No, no, not Pythagoras. He was the guy who lived from 580 to 500 BC, and who figured out that the sum of the squares of the other two sides was equal to the square root of the hypotenuse of a right triangle. He also figured out that, by listening to the sounds made when the blacksmith struck different lengths of metal, each length had a certain constant tone. He deduced that each tone could be designated as a fraction of length, and that therefore each tone had its own mathematical number. Music, therefore, was mathematical. As a matter of fact, he believed that the entire universe, including philosophy and religion, could be solved by mathematical equations. He established secret religious societies, which had secret mathematical formulas that could be applied to solve any problem. For making us aware that mathematics applies to everything around us, he was truly a genius. His secrets, however, were kept so secret that they have remained such, as his hugely popular societies gradually dwindled under political pressure. His influence certainly lives on. Copernicus, for example, states that he used the concepts of Pythagoras to deduce that the planets revolve around the sun, and that the earth is not the center of the universe.
No, it’s not the Pyth guy of whom we speak, but the Prot guy. Protagoras lived from about 485 to 410 BC, and spent most of his time discerning how you teach virtue to members of society. He believed that virtue (morals) were behavior patterns that were learned, and that we should all spend our time finding out how we could be better people, fit in better in our societies, treat others fairly. He also believed that there was no evidence all these Gods that all the other sophists talked about, existed at all. He was greatly concerned about the proper use of language and proper definition of the terms we use. These were not popular views, during his time. He was taken to task by those sophists who closely followed him, primarily Socrates and Plato. They believed that there was a supreme God, who was a total Good, that His virtue was a fixed entity in the universe, and that there were a bunch of other Gods in the sky who were making daily decisions about the lives of humans. The result was a gradual groundswell of protest concerning the concepts Protagoras taught. All of his books were burned, and he was banned from Greek society for the last remaining years of his life. Only a few quotes remain of those things he taught, coming from those who argued against his concepts.
That incorrigible attitude of that Greek society has cost all the rest of us, for the two and a half millennia that have followed, quite dearly. It is obvious that Greek society was unable to comprehend that freedom of speech is necessary for a healthy and moral society. As best we determine, from all knowledge we now possess, Protagoras was completely right on all counts. Human virtues, or morals, are entirely our own invention, created to help us understand what is most advantageous and what is detrimental to our societies. These values have no meaning or position for the rest of the universe. The universe does not care in the least what happens to us. We understand that the universe runs on physical laws of chance, and that there is not a Super Director in the sky who moves all of us in any whimsical way He or She wishes to on a daily basis, all for some grand purpose that will benefit humans. The only direction we can find in human life is that of natural selection. We understand that our value terms of right and wrong, good and evil, morals and ethics, are all screwed up because we include imaginative Gods in those equations, and do not include all of life. If you are too far ahead of everyone else in your society, you become a pariah. Such was the life of Protagoras. He got it all right, and most all the others who followed him got it wrong. The sooner we fully accept the concepts of Protagoras, and abandon those of Socrates, the better all our societies will be.
“Man is the measure of all things.” All values, virtues, evils, morals, ethics are formulated as to what works for us. Those morals are quite a bit different for a shark, a pig or a cow. All forms of life have their own morals of what is right or wrong for them. For us to believe that currently existing human morals apply to all other forms of life, or that they exist in some ineluctable entity out somewhere in the universe, is quite absurd. We are much too egocentric. The universe does not in the slightest way revolve around us. The only morals and ethics that are correct must understand that our values are created only by us, must include all other life, and must understand that none of these values apply to the universe in any way.
“Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life.” I deeply wish this concept of Protagoras had been adopted by all societies that followed. Instead, the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam elected to adopt the concepts of Socrates, that there was a God who controlled all things, and that this God was totally good. The concept of a devil God had to follow, in order to explain all the human misery that existed. That led to the concept of those religions that their God was the good God, and that all others, who did not accept their religion, had to be worshipers of the evil God: therefore deserving punishment or death. Wars and massacres have followed, most with this religious justification.
We have indeed suffered immensely, creating societal suicide, all because we have not yet understood that Protagoras was right about everything, 2500 years ago.