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Lesson 1.5: Relativity Theory
11 Plays2 months ago
Topics discussed:
- The Sophistic movement in general
- The traditional take on Protagoras
- Revisionary takes on Protagoras
- The psychodynamic reflections of Gorgias
- Prodicus' views on the importance of a good vocabulary
For more information, visit theluxuryofvirtue.com.
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Transcript
Socrates and the Peloponnesian War
00:00:02
Speaker
In the last lesson, I teased that we are now in the age of Socrates, and that is true. We are right smack in the middle of the Peloponnesian War, and that is a war that Socrates did fight in. However, before we cover Socrates, I did want to cover some other philosophical movements of the day that might help you understand Socrates a little bit better once we do get to him.
The Sophistic Movement's Influence
00:00:30
Speaker
A second reason why we are going to cover the Sophistic movement before we cover Socrates is that this movement, Sophism, was founded by a man named Protagoras. And as I've been researching for this class, I discovered some scholars believe that it might have been the case that Protagoras was actually a little more popular than was Socrates.
00:00:58
Speaker
And that gets you thinking about how it is that the way we write history, the way that we tell history, our shared intellectual history, has an effect of who we thought was kind of a bigger deal at the time, but at least during his lifetime or during their joint lifetimes.
00:01:16
Speaker
It might have been the case that Protagoras was just a little bit more popular and noteworthy than was Socrates. This is according to the sociologist Randall Collins, whose work I mentioned last time. And maybe part of this is because Protagoras was just a little bit older than Socrates, about 20 years older.
00:01:38
Speaker
So let's cover the Sophistic Movement in this lesson. I will cover a handful of Sophists. And well, let's talk about it. As I said, it is founded by Protagoras. And I wanted to tell you the overall branding of the movement. Now, it's not the case that everyone subscribed to this kind of thing, that every single Sophist engaged in exactly what I'm going to tell you the branding is.
00:02:04
Speaker
But in general, this was a sense that most people would get about what the sophists were all about.
Sophists' Teaching Methods
00:02:11
Speaker
So they were a bunch of traveling teachers. The label usually given to them is itinerant teachers. And importantly, they would charge for their services, right? This wasn't free. You had to pay to learn from a sophist.
00:02:29
Speaker
And if you're wondering whether or not you should buy their product, here's more or less what it would say on the box, right? They are concerned with personal development. That's what they're all about. And they will help you acquire the skills that lead to success.
00:02:46
Speaker
This set of skills might include several things, such as what is sometimes called abate, that translate to something like excellence. In other words, those virtues that will help you be excellent in some area of life.
00:03:03
Speaker
But the Sophists would also teach you how to be a persuasive speaker, right? That's very important for success, especially in a democracy where you can literally save your own life by giving a persuasive speech. We'll talk more about that in a second.
Humanism and Democracy
00:03:18
Speaker
But it seems that the Sophists were even teaching things like, you know, poise.
00:03:23
Speaker
and decorum. What that means is how to look the part of a successful person, how to make sure that you display the appropriate manners and the appropriate style of behavior.
00:03:37
Speaker
So that's the basic gist. In addition, I should mention that taken as a whole, it seems to be the case that there are some humanist and democratic elements in there. For example, it seems like perhaps a majority of sophists believe that humans are what ultimately give meaning to things, right? It's not necessarily the gods. There's a hint of agnosticism in several other sophists that we have information on.
00:04:07
Speaker
And so if it's not the gods that give meaning to things, it's humans. And so that would be humanism. That's what the label for that type of view is. And in addition to this, they seem to be pro the people, pro democracy. It's not that the elite get to decide what is good, what is bad, but all of us as humans, actually, quick asterisk there.
00:04:32
Speaker
It's really not all of us, it's actually males. right So this is still 400 BCE, right so we're not going to get a full egalitarianism between the sexes. But this is actually, you know in a way, a step in the right direction because many people at this time had strongly anti-democratic sentiments.
00:04:52
Speaker
And that has to do in part because of the war. But it's also the kind of culture that predominated in other parts of Greece, right? So the fact that the Sophists have some democratic tendencies and some egalitarian tendencies is worth noting.
00:05:11
Speaker
Now, were the Sophists actually true to their branding that they actually teach you the skills that you need to succeed?
Plato vs. Sophists: A Philosophical Clash
00:05:20
Speaker
Well, Probably some were and probably some were not true to the branding. So we do have some reports from people that lived through the Sophistic movement. ah Xenophon, for example, who was one of Socrates' students, said that they didn't really teach what they said they were going to teach. So he was definitely a critic.
00:05:43
Speaker
Plato, another one of Socrates' students, is generally antagonistic towards the movement itself, but there are some suggestions that there are some good sophists, right, or some better sophists.
00:05:56
Speaker
So again, in general, Plato's stance toward the sophists seems to be antagonistic. He portrays some of them as being mercenaries who are just out for money, and they don't care if society collapses because of what they teach, but at least some of them you could dialogue with. And so we have some examples of Socrates dialoguing with some of these sophists. That's where we get actually a lot of our information about the Sophistic movement.
00:06:25
Speaker
Speaking of antagonism towards the Sophistic movement, later philosophers, including Plato, would denounce Sophistic methods in general as having misled the people during a time of war. So during the Peloponnesian War,
00:06:43
Speaker
Athens was making decisions about essentially every major issue regarding the war through democratic means. In other words, people would vote on who the generals were, what the tactics should be, what the goals of the war are, right? So everything from grand strategy to who's going to put this plan into action.
00:07:06
Speaker
And so when you have a democratic republic like the one here in the United States, when the war goes poorly, well, you can in a sense blame the president or blame the party that's in charge during that time period.
00:07:20
Speaker
But when you have something like a direct democracy, as they did in Athens, who can you blame when the war goes south? right Eventually, the Athenians lose the Peloponnesian War. And even before they lose, a war that takes that long really wears down on society.
