Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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.
We see that Protagoras possesses great powers of reflective thought, and indeed reflection on consciousness came to consciousness with Protagoras. But this is the form of manifestation which was again taken by the later sceptics. The phenomenal is not sensuous Being, for because I posit this as phenomenal, I assert its nullity. But the statements “What is, is only for consciousness,” or “The truth of all things is the manifestation of them in and for consciousness,” seem quite to contradict themselves. For it appears as though a contradiction were asserted—first that nothing is in itself as it appears, and then that it is true as it appears. But objective significance must not be given to the positive, to what is true, as if, for example, this were white in itself because it appears so; for it is only this manifestation of the white that is true, the manifestation being just this movement of the self-abrogating sensuous Being, which, taken in the universal, stands above consciousness as truly as above Being. The world is consequently not only phenomenal in that it is for consciousness, and thus that its Being is only one relative to consciousness, for it is likewise in itself phenomenal. The element of consciousness which Protagoras has demonstrated, and owing to which the developed universal has in it the moment of the negative Being-for-another, has thus indeed to be asserted as a necessary moment; but taken for itself, alone and isolated, it is one-sided, since the moment of implicit Being is likewise essential.
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