Ancient Philosophy - Lecture 7 (Part One)
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
Lecture 7
The Sophists
When the term ‘sophist’ is not being used in a primarily pejorative sense, it can appropriately be interpreted as meaning ‘professional practitioner of wisdom (sophia)’. And the group of fifth-century thinkers traditionally brought together under this term have an excellent claim to be considered the first exponents of higher education in the West. Calling someone sophos without reservation or qualification at that time in Greek society was to ascribe to that person the highest and most desirable form of intellectual expertise even though there was far less agreement over what form this expertise took. However in the agitated political atmosphere of the fifth-century Greek city-states (especially those where a democratic system of government prevailed), one form of expertise that was highly valued was skill in civic speech: debate, exhortation, pleading a case in court, and formal eulogies. Irrespective of whether the immediate context was a council-chamber or law court, a democratic assembly or the private cabinet of a tyrant, an attempted mediation between fellow Greeks or a diplomatic mission abroad, success hinged on good communication skills and persuasive arguments. And the sophists purported to be both masters of this skill and instructors who could successfully teach it to other people.
Unfortunately any attempt to arrive at a sound understanding of the views and influence of the sophists faces two formidable obstacles. No writings survive from this group of thinkers, and we accordingly have to rely on scattered fragments preserved in the writings of later authors and various unreliable summaries of their doctrines offered by rival intellectuals and the compilers of fanciful histories of philosophy. Moreover the most extensive ancient treatment of sophistic thinkers and doctrines now extant is provided by Plato, and in his dialogues he seems to be intent on persistently attacking the sophists as counterfeit philosophers who make money from trafficking in apparent rather than real wisdom.
The combined effect of these two factors has been fairly disastrous as far as the reputation of the sophists is concerned. A kind of received view has emerged in which the sophists are seen as contributing nothing of lasting value to philosophy apart from their inadvertent role in rousing first Socrates and then Plato to expose their egregious fallacies and to defend sound ethical principles against self-serving forms of subjectivism and cynicism. Now it is certainly true that Plato and the Socrates portrayed in Plato’s writings have often been endorsed with enthusiasm as intellectual role models by philosophers of a theistic persuasion or moralizing tendency. Thus we find, for example, that Saint Augustine is happy to describe Plato as the pagan philosopher who comes nearest to Christianity. And the emphasis placed by Plato and his version of Socrates on the importance of care for one’s soul and the relative unimportance of such things as wealth, fame, and pleasure appeals to people who like to think of themselves as defending objective moral values against the corrupting influence of selfishness and animal passions. After our discussion of Plato’s views on ethics and politics, however, we might be markedly less susceptible ourselves to the supposition that Plato must invariably be on the right side in any disagreement he may have with the sophists. Indeed, in the light of the fact that Plato can plausibly be seen as building on and extending the unfortunate aspects of the pre-Socratic philosophic tradition exemplified by Thales and Parmenides, we might even be inclined to hope that the sophists will prove to be more sensitive than Plato to legitimate worries about philosophical methodology and what the means of inquiry available to philosophers can hope to achieve.
It is important to keep in mind here that the sophists should not be seen as exponents of a settled body of views. Their contemporary detractors tended to be uninterested in drawing distinctions between the views of individual sophists. Instead the sophists as a group are condemned as exploiting the power of persuasive reasoning for monetary advantage and driving a wedge between young people and the sound moral authority of their parents. However although Plato is repetitiously fond of contrasting the practice of the sophists in charging for their instruction with Socrates’ indifference to monetary considerations, his writings show that he is aware of substantial differences between the views of particular sophistic thinkers. Thus Thrasymachus, for example, is portrayed in Book One of the Republic as a sophist who rejects conventional morality, whereas the well-known sophist Protagoras is represented in the Platonic dialogue of the same name as a defender of the importance of following such rules, albeit on grounds that are too pragmatic to meet with Socrates’ unreserved approval. But as long as we do not lose sight of the existence of substantial differences between individual sophists, it does seem legitimate to say that their thought seems to have primarily organized itself around a central set of reflective positions that would have commanded the sympathies of the majority of these thinkers
One such position manifests itself in a marked tendency to maintain that the rules of everyday morality are, at bottom, mere man-made conventions. Many intellectuals of the second half of the fifth century in Athens were intrigued by the question of what could support our supposed obligation to respect the laws and protocols prevailing in their own society: a question made all the more pressing by the growing awareness of the very different laws and social norms prevailing in other societies and states. If a particular norm is merely a man-made convention (nomos) that prevails in one geographical location and is ignored or despised a few miles away, why should we bother to respect that norm? And are there potentially other forms of normative constraints that exist apart from human convention and are based not on human decisions but on objectively existing aspects of nature (physis) itself?
