The Sophist Quagmire
Before I start with the ideas of Socrates, I need to discuss the ideas of his primary opponents. As the power of Athens spread, and Athenian ideas flowed out while the wealth of imperial subjects flowed in (voluntarily or not), the ability engage in persuasion gained in importance.
As something of a democracy, the ability to persuade Athenian juries and assemblies of the benefits of one’s point of view could make the difference between the success or failure not only of individuals, but also of entire families.
For instance, one way the Athenians paid for public projects – up to an including large military expenditures such as the purchase of warships – included the use of “liturgy.” The public assembly of Athens, which included all the voting citizens who decided to show up, could assign an expense to a particular person or family – usually a wealthy one. That expense could range from cleaning up and refurbishing the agora (marketplace), to paving a road, to a transport or supply ship, even the construction of a trireme warship.
The idea was that an individual could only have gained his wealth because the social and economic culture of the city-state made that possible. As such, those who benefited the most from the city had the greatest responsibility to protect, maintain and improve the city. So, when a man and his family or clan gained in affluence, he or they gained greater responsibility for the safety, security and improvement of the city. (Imagine if the U.S. Congress decided that Bill Gates should personally fund the construction of a Gerald Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.)
As one might expect, many people could (and did) use this as a political weapon. A political rival could propose that an individual had so much wealth that he or she needed to bear a greater burden of expenses, and propose that the assembly impose a liturgy. Do that enough times, and a rival could wind up bankrupting his opponent – or, at least, damaging his finances enough to limit his ability to compete, or influence others.
In response, the person who faced the imposition could argue that another individual or family had greater wealth, and thus should bear the cost. Alternatively, that person could even propose that he or she exchange personal wealth with the one who proposed the liturgy, if he could persuade the assembly that the proposer had greater wealth.
The proposed impositions of liturgy occurred in addition to routine matters such as legal disputes, disposition of wealth and slaves taken in raids, the pay of rowers on triremes, reception of representatives of foreign potentates, and other sorts of political “business as usual.”
As the ability to persuade in a public forum gained in importance (and could mean the difference between continued success, or the possibility of financial devastation for one’s entire clan), experts arose who specialized in higher education. Known as “sophists,” or “wise men,” they provided training, in exchange for pay, not only in the discoveries of people such as Thales and the other “pre-Socratic” thinkers, but also taught grammar (the proper structure of language) and rhetoric (public speaking). In addition, the sophists tended to travel a lot (and read anything they could) and, as such, understood that different cities had different laws, and different societies had different cultural values.
That meant the sophists frequently focused not on knowledge they could prove objectively true (such as, perhaps, the “physis” of Thales and others), but also on how best to operate within the social, cultural and political circumstances (the “nomos”) that existed within a particular city. Since the sophists understood that, to a certain extent, every set of cultural mores, social conventions and political structures existed as artificial creations of human beings, then an individual adept at persuasion could gain a great deal of power through the manipulation of language and the exercise of influence – whether or not such manipulation and influence qualified as what most people would consider “moral” or “ethical.”
Moreover, because they taught methods by which to accomplish this, to anyone who could afford to pay them, most people in the city states — especially those who valued traditions — viewed them with suspicion, or even outright hostility.
While many (or even most) sophists regarded adherence to traditional values as (at least) useful over the long term, almost all of them agreed that such values were, essentially, relative. The most famous sophist, Protagoras, wrote that if a breeze felt cold to one person, but warm to another, then the breeze really was cold to the first person, and it really was warm to the second. Moreover, the sophists would argue, because only the personal senses mattered, then any objective statement about the temperature of the breeze had little importance.
To most sophists, that “relativism” extended to every part of human existence. Each individual had his own idea about what was best for him – what brought him the greatest pleasure, wealth and power – and success lay in the ability to persuade others to agree with that individual point of view. What might be objectively true mattered little (since values and circumstances varies widely from one place to another, anyway), and that meant rhetoric – the power of persuasion – mattered more than any other knowledge.
For their part, the sophists didn’t really consider this an “evil” point of view. For one thing, concepts of “good” and “evil” qualified as nomos – so, for instance, if people in a particular city or region believed the sacrifice of a child to appease the gods benefited the worshipper and the larger community, then such sacrifices would qualify as “good” for everybody except the child, and not evil, at all. (Of course, to the child this would count as an “evil” act – but if the parents received great public acclaim for volunteering the child for the sacrifice, it might not even seem evil to them. Such was the relative nature of nomos.)
