Our text this week: Consciencism Book pg. 39/40
Indeed, once Anaxagoras had emphasized socialistic responsibility of each for all and all for each, the next step was to emphasize the intrinsic worth of the individual.Thus a social progressive movement, which started with the supervention of a people over a class, ended with the separating out, the cult, of individuals.It was left to the Sophists to achieve this.This phase was given its most definitive utterance in the Protagoran statement that man is the measure of all things.The universe had passed from the hands of the gods into the hands of men.This Protagoran view, which was a passionate testimony to the new place of man in the scheme of things, was
quickly perverted by lesser minds into a grasping idealistic subjectivism.In this transformed form, it was a claim that reality was a replica of the subjective will.Indeed, it was in this form that Socrates criticized it.It was necessary to destroy this idealistic subjectivism; first, because it was but a short step from it to solipsism, the view that only oneself exists and other
things exist as one’s experiences; and, second, because in addition to
damaging the possibility of science and the public and objective grounding of truth, it undermined the foundations of society; for it made social reality, too, depend upon the subjective will.The original attempt to redeem society by giving it a united foundation, by asserting the unity and brotherhood of man, now promised to destroy the society which it had set out to save.
Egalitarianism desperately needed to be distinguished from anarchism, for anarchism is the political expression of subjective idealism.
Негізгі бет PHILOSOPHY OF ANAXAGORAS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MOVEMENTS
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