00:07:39
Speaker
We can see this even in the last 100 years. The Vietnamese War really wore down on American society, caused a lot of instability both here as well as horrible atrocities in Vietnam itself.
00:07:53
Speaker
The war in Afghanistan also took a very long time and it was very hard. Essentially, anyone that's ever invaded Afghanistan has had a very difficult time. That includes the British, the Americans, the Soviets. right Some people call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires.
00:08:14
Speaker
So any long war is going to have a lot of critics. And in Athens, where the people themselves would vote on how the war should be prosecuted, well, there's only one group to blame, and that is the people themselves. So many philosophers express a distaste for how people were voting and ultimately the reason why they voted in the way that they did was because they were persuaded by some very powerful speech. And who was teaching people to give powerful speeches?
00:08:45
Speaker
that's the Sophistic movement. And so eventually, the people turn against the Sophistic movement, or I should say more clearly, philosophers turn against the Sophistic movement. And perhaps the prime example of that is Plato himself.
00:09:01
Speaker
So just to give you a little timeline here so that you know that there is definitely a correlation here between choices being made in the Peloponnesian War by Athenians and the rise of the Sophistic movement, Protagoras lived from about 490 BCE to about 420 BCE.
00:09:22
Speaker
Now, he would have been in his prime right before the start of the Peloponnesian War, and he lived through at least the first decade of the Peloponnesian War. So if he was still out there, if he was still doing his teaching, it's easy to see how bad decisions might eventually get blamed on these sophistic methods.
00:09:44
Speaker
All right, so I'm going to get into some individual Sophists in a second. Here are just a couple of last little tidbits that might help you understand this movement in general. I've already mentioned that there were agnostics in the mix. Several Sophists tend to be somewhat skeptical about the traditional gods, traditional religion.
00:10:06
Speaker
Everyone that I'll be discussing today will have spent some time at least in Athens, even if they weren't originally from Athens. Part of that might have been for the following reason. So Athens had been growing in power and status, and that might have been in part because she was exploiting her allies, that alliance that was formed in order to put pressure on Persia.
00:10:31
Speaker
But nonetheless, Athens was rising in power. And in fact, it was this rise in strength that kind of inspired fears and the Spartans, they were thinking to themselves, well, if we're going to have to go to war with Athens, eventually, let's do it now before they get even more powerful.
00:10:50
Speaker
So in any case, Athens is becoming more influential, more important, and it is a democracy. So it might have been the case that there's a real demand for people who claim to be able to teach you how to speak persuasively. And in Athens, not only could this make or break your political career, but it might even actually you know help you survive. So I mentioned this earlier. There was a thing called ostracism in Athens.
00:11:20
Speaker
And essentially, if you are nominated for this ostracism and the assembly votes against you, you get pushed out of Athens for 10 years. And so the idea was to get rid of people that were bad for society, that had some kind of ill effect on the people.
00:11:41
Speaker
And you can imagine that in general, this was supposed to be good for society. You can get rid of some nefarious actors this way. If this thing were around today, you might get rid of some people who by and large seem to be more dividers than they are unitors.
00:11:57
Speaker
But this also is susceptible to misuse. So maybe some people just might be jealous of someone or someone is an inconvenient you know obstacle in their overall career trajectory. and So you just nominate them for ostracism and maybe get rid of them.
00:12:16
Speaker
So if this happens to you, being able to persuasively defend yourself, that might make or break you, right? Not only your career, but even your life because you might be exiled somewhere where you have no means and you might not fare well. And so into this context, the Sophists are showing up to Athens and they're happy to charge you to teach you how to speak.
00:13:07
Speaker
Okay, let's get into Protagoras now. I've already mentioned that Protagoras was born in around 490 BCE, which means that by the time that the Peloponnesian War began, he was too old to fight. As I already mentioned again, he was about 20 years older than Socrates.
00:13:28
Speaker
He was an itinerant teacher, that is, he traveled around selling his services. One interesting factoid that I found about Protagoras is that he would sometimes charge students what they thought his teachings were worth. In other words, he would go through the lessons, right you would go through the entire course, and then at the end he would say, here's what I want to charge you, but how about you just pay me what you think this was worth?
00:13:57
Speaker
And so that is a very interesting way of doing business. I should also add that he didn't always do that, but he did on occasion do that. His teaching method, actually, it's a little too close for comfort how similar it is to my teaching method, but he would write model speeches to defend both sides of an issue.
00:14:20
Speaker
In other words, if you're debating something like, oh, I don't know, should we take more colonies? Should Athens you know become even more of an empire and take more colonies? Well, he would write a speech for that position and then a speech against that position and you would be able to you know kind of see both sides of it.
00:14:41
Speaker
Not only would he write the model of speeches himself, he would have his students write some, he would make sure that they would defend both sides of the issue equally well, and that was the basic method that he would utilize. Now, this is sort of what I do in my regular face-to-face classes, so there is a risk here that I'm a bit of a sophist. I wasn't aware of this before, but now I have to wonder if I should redo my whole teaching style. Anyway,
00:15:09
Speaker
Once you see his teaching method, you quickly realize that some people would probably use these techniques for morally suspect goals. In other words, there might be some people who are taking his course in persuasive speaking simply to be able to manipulate others and gain political power, obviously. Any good tool, such as persuasive speaking, can be used for good or for bad.
00:15:38
Speaker
At the same time, however, and maybe this is biased the way I'm saying this, but you can see how this helps you be more even-handed when you're assessing a situation. If you can see both sides of an issue, you're being more thorough in your reasoning about the whole thing.
00:15:55
Speaker
And so, at least if you buy my defense of Protagoras' teaching methods, there seems to be both a benefit to this kind of course of persuasive speaking, this practice of creating model speeches on both sides of an issue, but there's also a risk there.