A typical sophistic answer to these questions would stress the existence of a gap between nomos and physis that potentially threatens ordinary morality. Plato and Socrates can plausibly be interpreted as holding that norms inherent in nature itself ultimately stand behind and justify an appropriately revised and purified form of morality that still shares many of the key features of orthodox moral thinking. Most sophists, in contrast, seem to have supposed that if there are any norms to be found in nature, then they point to very different conclusions from the ones usually endorsed by standard forms of morality. Thus we learn, for example, from a preserved fragment of the sophist Antiphon’s writings that he held that the majority of things that are just according to convention are at odds with nature. And in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias the sophist Callicles is presented as holding a position that is very reminiscent of Nietzsche’s claims that the superior individual needs to break free of the herd morality and assert his own right to self-determination. According to Plato’s Callicles:
We mold the best and most powerful among us, taking them while they’re still young, like lion cubs, and with charms and incantations we subdue them into slavery, telling them that everyone is supposed to get no more than his fair share, and that that’s what’s admirable and just. But I believe that if a man whose nature is equal to it were to arise, one who had shaken off, torn apart, and escaped all this, who had trampled underfoot our documents, our tricks and charms, and all our laws that violate nature, he, the slave, would rise up and be revealed as our master, and here the justice of nature would shine forth.
(Gorgias, 483e-484a)
A second position that seems to have been favoured by many sophists is a wide-ranging relativism. We tend to assume that people’s opinions and perceptions are answerable to a reality that exists independently of those opinions and perceptions. Thus we are now confident, for example, that the Earth revolves around the Sun. However we are also aware that in the Middle Ages the consensus was that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Our awareness of that general opinion does nothing though to persuade us that in the Middle Ages it was true for people alive at that time that the Sun did revolve around the Earth. And if we envisage a counterfactual situation in which the belief that the Sun revolves around the Earth once again becomes the predominant belief amongst human beings, we do not feel any inclination to suppose that this would of itself have any tendency to imply that it would in that situation be true for human beings that the Sun revolves around the Earth. The sophist Protagoras, however, is famous for reportedly saying that ‘Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are so, and of things which are not, that they are not.’ And in the Platonic dialogue Theaetetus, Protagoras is presented as holding an expansive form of relativism that maintains that for any judging subject A and any judgement whatsoever, his sincere judgement that it is the case that p entails that it is true for A that p.
Now it is by no means generally agreed that Plato is interpreting Protagoras correctly when he assigns to him a form of relativism that gives primacy to the judgements of each individual person rather than a group of people or a whole society. Irrespective, however, of whether Protagoras is interpreted as holding that the sincere judgement of individuals that p is true for the individuals in question or as holding that the sincere judgement of a society that p is true for the members of that society, the universal relativism ascribed to Protagoras by Plato seems to suffer from a problem of self-refutation. This problem is perhaps most easily explained in the case of the individualistic relativism envisaged by Plato, but it seems clear that it also afflicts the community version of relativism postulated by other commentators.
The key issue is that of what response Protagoras can coherently give to an interlocutor B who believes that Protagorean relativism happens to be false. Presumably Protagoras is committed to accepting that B’s judgement is true for B; for if Protagoras denies this, then he appears to be simply reneging on the truth of the ‘man is the measure’ doctrine (if that is correctly interpreted as any kind of relativistic view). However if Protagoras does accept this, then he himself comes to possess the belief that B’s judgement that Protagorean relativism is false is true for B. Moreover the belief that the belief that p is true for B commits one to the belief that p is true for B. Thus Protagoras now finds himself committed to the belief that it is true for B that Protagorean relativism is false, and that is equivalent to believing that the ‘man is the measure’ doctrine does not apply to B. However Protagoras’ original thesis was supposedly a universal one: it supposedly applied to all (human) judges. Consequently Protagoras now seems to be committed to the judgement that this thesis is false; and even if we permit him to insert one of his favourite relativizing clauses at this point, he is still committed to the judgement that it is false for him that the ‘man is the measure’ doctrine is true.
It is not clear to me, however, that we should interpret Protagoras’ comments about man being the measure as being in themselves an expression of a relativistic outlook. A preserved fragment expressing Protagoras’ attitude towards beliefs about the existence of the gods seems to be plainly an expression of agnosticism rather than relativism or, indeed, outright denial of their existence:
Concerning the gods, I am not able to know, neither whether they exist or not, nor what form they take. For many things stand in the way of knowledge: the obscurity, and human life being so short. (Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, 14.3.7)
It seems, accordingly, at least equally plausible to interpret Protagoras’ comments as reminding us of the truism that we have to make our own judgements and that we have no better access to the truth than is provided by those judgements. And if it is suggested that this is simply too banal a truism to be worth enunciating, it might be replied that the truism potentially gains some bite from reflection on what kinds of cognitive faculties it is plausible to ascribe to human beings. Grandiose philosophical claims about the ultimate nature of reality are ultimately answerable to the following question: if things were as this theory suggests, how could beings as limited in their capacities as we are possibly know that they stood thus?
At the same time the persistent tendency amongst ancient authors to link Protagoras with some fairly extensive form of relativism cannot be completely ignored. However there is clearly room for compromise for here: a person can have importantly relativistic views without necessarily indulging in the characteristically post-modern conceit of trying to hold that everything is relative. Thus we might be best advised to maintain that Protagoras adopted a non-global relativism that extended to value judgements and possibly perceptual judgements as well. This would allow us to view Protagoras as rejecting an objectivist interpretation of an extensive range of judgements that were lively objects of interest to his intellectual contemporaries, but it would not leave him burdened with a version of relativism that would be so wide-ranging as to call into question its own internal coherence.
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