The Stoic Creed - College of Stoic Philosophers

16 THE STOIC CREED
they are ;
etvai) of things that are, that
;
of things that are not, that they
are not."
Now, this sophistic view of the relativity of human
knowledge and of human morality, this Protagorean
doctrine of homo mensura (/ACT/DOT/ avflpwTros), individualistically
interpreted, 1 was met by Socrates met, not
after the manner of the modern critic
of philosophical
positions, but according to his own dialectic, in the
critical clash of intellect personally confronting intellect ;
and the contrary doctrine, though not in so many words,
was championed by him, namely, that human reason,
though limited in its range, can give us truth, and that
morality has a stable basis in reason and is universally
valid.
In this way, while agreeing with the Sophists in
upholding the rights of the individual to think and to
act, he separated from them wholly in his appreciation
of the dignity of the individual and his ability to effect
great things as participating in universal reason.
If "man is the measure of all things,"
then the
logical conclusion seemed to be that truth is merely
It has been argued (e.g., by Gomperz) that this individualistic
1
interpretation is not the correct one ; for, however it may have
been in the days (say) of Aristotle or even at the end of Plato s
life, neither Protagoras nor the Sophists of Socrates s time did inter
pret it individualistically. In this there probably is some truth ;
but
the point is that the Sophists did actually degenerate, on the line
of this interpretation, and that both Plato and Aristotle (the one in
the Thecetetus and the other in the Metaphysics) did interpret the
Protagorean formula individualistically, which seems to show that
relativity to the individual was at any rate implicit in the formula.
It is never well to forget that Plato and Aristotle were themselves
Greeks and lived near to the Socratic moment, and so were able
to appreciate movements of their time and to gauge tendencies
in a way that is scarcely open to modern non-Hellenic thinkers.