Protagoras' Relativism and Philosophy
00:16:15
Speaker
Given this risk, it's not surprising that some of his critics would say that he taught students how to make the weaker argument the stronger. What does that mean? It means that according to those that didn't like this method of teaching, he was simply teaching people how to argue for the bad position, the wrong position. By careful rhetorical tactics and manipulation, he would make you think that the view that is wrong is actually true.
00:16:47
Speaker
By the way, this criticism would eventually also get lobbed against Socrates himself, so perhaps this was just a common method for arguing against people who were known for their rhetorical skills. Two more tidbits about Protagoras here. He seems to have been somewhat agnostic about the existence of the gods, very interesting.
00:17:10
Speaker
And he also advocated for a free education, which is somewhat bananas given the time period. But before you say hooray for Protagoras, of course, this presumably only was for males. Again, this was 400 BCE.
00:17:31
Speaker
ah You're not going to find very egalitarian views about the genders yet, but it is interesting that, you know in the very least, he's advocating free education for males. No one else that I know of in this time period was saying something similar. Okay, let's jump into Protagoras' philosophical views. I will begin with the traditional take. This is what many historically had believed is the case with Protagoras, what his views actually were. ah Recently, however, some people have challenged the traditional view and I'll give you some of that in a second, but let's just go with the traditional take first. According to many scholars from the past, Protagoras is a global relativist. What this means is that there just is no objective truth
00:18:25
Speaker
There is truth for me, there is what's true for you, there is what's true for us, there is what's true for them, there is what's true for the scientists, and there's what's true for the creationists, and e etc., etc., right? This idea is taken from one of Protagoras's most famous fragments.
00:18:49
Speaker
It is usually summarized as just one sentence. Man is the measure of all things. What does that mean? Well, humans decide what's true. That is the traditional take on Protagoras, and he would find a way to convince you of this by, again, arguing both sides of an issue so you can say, well, I can see how this side is true, but I can also see how that side is true.
00:19:16
Speaker
Now, because we're going to focus on ethics in this course, I'm going to go over a revisionist take on protagonists because there are some very interesting ethical implications here. And also, because I do think that the revisionists, the people that want to say that's not exactly what protagonists was all about, I think they might be right.
00:19:38
Speaker
So here is a revisionist take. Let's begin with some problems with the traditional view. The traditional view is usually taken from a dialogue of Plato. It is called the Theatetus. And in it, the character Socrates, by the way, and most of Plato's dialogues, Socrates is always a character.
00:20:03
Speaker
And it is generally believed that in the early dialogues that Plato wrote, those are closer to what Socrates actually believed. And in the later dialogues, Plato was basically putting his own views in the mouth of Socrates. and In any case, in this one, we're sort of in the middle, so you know it could go either way. In any case, Socrates, the character,
00:20:28
Speaker
make some jumps about what it is that this little aphorism from Protagoras is all about. In other words, in this dialogue Socrates tries to tell us what Protagoras is all about and so I'm going to run that by you right now so you can see how it is that the traditional view came to be and why it might not be accurate. So In the dialogue, the characters begin by quoting Protagoras. Here is the line that they are referring to from Protagoras, quote, of all things, the measure is man. Of those that are the case, that and how they are the case. And of those that are not the case, that and how they are not the case.
00:21:15
Speaker
Okay, that is definitely a very loaded aphorism, a little phrase here that probably has a lot of meaning, a lot of metaphor built into it. And so there's very likely several ways to interpret it. But the way that Plato, or I should say Socrates in Plato's dialogue interprets it is to move from that claim that aphorism over to global relativism through a couple of steps. So basically, I'm gonna read it one more time here. Of all things, the measure is man. Of those that are the case, that and how they are the case. Of those that are not the case, that and how they are not the case. So there's definitely a sense of humanism here.
00:22:05
Speaker
If you deny that some things are a certain way, well, it's humans that get to decide why it is that they are that way. And if you deny that some things have a certain something about them, well, it's humans that are the ones that are denying this about those things.
00:22:23
Speaker
And we've already talked about how some people interpret the sophists as being the first humanists. But in the dialogue, Plato basically takes that quote and says, oh, I know what Bertag is just trying to say. He's trying to say that whatever we see, that's what's true for us, right? That's called perceptual relativism.
00:22:45
Speaker
Now, it might be the case that this inference moving to this conclusion is justified, but Socrates keeps moving to a more and more radical form of relativism as we go. So, he begins with a quote that I've already read twice.
00:23:02
Speaker
And then he says, well, that means that whatever seems to be the case for us is the case for us. So that means that whatever we think is true is actually true for us. And so that means that if we have some view about what's morally okay to do, then that view is actually true for us, right? That's called moral relativism. So whatever we think is good, that's what it actually is good for us.
00:23:30
Speaker
And then he goes from this all the way to global relativism. There just is no objective measure of anything. Whatever we think is true is actually true. And if someone else has a different view, that's actually true for them. And there you are once more in global relativism.
00:23:50
Speaker
What the criticism here is that it's not entirely clear that Protagoras actually believed that. In fact, the main source that we have for attributing this belief to Protagoras is this dialogue, which was written by Plato, who is in general hostile to the Sophistic movement. And it's not even Protagoras actually speaking in the dialogue, right? so There is a couple of questionable aspects here about this interpretation of Protagoras. And by the way, this is not just my interpretation. I'm pulling all this from a philosopher named Tezuko van Berkel. And he's the one digging deep into the fragments that we have from Protagoras and about Protagoras to try to discover what it is that he was all about. And so what was Protagoras actually about?
00:24:47
Speaker
I'm glad you asked. Let's move now into the ethics portion of the lesson where we can see more clearly perhaps what Protagoras might've been really thinking. So I'm gonna give you two interpretations of Protagoras, two new interpretations of Protagoras. And both of them will have separate ethical dimensions attached to them, right? Different ethical implications.
