Who Were The Historical Sophists?

Who were the Sophists?

It has become somewhat of a clich to accuse one s intellectual opponents of sophistry, yet who exactly the historical sophists were seems to elude many who employ the term. The Sophists were, broadly speaking the first professional philosophers insomuch as they were the first to realize that the intellect itself had a price worth paying. Thus indebted to the interests of their clients, the Sophists focused on rhetoric and linguistic analysis to the aim of strengthening the arguments of those who hired them. While they are remembered, in a way, as the bad guys in the tragic story of Socrates, who strove against their amoral approach to the intellectual sciences, such an approach is one-dimensional and treats those in the Sophist camp as monolithic. Among their camp were a number of curious individuals, some of which demonstrated considerable intellectual prowess, like that of Hippias of Elis (d. 399 BC), who was recorded by Plato as having taught mathematics, astronomy, music, history, literature, and mythology, and to whom the concept of natural law has been attributed.[1] Prodicus of Ceos (d. 395 BC), another Sophist, was among the frontiersmen in the sciences of linguistics and semantics, and was also known to have critically approached Greek religion, claiming that the gods of Greece were the mere personifications of natural forces, such that those worshipping Hephaestus are in fact worshipping fire, while those worshipping Demeter are worshipping bread. Gorgias of Leotini (d. 375 BC), like Prodicus, specialized in rhetoric and language, and was among the first to classify words according to their parts of speech. He was also fond of rhetorical exercises, and famously penned a defence of Helen of Troy the damnable harlot who got Troy sacked and many a Greek warrior slain (in the cultural memory of Ancient Greece) and a treatise of scepticism entitled On What is Not arguing for the impossibility of true knowledge and conveying it to others. All of these figures whatever their laudable achievements may have been however, pale in comparison to Protagoras (d. 420 BC), to whom the moral relativism of the Sophists can be attributed to.

Protagoras is best known for his belief that man is the measure of all things, which was understood to mean that what truth is for one man, is not necessarily true for another. Whether or not he was entirely a solipsist is a matter of contention, but what is clear is that he argued against the notion of objective truth this is not to say he believed that all opinions were equally valid, but rather, there is a certain subjectivity in thought to be reined in by the use of rhetoric. Protagoras was oft-criticized for his statement that he could make the weak argument appear strong and the strong argument appear weak, which, according to his critics, signified his mendacity. Protagoras never truly had a chance to defend himself against his critics, but perhaps he might have responded by saying that his efforts were not to disingenuously use the intellect to beguile common folk and swindle them of their wealth, but rather, in matters in which the truth was not clear, rhetoric and logic could be used as intellectual armaments to defend one s position and attack their opponents. According to Plutarch, such rhetoric came into play when a man was accidentally killed by a javelin thrown during an athletic contest the Sophist spent the entire day discussing who ought to be held responsible for the man s death: was it the man who threw the fatal spear, the overseers of the games, or even the unthinking javelin itself? We see such relativism in modern judicial systems, where lawyers and solicitors use the art of rhetoric to defend even those whose abominable crimes turn all others away from pity or sympathy. However, there may have indeed been an element of truth to the critics claims regarding Protagoras avarice: as the story goes, he once sued his pupil Eualthus for failing to pay for his philosophical services, and, when Eualthus rebutted that he was given a lousy education that led to him losing all of his court cases, Protagoras used his own sophistic rhetoric, arguing that if I win this case, you must pay because the verdict was for me if you win it, you must still pay because then you will have won a case.

The Sophists in the Eyes of Socrates

Whatever the historical realities of the sophists were, the importance of them truly lies in the perception of them by Socrates, Plato, and those who followed in their footsteps. For the Platonic Socrates, the sophists had committed a singularly inexcusable error in attempting to separate knowledge from virtue. For Socrates, the two were inseparably wedded, such that no one who really knew what the best thing to do was could do otherwise and all wrongdoing was truly the result of ignorance. In Plato s Protagoras, we see Socrates (d. 399) expose the falsity of the sophistic claim that they were imparting virtue through their educational services by pointing to a distinction between phron sis (practical virtue) and political aret (virtue required for life in public affairs). While one could play the role of obedient citizens by being taught the forms of aret in the schools of the Sophists, true, useful virtue must not be mere habit: instead, it must have an authentic place in the soul and engender intellectual prudence and insight. Through his eponymous method of questioning, Socrates demonstrated that those who claimed to teach virtue could not do so while adhering to the relativism characteristic of Sophism.

Thus, the Socratic response to the approach of the Sophists was an epistemic shift from a world-view based on leading practical public lives marked by worldly success, to one in which seeking knowledge itself with the virtuous aim of human life. The pride of Socrates laid in his admission of his own ignorance he, unlike the Sophists, did not pick a position and then employ his intellect to defend it. Instead, he started from a position where nothing was taken for granted, and employed the intellect to critically analyze and dissect the propositions of others, employing dialectical argumentation to demonstrate the absurdity of certain points. When once the Sophists started at the conclusion and worked their way down to the premises of arguments, Socrates did the opposite, and this, above all other considerations, may be why we bisect Greek philosophy into the pre-Socratics and those who followed the wise man of Athens: although other philosophers may have contributed ideas of equal import, it was the methods of Socrates that distinguished him from his predecessors.

[1] Natural Law: An Introduction And Re-Examination. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. 2.