Protagoras visits the Darwinian planet - Exploring the Foundations of Humanism - Cover Story

Humanist, March-April, 1998 by Anselm Atkins

Humans create their own reality Humans are the masters of the world. This, in a nutshell, is the message of the great anti-Socratic philosopher, Protagoras.

The underlying question here is whether humans invent reality or discover it. invent it, every bit, says Protagoras. This is a stupendous insight into the fact that the cultural world we inhabit is our own creation. Our minds have made all these wondrous things. We bring culture into being: art, religion, politics, ethics, philosophy -- even science. Angels and gods and monitored elections, spears and railroads and computers -- we invented them all.

But do we invent every single thing? Even the natural world, the physical world which upholds us and the biological world out of which we have sprung? We invent the strings with which we play upon the world as if upon an instrument -- including the notion of a world and all the philosophies which flow from the realization of being in a world. But the world itself we do not invent.

Protagoras says there is no "world itself." There is only the world as it appears to me. Protagoras, meet Charles Darwin.

We who are cultural relativists do indeed lay wreaths at Protagoras' feet. it seems pretty clear -- at least to humanists -- that all the cultural splendors we boast, in all their beauty and complexity, have been brought upon the scene from nothingness or from blank apedom by our own sapient selves.

What I want to argue is that there is something we didn't invent. If Protagoras could just look around this planet for a second with the eyes of a Darwinian, he might realize what was missing from his vision.

The other night I tripped on a step and fell on a concrete sidewalk. Nothing about this was invented by me, other than the sentence which just now describes it. I did not invent the flesh, bone, concrete, or gravity which came into play in forming what I call my experience -- though the words, I grant, came from my society. Neither did I invent the physical brain which experienced the event and conceived the above description, though I grant that the notion of brain and such is the invention of my society. Put another way: the sidewalk took my measure.

Pause now to consider what we have learned from the Darwinian revolution. It has great bearing on the problem of knowledge (which Protagoras himself introduced into the history of philosophy) -- and about how any measure of reality can be taken at all.

The first thing to notice is that humans, with all their wild, creative minds, have evolved out of a primitive physical pot of animal flesh. In this seething, swarming pool of genes, natural selection saw to it that what worked got passed along and what didn't was not.

Mind in animals was part of what was working (for many sound survivalist reasons). Any aspect of animal mind that didn't "correspond" in a sufficiently realistic way to what was "out there" didn't get passed along and, therefore, isn't with us today. Primates who "invented" grapevines to swing on perished long ago. Surviving primates and their descendants "discovered" where the real grapevines actually hung. Some opinions about grapevines were just downright better than others. All of our own ancestors had good opinions about grapevines, and so do we, generally speaking (especially the winemakers).

Each person is not the measure of all things when it comes to the preexisting natural world out of which we evolved. Opinions that are radically out of touch with biological conditions fade away. Vine tenders who mismeasure grapevines end up as dock hands. (This is not to deny that what 'seems so' to the inept vine tender really does "seem so" to him or her.)

Protagoras lived among us for awhile because his mind was, in most important respects, attuned realistically to what was actually the case in the world of his time. In the words of the song "The Gambler": he knew when to hold 'em, knew when to fold 'em, knew when to walk away, and knew when to run. Otherwise we would never have heard of him.

Picture yourself as one of our ancestors leaping out into the void for a swinging vine. If you invent a vine that is not really there, then you are not our ancestor and we are not your descendants. Welcome to Darwinian epistemology.

This simple example is actually the answer to the basic conundrums of modem philosophy. Remember when you were a sophomore how you reveled in being able to show that no one could prove that yonder table existed? The flaw in the tradition of epistemological puzzlement is that, except for Aristotle, no philosopher prior to 1859 had dealt with biology or evolution.

Your brain is attuned to a reality out there. If this were not so, you would not now exist to be arguing about it. Correspondence between your brain and a reality "out there" has all been taken care of in your animal and primate lineage, which over the ages has adapted itself to reality -- or perished. Rest assured, your brain is a good tool for scooping up reality. The brain evolved with reality -- otherwise it did not evolve at all.