00:25:14
Speaker
Unfortunately, we will probably never know what Protagoras really believed, unless there's some new fragment discovered that says very explicitly what he was all about. Nonetheless, both of these interpretations are very interesting, since they lead to some what I think are enlightening ethical views.
00:25:36
Speaker
So the first interpretation we'll cover is from the aforementioned Tezuko Van Berkel. And according to Van Berkel, Protagoras is basically a subversive anti-aristocratic philosopher. So he is very much pro-democracy and ah against the aristocracy.
00:25:59
Speaker
And so what that means, essentially, is that during this time period, as I've already mentioned, lots of people were moving against democracy. They were generating arguments that said basically most people, the uneducated people, are the poor people,
00:26:16
Speaker
They don't have what it takes to reason well about politics. They also can't control their own emotions. They get manipulated by powerful of speeches. It's the case that we should really just let smart people, rich people, those should be the ones that actually get to vote. The people that know a lot about politics, only they should be able to have a say in politics.
00:26:41
Speaker
Protagoras was actually going against this view. He was saying when he said something like, man is the measure of all things, what he's saying is that humans, not the elite, not the aristocrats, but just generic humans,
00:26:56
Speaker
they ought to have an equal say in what happens in our society. He's essentially denying that the aristocrats have some privileged epi epistemic status. So some people would say, only the aristocrats know how politics actually works. And what Proteiber is saying is, well, and now I'm kind of you know being a little liberal here with my interpretation, but The aristocrats can't possibly know everything about politics because they only occupy one particular domain, society in general. In other words, if you want to really understand society from every single possible angle, you can't look at only the views of those that can only see from one angle.
00:27:46
Speaker
So the aristocrats, they see one side of society, but if you want a real complete perspective, well, you need those that are perhaps a little poorer or that are perhaps a little more pious, more religious, or perhaps also that are more so involved in athletics and that kind of thing, that aren't always preoccupied with politics. You need a wide swath of the population to really look at something because everyone is a measure of all things, right? It's not just the aristocrats that get to decide how much money is the right amount and how many colonies are the right amount and how many religious festivals we should have. It ought to be everyone because everyone has some sort of insight that they can contribute. to
00:28:37
Speaker
Now, these are very interesting ideas coming from Protagoras and more modern parlance. We might say that making political decisions requires a whole lot of information processing power. and And rather than limiting yourself to just one small sector of the population, you should expand it as much as possible so that you can get as many brains working on this information processing problem.
00:29:06
Speaker
Of course, Protagoras doesn't quite put it that way. I'm definitely reading into it at this point. But what I will say is that there is good evidence that he might have met something like this, that he might have had a subversive anti-aristocratic message.
00:29:22
Speaker
What Tezuku Vain Berkel did to establish this is he was basically looking at other uses of the word measure around the time period. And he found it in a couple of different places. One example is a poem by the poet Theognis, and the poem is called the elegiac poems.
00:29:43
Speaker
And basically what he found is that when they would use the word measure, it always had to do with the elite, with the noble. It would always say something like, the noble know how to observe the measure in all things. The nobles are the one that know how to control their emotions, right? They measure their emotions. So it might've been the case that Protagoras was using exactly that metaphor to go counter to that aristocratic message, right? That pro aristocratic message.
00:30:12
Speaker
And so the metaphor, which is actually very rich and deep, seems to have had a very pro-democracy message.
00:30:23
Speaker
OK, here is a second take on what Protagoras was all about. This one comes from Waterfield, whom i've I've spoken about before in this course. And on this view, Protagoras was more of a skeptic So we will actually do a very deep dive into skepticism in the next set of lessons. But for now, let's just have this definition of skepticism. Skepticism is a view that knowledge is impossible, that there are some things you just can't know, or maybe there's nothing you can know. So it varies in how extreme it is, but it generally has to do with a denial of knowledge, some kinds of knowledge.
00:31:04
Speaker
So on this view, here's what Protagoras was trying to get at when he would say, man is the measure of all things. What he is essentially is denying is that there is an objective measure, but that doesn't mean relativism. What that means is this. When opinions conflict, when you have a view about this policy that goes against my view,
00:31:32
Speaker
we actually can't know which is true. And that's specifically because there is no objective measure of things. I'm doing my best and I think policy A is a bad idea and you're doing your best and you think that policy A is a good idea. And so what are we supposed to do? Well, Protagoras is saying that there's actually no objective way to arbitrate between R2 positions.
00:32:00
Speaker
In other words, he's saying that there's just no way you can write one of the sides off. There's no moral superiority of one side over the other. One side isn't obviously the right one. It might be the case that intelligent people do disagree. And in a sense, neither one of them are wrong.
00:32:21
Speaker
And so what Waterfield does in order to figure out what Protagoras is suggesting here is that pulling from platonic dialogues, Waterfield thinks that Protagoras is something like a utilitarian. Now, let me explain that.
00:32:39
Speaker
He believes that sometimes our beliefs clash and you don't really know which one's true, but there might be a way to choose which one is better, not truer, but better. And that would be based on some kind of utilitarian analysis.
00:32:55
Speaker
In other words, one of these believes one of these views, either yours or mine, is better to believe, is better for us, or better for society. And in those cases, even if it's not truer than the other view, it's just better to believe in for society or for us as individuals. And so what you are pursuing when you are selecting between conflicting beliefs is basically some kind of social harmony But again, it's not that one view is true and the other one is false. Maybe they're both true, but one is just more useful, more helpful, more conducive to harmony. And that's how we should resolve our conflicts.
00:33:42
Speaker
If I had to choose between these two interpretations, i I kind of think I'd go with the first one. I think that Waterfield might be stretching a little bit, but that's okay. I think either way, Protagoras is actually much deeper than at least my teachers gave him credit for. I had teachers whose names I won't say were very anti the Sophistic movement and basically just use it as a punching bag during lecture.
