Protagoras

It is the sophists, with Protagoras at their head, who are the true precursors of modern thought; they are the "thinkers" properly so called, in the sense that they limited themselves to reasoning and were hardly concerned with "perceiving" and taking into account that which "is." And it is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned — Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well — but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit.

 

Taking into account the fact that according to a — rightly or wrongly — universally recognized terminology, the word "philosophy" designates all that extrinsically pertains to thought, we would say that there is a philosophy according to the "spirit," which is founded on pure intellection — possibly actualized by a particular sacred Text — and a philosophy according to the "flesh," which is founded on individual reasoning in the absence of sufficient data and of any supernatural intuition; the first being the philosophia perennis, and the second, the ancient Protagorism as well as the rationalist thought of the moderns.(10)

The Sophists inaugurate the era of individualistic rationalism and of unlimited pretensions; thus they open the door to all arbitrary totalitarianisms. It is true that profane philosophy also begins with Aristotle, but in a rather different sense, since the rationality of the Stagyrite tends upwards and not downwards as does that of Protagoras and his like; in other words, if a dissolving individualism originates with the Sophists—not forgetting allied spirits such as Democritus and Epicurus— Aristotle on the other hand opens the era of a rationalism still anchored in metaphysical certitude, but none the less fragile and ambiguous in its very principle, as there has more than once been occasion to point out.

 

As for the profane and properly rationalistic philosophy of the Greeks, which is personified especially by Protagoras and of which Aristotle is not completely free, it represents a deviation of the perspective which normally gives rise to gnosis or jnana; when this perspective is cut off from pure intellection, and thus from its reason for existence, it becomes fatally hostile to religion and open to all kinds of hazards; the sages of Greece did not need the Fathers of the Church to know this, and the Fathers of the Church could not prevent the Christian world from falling into this trap. Moreover through the civilizationism which it claims as its own, so as not to lose any glory, the Church paradoxically assumes responsibility for the modern world —described as “Christian civilization” — which nevertheless is nothing other than the excrescence of that human wisdom stigmatized by the Fathers.