Sophists

SOPHISTS. - Representatives of a vast cultural and philosophical movement that flourished in Greece, particularly in Athens, in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. The best-known masters of sophistry are: Protagoras of Abdera, Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Antiphon, Hippias of Elis and, in certain respects, Critias, the leader of the Thirty Tyrants. Too little of their writings has survived for it to be possible to form an exhaustive knowledge of this intricate and multiform period; nor can the tragedies of Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes, or the Platonic dialogues be accepted as indisputable sources, because of the inevitable subjectivism that inspires them.

The term "s." (σαφιστής: wise man) did not originally have a pejorative sense: Herodotus (I 29, II 49, IV 95) called Solon, Pythagoras (v.) and the founders of the Orphic mysteries "s."; Prometheus is called "s." in Aeschylus (Prom., 62; cf. Plato, Prot., 312 c); in the 5th century the term takes on the meaning of a know-it-all quibbler; and sophistry is defined by Aristotle (Soph. el., 1, 165 a 21): "an apparent wisdom, not real; and the s. is a dealer in apparent wisdom, not real." In reality, sophistry is the most conspicuous outcome of a profound crisis in Greek society: it is the moment in which the Greek man, under the urgency of new social and political upheavals, becomes aware of the conventionality of his institutions, of the insubstantiality of his beliefs, of the relativity of culture; he crumbles the past with a bitter anti-historical animosity, while yet bearing within himself the demand for what subsists "by nature"; he asserts himself proudly at the center of his human world, and yet looks with sadness upon life, "like an ephemeral vigil" (Antiphon, in Stobaeus, IV, 34, 63); he sees in the will to power the condition of his own destiny, and yet recognizes the necessity of good laws (εὐνομία) and the value of ethically heroic actions. The s. are the enlighteners of their time: they discover man, or rather they discover in man that point at which he is more than nature and is not yet conscious spirit; they conclude an epoch and announce, in a whirlwind of contradictions, theatrical gestures, scandalous propositions, noble intentions, a new era, from whose restlessness Socrates and Plato would be born.

