The varied intellectual activity of the fifth century included a newly vigorous interest in questions of language and rhetoric, especially its connections with human perception and thought and with the ultimate reality that is the object of human perception and thought. The questions were inspired in part by the Eleatic argument, including its confidence in the power of argument to discern and posit fundamental truth, but also gained a new urgency from the increasingly democratic politics in Athens, where justice in the law courts and policies of state in the assembly were determined through verbal debate and ultimately one argument’s victory over another. In an environment where success in arguing carried such high stakes, there arose a group of intellectuals offering themselves as professional teachers of virtue, justice, and success. These men, labeled since Plato the ‘‘Sophists,’’ were understood in the popular imagination as advocates of positions threatening to traditional wisdom: the view that nomos or convention was opposed to physis or nature, together with a belief that, when it comes to human practice, ‘nomosis king’’; a claim that for every matter there existed two opposing valid arguments, and that through instruction ‘‘the weaker’’ argument could be made ‘‘the stronger’’; and a belief that popular justice was a virtue of convention rather than nature, whereas real justice was ‘‘the interest of the stronger.’’ Fifth-century writers such as Herodotos (e. g., 3.38), Aristophanes (Clouds), Thucydides (especially the Mytilenean debate and the Melian dialogue), the Hippocratics (On Ancient Medicine, On the Art, On the Nature of Man), and more broadly Euripides (e. g., Medea, Hippolytus, Helen, and passim) attest to the novelty and popularity of these ideas, often casting them as destructive of civic morality.
Whereas these articulations of current thought tend not to attribute the new ideas to named historical individuals, Plato, writing a generation later (late 390s to the early 340s), devoted his full literary and intellectual genius to showing that his own teacher Sokrates, executed by the Athenians in 399 for ‘‘corrupting the youth,’’ had no share in the dangerous nominalism of the Sophists: indeed, whereas they engaged in intellectual activity for purposes of winning - winning money and reputation as well as arguments - Sokrates did so in pure pursuit of the truth. Plato thus provides in his dialogues of Sokrates unique detail about the identities and arguments of the particular men whom Sokrates allegedly made it his mission to oppose and confront ( Apology, taking issue with Clouds, where Sokrates himself was represented as the main ‘‘Sophist’’). In Protagoras he names Prodikos of Keos and Hippias of Elis as the most important Sophists in Athens next to the title character Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-20); in Republic book 1 he attributes a noxiously conventionalist, or possibly nominalist, view of justice to the famous rhetorician Thrasymachos of Chalkedon (at his prime c. 430-400), and in Gorgias he portrays Kallikles of Athens, a (possibly fictional) admirer of the well-known title character Gorgias of Leontinoi (c. 485-post 399), defending the claim that the rule of the stronger is natural justice (like the Athenian speakers in Thucydides’ Melian dialogue): hence conventional justice would be a fiction set up by agreement among the weak to curb the power of the strong. Xenophon, like Plato an apologist for Sokrates, adds the Athenian Antiphon of Rhamnous to Sokrates’ ‘‘sophistic’’ interlocutors - assuming that Antiphon of Rhamnous is identical to Xenophon’s Antiphon ‘‘the sophist’’ (Nails 2002: 32-4) - and Antiphon, too, is associated with the power of argument on the one hand and the superiority of ‘‘natural’’ to ‘‘conventional’’ justice on the other.
Not all the famous older ‘‘Sophists’’ were proponents of the dangerous ‘‘sophistic’’ positions, however: Plato and others present Prodikos and Hippias not as skeptics or relativists, but as advocates ofpositive doctrines. Prodikos was famous for views about linguistic correctness, especially the distinction of apparent synonyms, and he reinterpreted the labors of Herakles allegorically to demonstrate the superiority of virtue to pleasure (Xenophon Memorabilia 2.1). Hippias was famous for his confident claims to know and speak about almost every contemporary field of knowledge, from mathematics to genealogy to Homeric literature, and his ‘‘self-sufficiency’’ (Hippias Maior) was supposed to extend even to his elaborate wardrobe, which he crafted with his own hands. Hippias was credited with creating lists of Olympic victors that became the basis for historical chronology. In two senses, then, Hippias might be recognized as an important predecessor to Aristotle and the Peripatetics in the ‘‘organization of knowledge’’: first, he collected information and organized it for presentation and application, and, second, he organized a wide range of fields of knowledge into a repertoire of speeches or, perhaps, a curriculum he could offer to others. Prodikos and Hippias are portrayed disdainfully by Plato because they are somehow charlatans, claiming to know what they really do not know or what is not worth knowing. The implication that the ‘‘sophist’’ has a pseudo-knowledge, especially when it is achieved through short cuts and fallacious argument, becomes the leading idea in Aristotle’s frequent use of the term (Classen 1981).