00:34:12
Speaker
But I definitely think that after doing a deeper dive on Alex Protagoras, there is something valuable to be learned there. Let me give you a quote here from Waterfield that basically expresses my my sentiments towards Protagoras now. All the strands of his thought are interlinked and based on moderate sc skepticism. If we cannot be certain about the truth of a matter, then we are justified in arguing either side of the case.
00:34:42
Speaker
We are justified in agnosticism, and we are even justified in denying the possibility of falsehood. It seems likely to me that if more of Protagoras' written work had survived, we would be able to classify him more securely as a coherent and innovative thinker.
00:35:05
Speaker
Well said, Mr. Waterfield. To sum up, Protagris' ethical points that we looked at here, he seems to be telling us two things, right? if were If we're going to go with both interpretations. In the first interpretation, he seems to be telling us this. In some domains, maybe politics is a good example of this, we are all epistemic peers. What that means is that we all have access to the same bunch of knowledge And we all have the same processing power to deal with that knowledge. But it's so much knowledge that none of us can handle all of it at once. And so maybe the best thing to do is to treat each other as epistemic equals with the result being this.
00:35:54
Speaker
When you give your analysis, I should take it seriously. And when I give my analysis, you should take it seriously. Because we're both trying to deal with this big problem that no one person alone can really process. In a way, it's possible that we are both sort of true. And so we have to find a way to cohere our differing viewpoints. Since if we're both actually trying to understand the matter at hand,
00:36:23
Speaker
then we both have something valuable to add to the conversation. According to the second interpretation, Protagoras is a little more skeptical, and this also has an ethical implication. The main lesson we learned from this second interpretation is that when epistemic peers disagree,
00:36:44
Speaker
The solution might be somewhere in the middle. Rather than rejecting one or the other or both, it might be the case that neither one of them is false, neither viewpoint is false. And what you have to do is essentially look for the one that might produce more social harmony, the viewpoint that is just better to believe either for individuals or for society as a whole. And so again, it's not that one side is right and the other is wrong.
00:37:15
Speaker
It's just that we can't decide between them and we should opt for social harmony rather than to fight. I think those are deep thoughts here from Pythagoras and there's obviously something to be learned from Pythagoras and be applied to in our modern age.
00:37:34
Speaker
Just in the last couple of years, we've actually seen academic books, academic works being published that are against democracy. I'll just tell you about one of them. It's called Against Democracy, and it's published by Princeton University Press. And the general premise of the book is that a lot of people don't know about politics, and it's not entirely clear we should let them vote. Maybe we should only let those who are learned about politics actually make political decisions.
00:38:08
Speaker
But if we take protagonist's views seriously, at least on one of the interpretations that we covered, the realm of politics is a big, complicated mess. And although people like political scientists and people who study politics specifically might have a lot of knowledge about society and politics from one angle, there are many, many angles by which we can look at our political problems.
00:38:35
Speaker
And so by taking seriously the idea that other people, even if they can't pass a civics test, might have something valuable to contribute, then we are taking seriously some of Protagoras' arguments. Also applicable to our modern day is this idea that Sometimes neither one of us are wrong. If you disagree with me, it might be the case that neither one of us is strictly speaking wrong, but that maybe one of us has a view that is better for social harmony. And so instead of fighting, instead of saying you're wrong and we dig in our heels, we should instead think, okay, well, we can't agree on this. What would be better for society? Let's do that. Let's talk about that instead.
00:39:36
Speaker
Okay, I spent a lot of time on Protagoras and that's because he really is the flagship of the Sophistic movement. So everything we said about Protagoras could just as easily be said about the other Sophists we'll be covering. They are not necessarily mischievous thinkers who are trying to get money mercenaries who just want their paycheck and they don't care if society collapses.
Gorgias and Responsibility
00:40:05
Speaker
At least some of the sophists were, you know, thinking hard about tough subjects and we should not dismiss them offhand. So then let's move on to Gorgias or Gorgias. I've heard it pronounced both ways before. He was born in Sicily, which was allied to Athens during the Peloponnesian War.
00:40:28
Speaker
A fun little factoid here, he was taught magic by Empedocles, whom we covered last time. In any case, we do know that he did spend some time in Athens, and here is what we can learn from him, ethically speaking, and it has to do with when people are responsible for their actions.
00:40:50
Speaker
Much like Protagoras, he wanted us to give pause to our automatic judgments about the beliefs and actions of other people. Rather than immediately dismissing some person's opinion because it conflicts with yours, take a moment and think about why it is they think what they think. In one of the works that we have from Gorgias titled Helen,
00:41:18
Speaker
What Gorgias tries to do is figure out whether Helen of Troy is responsible for the war that was essentially fought in her name. Remember, the Trojan War is when Helen goes off with the handsome Prince Paris, and so the Spartan king who just lost his wife Helen to some Trojan wages war on Troy, and and so on and so forth.
00:41:47
Speaker
The question here is, is Helen ultimately responsible for these events? Well, typical for the Sophistic Movement, in the work, there is actually no definitive answer as to whether or not we should blame Helen. But what I want to cover is Gorichyas's arguments for why maybe we shouldn't automatically think that Helen is to blame.
00:42:15
Speaker
So here is a basic assumption that Gorgias makes, you should only be held responsible for those things that you have done and not for what has been done to you. So, you know, let's dig a little deeper here. What he means is that you should only be held responsible for those actions that you sort of and internally generated, those actions that you were thinking straight, your capacity to reason went through the different options and you chose one and you went with it. Those are the actions that you should be held responsible for. And in those other situations where your passions, right, your emotions, your mood, your feelings, when they're in the driver's seat,
00:43:05
Speaker
you shouldn't be held responsible for those because your emotions are too easily controlled by external influences, right? Even the weather puts you in a bad mood and that might actually affect your decisions and actions. And Protagric is suggesting something like, I'm not sure that we should hold people responsible for those actions that are done under the influence of the passions when they're very strong. So let's look at a quick example. Gorgias asks us to think about the following case. What if the gods influenced you with their powers, right? They did some kind of remote control on you and they made you do something hurtful to your best friend.
