Man the Measure
5. Doing it Ourselves
Protagoras may choose to put more backbone into his account than this, but from a different direction. He can see conversation, the pre-sentation of words, as an activity with political and practical impli-cations. Words are deeds, and the deeds can be successful or not in a different dimension from any associated with logos. They have effects, both intended and unintended. They can be useful. In the social world they can seduce and offend, and sway law courts and mobs. So there is a dimension of success and failure, but it has nothing to do with hitting the bull’s-eye of truth. It has to do with achieving our ends, such as maintaining friendly relations with our fellows, or bending them to our wills. This is in fact what Plato’s most notorious opponents, the Sophists, thought, and it is the seed of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. It is also the seed of one signifi-cant movement in our approach to history. It makes a lot of differ-ence whether we think of the writers we regard as spokespersons for a culture as trying disinterestedly to say how things are, or whether we see them merely as deploying words as tools in particular contests and conflicts. This is the difference between the ordinary approach to people’s sayings, and the Soviet Union’s approach described in the last chapter.
On this line a poor remnant of the norms we talked about might still remain, a pallid, ghost-like remainder of a more full-blooded notion of correctness. For within a like-minded group deviations from some responses can provoke hostility. Walking around the mar-ket place, Protagoras need not be surprised at the phenomena of human disagreement. Rejection and exclusion await the maverick – that is, someone who is the equivalent of the navigating calculator or the person with the differently trained palate or the unusually horny hands. These rejections and exclusions can be voiced, and the appro-priate vocabulary will be exactly that of right or wrong, rational or irrational, true or false. But if this is how we think of ourselves, man remains the measure, and the clouds of relativism still lower over us.
All responses are indeed of the same status, so far as authority and
reason are concerned. It is just that some commend themselves to our fellows, while others do not. Or, in a wider landscape, some enable us to cope better than others. But none has the stamp of truth, or unique accord with the way of reason.
This relativist can reinject standards into the world, regaining a pallid substitute for logos. He can say that there is not just the end-less variation of subjectivities. There is in addition the possibility of endorsing and grading responses: there is agreement and disagree-ment, and the human activity of awarding marks from zero to 100 per cent. This will sound like a concession to absolutists. But the kicker is that this is ‘just us’, just one of our responses. Among our responses, says this Protagorean, there are responses to the responses of others, and especially our ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’ responses. But don’t think that these responses escape the variation of subjectivity. They are the creatures of happenstance and contingency, evolution and culture, just as much as how things taste or how things feel, or which art looks good.
To see how this would play out, let us return to the image of human beings as instruments. We noticed that even a lens that gives cloudy or what we would call distorted results is obeying the same optical laws as any other. But surely we can call it faulty? On this line, indeed we can, but that is simply relative to our own practices of endorsing and grading. It is no more faulty in itself than a mountain that stands in our way is at fault for doing so. If our aims changed it might be just what we wanted, just as soft-focus lenses are required for some kinds of portraiture.
The set-up now is delicate. The absolutist feared the bleached-out world of endless variations of subjectivity, with no ‘oughts’ visible.
He held out for standards and norms, proper and rational judgements and arguments, better than their disreputable opposites. And now, under pressure from the moving bull’s-eye problem, the relativist seems to have thrown in the towel, admitting some notion of success and failure, some standards and norms governing what to say. But then he snatches the towel back, by adding that it is just us.8These norms are of our own making. It is contingent and potentially vari-able whether we adopt them or impose them. They are one more
expression of our subjectivities. And now the absolutist will complain that he wanted bread but has been given stones. He wanted real norms, real standards, real objectivity and real truth, and is given only a fake. Like Plato, he wanted the light of the sun, but he is given only that of a man-made lantern.
Here is an example of this argument at work in the history of philosophy. Ancient scepticism, as we have seen, relied heavily on the argument from the variation of subjectivity. When this sceptical tradition was rediscovered in Europe, at the end of the sixteenth cen-tury, it was rapidly realized that scepticism needed not only the fact that subjectivities vary, but also the view that each different subjective response was equally ‘good’. However, critics complained, we can easily privilege some subjective responses above others – the impres-sions of those whose constitutions are sound as opposed to those who are sick, for example. So, at a stroke, the sceptic or relativist is silenced.
Unfortunately, this is convincing only if the sceptic is silenced in the right way. But here is the seventeenth-century French philosopher Gassendi:
who can be certain that the constitution that you call unsound gives rise to appearances that are less true than the ones framed by the constitution you consider legitimate and sound? Just as there are certain mad people who see things more clearly than those of sound mind, so those whose constitution departs from the normal pattern perhaps perceive things more clearly and truly than others.9
In other words, from the absolutist point of view, the problem is not that of finding some criterion for privileging some impressions above others. The problem lies in supposing that whatever criterion we hit upon is the right one. The absolutist wants it to be that of reason properly attuned to the world, that of logos itself. Otherwise, he com-plains, we are just making it up as we go along. It would be like declaring that the true position of the rainbow is where it is seen as being when viewed from the garden gate. It might give us a decision;
but it is not giving us a discovery.
