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Protagoras' Famous StatementAuthor(s): P. H. EppsSource: The Classical Journal, Vol. 59, No. 5 (Feb., 1964), pp. 223-226Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and SouthStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3295019 .
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PROTAGORAS' FAMOUS STATEMENT
MANIS
THE MEASURE of all things,of the things that are how theyare, and of the things that are not how
they are not" (pinto.n chre-mito-n
m'tron estin inthro*pos,t6.n
m"n 6nto-nho*s stin,
t6.nde ouk 6nto.n ho*s ouk
estin) - Protagoras.This statement, like many others of
comparable import, has suffered
egregiously at the hands of expositors.In the first place, they generally quote
only the first five words of the Greeksentence as though they embracedthe complete quotation, which theydo not. In the second place, they reg-ularly seem to miss the statement'smost likely meaning. They take no ac-count of the character of the works
this statement is said to have comefrom. Plato says (Theaetetus 161c)that it was stated by Protagoras atthe beginning of his work on Truth.
Sextus Empiricus says (Adv. mathe-matikos 7,60) that it was given at the
beginning of a work called Refuta-tions. Although neither of these worksmakes clear, as far as is known, justwhat Protagoras had in mind in mak-
ing this statement, they should never-theless receive consideration by any-one trying to determine what he most
likely meant.
Since the Greeks appear to have
been the first people we know of to dis-cover the fuller powers of the human
mind, they were the first to envision
theextensive part
man could accord-
ingly play in managing, changingand controlling his life and environ-ment. The Greeks very naturallytherefore made more of man and of
man's powers than any people priorto their time. It is little wonder, then,that man and his possibilities consti-
tute the chief subject of Greek litera-
ture. Man was, for the Greeks, the
paragon of all created beings, most
"fearfully and wonderfully made."This persistent emphasis of the
Greeks on man, on his precarious sta-
tus in the nature of things and on his
fearful possibilities has, at times,tricked religious protagonists and
even some scholars, over-anxious to
maintain exclusive dichotomies, into
asserting that the Greeks so idolized
man that their culture was anthropo-centric only. They strongly imply that
the Greeks recognized no higher be-ing than man. They further insist that
a genuine humanist can have no com-
merce in his thinking or writings with
any degree of theism. This erroneous
idea seems to have gained in preva-lence ever since humanism came to
be classified as a philosophy of life de-
void of all theistic implications. "Man
the measure of all things," even
though an ex parte statement, seemed
too convenient a handle for those eagerto derogate humanism as an a-theistic
philosophy to pass over.
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224 P. H. EPPS
There are passages in Greek litera-
ture which dwell on the indomitable
spiritand extensive achievements of
man. They occur in plays, and theyhave a dramatic import and signifi-cance which should not be forgottenwhen they are abstracted from theircontexts. The most extensive of theseare the long recital of man's accom-
plishments by Prometheus in Aeschy-lus' play by that name (436ff.), the fa-mous chorus in Sophocles' Antigone
(332ff.), and Theseus' statement in
Euripides' Suppliants (196ff.). But allthis praise and glorification of manand his achievements do not mean
that the Greeks considered man theultimate being of importance in the
universe, as interpreters of Pro-
tagoras' statement frequently imply.Greek writers from Hesiod throughPlato have too much to say about
gods, beneficent spirits, and evenabout an ever-watchful, all-seeing,
sin-avenging deity, not to be escapedor thwarted, for any one to claim legit-imately that Greek civilization was
anthropocentric only. It is true that
man, that strange mixture of goodand evil and of folly and wisdom, evenat his best, was the central visible be-
ing and enigma for the Greeks. Yet,as Livingstone reminds us (Greekideals and modern life, p. 154), God,as Pindar and others speak of him, is
always there - a remote, invisibleand mysterious presence in the back-
ground: a power with which man must
ever reckon.
Certainly Greek civilization was not
as deity-centered as the Hebrew was.
Yet this neither implies nor necessi-
tates that Greek civilization was man-
centered only. It was only more man-
centered than the Hebrew civilization
was. And we may well be grateful thatit was; for it is difficult to see how theGreeks could have initiated into the
world the many worthy things theydid initiate, if they had been as priest-controlled as the Hebrews were.To be correct, therefore, interpretersshould say only that Greek civilizationwas more man-centered and initiallymind-centered than Hebrew culturewas. In fact, it would be difficult tofind any literature of the pre-Chris-tian era, apart from the Old Testa-
ment, that is more deity-centered or
more replete with exhortations to a de-
ity-centered morality and moral liv-
ing than Greek thoughtand
literature.Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles and the
body of Socratic-Platonic teachingsand expositions make this clear.
It will help to keep one's thinking on
this subject within the limits of the
facts, if one will remember the generaldifference between the Greek and He-
brew method and approach to the God-
man problem. Simply stated, the Greeks
proceeded from the seen to the un-
seen (the inductive approach), where-as the Hebrews proceeded from the
unseen to the seen (the deductive meth-
od). As Livingstone correctly says
(ibid. p.154), for the Greeks, God was
the conclusion to which they were led
by their studies and investigations;but for the Hebrews, God was the
major premise from which they always
started, and everything was viewed
by them first of all from that premise.
This simple fact, if kept in mind, willdo much to help one keep these two
cultures in their proper perspectives on
this matter.