00:43:54
Speaker
Should we hold to responsible for these actions? Well, the gods were in the driver's seat and they are external to you. So it seems like, no, you aren't really culpable in the situation. If you agree with that, then Gorgias is gonna take you on a ride now. Okay, what if Paris, he was just so handsome that he essentially put a spell on her, on Helen, emotionally speaking.
00:44:24
Speaker
so that her passions were too stirred up and she couldn't think straight. And thus that's why she left with him. In this case, it was something external to Helen, that is Paris's beauty, Prince Paris and how handsome he is, that influenced her emotions. And then her emotions grew so strong that they drove her to abandon her Spartan King husband.
00:44:52
Speaker
Can we really blame her when it was external forces driving her decisions? Gorgeous is suggesting no. Now, I think a lot of people can relate with this. I actually remember a comedian once at a live show that I went to talking about how he was standing at the post office and he saw just such a beautiful woman, so beautiful, he couldn't even remember his name. And in those two minutes that he was there in line with her, he fantasized about their life together and how they're gonna get married and have kids and how they'll grow old and what they'll do.
00:45:40
Speaker
All of it without even saying a word to her. He basically fell in love with someone that he never uttered a word to. And for all I know, she never even looked at him. That's how crazy our emotions can make us. He was so in lust at the moment that he couldn't really think rationally. If he were to make a decision in that sort of situation,
00:46:09
Speaker
Do you really wanna say that it's really reflective of who he is as a person? It's not entirely clear. I mean, if you're even in doubt a little bit, that's the point that Gorgias is trying to make. What if you just heard a very persuasive speech? If you're in the grip, sort of speak, of this persuasive speech,
00:46:35
Speaker
can you really be held responsible for your actions? Gorgias discusses how powerful for speeches, they're sort of like witchcraft. They have a magic to them. And we can easily give contemporary examples of people that are sort of taken by some powerful speech and go do crazy things because of the speech.
00:47:01
Speaker
I mean, take your pick with regard to political activism from either the blue people or the red people. It seems to be that some charismatic leaders can incite action through their words. And what Gorgias is asking us to do here is to think about the power of these speeches. They are external to the listener.
00:47:27
Speaker
and they stir the emotions, they're designed to do that. That's what these politicians are trained to do, by the way. And so it's not entirely the case that you can hold these people responsible for what they do. At least that's what the suggestion is.
00:47:44
Speaker
I have one more here, one more thought here from Gorgias. And it's really, you know, throwing a monkey wrench into the whole thing. And that's why I love the Sophists, I think. They just kind of always do some kind of twist at the end. He even says, think about Helen herself. She was so beautiful. And think about warfare itself. It is so divisive.
00:48:10
Speaker
These two ideas together, Helen of Troy and warfare, are by their very nature, very emotionally arousing. Her beauty made it so that you really can't think straight about her. And warfare is notorious for dividing the people over whether they're for or against it.
00:48:32
Speaker
And so this means, according to Gorgias, that we can't even get accurate reports about Helen herself because when we're trying to even broach the subject, your emotions are already going in one direction or the other. So it is extremely hard to get an unbiased ah objective account about Helen of Troy. Maybe we can never be sure about this domain.
00:49:05
Speaker
Here is the punchline, ethically speaking, don't go with your automatic judgments.
Emotions and External Influences
00:49:13
Speaker
Try to be more reflective. And this goes both ways, right? Always be aware of how the environment might influence your emotions and how your emotions might influence your thoughts and judgments and actions.
00:49:28
Speaker
So always be mindful of how the external factors that surround you are influencing you, but also try to be mindful about how external factors influence others. So that maybe someone's behavior isn't reflective of their personality or their character, but it's just a circumstance of the situation they find themselves in. Two quick points that I want to make on this,
00:49:56
Speaker
Beginning in the 20th century, social psychologists have made a ton of discoveries about how it is that the external environment influences our actions, our thoughts, our judgments, our opinions, et cetera.
00:50:14
Speaker
There's a wonderful book called The Person and the Situation that, you know, I think it's from the 80s originally, but it is very useful as a quick survey of these experiments. It's dozens and hundreds of experiments. I mean, it is a well attested phenomenon that the environment influences us in measurable ways that aren't directly accessible to consciousness. In other words,
00:50:42
Speaker
The situation shapes what we think and what we do, and we don't even notice it. I'm sure that if Gorgias was around today, he would make ample use of these findings to try to get us to be more reflective about what we do, what we think about ourselves and others, and noting always that the environment plays a role. So that's point number one. Point number two is this.
00:51:10
Speaker
literally in the very next generation after Gorgias, we will see schools of philosophy and also spiritual movements, I guess you can call them, stress that we pay close attention to our emotions because once they flare up, they might mislead us and they might make us do things that don't align with our values.
00:51:36
Speaker
So the Sophists, even though they get maligned all the time, are clearly influential here in the history of
Impact on Later Philosophical Movements
00:51:45
Speaker
philosophy. and None other than the Stoics and the Epicureans will make many recommendations that resonate a lot with what the Sophists were saying.
00:52:27
Speaker
Let me close now with one last sophist, Pradikas. We know very little about Pradikas' life. We do know that he was probably fairly rich from his teaching, so he must have been fairly good at whatever it is that he was teaching. And we also get the general sense that he wasn't like some of the bad sophists, as I have tried to make clear,
00:52:57
Speaker
It's probably the case that some of the Sophists were a little like mercenaries. They were just trying to get cash. But at least some of them, like the two that we just covered, Protagoras and Gorgias, were quote-unquote good sophists. It seems that the very fact that Plato has dialogues where Socrates is talking with them, where Socrates is having conversations with them, suggests that they're not entirely out for the overthrow of the existing ethical order.