Let us sum this all up by saying that the absolutist wants a special
validation, an independent seal of authority attaching to his opinions, which we have called logos. And the relativist claims that logos is silent: the absolutist’s cherished authority is a fantasy. There is no such authority. All opinions are equal in the sight of logos. None is required by this alleged authority, and none is forbidden. There is no such thing as asymmetrical standing whereby my opinion gets more marks from logos than yours. But the relativist is happy to offer a substitute: a socially constructed, contingent, situated parade of words such as ‘rational’ or ‘true’. They signify a propensity to criti-cize each other that is itself an expression of our subjectivity. And predictably, this talk of norms will sound, in absolutist ears, like a monstrous parody of the real thing.
We might compare the difference between Plato and Protagoras to that between two attitudes to justice and law. The tender-minded absolutist respects the majesty of the law. He may not literally think in terms of God’s laws, but he does think of justice as almost divine, and in his mind human institutions such as law courts are altars to this divinity. He thinks in terms of a rigid set of laws of behaviour, an independent set of demands to which human beings and human societies must conform. Compared to this standard our own institu-tions and practices often fall short, but it is our duty to improve them until they become the best approximation we can manage to the ultimate true standard.
The relativist, tough minded as ever, mocks the ideology, what the Germans call a Begriffshimmel, or ‘concept heaven’, in which the immutable relations between rights, duties, justice and truth hold their eternal sway. He sees only human institutions, ways of coping with social mess, patchworks and fixes and compromises, some of which prove useful, some of which break down, all of which have in principle a lifespan which depends on us and the problems we meet.
The relativist would not be surprised by a Lord Hutton, whereas the absolutist would be outraged.10 The relativist would be happy to think that final legal authority rests with some sovereign, human, lawmaking assembly, such as Parliament. The absolutist will hold that when Parliament tramples on rights and transgresses against the moral truth, for instance by denying people the right to due process
as contemporary parliaments in Britain and America are happy to do, its edicts are no laws at all, but only the commands of a gang that happens to have gained power.
I suggest that we can all understand the relativist attitude to law, whether or not we sympathize with it. Even if, with the absolutist, we worry whether it is in the end bleak and cynical, we are hardly likely to think it is self-refuting. Indeed, in the modern world from which God is markedly absent, we may have difficulty thinking any other way. What kind of reality could ‘laws of justice’ be supposed to have, if they are neither God’s commands on the one hand, nor those of human beings on the other? These seem to exhaust the alternatives, so if we lack the first we must put up with the second. This is the problem of the status of law. The absolutist is holding out for some-thing very grand, but while we may vaguely imagine such grandeur somewhere else, in a Begriffshimmel or Plato’s heaven perhaps, we find it hard to discover it here on earth. But it is here on earth that we conduct our lives.
Now it is easy to understand Protagoras’s position. Think of him as simply extending this view of law beyond the world of courts and judges to include laws of reason and right judgement across the board, covering our science and history as well as our laws and our norms of behaviour.
While this example may be useful, it may also make it sound as if, provided we are theists, accepting the existence of a deity, all is plain sail-ing for the absolutist. Justice is God’s command. But it is well known that this is only a stop-gap, since it is very hard to understand how some-thing could become true just simply by being commanded, however powerful or frightening the being that commanded it. A just practice would be commanded by a just deity, no doubt, but that throws the question back on to why we suppose our deities are just, and whether that judgement in turn could be more than an expression of our own subjectivity. Indeed, the vengeful and jealous and fearsome monotheistic deity seems very obviously to be exactly that.11So it is plausible to say that the boot is on the other foot: we think of a deity in this connection simply in order to flesh out and embody our longing for absolutes. We explore this idea further in connection with Nietzsche, in chapter 4.
We have learned, then, that the canny relativist must avoid simple formulations, such as the one Rorty provided, or the one Putnam considered. If these formulations are true, then they are false, which means that they are false – that is, they refute themselves. But we have suggested that this is not quite as devastating as it seems. The rela-tivist can retain the spirit of his position without having to expose himself to the judo-flip. He does so by pouring cold water on the idea of reason as a kind of divinity, an external or alien authority guiding our minds. For this he substitutes rules of our own making, ways of carrying on which we privilege, perhaps only at particular places and times.
In the same way, he sidesteps the problem of the moving bull’s-eye, by allowing in some socially constructed standards, something less than the absolutist’s real thing. Logos is silent, and all opinions what-ever are logos-symmetrical, but we have a serviceable substitute, he suggests, in norms and standards of our own making.