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Chapter 4 - The Protagoras: a science of practical reasoning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2013

Martha C. Nussbaum
Martha C. Nussbaum
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

And look: I gave them numbering, chief of all the stratagems.

Prometheus, in Aeschylus[?], Prometheus Bound

Every circumstance by which the condition of an individual can be influenced, being remarked and inventoried, nothing…[is] left to chance, caprice, or unguided discretion, everything being surveyed and set down in dimension, number, weight, and measure.

Jeremy Bentham, Pauper Management Improved

They did not want to look on the naked face of luck (tuchē), so they turned themselves over to science (technē). As a result, they are released from their dependence on luck; but not from their dependence on science.

Hippocratic treatise On Science (Peri Technēs), late fifth century b.c.

The Antigone spoke of a life lived ‘on the razor's edge of luck’. It warned against overambitious attempts to eliminate luck from human life, displaying both their internal failures and their problematic relation to the richness of values recognized in ordinary belief. Its conclusion appeared conservative: human beings had better stay with ‘established conventions’ in spite of the risks these leave in place. Both Aeschylean and Sophoclean tragedy have, in this way, combined a keen sense of our exposure to fortune with an awareness that some genuine human value is inseparable from this condition. This recognition left, it seems, little room for decisive progress on our problems.

The late fifth century in Athens, the time of Plato's youth, was a time both of acute anxiety and of exuberant confidence in human power.

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The Fragility of Goodness
Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
 , pp. 89 - 121
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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