In the course of the fifth century, Hellenic culture attained a delicate and fertile balance between the ancient mythological tradition and the modern secular rationalism. Temples to the gods were erected with an unprecedented zeal to capture a timeless Olympian grandeur. Yet in the monumental buildings, sculptures, and paintings of the Parthenon, in the artistic creations of Phideas and Polyclitus, this grandeur was accomplished not least through meticulous analysis and theory, through a vigorous effort to combine human rationality with the mythic order in concrete form. The temples to Zeus, Athena, and Apollo seemed to celebrate man’s triumph of rational clarity and mathematical elegance as much as they offered homage to the divine. Similarly, the Greek artists’ renderings of gods and goddesses were renderings of Greek men and women—ideal, spiritualized, yet manifestly human and individual. Still, the characteristic object of artistic aspiration continued to be the gods, and there remained a sense of man’s proper limits in the universal scheme. The new creative treatment of myth by Aeschylus and Sophocles, or the odes of the great choral poet Pindar, who saw intimations of the gods in the athletic feats of the Olympic games, suggested that man’s own developing abilities could enhance and give exalted expression to the divine powers. Yet both tragedies and choral hymns upheld the boundaries of human ambition, beyond which lay danger and impossibility.
As the fifth century advanced, the balance continued to shift in favor of man. Hippocrates’s seminal work in medicine, Herodotus’s observant histories and travel descriptions, Meton’s new calendrical system, Thucydides’s penetrating historical analyses, the bold scientific speculations of Anaxagoras and Democritus—all extended the scope of the Hellenic mind and forwarded its grasp of things in terms of rationally comprehensible natural causes. Pericles himself was intimate with the rationalist philosopher and physicist Anaxagoras, and a new intellectual rigor, skeptical of the old supernatural explanations, was widespread. Contemporary man now perceived himself as more a civilized product of progress from savagery than a degeneration from a mythical golden age.5 The commercial and political rise of an active middle class further moved against the aristocratic hierarchy of the old gods and heroes. The long-stable society celebrated by Pindar for his aristocratic patrons was giving way to a new order that was more fluidly egalitarian and aggressively competitive. With that change was also left behind Pindar’s conservative maintenance of the old religious values and sanctions against uninhibited human endeavor. Belief in the traditional deities of the Athenian polis was being undermined, and a more critical and secular spirit was strongly on the ascent.
The most acute stage in this evolution was reached in the latter half of the fifth century with the emergence of the Sophists. The leading protagonists of the new intellectual milieu, the Sophists were itinerant professional teachers, secular humanists of a liberal spirit who offered both intellectual instruction and guidance for success in practical affairs. With the expanded possibilities for political participation in the democratic polis, the services of the Sophists were in high demand. The general tenor of their thought was marked by the same rationalism and naturalism that had characterized the development of philosophy before them, and that increasingly reflected the spirit of the age. But with the Sophists, a new element of skeptical pragmatism entered Greek thought, turning philosophy away from its earlier, more speculative and cosmological concerns. According to Sophists such as Protagoras, man was the measure of all things, and his own individual judgments concerning everyday human life should form the basis of his personal beliefs and conduct—not naive conformity to traditional religion nor indulgence in far-flung abstract speculation. Truth was relative, not absolute, and differed from culture to culture, from person to person, and from situation to situation. Claims to the contrary, whether religious or philosophical, could not stand up to critical argument. The ultimate value of any belief or opinion could be judged only by its practical utility in serving an individual’s needs in life.
This decisive shift in the character of Greek thought, encouraged by the contemporary social and political situation, owed as much to the problematic condition of natural philosophy at that time as to the decline in traditional religious belief. Not only were the old mythologies losing their hold on the Greek mind, but the current state of scientific explanation was reaching a point of crisis. The extremes of Parmenidean logic with its obscure paradoxes, and of atomistic physics with its hypothetical atoms, both of which controverted the tangible reality of common human experience, were beginning to make the entire practice of theoretical philosophy seem irrelevant. In the Sophists’ view, the speculative cosmologies neither spoke to practical human needs nor appeared plausible to common sense. From Thales on, each philosopher had proposed his particular theory as to what was the true nature of the world, with each theory contradicting the others, and with a growing tendency to reject the reality of more and more of the phenomenal world revealed by the senses. The result was a chaos of conflicting ideas, with no basis upon which to certify one above the rest. Moreover, the natural philosophers seemed to have been constructing their theories about the external world without adequately taking into account the human observer, the subjective element. By contrast, the Sophists recognized that each person had his own experience, and therefore his own reality. In the end, they argued, all understanding is subjective opinion. Genuine objectivity is impossible. All a person can legitimately claim to know is probabilities, not absolute truth.
Yet, according to the Sophists, it did not matter if man had no certain insight into the world outside him. He could know only the contents of his own mind—appearances rather than essences—but these constituted the only reality that could be of valid concern to him. Other than appearances, a deeper stable reality could not be known, not only on account of man’s limited faculties, but more fundamentally because such a reality could not be said to exist outside of human conjecture. Yet the true aim of human thought was to serve human needs, and only individual experience could provide a basis for achieving that aim. Each person should rely on his own wits to make his way through the world. Acknowledgment of the individual’s intellectual limitations would therefore be a liberation, for only in that way could a man seek to make his thought stand on its own, sovereign, serving himself rather than illusory absolutes arbitrarily defined by unreliable sources external to his own judgment.
