PROTAGORAS RE-DISCOVERED:

HEIDEGGER'S EXPLICATION OF PROTAGORAS' FRAGMENT

MANFRED S. FRINGS

The question of Being (Seinsfrage) is the one and only question that
determines Heidegger's path of thinking and its limits. To facilitate our
understanding of this, he has given us detailed analyses of Parmenides,
Heraclitus and Anaximander. However, his discussions on Protagoras have
never found a conspicuous place in background literature. Nonetheless,
his views on Protagoras are of great import and it is the purpose of this
paper to make this explicit. In particular, we shall examine Heidegger's
understanding of Protagoras' fragment which states that man is the
"measure" of all things present and not present.
Heidegger discusses the fragment in volume II of his work Nietzsche.
It will be helpful if we first see the nexus between Protagoras and Nietz-
sche. We will begin by outlining the interconnective contexts which bind the
two men in Heidegger's thinking, so as to enable us to fix precisely the
place in which his explication of Protagoras ties in with Nietzsche's basic
metaphysical position. We will then be in a position to understand Hei-
degger's own novel translation of the famous fragment.
Hence, our presentation divides into three parts: 1.) the framework of
thought in Heidegger's Nietzsche I and II and Protagoras' fragment in
this framework, 2.) Heidegger's own explication of Protagoras' fragment,
and 3.) my own brief gloss on the subject made on the basis of section
IX of Nietzsche II, entitled: Entwiirfe zur Geschichte des Seins als Me-
taphysik, which Heidegger himself regards as a necessary prerequisite for
understanding his thinking as a whole.
1.) Any presentation of Nietzsche's metaphysics involves the difficulty
of one's being re-volved in the circularity of Nietzsche's thought. Indeed,
the cycle - this word taken symbolically - underlies Nietzsche's basic
metaphysical position. Heidegger points to this fact and we are well
justified in stating that Heidegger's Auseinandersetzung (i.e., critical
dialoguing) with Nietzsche has not only opened up new dimensions in
Heidegger's own thought, but also (and from the viewpoint of Heidegger's
metaphysics) offered new bases for variant explications of Nietzsche.
Heidegger repeatedly tells us that the five central themes in Nietzsche's
metaphysics, viz., Will to Power, Nihilism, Eternal Recurrence, Over-Man
and Justice (in Nietzsche's sense) are interwoven, so that any one involves
and revolves through the rest.
But we must caution ourselves right at the beginning not to fail victim
to descriptive or psychologistic interpretations of either Heidegger or
 Protagoras Re-Discovered 113

Nietzsche. Rather, we must venture a step, however small, into the core of
Nietzsche's metaphysical position as seen through Heidegger. For any
so-called interpretation of Nietzsche is contradictory to the nature of his
own attempts to reach the ground of Being through the aforementioned five
central themes. For Being is a text for Nietzsche into which ever since
Plato man has injected anthropological and rational meanings. Truth for
Nietzsche has essentially been perspectival interpretation. At the founda-
tion of Nietzsche's metaphysics there arises, therefore, the question of how
Being as a whole can be known at all without human interpretation, or, as
he puts it, without "humanization." His prophetic answer is the Over-Man
as understood in the circularity of Nietzsche's central themes. We shall
return to the thematic of the Over-Man later.
Now, what is the step we must take into the domain of thinking
Nietzsche through Heidegger and precisely how will this step lead us to
Protagoras' fragment? The answer is: through Nihilism.
Nihilism is one af the five central themes in Nietzsche's metaphysics.
Nihilism recurs in each of them and each of them recurs in nihilism. This
recurring relatedness exists throughhout Nietzsche's metaphysics. At first
glance this looks like a system. But nothing is more removed from Nietz-
sche's endeavors than the attempt to construct a rational system. Indeed,
rational thinking is, as he states, only an "interpretation acco.rding to a
scheme which we cannot escape" (Notes, 1887). And Over-Man himself
is the denial of reason occurring in the essence of history.
For Nietzsche, history is understood metaphysically, i.e., as the history
of the self-deployment and continuous rise of nihilism. But this nihilism
must be strictly distinguished from the meanings the term has obtained
especially in modern times and to which Heidegger refers us in his essay
"Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot' " contained in Holzwege. Nihilism is for
Nietzsche the inevitable happening of the annihilation of the region of
transcendence in history, i.e., the historic self-enacting abolishment of
ideals, ideas, norms, principles, absolutes, rules, objectives and values that
had been thought to be above and beyond man's earth. Then, too, nihilism
is the gradual change of traditional notions of truth into their inevitable
suicide. In the former proposition the word truth has the following mean-
ings: 1. truth as interpretation of something, 2. truth as correspondence
between object and subject (adaequatio), 3. truth as logical truth, i.e., non-
contradiction, 4. truth as ultimate transcendent source, or GOd. We shall
confine ourselves to the last meaning of truth, i.e., transcendent truth.
For Nietzsche, history is the process of nihilism and inasmuch as
nihilism is the historical law through which transcendence will annihilate
itself through the advent of Over-Man, God has died. "God" does not only
stand for the Christian GOd, as Heidegger stresses. In essence, the death of
God is the death of the very location and domain (Stelle) of the tran-
scendent itself over and above man's abode, the earth. Truth has been in-
jected into this transcendent domain. Moreover, the transcendent domain