00:53:31
Speaker
They had views that maybe Plato ultimately disagreed with, but he wasn't as hostile to them as he was with some of the other sophists. Prodicus is part of this batch of good sophists, and I really like um two of his ethical pronouncements. Let me begin by discussing Prodicus's emphasis on the importance of a good vocabulary.
00:54:02
Speaker
He seems to have taken a special care to promote the careful use of words. He didn't like people using language in a sloppy way. He wanted the meanings of words to be consistent. In fact, he might've worked on the very first Greek dictionary. We don't really know, we don't have it, but he might've worked on it.
00:54:29
Speaker
But more than anything, he seems to have believed that if we use words precisely, carefully, this can only be good for us because this will help us get the facts straight. What kind of facts is he talking about?
00:54:49
Speaker
he seems to be discussing our sort of own self-talk, our own self-chatter. That's very interesting because the way to interpret this is he was looking for some kind of linguistic granularity. This is all very abstract. Let me give you a concrete example to sink your teeth into. This example comes from Galen. Galen discussed the work of Prodicus.
00:55:16
Speaker
And basically, Galen tells us this, one should have the vocabulary to be able to precisely describe the kind of pleasure one is experiencing. So in other words, there is a whole spectrum of pleasurable experiences. And if we have a very poor vocabulary, well, we end up describing everything as amazing.
00:55:42
Speaker
I bet you know people like this, that they don't have a very robust vocabulary. They basically use the same word to describe every good thing that happens to them, right? they They get a parking spot right next to where they're going. It's amazing. Or they just had some really good ramen, right? Oh, it was amazing.
00:56:06
Speaker
Or they just met the person of their dreams and are going to get engaged and they're going to get married. Oh, she's amazing. Or he's amazing. Or they just got their dream job. Oh, it's amazing.
00:56:22
Speaker
This person describes ramen, the love of their life, and their dream job all as amazing. That's slightly insulting, I think, to the love of their life to be compared, essentially, to a bowl of ramen. What you want is to be able to correctly assign levels to the kind of pleasure that you're experiencing. This is Prodigus' main message.
00:56:54
Speaker
two little points on this. One, the Stoics would be greatly influenced by this sort of idea, not that we know it if it comes directly from Prodigus, but the Stoics would say that if you exaggerate the language in which you frame the situation you find yourself in,
00:57:15
Speaker
then you will exaggerate the situation in your mind's eye. In other words, if you describe some headache that you have in a very histrionic way, in a very exaggerated way, well, then you will experience it that way. If you say it might as well be the case that an elephant is stomping on my head, that's how bad my head hurts.
00:57:38
Speaker
Well, then you are actually making it even worse. So you have to use words in a very careful way so as to properly describe it clearly. If an elephant were actually stomping on your head, you wouldn't be saying much of anything. So let's not blow things out of proportion.
00:58:00
Speaker
Okay, that's point number one. The Stoics would echo this very sentiment that Prodigus is expressing in a generation or so. The second point that I want to make is that, again, modern neuroscience backs up what the Sophists are saying. I'm thinking in particular here of the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett. She is one of the most cited cognitive neuroscientists around today.
00:58:30
Speaker
And in her book, How Emotions Are Made, she discusses the need for what she calls emotional granularity. She discusses how there are various different kinds of negative emotional states and positive emotional states. And if we describe every single negative emotional state as I'm depressed and every single positive emotional state as amazing,
00:59:00
Speaker
Well, we are living in a very emotionally impoverished world. You need to be able to differentiate different categories of negative emotions or negative feelings.
Prodicus on Religion and Morality
00:59:13
Speaker
It can't be just sad or happy.
00:59:16
Speaker
Depression is a real phenomenon and it is very serious. And it's probably the case that you shouldn't describe your condition as depression unless you know full well what the symptoms of depression really are. So with regard to negative emotion, I've seen people describe themselves as depressed when it really just seems like they were probably more so bored, maybe tired, right?
00:59:43
Speaker
I mean, they were just really exaggerating how their weekend was going. They just didn't plan very well to have positive experiences. It wasn't going as well as they thought it would go. And so they described themselves as depressed, but really, again, they just, you know, were probably a little bored. Let's look now at the positive end of the spectrum.
01:00:07
Speaker
Some people might describe themselves as feeling amazing when really they're just pleased or content. And that's okay, that's a good thing. But if you use words like pleased and content, that saves essentially the word amazing for more extremely positive events.
01:00:27
Speaker
delighted maybe as a step up and you can just kind of keep learning words that you can put on a spectrum from negative to positive and you can more carefully describe your own emotional state to yourself. This is for yourself. So you have an accurate framing of the situation you find yourself in emotionally speaking.
01:00:51
Speaker
Okay, let me move on to another ethical reflection courtesy of Prodigus. And let me preface this with a little bit of Prodigus' philosophy of religion.
01:01:04
Speaker
Prodigus is interesting in that he gave some early deflationary accounts of the origins of religious beliefs. Now, we have seen this before. We saw that Xenophanes basically said that we had this psychological intuition.
01:01:22
Speaker
to describe the gods in ways that are very similar to us. I think it was what the Thracians made the gods seem like Thracians, the Ethiopians like Ethiopians. If horses had gods, they would describe them as horses.
01:01:39
Speaker
So that's already one deflationary account of the origins of religious belief. Prodigus is going to give us another one. He claimed that humans basically just deified aspects of the natural world that were useful to them. So the sun is useful. The sun is a god. Rivers are useful. Rivers are gods. Rain is useful. The rain is a god, etc, etc.
