly of Athens made short work of a self-refuting philosophy. This should whet our appetite for the next chapter, in which Socrates takes the starring role.

What Is Relative?

Similarly, we find a wide variety of sounds and inscriptions in human languages. For example, the general concept of cat may be written in Chinese or in English. Since each language uses different symbols for writing, its graphic inscription for cat will differ. This is true for voicing the word cat as well. Through a long, messy process not instigated by any central planning, each culture selects its own conventions of communication. Are not these two syst...