With these matters out of the way,
what does Protagoras seem most likely
to have had in mind when he declared
that "man is the measure of all things,
of the things that are how they are,
and of the things that are not how
they are not?"1 Interpretations willvary, of course. But was he not simply
stating the inescapably inherent sub-
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PROTAGORAS' FAMOUS STATEMENT 225
jectivity of all human knowledge and
thinking? Why may not that be all
Protagorashad in mind in this famous
statement-- just that, with all its im-
plications, and nothing more? He mayvery well have seen, through his logi-cal and metaphysical thinking, thatman was doomed in the nature of
things to be, as Sextus says,2 thecriterion for judgment in all that he
interpreted. Protagoras doubtless saw
that nothing - literally nothing - can
be understood by any person until it
has been interpreted and brought toterms, to some extent, with that per-son's mind, values and thinking; that
things had to be judged as good or
bad, beautiful or ugly, etc. to or for
man--i.e. from man's, and not from
some other creature's, point of view.How could (or can) it be otherwise?
The only mind, eyes, senses and per-ceptive powers man has or can have
to interpret anything by must inevi-
tably be his own personal ones. Hecannot see or conceive of things as
suprahuman or other-planetary beings
might. He can see more than sub-
human primates, but less no doubt
than suprahuman beings, if there be
such. Steak, for example, is good,from man's point of view, but cattle
could never be persuaded to agree. In
other words, man cannot escape, in
any situation or in any circumstances,
his finiteness and his limitations; andany judgment he renders is, and must
be in all cases, colored and influenced
by man's limitations and by his inter-
est and point of view. He cannot enter
into perfect or unconditioned empathywith another being, but only into a
humanly conditioned one. No matter
how hard man may try to project his
thinking and feelings unconditionally
outside himself, his interests andstandards and values go inevitablywith his projected thoughts and feel-
ings. All this is inherent in the natureof things. Yet few people really be-lieve that or act
uponit.
Protagoras,though, doubtless saw this clearly andstated it with this unusual clarity.
If this is all Protagoras meant by hiscelebrated statement - that, as far asman is concerned, everything must of
necessity be conceived and interpretedthrough man's senses and their inevi-table limitations - the intellectual cli-mate of Greece seems to have been
ripe at that time for such a statement
as this by Protagoras. For Gorgias, acontemporary of Protagoras, had al-
ready proved, we are told, in his
treatise On not being or concerningnature, (1) that nothing existed (ap-
parently as a pure, unconditioned, ob-
jective reality); (2) that, if it did, itcould not be comprehended (evidentlyby any living organism); and (3) that,if it could be comprehended, it could
not be communicated.3 Gorgias thus
seems to be saying that nothing existsor can exist objectively in this world;or if it does, man has no way of deal-
ing with it. Whatever of reality be-
comes known to any living organism,
including man, has to become known
to that organism through the fog and
mist, so to speak, of that organism's
limitations, values and response-capa-bilities. Therefore, by the time any
portion of what may have been genuine
reality becomes intelligible to a per-son, it is no longer pure, objective
reality but a modified version of it. In
similar fashion, if reality could be
comprehended in a pure, objective
form, the only means of communica-
tion possible for man would have cor-
rupted it by the time it became
communicated to man. Thus, while
Protagoras was stating the inherent
subjectivity of all human knowledge,Gorgias was stating the impossibilityof man's knowing anything in its pure,
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226
objective form. The two prounounce-ments complement each other.
If the above is a correctinterpreta-tion of Protagoras' notable statement,
and if the inevitable subjectivity of all
human knowledge is what and onlywhat he meant his declaration to con-
vey, then Plato must have misunder-
stood Protagoras, unless Plato's clear
dislike of sophists made him captiousabout the statement. However that may
be, if the above is what Protagoras had
in mind, he would have found it easy
to dispose of both of Plato's objections.When Plato asks (Theaetetus 161c)
why Protagoras did not make a swine
or a baboon the measure of all things,
Protagoras could have answered: be-
cause a swine or a baboon would have
to measure things only on the basis of
what they could perceive and think,i.e. only on the basis of subhuman
thoughts. But since man can see more
than a swine or a baboon, including all
that swine and baboons can see, andcan therefore measure things with a
more adequate subjectivity, to make a
swine or a baboon the measure would
mean the exclusion from a swine-
measured world of all that would be
encompassed in a human-measured
world. It would therefore be folly of
the first order to make a less percep-
tive creature instead of the most per-ceptive one the measure of all things.
In the samemanner,
when Plato
theistically proclaims in his latestwork (Laws 716c) that God, ratherthan man, should be the measure of
all things for man, Protagoras could
readily have answered: exactly so. Butwhat God? It would have to be God asman could best conceive him. That is
the only God man can know. Here too
man still remains the measurer. Thereis no escape. Man's conception of the
deity will grow and be refined, as italways does, even though the deity
may not. Even the Bible shows such
growth. So did the Greek conceptionof Zeus, their supreme deity, as can
be seen by reading the literature from
Hesiod through Cleanthes' majestic
hymn to Zeus. Thus Protagoras' state-
ment, as interpreted above, remains
true. Man must inexorably interpret all
things from the standpoint of man or
from his conception regarding thosethings. And man has no escape from
doing so. That, and only that, seems
to one person at least to be what Pro-
tagoras was trying to make clear in
his memorable statement.
P. H. EPPsUniversity of North Carolina
1 I have taken ho.s in this statement to mean"how," in the relative sense. This is contrary,as Kranz says (Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker[1959] vol.2, p.263), to Diels, who insists that ho.shere means "that, not how" (dass, nicht wie).How one can be so sure that any word as am-biguous as ho.s with a participle must meandass and only dass is difficult to see. This is espe-cially true with ho.s meaning "how" in the rela-tive sense, so well documented as it is in Liddell-Scott under ho.s, Ac. Moreover, as Kranz sanely
adds, only the rest of the context of Protagoras'statement, whatever it was, could make certainthe exact meaning of ho.s in this statement as ithas survived. The ancient commentators seem tothink that what Protagoras meant was this: how-ever anything appeared to a man, that was theway it was for him.
2 Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokrat-iker, vol.2, p.258.
3Diels-Kranz, vol.2, pp.279ff.