01:02:07
Speaker
So he says that's how gods begin. And once you have the idea of a god, maybe you start adding more gods to the mix. For example, maybe really exceptional human beings from your past. Maybe they're gods, right? There is someone who was so good to the clan or the kingdom that we remember them very fondly and over time, their biographies get exaggerated.
01:02:33
Speaker
And next thing you know, they're a God. And so that's how gods enter the belief system of humans. It's either that some natural resource or some person was very beneficial. And this idea of how beneficial they are to the group just sort of balloons and and eventually turns into a conception that this must be a God. Now, this type of argumentation led to many people believing that Prodigus was an atheist may be the first atheist in Western history. Who knows? We're not even sure he was an atheist. We only know that people thought he was. Nonetheless, here is the ethical point I want to get to. Even though he probably maybe rejected the existence of the gods, he seems to have promoted religious belief.
01:03:27
Speaker
If the gods don't exist, why would he say people should believe in them anyway? Well, he thought that belief in the gods promoted good behavior and that this made for a more cohesive, more cooperative society. This is quite controversial, right?
01:03:51
Speaker
The gods don't exist, but you know what? Might as well believe in them because you'll be a better person. I've already mentioned one comedian in this lesson. There's also a joke by Patton Oswald, where he says that he doesn't care what people believe in.
01:04:09
Speaker
as long as it makes them a better person. That seems to be what Prodigus is teaching. And so it's not a blanket statement saying any religion is good. He's saying, at least those religions that promote good behavior, those ought to be endorsed and tolerated, even by atheists like himself.
01:04:33
Speaker
The reason why this is controversial is that we had earlier in this course talked about how getting rid of religious superstitions is good for people. You get rid of unnecessary fears about how it is that the world works and believing that thunder is God being angry and all of that. And I might have mentioned that In the Enlightenment period, the so-called Enlighteners thought it was a duty of theirs to try to get rid of superstitions in the population. According to these Enlighteners, we do well by attempting to quell the superstitious from their unsupported beliefs. That will be good for society to get rid of superstition.
01:05:25
Speaker
Enter Prodigus, he says, oh no. These superstitions, these religious beliefs help people behave well. And for that reason alone, we need them to stick around. What are you going to put in place of these religious systems if you take them away? They're needed to get people to behave well. If we want to reflect on this for a second, it seems like we need more research.
01:05:55
Speaker
Is there some kind of secular alternative that will get people to behave well? Or do people really need religious systems to behave well, to be good people? Is it the case that some people need this and others don't? How do we figure that out? These are all interesting conversations to be had and they are provoked by this idea from Prodocus.
01:06:25
Speaker
Let me move here to wrap up this lesson by discussing how we find that many of the ideas of the sophists actually do get backed up by contemporary science, namely psychology and neuroscience. In other words, ah findings in the sciences from the last hundred years or so actually back up some of what the sophists said.
01:06:54
Speaker
With regard to protagonists, social psychologists have shown us that if someone is from a different political camp, we often don't process the information that they're providing to us in the same way as when we process information of people of our political affiliation.
01:07:16
Speaker
So it really is a case that we automatically dismiss what they're saying if they're part of the other political team. And to reiterate, protagonists thought this dismissal was unjustified. When it comes to really complex domains, it seems like we ought to listen to everyone because exactly because they differ in their views from us,
01:07:44
Speaker
That's why they have a new perspective and more information to add to the attempted solution regarding the problem we're facing.
01:07:55
Speaker
Social psychologists have also discovered that the environment influences in dramatic ways that we are often not consciously aware of.
01:08:07
Speaker
This movement in social psychology is called Situationism, and it seems to jive with a lot of what Gorgias was saying, that the environment influences your emotions, your feelings, your mood, and that this in turn leads you to certain behaviors and judgments that you might've not engaged in had the situation been different.
01:08:35
Speaker
And it gets you to wondering whether or not we can really be held responsible for those actions that are dominated essentially by things that are external to us. Lastly, when we were covering prodigus, we wondered whether it's the case that having a robust vocabulary can help us deal with our day-to-day emotional events If we had more words for describing our negative emotions, we might not go to the top shelf descriptions right away, right? We might not say immediately, I'm depressed. We might say that we are displeased. We are bored. We are feeling lethargic or tired. There's all these other things that are along the way to a very strong mental condition like depression.
01:09:27
Speaker
The same goes for the positive side of the emotion spectrum. We shouldn't immediately go for, I feel amazing, but there's, you know, various steps along the way, pleased, content, happy. Prodigus also gets us to reflect on good behavior as being caused by religious belief systems.
01:09:51
Speaker
There are some scholars who make the case that religious beliefs do get us to behave better. In other words, those people who have their religious beliefs activated, so to speak, sometimes the language used here is the word primed. So those people who are primed to have religious thoughts just are more cooperative.
01:10:15
Speaker
One person, one social psychologist who works in this area is Ara Norinzayan. He has a book called Big Gods, which describes his research into this domain. And the main question for us is, is it the case that people need some kind of religious belief system to behave well? Do people need to believe in the gods or God to be good?
01:10:46
Speaker
Prodigus seems to have been firmly on the side of saying that religious beliefs are good for society, even though he himself probably didn't have any religious beliefs. Now, I don't know what the answer to this question is, but it's something worth thinking about. Maybe for some of us, religious beliefs are necessary for good behavior, and for others, not so much.
01:11:15
Speaker
I suppose that what we can say in closing is that if we want to behave well, if we want to thrive, if we want to have some kind of control over our emotions, it might not be unreasonable to learn a bit more about what psychology and neuroscience have to say about the mind, about human judgment, about behavior.
01:11:42
Speaker
This reminds me of that famous inscription at Apollo's temple at Delphi, know thyself. Perhaps science can be one of the tools that you use as you try to understand who you really are.