F. C. S. Schiller

“ Having abstracted from the personal maker of the judgment, he never noticed that errors do not exist as such until they are found out. A false judgment is in form indistinguishable from a true one, a self-contradictory judgment being unmeaning as expressed. Hence in dealing with errors no man can ever be simultaneously in a condition of both knowing and not knowing. While we maintain the ‘error,’ we judge it to be ‘true’; when we have discovered it to be an ‘error,’ we no longer affirm it. As critics we can of course perceive errors which others judge to be true. ”

“ Pedantry is the poverty of the soul, and like poverty it is always with us, while it is only occasionally that the human spirit rises in revolt against the dust-storms of finely comminuted knowledge with which it buries alive all originality and force. ”

“ And the connexion between it and a failure to solve the problem of Error is this: if the possibility of Error cannot be explained, there can be no ‘false opinion’: and if there can be no ‘false opinion’ then all opinions are true; but this was precisely what Protagoras had meant, according to Plato. Hence the Platonic inquiry is on its own showing in the awkward position of being bound to discover a tenable theory of Error in order to save itself from a relapse into a Protagorean ‘subjectivism,’ which it has itself rashly declared to be equivalent to an abolition of all truth. ”

“ The growth of Science and the application of Knowledge to Life are too stupendous facts to be ignored even in the seclusion of academic lecture-rooms. And so, though philosophers as a body will naturally be the last persons to admit it, it must eventually be recognized that Protagoras’s vision of a Truth that did not shun commerce with man was truer than Plato’s dream of an Eternal Order that transcends all human understanding. ”

“ Unfortunately we have little direct knowledge of this earliest Humanism. Its heroes and martyrs, Protagoras and Socrates, have left us no memorial. It is true that by the irony of history the spiritual heritage of one of them soon became a valuable asset, to be disputed over by the philosophic schools of the fourth century, and that so in the end Socrates has become for history what it suited the interest of the strongest, i.e., of the greatest writer, that he should appear. Plato has made our ‘Socrates’ into an intellectualist like himself. ”

“ It is utterly shallow, therefore, to regard Protagoras’s dictum as an irresponsible freak of subjectivism. Subjectivism from its nature can never be unreflective, any more than pessimism. Objectivisms and optimisms always are initially unreflective, and frequently remain so to the end. For the necessities of life have severely schooled us to begin by turning outward the eye of the soul, and the last thing that man thinks of, the last thing he discovers, is himself. ”

“ For the first time he consciously realizes that he is the Spectator of it all, that the whole world’s infinite complexity exists in relation to him, and that he has not merely an eye to see but also a mind to devise and a hand to execute, if he but has a spirit to dare, that if he will but strive patiently and resolutely to co-ordinate his powers, he may aspire to control the flux and to divert it into channels conducive to the attainment of his highest ends. ”

“ For it starts with human knowing, not with ‘ideals’ of a ‘perfect’ knowledge inaccessible to man. Every judgment is a claim to ‘truth,’ i.e., an experiment with ‘reality’ as it appears to us. But such experiments may fail as well as prosper. If they succeed, we recognize their value and hail them ‘true’. If they fail, wholly or in part, we condemn as ‘false,’ and admitting that we were ‘wrong,’ withdraw the values claimed. Gradually in the course of time there are thus segregated two great realms, of light and darkness, Truth and Error. ”

“ If so, he did not yet perceive that all ‘truths’ are ‘values,’ and therefore ‘goods,’ even though an individual’s truths are good and satisfying only to him, and their value is very restricted, because their currency is small. Nor again can he have seen that the same ambiguity which pervades truth-values pervades also all the rest. Many things are judged ‘good,’ which are not really good, just as they are judged ‘true’ without being really true. Everywhere there is needed a bridge of validation by use to cross the gap between claim and validity. ”