While most sophists, themselves, lived fairly exemplary lives, they did so more as a stratagem than because they had much in the way of emotional investment in the traditions of their people. Protagoras, himself, noted that the existence of justice and self-discipline were essential qualities for civilized people and, in fact, no civilization could exist, at all, unless the vast majority of its populace valued both. However, most sophists viewed justice and self-discipline as having practical value (they allowed for civilized life), but disregarded the notion that such rules had any sort of objective truth, or were ordained by the gods (as many traditionalists argued).
Few sophists believed in the existence of the Olympian gods, but did consider the worship of them a useful social convention that provided emotional comfort to the uneducated – and thus enhanced social stability. However, none of them accepted the notion that “tradition” provided a valid excuse for any sort of religious belief, or other social conventions. To them, all social conventions – including religious belief – were subject to skeptical review, and only honored and kept if rationally justified as somehow useful to the society, at large. As such, many sophists were privately agnostic, and Protagoras, himself, said he had no way to know anything about the gods with certainty, since the subject would be too complex and human life was too short.
Some sophists went a step or two further, and voiced skepticism about whether or not cultural mores and social convention might actually stunt the human mind. One sophist, Thrasymachus, said humanity – as products of the natural world and creations of the gods – should strive to live according to the patterns of nature, as much as possible. As such, Thrasymachus argued, the strong and the clever had every right to impose their wills upon the weak, just as the predator animal had every right to sink its teeth into the throat of the prey.
To Thrasymachus (and other sophists, although not to all of them), might really did make right, the powerful could and should do as they willed, and the weak simply had to endure whatever the strong imposed upon them. Moreover, to Thrasymachus, the individual had every right to use any means at his disposal to gain power and influence, so as to exercise his will on others, and achieve the greatest amount of personal pleasure.
Thrasymachus, and others such as him, argued that social mores and ethical codes originated as attempts by the weak to constrain the strong – and, as such, ran counter to human nature. However, because the weak outnumbered the strong so thoroughly, it behooved the strong to pretend to adhere to religious beliefs and social mores in public, while flouting them in private as much as possible, as a means to achieve greater pleasure. Thrasymachus and some of his colleagues thus viewed the powerful as “shepherds,” who cared for their flock only until such time as all could be fleeced and some even eaten.
As a tool to achieve power, Thrasymachus and most other sophists focused on rhetoric as perhaps the most valuable tool used to gain and exercise influence. Any speech that convinced listeners counted as a “good” speech, even if it included nothing that anybody would consider objectively true. In fact, the deliberate use of falsehood counted as perfectly acceptable, so long as it helped the speaker achieve his goals.
The parallels to modern U.S. politics are pretty obvious. The sophists of Classical Greece would have immediately understood the utility of deliberate lies told to provide emotional validation to the frustrated so as to gain political support; “alternative facts” as a means to persuade; and personal attacks upon opponents — especially those responsible for reporting objectively. A bit more than two weeks old as of the time of this post, the administration of Donald J. Trump has provided a superb example of the use of sophistry (albeit of a particularly blunt and ham-fisted sort) to gain political power to impose his will upon others, regardless of the unethical nature of those acts.
Back in the days of Classical Athens, our Athenian opportunist, Alcibiades, was the Trump of the time. He had little regard for Athenian law or traditions, used every event as an opportunity to increase his personal power, and didn’t hesitate to prostitute himself to Greece’s traditional enemy, Persia, if that meant he benefited.
While Socrates and his students specifically mentioned Alcibiades as the perfect example of the corruption engendered by sophists, they didn’t restrict their criticism to individuals. To them, the notion of education meant solely to gain power had permeated much of Athenian culture and corrupted many of its leaders. As a result, the leaders of Athens acted in unethical ways that resulted in the rebellion of the empire’s subjects, and its eventual defeat by Sparta’s Peloponnesian League.
So, while not all sophists actually advocated unethical activity, enough of them did so that the term, “sophistry” has entered most of languages as a pejorative term. In modern parlance, it is defined as, “plausible but fallacious argumentation,” or “a plausible but misleading or fallacious argument.” In other words, someone engages in sophistry if he or she makes an argument that sounds good, at least at first, but actually has no basis in fact; or even argues that facts have no relevance, at all.
Links:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sophists/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/sophists/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_(ancient_Greece)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sophist-philosophy