The Sophists proposed that the critical rationalism that had previously been directed toward the physical world could now more fruitfully be applied to human affairs, to ethics and politics. The evidence of travelers’ reports, for example, suggested that social practices and religious beliefs were not absolutes but merely local human conventions, received pieties varying according to each nation’s customs with no fundamental relation either to nature or to divine commandment. The recent physical theories were drawn on to suggest the same conclusion: If the experience of hot and cold had no objective existence in nature but was merely an individual person’s subjective impression created by a temporary arrangement of interacting atoms, then so too might the standards of right and wrong be equally insubstantial, conventional, and subjectively determined.
The existence of the gods could similarly be recognized as an undemonstrable assumption. As Protagoras said, “Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not, nor of what form they are; for there are many obstacles to such knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life.” Another Sophist, Critias, suggested that the gods were invented to instill fear in those who would otherwise have acted in an evil manner. Much like the physicists with their mechanistic naturalism, the Sophists considered nature an impersonal phenomenon whose laws of chance and necessity bore little concern for human affairs. The evidence of unbiased common sense suggested that the world was constituted by visible matter, not invisible deities. The world was therefore best viewed apart from religious prejudices.
Hence the Sophists concluded in favor of a flexible
atheism or agnosticism in metaphysics and a situational morality in ethics. Since religious beliefs, political structures, and rules of moral conduct were now seen to be humanly created conventions, these were all open to fundamental questioning and change. After centuries of blind obedience to restrictive traditional attitudes, man could now free himself to pursue a program of enlightened self-interest. To discover by rational means what was most useful for man seemed a more intelligent strategy than to base one’s actions on belief in mythological deities or the absolutist assumptions of unprovable metaphysics. Since it was futile to seek absolute truth, the Sophists recommended that young men learn from them the practical arts of rhetorical persuasion and logical dexterity, as well as a broad spectrum of other subjects ranging from social history and ethics to mathematics and music. The citizen could thereby be best prepared to play an effective role in the polis democracy and, more generally, assure for himself a successful life in the world. Because the skills for achieving excellence in life could be taught and learned, a man was free to expand his opportunities through education. He was not limited by traditional assumptions such as the conventional belief that one’s abilities were forever fixed as a result of chance endowment or the status of one’s birth. Through such a program as that offered by the Sophists, both the individual and the society could better themselves.
Thus the Sophists mediated the transition from an age of myth to an age of practical reason. Man and society were to be studied, methodically and empirically, without theological preconceptions. Myths were to be understood as allegorical fables, not revelations of a divine reality. Rational acuity, grammatical precision, and oratorical prowess were the prime virtues in the new ideal man. The proper molding of a man’s character for successful participation in polis life required a sound education in the various arts and sciences, and thus was established the paideia—the classical Greek system of education and training, which came to include gymnastics, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, music, mathematics, geography, natural history, astronomy and the physical sciences, history of society and ethics, and philosophy—the complete pedagogical course of study necessary to produce a well-rounded, fully educated citizen.
The Sophists’ systematic doubting of human beliefs—whether the traditional belief in the gods or the more recent but, in their view, equally naive faith in human reason’s capacity genuinely to know the nature of something as immense and indeterminate as the cosmos—was freeing thought to take new and unexplored paths. As a result, man’s status was greater than ever before. He was increasingly free and self-determining, aware of a larger world containing cultures and beliefs besides his own, aware of the relativity and plasticity of human values and customs, aware of his own role in creating his reality. Yet he was no longer so significant in the cosmic scheme, which, if it existed at all, had its own logic heedless of man and Greek cultural values.
Other problems were presented by the Sophists’ views. Despite the positive effects of their intellectual training and establishment of a liberal education as a basis for effective character formation, a radical skepticism toward all values led some to advocate an explicitly amoral opportunism. Students were instructed how to devise ostensibly plausible arguments supporting virtually any claim. More concretely disturbing was the concurrent deterioration of the political and ethical situation in Athens to the point of crisis—the democracy turning fickle and corrupt, the consequent takeover by a ruthless oligarchy, the Athenian leadership of Greece becoming tyrannical, wars begun in arrogance ending in disaster. Daily life in Athens saw minimally humane ethical standards unscrupulously violated—visible not least in the exclusively male Athenian citizenry’s routine and often cruel exploitation of women, slaves, and foreigners. All these developments had their own origins and motives, and could hardly be laid at the feet of the Sophists. Yet in such critical circumstances, the philosophical denial of absolute values and sophistical commendation of stark opportunism seemed both to reflect and to exacerbate the problematic spirit of the times.
