The Sophists (Woodruff, PJS)
Most of what students have been taught about the sophists is wrong, owing to Plato's one-sided representation of them, and the attractiveness, then and now, of identifying intellectual villains to provide contrast for the philosophers we admire. Accordingly, this section is a plea to look at the evidence more closely, at what Plato says, at the surviving texts, and at the considerable influence of sophists on writers such as Thucydides, Sophocles, and Euripides.
The teachers now known as sophists did not constitute a well-defined group at the time of Socrates. The earliest surviving use of the word sophistes is found in an ode of Pindar (Isthmian 5.28, 478 BCE), where it means "poet," and the remarks Plato provides Protagoras at Protagoras 316d if., confirm that early poets could be considered sophists, although they did not use this word for themselves. In the context, Protagoras implies that Homer and Hesiod and Simonides acted as sophists in their role as educators, and indeed their poetry belongs to what we could aptly call the wisdom literature of ancient Greece.
The word sophistes is simply a masculine-ending noun formed from the adjective sophos, wise or clever. The adjective carries a double valence, as it sometimes suggests an admirable wisdom, and sometimes the sort of cleverness that can be devious and frightening. Such a double valence reflects the response of the Greeks to their own intellectual achievements, as we read in Sophocles' famous choral ode (exploiting the double valence of the word deinos): "Many wonders, many terrors, but none more wonderful or more terrible than a human being"; as the chorus goes on to show by examples, what is wonderful and terrible about human beings is the power they have through the inventiveness of the human mind (Antigone 332-75).
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The teachers now known as sophists do not have a great deal in common, but certain features are found in most of them:
1.1. Teaching for pay. Most sophists taught, at what we would call the level of higher education, for substantial fees, but Antiphon apparently made his money by writing speeches for others to deliver (logography), a new profession at the time. We are told that Protagoras amassed a considerable fortune by teaching, and Hippias (as shown in Plato) brags that he has done the same (Greater Hippias 282de).
1.2. Traveling. Most sophists traveled widely. They did so on business, to earn lecturing fees from around the Greek world, and probably also because many of them were interested in the variety to be found in different cultures. Antiphon again is an exception; he was an Athenian and seems to have worked at home. Protagoras and Hippias, by contrast, seem to have been in constant motion in the service of their lucrative business (Greater Hippias 282de).
1.3. Employing the art of words. Their one common attribute appears to have been their use of the art of words, but, since oral performance was the only way for them to teach, this is neither surprising nor, in itself, very interesting.
Sophists taught the art of balanced debate, with equally timed speeches on each side of a contentious issue, and this art is frequently displayed in tragic plays of the period, as in the balanced speeches offered each other by Creon and his son Haemon in Sophocles' Antigone. Thucydides employs the same art in his history, on several occasions. Now, if you know how to speak on either side of an issue equally persuasively, then (assuming that both sides cannot be right) you know how to give persuasive arguments on behalf of at least one position that is wrong. So the art of opposed speeches (antikeimenoi logoi) would seem to entail the art of winning an audience over to a false position. We shall see, however, that two speeches may collide over what is merely reasonable (eikos — see section 1.4 below), and that such cases are usually the subjects for the opposed speaking taught by sophists. In such a case, both sides may have equally reasonable cases to make, and the art involved in presenting both is innocent on the charge of telling plausible lies.
Aristotle says that Protagoras taught students how to make the weaker argument win in a debate (as Socrates is shown doing in the Clouds), and we are told by several sources that Protagoras taught people how to argue on both sides of any issue. This is summed up in the oft-repeated claim that the sophists taught principally rhetoric, by which is usually meant the art of persuasive speech taken in isolation from the truth or content of speech. Recent scholars have argued, however, that this concept of rhetoric is due not to the sophists but to Plato, and although the matter remains under dispute, we must at least conclude that it is not clear that any sophist really had the concept of rhetoric that they are supposed to have taught. Moreover, the Greek interest in public speaking in this period was not limited to persuasive speech in assemblies or law courts; Greek audiences were delighted by displays of speaking and debate, and these appear to have been a form of public entertainment. ....
1.4. Speaking without knowledge. Public speakers must often give speeches on subjects that are not known either to them or to anyone else. Policy issues, such as are debated in the Assembly, often hinge in what it is reasonable to expect (eikos). The outcome of a war, for example, cannot be known in advance, so that a decision on whether to go to war must rest on what is eikos. The same goes for some forensic issues; in the absence of an eye-witness, who would satisfy the conditions for having knowledge, a case at law would have to be decided on the basis of what is most reasonable.
Plato and Aristotle both make the complaint that sophists, especially Protagoras, prefer eikos to truth. Eikos is traditionally translated as "probability"; this translation dates to a time when the Latin-based word meant "believability," and is supported by the close affinity in ancient Greek usage between eikos and pithanon. Plato, however, understood eikos to mean a misleading facsimile of the truth – something that, al-though not true, could be mistaken for the truth. But studies of actual usage from the period show that eikos means what it is reasonable_to believe in circumstances when the facts are not clearly known. In such cases, speeches on either side can be equally reasonable. Such, for example, are the speeches Thucydides reports to have been given by the two generals before the naval battle in the harbor at Syracuse (7.61–4, 66–8); the two forces were equal, and the two outcomes were equally probable. Indeed, the battle hung in the balance for an extraordinarily long time before a small, unexpected event started a cascade of troubles for the Athenians.
