The Subjective Materialist Doctrine of Protagoras

Anaxagoras, Democritus, Protogoras, and Empedocles held their opinions because they they thought, ’that which is’ was identical with the sensible world.

But physicality has largely the nature of the indeterminate.

Therefore, they speak plausibly.

But they do not say what is true.

They saw that all this world of nature is in movement and changes from which no true absolute statement can be made.

So they said that:

• everything is changing
• yet nothing could truly be affirmed

The Heracliteans, as Cratylus, held the most extreme of this belief.

who finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger, and

He criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river.

He believed that you cannot even step into a river once.

I understand why they say that the changing does not exist when it is changing.

But this is disputable.

This is because:

• that which is losing a quality had that quality which is merely being lost
• that which is gaining a quality already has a scope for that quality.

A thing that perishes means it has existed.

A thing that is coming to be, means it has a cause.

These processes cannot go on ad infinitum.

It is not the same thing to change in quantity and in quality.

Grant that in quantity a thing is not constant; still it is in respect of its form that we know each thing.

It would be fair to criticize those who hold this view for asserting about the whole material universe what they saw only in a minority even of sensible things.

For only that region of the sensible world which immediately surrounds us is always in process of destruction and generation; but this is-so to speak-not even a fraction of the whole, so that it would have been juster to acquit this part of the world because of the other part, than to condemn the other because of this.-And again, obviously we shall make to them also the same reply that we made long ago; we must show them and persuade them that there is something whose nature is changeless. Indeed, those who say that things at the same time are and are not, should in consequence say that all things are at rest rather than that they are in movement; for there is nothing into which they can change, since all attributes belong already to all subjects.

“Regarding the nature of truth, we must maintain that not everything which appears is true; firstly, because even if sensation-at least of the object peculiar to the sense in question-is not false, still appearance is not the same as sensation.-Again, it is fair to express surprise at our opponents’ raising the question whether magnitudes are as great, and colours are of such a nature, as they appear to people at a distance, or as they appear to those close at hand, and whether they are such as they appear to the healthy or to the sick, and whether those things are heavy which appear so to the weak or those which appear so to the strong, and those things true which appear to the slee ing or to the waking. For obviously they do not think these to be open questions; no one, at least, if when he is in Libya he has fancied one night that he is in Athens, starts for the concert hall.

And again with regard to the future, as Plato says, surely the opinion of the physician and that of the ignorant man are not equally weighty, for instance, on the question whether a man will get well or not.-And again, among sensations themselves the sensation of a foreign object and that of the appropriate object, or that of a kindred object and that of the object of the sense in question, are not equally authoritative, but in the case of colour sight, not taste, has the authority, and in the case of flavour taste, not sight; each of which senses never says at the same time of the same object that it simultaneously is ‘so and not so’.

But not even at different times does one sense disagree about the quality, but only about that to which the quality belongs. I mean, for instance, that the same wine might seem, if either it or one’s body changed, at one time sweet and at another time not sweet; but at least the sweet, such as it is when it exists, has never yet changed, but one is always right about it, and that which is to be sweet is of necessity of such and such a nature. Yet all these views destroy this necessity, leaving nothing to be of necessity, as they leave no essence of anything; for the necessary cannot be in this way and also in that, so that if anything is of necessity, it will not be ‘both so and not so’.

If only the sensible exists, there would be nothing if animate things were not; for there would be no faculty of sense.

Now the view that neither the sensible qualities nor the sensations would exist is doubtless true (for they are affections of the perceiver), but that the substrata which cause the sensation should not exist even apart from sensation is impossible.

For sensation is surely not the sensation of itself, but there is something beyond the sensation, which must be prior to the sensation; for that which moves is prior in nature to that which is moved, and if they are correlative terms, this is no less the case.