The Sophists’ relativistic humanism, for all its progressive and liberal character, was not proving wholly benign. The larger world opened by Athens’s earlier triumphs had destabilized its ancient certainties and now seemed to require a larger order—universal, yet conceptual—within which events could be comprehended. The Sophists’ teachings provided no such order, but rather a method for success. How success itself was to be defined remained moot. Their bold assertion of human intellectual sovereignty—that through its own power man’s thought could provide him with sufficient wisdom to live his life well, that the human mind could independently produce the strength of equilibrium—now seemed to require reevaluation. To more conservative sensibilities, the foundations of the traditional Hellenic belief system and its previously timeless values were being dangerously eroded, while reason and verbal skill were coming to have a less than impeccable reputation. Indeed, the whole development of reason now seemed to have undercut its own basis, with the human mind denying itself the capacity for genuine knowledge of the world.
Socrates
It was in this highly charged cultural climate that Socrates began his philosophical search, as skeptical and individualistic as any Sophist. A younger contemporary of Pericles, Euripides, Herodotus, and Protagoras, and growing up in an era when he could see the Parthenon built on the Acropolis from start to finish, Socrates entered the philosophical arena at the height of tension between the ancient Olympian tradition and the vigorous new intellectualism. By virtue of his extraordinary life and death, he would leave the Greek mind radically transformed, establishing not only a new method and new ideal for the pursuit of truth, but also, in his own person, an enduring model and inspiration for all subsequent philosophy.
Despite the magnitude of Socrates’s influence, little is known with certainty about his life. Socrates himself wrote nothing. The richest and most coherent portrait of the man is that contained in Plato’s Dialogues, but precisely to what extent the words and ideas attributed there to Socrates reflect the subsequent evolution of Plato’s own thought remains unclear (a problem we shall address at the end of the chapter). The extant reports of other contemporaries and followers—Xenophon, Aeschines, Aristophanes, Aristotle, later Platonists—though helpful, are generally secondhand or fragmentary, often ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory. Nevertheless, a reasonably reliable picture can be pieced together by drawing on the early Platonic dialogues in combination with the other sources.
It is evident from these that Socrates was a man of singular character and intelligence, who was imbued with a passion for intellectual honesty and moral integrity rare for his or any other age. He insistently sought answers to questions that had not before been asked, attempted to undermine conventional assumptions and beliefs to provoke more careful thinking about ethical matters, and tirelessly compelled both himself and those with whom he conversed to seek a deeper understanding of what constituted a good life. His words and deeds embodied an abiding conviction that the act of rational self-criticism could free the human mind from the bondage of false opinion. Because of his dedication to the task of discovering wisdom and drawing it forth from others, Socrates neglected his private affairs, spending all his time instead in earnest discussion with his fellow citizens. Unlike the Sophists, he did not charge for his instruction. Although intimate with the elite of Athens, he was altogether indifferent to material wealth and conventional standards of success. Socrates gave the impression of being a man unusually at one with himself, though his personal character was full of paradoxical contrasts. Disarmingly humble yet presumptuously confident, puckishly witty yet morally urgent, engaging and gregarious yet solitary and contemplative, Socrates was above all a man consumed by a passion for truth.
As a young man Socrates appears to have studied the natural science of his time with some enthusiasm, examining the various contemporary philosophies concerned with speculative analysis of the physical world. Eventually, however, he found these u
nsatisfying. The welter of conflicting theories brought more confusion than clarity, and their explanations of the universe solely in terms of material causation, ignoring the evidence of purposive intelligence in the world, seemed to him inadequate. Such theories, he judged, were neither conceptually coherent nor morally useful. He therefore turned from physics and cosmology to ethics and logic. How one should live, and how to think clearly about how one should live, became his overriding concern. As Cicero would declare three centuries later, Socrates “called down philosophy from the skies and implanted it in the cities and homes of men.”
Such a shift was indeed already reflected in the ideas of the Sophists, who also resembled Socrates in their concern with education, language, rhetoric, and argument. But the character of Socrates’s moral and intellectual aspirations was sharply different. The Sophists offered to teach others how to live a successful life, in a world in which all moral standards were conventions and all human knowledge was relative. Socrates believed such an educational philosophy was both intellectually misconceived and morally detrimental. In opposition to the Sophist view, Socrates saw his own task as that of finding a way to a knowledge that transcended mere opinion, to inform a morality that transcended mere convention.
At an early date in the young philosopher’s life, the oracle of Apollo at Delphi had declared that no man was wiser than Socrates. Seeking, as he later put it with characteristic irony, to disprove the oracle, Socrates assiduously examined the beliefs and thinking of all who considered themselves wise—concluding that he was indeed wiser than all others, for he alone recognized his own ignorance. But while the Sophists had held genuine knowledge to be unattainable, Socrates held rather that genuine knowledge had not yet been achieved. His repeated demonstrations of human ignorance, both his own and that of others, were intended to elicit not intellectual despair but rather intellectual humility. The discovery of ignorance was for Socrates the beginning rather than the end of the philosophical task, for only through that discovery could one begin to overcome those received assumptions that obscured the true nature of what it was to be a human being. Socrates conceived it his personal mission to convince others of their ignorance so that they might better search for a knowledge of how life should best be lived.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 5