Читать книгу Philosophy and the Social Problem - Уилл Дюрант - Страница 10

THE cultural representatives of this individualistic development were the Sophists. These men were university professors without a university and without the professorial title. They appeared in response to a demand for higher instruction on the part of the young men of the leisure class; and within a generation they became the most powerful intellectual force in Greece. There had been philosophers, questioners, before them; but these early philosophers had questioned nature rather than man or the state. The Sophists were the first group of men in Greece to overcome the natural tendency to acquiesce in the given order of things. They were proud men—humility is a vice that never found root in Greece—and they had a buoyant confidence in the newly discovered power of human intelligence. They assumed, in harmony with the spirit of all Greek achievement, that in the development and extension of knowledge lay the road to a sane and significant life, individual and communal; and in the quest for knowledge they were resolved to scrutinize unawed all institutions, prejudices, customs, morals. Protagoras professed to respect conventions,[6] and pronounced conventions and institutions the source of man’s superiority to the beast; but his famous principle, that “man is the measure of all things,” was a quiet hint that morals are a matter of taste, that we call a man “good” when his conduct is advantageous to us, and “bad” when his conduct threatens to make for our own loss. To the Sophists virtue consisted, not in obedience to unjudged rules and customs, but in the efficient performance of whatever one set out to do. They would have condemned the bungler and let the “sinner” go. That they were flippant sceptics, putting no distinction of worth between any belief and its opposite, and willing to prove anything for a price, is an old accusation which later students of Greek philosophy are almost unanimous in rejecting.[7]

The great discovery of the Sophists was the individual; it was an achievement for which Plato and his oligarchical friends could not forgive them, and because of which they incurred the contumely which it is now so hard to dissociate from their name. The purpose of laws, said the Sophists, was to widen the possibilities of individual development; if laws did not do that, they had better be forgotten. There was a higher law than the laws of men—a natural law, engraved in every heart, and judge of every other law. The conscience of the individual was above the dictates of any state. All radicalisms lay compact in that pronouncement. Plato, prolific of innovations though he was, yet shrank from such a leap into the new. But the Sophists pressed their point, men listened to them, and the Greek world changed. When Socrates appeared, he found that world all out of joint, a war of all against all, a stridency of uncoördinated personalities rushing into chaos. And when he was asked, What should men do to be saved, he answered, simply, Let us think.