Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Typus des konservativen Agnostikers: Protagoras, Montaigne, Bayle, and Hume; Physis

Kurzinhalt: ... the position will dissolve either into the immanentist dogmatism of the sophists of the second generation, making Physis the new source of authority, or into the restoration of the problems of transcendence

Textausschnitt: 382b If the assumption of philologists that this passage is influenced by Protagoras be accepted, it would indeed be a key to the Pro-tagorean attitude; for the chapter closes with the line from Pindar that Nomos is the king of all. The theoretical gap was perhaps not experienced too sharply because for Protagoras Nomos was still the king of human beliefs, rather than human belief the king of Nomos. In Protagoras appears, for the first time, the type of thinker who is a skeptic, or agnostic, with regard to transcendent reality and, at the same time, a conservative with regard to historical order. Since the combination of the two attitudes has caused, and is still causing, difficulties in understanding the thinker, it may be well to recall that his case is not singular. The type of the conservative skeptic recurs, toward the end of the fourth century, in the person of Pyrrho and is continued by his skeptic successors. In Western civilization it recurs, after the upheaval of the Reformation, in Montaigne, Bayle, and Hume. The difficulty of understanding the hybrid position is caused by its theoretical insufficiency; it seems unbelievable that an otherwise astute thinker should be blind to the previously characterized theoretical gap. It is all the more necessary to be clear about the strand of archaic wisdom in the conservative mind, preserving it in a time of rapid intellectual movement from derailment into revolutionary dogmatism. While such balance can be preserved in the individual case, the attitude of conservative skepticism is unstable on principle; it can be preserved only under the condition that the theoretical question of validity and its source will not be raised. A more inquisitive mind will not be satisfied with such abstinence. And as soon as the question is raised the position will dissolve either into the immanentist dogmatism of the sophists of the second generation, making Physis the new source of authority, or into the restoration of the problems of transcendence as we have seen it in the opposition of Socrates to the sophist in Plato's Protagoras. (Fs) (notabene)