Protagoras and Gorgias are the most likely individual candidates for views that laid open the ways to the challenge to objective ethical values that so inflamed
Plato’s hostility to the sophists. Protagoras allegedly advocated relativism, and Gor-gias apparently disregarded moral issues altogether: by a possible reading of his text On Not Being, Gorgias denied that there is any reality at all, let alone an ethical reality. At the same time, it is difficult to attribute the right sort ofdangerously relativist or nihilist positions to either without trusting Plato’s already biased presentation (Bett 1989). Like Anaxagoras, Protagoras is closely associated by our sources with Perikles (Plutarch Perikles 36.3); like Empedokles and Herodotos, he was associated also with the colony at Thourioi: Perikles allegedly invited Protagoras to design its constitution. The leading interest of Protagoras seems indeed to have been politics, namely, the ways individuals who differ in intellectual and affective disposition can cooperate as a unified community. Protagoras' interest in language and argument should, then, probably be subordinated to his interest in political justice and constitution. In Plato’s respectful but ultimately hostile portrayals, Protagoras is shown in conversation with Sokrates about the coherence of the position of the professional teacher of excellence, as Protagoras claims to be (Protagoras), and the nature of knowledge ( Theaetetus). In Protagoras, the title character defends his profession explicitly against the view that virtue cannot be taught, or indeed formalized in any way that could render it teachable, and implicitly against the view that all citizens who have the capacity for human virtue are equally excellent, and hence have no need for a paid expert in excellence. In the more technical Theaetetus, the Protagoras character is made to defend the view that knowledge is perception, that is, that ‘‘man is the measure of all things,’’ a subjectivist view of truth that Plato adamantly refutes throughout his corpus. Although this claim by Protagoras may have been made in connection with political ‘‘truth,'' such as deliberations about the best constitution or course of action for the city (Farrar 1988), Plato and his followers tend to assess it in reference to physical truth and sense perception of the physical truth, such as whether the wind is cold or warm.
The analogy between physical truth and political ‘‘truth’’ is, however, not complete, and the type of ‘‘relativism’’ that can be plausibly reconstructed in each case is fundamentally different. Modern discussion of Protagorean and Sophistic relativism, which seeks to understand both the appeal of the Sophistic views and the fervency of the Platonic renunciation, distinguishes three types of relativism that could have been at stake (Kerferd 1997). First, the privileging of‘‘private’’ truths could imply that no public, or objective, truth exists: this is objective nihilism. Second, the private truth might be not an independent thing, but a phenomenal interface between a perceiver and an object, perhaps really caused by a public object, but caused differently for different recipients: this is a relativism - or, better, subjectivism - of some qualities, or predicates, but not objective nihilism. Third, the real object might really have conflicting qualities within itself, whether because it is always changing (as in the ‘‘secret doctrine,'' associated with Herakleitos, which Plato ascribes to his Protagoras character in Theaetetus) or because its complexity, regardless of change, exceeds the capacity of a human thinker to posit completely true propositions about it: this is, then, less a problem about what exists (existence becomes richer than it was on a naive view) than another type of subjectivism, together with pessimism about human knowledge. In charting out these different ‘‘relativisms’’ it is important, we see, to distinguish between absolute versus relative existence or ontology on the one hand and objectively versus subjectively true judgments on the other. The point Protagoras makes at Protagoras 334A-B, that olive oil is bad for plants but good for people, demonstrates, more so than the discussion in Theaetetus, a true relativism. This example is not an epistemological matter, but an ontological one: the good quality in the olive oil really is relative to the consumer of the olive oil, regardless who perceives it, or how it tastes. If Protagoras was interested primarily in questions such as the temperature of the wind, his relativism was most probably of the second type, actually a subjectivism. If he was interested primarily in moral and political issues, however, the first and third types of relativism become more plausible, and the fact that he exerted himself over constitutions and teaching renders it unlikely that he was an objective nihilist. The question then arises how physical ‘‘facts’’ and political or ethical ‘‘facts’’ are to be compared. If Plato’s strict, homogeneous objectivism is an extreme position, this would explain his vehemence against plausible views of Protagoras and the other Sophists.
Gorgias, said to have come to Athens in 427 on an embassy from Leontinoi, is never called a ‘‘sophist’’ but is associated most commonly with the most damning positions of sophistry. In Plato’s Gorgias he represents, sometimes indirectly through his associates Polos and Kallikles, the position that the skills of rhetoric supersede all others, and rhetoric is somehow the supreme knowledge: at the same time, rhetoric is amoral, and the teacher ofrhetoric is not responsible for whatever immoral applications his pupils might give to his teachings. Three works of Gorgias himself survive in more or less original form, and these can be read as articulations of views that fit well into the picture of the relativist, nihilist sophist. The Defense of Helen, written, amid contemporary consensus that Helen of Sparta was responsible for the Trojan War, as an apparent exercise in making the weaker argument the stronger, affirms that language or logos is a ‘‘great lord’’ which through its essentially deceptive powers overrules like a drug all competing modes of mental input and thus controls thought and choice. The fictional defense speech of the mythical Palamedes against Odysseus’ charge of treason demonstrates the powerful potential of argument from probability in a situation where eyewitness knowledge of the historical facts of the matter is unavailable. The fragmentary work On Nature, sometimes called On Not Being, which survives in two paraphrases by other thinkers, argues in Eleatic style for the three paradoxical theses that (1) nothing exists; (2) if it (anything) does exist, it cannot be known; (3) if it can be known, it cannot be communicated from one mind to another through speech. On the face of it, this argument seems equivalent to the nihilism that makes the sophist so threatening to traditional wisdom and social order. But the overall structure of the three-pronged argument, which proceeds onward only in the case that each thesis is false, and presents itself overall as a compelling argument for the audience of the words only if the final thesis is false, makes it likely that Gorgias is interested in demonstrating second-order points about how arguments work, not the first-order points that he uses as his content, which might instead count as a ridiculous joke at the expense of Parmenides and his very different assumptions about the power of argument (e. g., Long 1984). Gorgias does in general depend on the existence, knowability, and communicability of truth; at the same time, if one is willing to read excerpts out of context, the stereotypical ‘‘sophistic’’ views associated with rhetoric can be found throughout his work.
World History