Prehistory, for example, must be a matter of eikos, as must the facts in a case with-out witnesses, or the future effects of policies under debate. The art of arguing on either side of an issue with reference to eikos was necessary to the procedure of adversary debate by which decisions were made in ancient Greece, even before democracy. I shall turn below to the likely connection between this sort of teaching and the good judgment that Protagoras offered to teach.
1.5. Promoting relativism. Sophists are often said to be relativists, but this general claim is not supported by. the evidence. Relativism, simply defined, is the claim that the same sentence can be both true and false, in being true for one person and false for another. This is usually understood to be the claim that what I believe is true for me, while what you believe is true for you. The claim allows that contrary beliefs are in some sense true for different people.' Gorgias is probably not a relativist, because he seems to assert that no beliefs at all are true. Antiphon, who appeals to nature as a standard for criticizing law, cannot be a relativist, and the same would go for Callicles, who appeals to a natural standard of justice.
Protagoras, however, is a relativist according to the evidence of Plato's Theaetetus (which influenced later sources), but other evidence, even in Plato, tells a different story. Plato shows Protagoras in the Protagoras arguing in effect for a natural basis of the virtues of justice and reverence, on the grounds that they are necessary to human survival; groups of people without such virtues would have scattered and not been able to defend themselves, and the human race would have died out. Protagoras' implicit assumption is that if justice and reverence are present in a community, they will suffice to prevent the sort of divisiveness that tears a community apart. It would be preposterous to suppose that justice is whatever anyone thinks it is, and, at the same time, that justice is necessary to fend civil war away from any given community. Suppose, for example, that Thrasymachus gets to decide what justice is, so that justice is nothing but whatever benefits the ruler; then mechanisms for justice will not make society more stable, but more liable to division and even civil war. There must, on Protagoras' theory, at least be a pragmatic test for what counts as justice. Protagoras also had teachings about the correctness of words that are not compatible with relativism as defined above; he was prepared to criticize currently acceptable usage, but he would have no basis for this if he were a relativist regarding truth.
The good is another matter. Many sophists, however, seem to have made both the good and the beneficial relative to the beneficiary, as we saw above. Protagoras, for example, points out that olive oil is harmful to plants and the hair on most animals, but beneficial when applied to human hair and skin (Protagoras 334a–c). And Thrasymachus held that the justice that is beneficial to rulers is harmful to those over whom they rule (Republic 1.338c ff.); that is why he insists that Socrates say precisely what justice is, and not declare simply that justice is the beneficial (336d). By this he probably means that Socrates should specify, as Thrasymachus is about to do, who it is that benefits from justice if justice is beneficial.
1.6 Appealing to nature vs. convention. Some sophists drew a sharp dichotomy between convention (nomos) and nature ( phusis). Earlier poetry and philosophy associated phusis with unchanging truth, and nomos with appearance or with the fluctuations of opinion. On the whole, when sophists make this distinction, they treat nomos with disdain and appeal to nature as a standard. Had they taken convention to be the standard, they would have been relativists, but they do not seem to have done so. No sophist, so far as we know, appeals to nomos to set aside a purported principle of nature, and a number of them go the other way.
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1.7. Supporting democracy. Many of the teachers now known as sophists came from democratic cities, but not all, and not all were in favor of democracy. This is odd, because the public speaking (which many sophists taught) is especially valuable in democracies. Antiphon (probably the same man as the sophist) was executed for attempting to overthrow democracy in Athens, in spite of his plea that a seller of prepared speeches is an unlikely opponent of democracy Protagoras speaks in favor of democracy in Plato's dialogue of that name, but some scholars have doubted his sincerity, and others such as Thrasymachus and Callicles raise serious objections to the rule of law, widely recognized as an essential feature of democracy at the time.
1.8. Teaching virtue. The word "virtue," like "wisdom," has a range of uses. Normally, it can be used for any quality that one needs in order to be successful in some line of endeavor; accordingly, although it often has a clearly ethical meaning, it does not always do so. For Socrates, virtue is to the soul as health is to the body. That is what Socrates does not believe can be taught; not surprisingly, the qualities sophists claim to teach are rather different.
Gorgias evidently said that he never proposed to teach virtue, but a number of other sophists seem to have made just such a promise. Of these, Protagoras is preeminent; he announced that his main teaching concerned euboulia, good judgment (Plato's Protagoras 318d-319a), which Socrates understands to be expert knowledge (techne) of politics (319a). Protagoras accepts this understanding, and also follows Socrates when, without fanfare, he takes the techne of politics to be the same as virtue (arete). This occurs during Socrates' argument that what Protagoras claims to teach cannot be taught (319a-320b). In a later, but related, context, Socrates implies that a sophist just is someone who proclaims himself a teacher of virtue (Protagoras 349a).
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1.9. Seeking natural explanations. Some sophists nad some interests in natural science, but most of them concerned themselves more with social science, especially with theories of the origins of culture, and in this area they displaced the gods from their traditional role as source of the arts practiced by human beings. But science of any kind had little appeal for most of the sophists.
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Kontext: Sokrates (PR Hrachovec, 2007/08)
Kontext: Socrates Among the Sophists (PJS)
