| Deals
and Ideals: Introduction, continued |
| Chapter
1 |
Two
Concepts of Nature, and Two Concepts of Reason
The Sophists, Plato and Natural Law, Continued |
|
The particularism
of the self-destructive Protagorean relativism was an attempt
to avoid such recognition. Relativism is perennially socially
successful among resourceful and enterprising classes, because
of its reductionist version of naturalism, the celebration
of human nature as individualist, competitive, aggressive
and acquisitive. If such an attitude, which is what is popularly
understood by "cynicism", is adopted by a ruling class it
will lead to an anarchism from above (for instance, what Engels
called "anarchy of production"). Individuals of dominated
and exploited classes may respond with suspicion and self-defence,
in an anarchism from below, which is only its mirror image
and which is also popularly known as cynicism. Callicles and
Thrasymachus are representatives of these two positions. It
is important to distinguish both those positions from the
original philosophical Cynicism of Diogenes and his followers,
which was suspicious of the reality of power (for instance
that of Alexander) but not of the idea of justice, and which
contributed to the foundation of Stoicism. It is also important
to distinguish them from the philosophical position of ethical
and communitarian anarchism, of which a leading representative
today is Noam Chomsky.
|
| In the
conflict between the followers of Socrates and the Sophists
competing views of nature, and hence versions of naturalism,
were opposed to each other with great clarity. In regard to
the Sophists I take Guthrie's history as authoritative and as
giving both sides of the pro- and anti- Sophists debate. No
one sophist held all the views generally attributed to sophism,
but I am following Plato in seeing Callicles in the Gorgias
as typifying a possible extreme logical development of basic
views shared by many of them, and widely current in Athens at
the time, being given full sympathetic expression by writers
such as the radical historian Thucydides and hostile expression
by the conservative comic dramatist Aristophanes. |
| Sophistic
naturalism was relativist and individualistic, making the immediate
particular arbitrary whim of any individual human mind or any
social convention the measure of truth and value. The opposing
spiritual dialectical enlightenment was communal, seeing a universal
rationality common to the divine and the human mind as the measure
of truth and value, and a potential source of total harmony.
Sophistic moral relativism is the theory that all morality is,
not contingently or in fact, but necessarily or in principle,
an expression of will or power, by which every "individual"
secures her or his own "interests" against those of others.
The Sophists saw rules of justice as a convention imposed on
others by each of us, as the means of gaining our own pleasure
and avoiding harm from others. Protagoras claims in Plato's
eponymous dialogue that the source of politics is Prometheus
the bringer of technology, and that its instrumentalist function
is a substitute for the animals' teeth and claws. |
| The
Sophists' radical interpretation of nature in general as raw
and primitive stuff, which needs to be improved by art (that
is, technology) led them in the case of human nature to an atomistic,
mechanical and almost socio-biological view of human nature,
and an instrumental view of reason as serving the passions by
the social engineering of articles of convention. They claimed
that that was being rational; that they were seeing nature as
it is, and not as it allegedly ought to be or could be; they
were being what Max Weber called "disenchanted". In fact, however,
their view of nature was a reductionism which forced human nature
into a Procrustean bed. They represented it as a manifold of
finite beings competing for pleasure, possession, domination,
in which the stronger individuals rule and, according to nature,
should rule. Thucydides's account of the Athenians' Realpolitik
attitude to the Melian delegation which came suing for mercy
expressed their view succinctly: of the gods we believe, they
said, and of men we know that the stronger rules and the weak
submit. Men bargain about justice only when their forces are
equal. We did not invent this law, we found it in nature, and
we expect it to go on forever; that is why we apply it. You
would do the same to us if you had the power. So they massacred
the men of Melos, sold the women and children into slavery,
and later colonised the deserted island. The story of Gyges's
ring is an ideological justification, an apologia, for their
view: Gyges breaks the conventions because with a magic ring
he can do so with impunity; his murderous behaviour is a paradigm
not only of natural but of rational behaviour. For the Sophistic
approach, the question "Why should I be moral?" could only mean
"What's in it for me?", "What's the deal?"; that is, show me
that it's worth my while, a bargain in terms of pleasure, money
and power, or at least survival; the word pleasure could stand
as a generic term for all of those, meaning "what I want". While
Aristotle's genial analysis of the concept of pleasure in Book
X of the Nicomachean Ethics solves problems which Plato's more
moralistic concept of pleasure did not, I think there is still
a case for distinguishing pleasure - for example, the pleasantness
of the sugar coating on a pill - as a "perceived" good which
is frankly subjective, particular and relative, from the good,
values and ideals, which - like the medical qualities of a pill
- are claimed to be objective, and are made the basis of putatively
rational and universal claims. However unpleasant a pill may
be without a sugar coating, it is valued and recommended universally
as good, for its capacity to bring well-being. The equivalent
distinction in disvalue is that between a mere nuisance and
an injury, harm or damage. The Sophistic (like the Hobbesian
and the Benthamite) answer to the question "Why should I be
moral?" assumes a theory of reason as serving brute nature,
seeing both nature and reason as confined to the manifold of
particular finite realities, related to each other as values
only in terms of pleasure and pain, and of exchange or retribution.
Polemarchus in The Republic expresses it well: justice is doing
good to your friends and harm to your enemies. Bribery and intimidation
is the basis of politics as negotiation, lobbying. It sees rules
of justice as a convention imposed on each other by each of
us, as a means to gaining our own pleasure and avoiding harm
from others. The reductionist unity imposed by the Sophistic
theory of human nature is a distorting mirror image of the kind
of unity sought by dialectical reason; it is a very blunt Ockhamite
razor, used with Procrustean intent. It reduces explanatory
principles to one, in this case a biological law of force: "the
stronger rules". |
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