“ Can it be maintained that each man is the measure not only of his present perception, but also of the future? Will that be exactly as he anticipates? And does not the knowledge of the advantageous depend mainly on the future?
The Platonic ‘Socrates’ appears finally to rest his case on this point and on the argument in 171 C [our No. (4) ] , by which Protagoras was alleged to refute himself. In reality, however, the appeal to the future leads to a triumphant vindication of the Humanist interpretation. For how does the future decide between two rival theories of truth? ”

“ We need plastic conceptions that can adjust themselves to the dynamic nature of reality, and, in Plato’s parlance, can know the ‘flux.’ It is only in unmeaning tautologies that the ‘ideas’ remain immobile even in the single judgment. In all real knowing subject and predicate always have their meaning changed by being combined in a judgment, alike whether this growth enriches only the mind of a single knower or extends to all those who are interested in the advancement of human knowledge. ”

“ But this validity is the reward of value and the result of selections based on experience. The ‘validity’ of a claim to truth is neither logically nor etymologically other than its ‘strength.’ There is no need to presuppose any inaccessible supercelestial archetype which ratifies and sanctifies by a suprasensible communion, the human imitations we inexplicably make. Still less do we need any deus ex machina supernaturally to establish by his fiat any initial ‘commonness’ of truth. We do not even need any ‘independent’ object magically authenticating its ‘true copy’ in our thoughts. ”

“ In some cases, as in palliating the clearly deliberate misrepresentation of Plato by Aristotle, such an expedient may commend itself to the timidity of reconcilers reluctant to admit that one great thinker may fail to appreciate another, though in this case we know at least that there was a Platonic School on which to impose the burden Aristotle falsely fastens on to Plato, and though even then the hypothesis does not cover all the facts. But in general a master contends with masters and not with disciples. Moreover, there is no clear evidence that Protagoras had any disciples. ”

“ Indeed, the ‘errors’ that trouble us are generally not our own, but those of others, which they affirm and we deny. But when the traditional ‘logic,’ after tabooing all systematic reference to the psychological context of its subject-matter, proceeds to treat of Error in the abstract, it declines to look beyond the fact that ‘the same’ proposition is both affirmed and denied, both known and not known. I.e., it has abstracted from this difference in the persons who affirm and reject the erroneous judgment. ”

“ The memory of a perception must not be lumped together with the perception. It is in no wise absurd that the same person should know and not know the same thing—at least, we must add, if as in Plato’s examples (165, etc.) the thing is taken in a different reference. As for the difficulty of the change in the knower which results from his interaction with the object, we can, if you insist that he cannot be identical in change, regard him as an infinite plurality. ”

“ The second point to be grasped is that the seat of Error is not in any defective configuration of the ‘object,’ but in its relation to a cognitive purpose. That some errors consist in the affirmation of non-existent objects is not only unimportant, but wholly irrelevant. It is irrelevant because it involves a confusion of an ontological with a logical ‘object’. The logical ‘object’ is never non-existent, even though we may be discussing Centaurs, Chimaeras, Absolutes, intellectualistic theories of knowledge and other ontological nonentities. ”

“ All the later revivals of Humanism have been subsequent to the institution of a learned caste whose academic spirit is always largely occupied with ritual observances for giving his due (and not infrequently a good deal more) to the Demon of Pedantry; and so they have had to live and operate in and upon a more or less unfavourable atmosphere. They could not always succeed in developing their Humanism to the full. ”

“ For we thereby incapacitate ourselves for distinguishing between a truth and a claim to truth, and as the latter may be wrong, error becomes a kind of truth and we are, once more, unable to distinguish between truth and error. ”

“ The only sense (out of many) in which a Humanist theory of knowledge does away with ‘independent objects’ is the utterly nugatory one in which the ‘object’ is made so ‘independent’ as to transcend human cognition altogether: all the other senses of ‘objectivity,’ it expounds and explains, each in its proper place. It is most unfortunate that both ‘realists’ and ‘absolute idealists’ should apparently have piqued themselves on, quite irrationally, affirming just this superfluous absurdity, and on tying all the legitimate senses of ‘objectivity’ on to it. Cf. my Studies in Humanism, pp. ”

