Methodos (Feb 2020)
Protagoras, Nietzsche, Heidegger : de l’histoire de l’être à l’histoire des valeurs
Abstract
This article examines the fragment on homo-mensura by Protagoras, first by summarizing its possible interpretations, then by presenting the respective and antagonistic positions of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Heidegger, against Nietzsche, places the fragment on an ontological and Platonic background, where measurement is only possible from the ontological opening that precedes it. This interpretation has its historical and philological legitimacy. But Nietzsche understands the fragment as entirely irreducible to Platonism: Protagoras (with Thucydides) conceived knowledge as the study of psychological types, not according to a stable epistemic norm, but according to the variations in intensity that affect every psyche but also every social community. I draw on this last intuition to defend what seems to me to be the richest interpretation of the fragment of the homo-mensura, based on the remarks of Eugène Dupréel – a social and normative interpretation in which Protagoras is the thinker of a praxis (medicine, politics...) which, in a given situation and community, is capable of improving the subjective impressions of the greatest number.
