href="#ub775af72-ce02-5923-b5c8-5ee6c1beeb90">GREEK RATIONALISTS: Arguing for Argument
Had we lived in the classical age of Greece – Plato’s time – we would have confronted a new cultural hero: the philosopher-king. Homer’s warriors no longer occupy the higher reaches of human achievement: they have been replaced in the heroic pantheon by philosophers. This period is characterised by the first great transformation in Western thought, or what Nietzsche called ‘the genuine antagonism’. Had we been educated in Plato’s Academy we would have been told to ignore Homer’s Iliad and commit ourselves to Plato’s Utopia (described in The Republic). An odd development, one might say. And Nietzsche did say so, but that was over 2000 years later and most philosophers disagree with him in any case. Nietzsche thought that Homer was a glorifier of life and Plato a slanderer of life: a man who had to lie himself out of reality. Nietzsche was a naturalist and believed with Homer that there is only one world and this is it. Plato was a spiritualist and, in opposing two worlds to Homer’s single natural world, created fascinating philosophical problems.
Plato and his followers replace Homer’s emphasis on physical power and heroic action with the importance of logos: thinking and reasoning about the world. Those who dedicate themselves to logos are led to sophia – wisdom – and those who love (philo) wisdom are philosophers. Plato transcends Homer’s world because he replaces mythos – thinking about a God-driven world – with logos. The Homeric idea that man is Homo natura is replaced by the idea that man is Homo sapiens: man the knower, or man the truth-seeker. Plato thus creates a new cultural hero, replacing the sophisticated fighting animal with the truth-seeker. Virtue is transferred from the physical to the intellectual plane and the physical world is progressively devalued in favour of the spiritual world.
The first great transformation in Western thinking is a movement from one world to two – from this material world to a second, immaterial world. In the sixth century BC philosophers took seriously the idea that there are two worlds: a physical world accessible to the senses, and a metaphysical world accessible to the mind. Since the physical, everyday world is infected by sense-defeating illusions, the metaphysical world must be the true, or real, world. Since the mind is the key to penetrating this second world it is extolled in proportion as the senses are devalued. Here is the beginning of the Western rational tradition, and a libel on the natural world.
Philosophically, this tradition begins around 600 BC with Thales who claims that ‘everything is really water’. Now it is obvious that the world of the senses does not lead us to conclude that the world is really water. So, philosophically, the most important of Thales’ four words is ‘really’. The world we perceive is characterised by considerable diversity (rocks, trees, people, mountains, lakes, etc.), but the real world is uncontaminated by human perception: it is a single, metaphysical world. Since our everyday world of sense-perception is not the real world, it must be an apparent, illusory world, because in reality the world is one. So everything is really something else and not what it appears to be. A consequence of this reasoning is a devaluing of the natural, everyday world in favour of a private, mental world which is revealed by thinking. This private world is richer than the natural world because it enables us to build a bridge from mind to a supernatural world uncontaminated by the senses.
Thales was followed by philosophers who agreed with him in principle that the real world is unity but disagreed with his conclusion that the world is really water. Anaximander said that everything is really primal being, Pythagoras preferred number(s), Heraclitus fire, Empedocles love and strife, Democritus atoms. This proliferation of speculation is reminiscent of the various soapbox orators in The Life of Brian who predict the arrival, at different times and places, of the messiah.
By about 430 BC, in what is known as the ‘Athenian Period’, some thinkers attempted to bring a halt to these extreme and competing philosophical speculations. Led by Protagoras, the Sophists were sceptical about absolute truth and became the official opposition to the truth-seeking philosophers. The Sophists travelled from town to town arguing for one truth today and another tomorrow, (rather like today’s management consultants). In some cases they argued against the possibility of arriving at the truth at all. Forsaking truth-seeking for power and persuasion, their motto was not Homo sapiens but Homo mensura - man in the measure of all things - a view which leads to scepticism and subjectivity with respect to truth, pragmatism with respect to life, and relativism with respect to everything, except relativism. In our day, Protagoras is the only ancient philosopher favoured by the better-read postmodernists.
It seems that Protagoras was the first Greek to maintain that there are two opposing sides to every question. He gave public readings for which he charged handsome fees and was never short of an audience. In his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius says that Protagoras would begin his lectures by announcing that man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not. Surprisingly, after such an ambiguous opening, he would still have an audience. He believed that the soul is nothing apart from the senses and as for the gods, as we have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist, it is pointless to argue about them. The two significant obstacles that impede knowledge were, for him, the obscurity of metaphysical questions and the shortness of human life. For these agnostic words the Athenians expelled him and burned his books in the market-place. He extolled carpe diem, instituted debating as an important cultural activity, and taught rival pleaders the tricks of the trade. He seems to have been the inventor of the Socratic dialogue of questioning, answering and more questioning.
The view that man is the measure of all things encouraged pragmatic thinkers to conclude that truth is what works. This, of course, makes all religions, voodoo, Indian rain-dancing and countless other absurdities true because they ‘work’ for true believers. Replacing logical and scientific truths with pragmatic truth is popular with the guardians of political correctness because if a true statement (i.e. one that corresponds with the facts) offends people, it clearly does not ‘work’ for the offended ones and so should not be uttered. That we have arrived at this state of intellectual affairs shows the influence of Protagoras and the Sophists who chime in well with the relativistic spirit of our times. After all, how can one give offence to another if the key question is not: ‘Does it correspond with the (inconvenient, upsetting) facts?’ but: ‘Does it work for you?’
Unlike postmodernists, the Sophists were not so naive as to believe that they could dispense with truth. However, their influence did lead to a widespread scepticism about the capacity of humans to arrive at the truth. Gorgias, in the 440s BC, claimed to have ‘proved’ that (a) there is nothing; (b) if there is anything, we cannot know it; (c) if we know it, we cannot communicate it. Such reasoning led many people to conclude that if one can ‘prove’ these propositions, one can prove anything. In our time this form of pragmatism has led to what philosophers in the nineteenth century called nihilism and what is today called postmodernism. The man who stood against the Sophists, relativism and lazy pragmatism, was Socrates.
To say human beings are the measure of all things is saying very little if we do not know what a human being is. To gain an understanding of individual human beings Socrates engaged his fellow Athenians in conversation and encouraged them to argue rather than merely express their feelings. Of all the functions of language, the expressive function is the most primitive since it merely serves to express the feelings of the speaker. The descriptive function is more sophisticated because it describes states of affairs. Of even greater sophistication is the argumentative function which serves to present and compare arguments in connection with questions or problems. These three functions constitute a logical hierarchy because when we describe we express, and when we argue it is about descriptions: we cannot argue about feelings. An argument serves as an outward expression of an internal state of a person. Insofar as it is about something it is descriptive. Since self-expression is revealing of feelings it is independent of truth or falsity; descriptions can be true or false; arguments can be valid or invalid. For example, a communication may hide or reveal the feelings of a speaker, describe