“ It is also quite clearly the complete answer to the attacks on the humanism, miscalled the ‘subjectivism,’ of Protagoras, and the solution of the problem of a common truth. It explains how we pass from individual claims to social values, and attribute to them an objective validity. The bricks out of which the temple of Truth is built are the individual judgments which supply the material. Every one is continually making them. ”

“ It is thus that the wise man is distinguished from the fool; he is one who is able, when things appear to us and are bad, to make them appear and be good.’ [I.e., who teaches us how to make the best of a bad job and to adjust ourselves to life.] ‘Your own illustration of the sick man to whom what is sweet to the healthy seems bitter tells against you, Socrates. ”

“ If the seeds of such sterilities are scattered on the ground by breezes that issue from the bags of Æolus, they will fail to germinate in a soil so richly manured by the heart’s-blood of human desire and the bones of the martyrs of human science. ”

“ The alternative theory I venture to suggest will be found to cast no such slur upon the moral and intellectual character of Plato. It credits Plato with an honest desire to state his opponent’s case and assumes merely that he has not fully grasped an alien point of view for the appreciation of which his whole type of mind unfitted him, and which even so he has grasped much better than the generality of intellectualists have done down to the present day. ”

“ The Humanists of the Renaissance, for example, were doubtless sincere humanists in their intentions. They tried to set man’s spirit free from the crushing armour of Scholastic learning, which had immobilized the medieval sage quite as effectively as his defensive mail had immobilized the medieval knight. ”

“ The argument in 170 D, which seems a clincher to Plato, is almost ludicrously inconclusive to one who has grasped the manifest meaning of the Protagoras Speech. It is in no wise absurd that an opinion (which you may roughly call ‘the same’) should be ‘true’ to me and ‘false’ to you; nor that one man should be right and 10,000 wrong. ”

“ And the philosopher must urge this difficulty still more insistently than the literary critic. The Theætetus contains a position of immense philosophic importance, whether it originated with Protagoras or with Plato. It is never dealt with. Why not? And is not the philosopher seriously concerned to estimate how much it detracts from the security of Plato’s chosen creed to have left a hostile stronghold, however weakly garrisoned, untaken, nay unassailed, in his rear? ”

“ Plato is battling pro aris et focis, to save the central fire of intellectualism from extinction, and it is probably because he realized this as none of his successors have done after him, that he produced his great classical discussion of the problem, which is distinguished by ingenuity and ennobled, though not saved, by the frank confession of final failure. ”

“ Total humanity cannot be identified with any one of its functions, and so ‘humaner letters’ are neither the ‘whole duty of man’ nor even more than comparatively humane. In Scotland ‘humanity’ was academically reduced to Latin. Hence an impartial judge might soon doubt the superiority of Humanism over the Scholasticism which it supplanted in this very point of pedantry. ”

“ That this failure was an inevitable outcome of Plato’s presuppositions is the next point for us to understand. We shall in understanding this understand also that no intellectualist theory of Error is possible, and consequently no really adequate intellectualist theory of knowledge. For a theory of knowledge which cannot explain Error cannot discriminate it from Truth, and so cannot explain that either. ”

“ We see, therefore, that in a sense, though no one can be said to opine falsely, some are wiser than others.’ The Speech concludes with a grave admonition to ‘Socrates’ to cease from arguing disputatiously, and points out the harm this does by disgusting people with philosophy, and the perils of arguing from the current usage of words which only lead to puzzles. ”

“ For it only shows that Plato had no conception of the meaning and scope of the argument he had just stated. In 169 D, he starts again from the bare dictum as if the Speech had done nothing to explain its real meaning nor given it a philosophic context. And the reasons ‘Protagoras’ had given for the dictum are actually treated as concessions derogating from its validity and inconsistent with his original assertion! Nothing could be more unfair and unenlightened, or even more contrary to the very wording of the Speech. ”