Plato may be one of the most famous Greek philosophers in history, but his way of thinking did not represent all Athenian intellectuals who populated that Mediterranean power during the 5th century BC. C. Protagoras, the best known of the sophistic philosophers, embodies a way of understanding reality diametrically opposed to that defended by the disciple of Socrates.
In this article we will see what characterized the philosophy of Protagoras and what his way of thinking was based on relativism
This well-known philosopher was born in Abdera, in northern Greece, although he traveled a lot, something typical of men with an intellectual profile who lived during the era of Hellenic splendor. At the time when Pericles led the city-state of Athens, Protagoras was his advisor and advisor, and even, at the governor’s request, he drafted the constitution of a Greek colony.
Having lived so long ago, not much is known about the personal details of his life. His intellectual positions are known, given that Plato spent a lot of effort refuting his arguments in his books as we will see.
The relativistic theory of Protagoras
The fundamental and basic aspects of the theory of Protagoras, based on an explicitly relativistic way of thinking are the following.
1. The function of philosophy is not to access absolute truths
Protagoras believed that every statement is conditioned by the context in which it is issued. This means that it cannot express universal truths in words, since it is always limited by the time and place in which it was generated, either by the lack of information about something or by the lack of objectivity of the person who supports the statement, who is often personally and emotionally involved in the debate.
Similarly, context also affects how the statement is interpreted, and can have completely opposite meanings depending on where it is used.
2. There are as many points of view as there are people
Each human being sees things in their own way, given that our past and our life trajectories are unique and clearly distinguishable from the rest. When faced with the same topic of discussion, it is always possible to find many people who have a different opinion than everyone else. Although we look alike, we tend to differ in many ways.
3. What is true is decided by each person
From the above it follows that there are many truths valid for certain people and not so much for others, and that cannot be avoided no matter what we do.
4. Philosophy must convince
Since we cannot agree on absolute truths, the philosopher’s task is to make the ideas he defends sound convincing, not that they are (since we cannot imagine something that is universally valid, which for Protagoras would imply that it is valid for everyone.
Thus, the intellectual must think more about the effects of making a statement than in the veracity of that statement. This will make the speech being defended seductive and attract the sympathies of many people.
The role of sophist philosophers
The previous point is something that a type of philosophers called sophists shared. The sophists were advisors and counselors who They trained the most influential men in Greece in the art of rhetoric, which made a lot of sense in Athens. In this city-state, democracy consisted fundamentally of knowing how to defend certain ideas in assembly, which is why a large part of intellectual life was oriented towards politics.
Thus, Protagoras and many other sophists took advantage of this form of government to teach the most useful techniques of speech and prosody, capable of making a bad argument seem good in the eyes of others.
This was highly criticized by both Socrates and his disciple, Plato, since both believed in the existence of universal truths. The implications of Protagoras’ work were to say that behind reality there is no universal structuring truth of everything that exists, just certain ways of arranging ideas and words to make them sound good and fit with one’s own way of thinking. Hence this intellectual position is called relativism: everything is relative and only opinions matter (or, more accurately, both opinions and who holds them).
Nowadays relativism still exists, although the sophists disappeared with Ancient Greece. The defenders of this current in the 20th and 21st centuries are fundamentally defenders of the postmodern conception of reality, according to which it must be recognized that there are different stories about what exists and these must coexist.
