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 a situation accurately or inaccurately, suppress or stimulate argument. Socrates encouraged his fellow citizens to embrace the higher functions of language because it is only by using descriptive and argumentative language that they can be said to be Homo sapiens.
The purpose of Socratic dialectic is to move knowledge outward to objective definitions and inward to the inner person. Socrates searches for truth through argumentation and he presupposes an ability and willingness to work with the rules of logical validity. His project is based on the famous motto: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’ and it owes much to the unique individual who was Socrates. Short of stature with a strutting gait, he was by all accounts an ugly, urbane, even-tempered man who loved debate, a good dinner and plenty of wine. Plato describes him as indifferent to pleasure and careless of dress, morally courageous as he was physically courageous on the field of battle, and intellectually honest. He surprised his colleagues by his powers of physical endurance and could stand for hours, apparently lost in philosophical thought: the most famous instance was when serving in the army and he amazed his comrades by standing as if in a trance for a day and a night.
He delighted in engaging unsuspecting youths or retired military officers in conversation and quickly discovered that they did not know of what they spoke. When they used such words as ‘justice’, ‘courage’ or ‘love’ he would interrupt them with the question: ‘But what is ‘courage’?’ His interlocutors would give examples of Athenian courage, Trojan courage or Spartan courage and again Socrates would interrupt them: ‘I did not ask you for a laundry list. I asked you for the meaning of ‘courage’.’ The usual response to such a challenge was for his interlocutors to offer a definition which Socrates would throw back at them with the comment: ‘But this leads to an infinite regress since you have to define every word in your definition, ad infinitum.’ The Platonic dialogues show us this dialectical procedure in action and it is clear that Socrates controls the discussion because he asks unanswerable questions about the meanings of words. Indeed, he seems never to have accepted any answer to the question: ‘What is the essential meaning of a moral concept?’
After encountering Socrates, debating, dining and getting drunk with him, the Athenian youths ran into difficulties with their parents. By arguing incessantly about the meaning of moral concepts, Socrates showed the sons of rich and powerful parents that they, and their parents,