Protagoras (b. around 480 B.C.; his principal work is the Περὶ ἀληθείαις) sums up one of the essential aspects in the well-known aphorism: "Man is the measure of all things, of existing things that they are, of non-existing things that they are not" (Diogenes Laertius, IX, 51). The world is reduced to phenomenality relative to the sentient and opinionating subject; it is impossible to transcend the immediate datum, except through the imagination and arbitrariness that create the fictitious world of human conventions; our thought has no metempirical powers: either it halts at the limit of appearances, or, if it transcends them, it ventures into the tangle of antilogies and loses sight of the immutable. Every empirical individuality is an unrelated subjectivity, closed to any authentically spiritual relation. The polemic becomes heated against the presumptions of the wise men, especially against the Eleatics: the one, eternal, immutable Being, object of pure intelligence, is not, maintains Gorgias (b. around 484); non-being, that is, phenomenal becoming, fluid and mutable, is, and we are nothing but what we become moment by moment. Even if Being were, we could not know it, since it remains always "beyond"; to touch it would mean to subjectivize it, that is, to annihilate it as being. And even if a cognitive contact were possible, we could not then communicate it to others, since the spoken word would bind us again to subjective phenomenality. The word does not reveal Being, but only the thousand fleeting aspects of becoming: it is a great force (λόγος δυνάστης μέγας ἐστίν) that seduces souls (ψυχαγωγία), arousing passions, determining acts, creating ideologies, in short constructing the world of men: it is an amoral force that binds natural, not spiritual, relations between souls. Therefore rhetoric is the art par excellence, which the s. claim to teach, aimed at dominating, at confounding the adversary, at making the false appear true. The same researches on homonyms and synonyms, of which Prodicus boasted, aim, more than at shedding light on the logical structure of language, at ensnaring thought and closing every passage to it. Now, if the true is what appears, if the word is no longer in function of the intelligence and the intelligence of being, then the good too falls under the same criticism: the good is what appears as such to the individual: that is, the useful, or the pleasant, or the expedient. Outside this relation with empirical individuality the good has no meaning. And if on the one hand Thrasymachus exalts the man who without scruples satisfies all his desires and places himself at once above every law (Plato, Resp., I, 338 d-348) and if on the other Prodicus, in the tale of Hercules at the crossroads, preserved by Xenophon (Mem., II, 1), celebrates the hero who prefers virtuous and laborious glory to soft happiness, this is not a contradiction: in both cases, at the center is always man as will to power, not an objective and universal value; virtue is always stripped of its ethical essence and conceived as ability, as constructive force. The distinction between φύσις (nature) and νόμος (convention; cf. Plato, Prot., 337 c-d; Gorgias, 482 a-484 b; Theaet., 172 b) likewise leads to the same conclusions. By nature man is free, released from any moral and juridical bond, superior to every law: his force is his right. Then convention placed a limit on the original impulses of instinct and trampled on the rights of nature, determining the distinctions between good and evil, between virtue and vice, between just and unjust. The laws of the State, with the aim of preventing a greater evil, placed a curb on the natural right of the stronger, committing the gravest injustice. Thus the s., in investigating what is "by nature," that is, the original and irreducible element of man, showed that they wished to go beyond relativism (v.) and subjectivism (v.): beyond conventions, laws, civilization, history they sought man plain in his naturalness and to him alone they recognized the right to dominate. In this way they posed the problem of the authenticity of the human essence; in other words, the problem of human destiny. And since the s. discovered in man naturalness, not spirituality, their solution could not but be inadequate. It would fall to later speculation to discover man: and yet the problem was an inheritance from sophistry. Meanwhile the distinction between φύσις and νόμος led not only to an unbridled immoralism, but also bore upon the structure of Greek society and its prejudices, fought social privileges, condemned slavery, branded as false and conventional the distinction between Greeks and barbarians (Antiphon, pap. Oxyrh. 1364, fr. II). Nor was there lacking one who, like the unknown author of the fragment preserved by Iamblichus (Proptr., 20; and for this reason remembered as the "Anonymous of Iamblichus"), traced a common humanity even in the so-called superman (v.) and saw in good laws the first condition of human association: for "even force, insofar as it is force, is not saved except with law and justice" (5th ed. edited by E. Pistelli, Leipzig 1894, p. 100). Against popular religion and the religious phenomenon in general, too, their critical and demolishing fervor was exercised. With Protagoras, skeptical in the face of every transcendence, the attitude was one of prudent agnosticism: "as for the gods, I have no way of ascertaining either that they are or that they are not, for many things stand in the way of this: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life" (Diog. Laertius, IX, 51). Prodicus went even further and attempted an explanation of the genesis of religion: the divinities are the objectification of things useful to man (Sextus Emp., Adv. math., IX, 18), while Critias saw in the gods the invention of cunning politicians for the purpose of terrifying the people and bending them more easily to the coercion of the law (Sextus Emp., ibid., IX, 54).

The dilettantish naturalism of the Sophists exhausted its historical function in the work of critical revision of values, to which it spurred contemporary thought; it was not the cause of the immoralism of the age, but a concomitant phenomenon, even if it contributed, perhaps, through the authority of its most famous representatives, to justifying it and elevating it to a principle. In the crisis of Greek society in the 5th century, Sophistry accelerated the rhythm of the evolutionary process, placing the Hellenic man decisively face to face with himself and with his moral condition. A sign of new times in the course of maturing, rich in turbulent ferment, it suggested, prepared, sketched, but built nothing positive, since it had neither the sense of universality, nor the cult of values, nor the seriousness of inquiry. Not even in the field of artistic theories, despite Gorgias's precious opinions on the "word," was it able to find the criterion of an authentic interpretation, since it failed to recognize language (v.) as communication and the spirituality of the expressive act. Of its doctrinal suggestions, relativistic subjectivism would fertilize not only the skepticism (v.) of a Pyrrho or an Aenesidemus, but any other historical form of skepticism; individual and political immoralism would be renewed in the pages of Hobbes's Leviathan (v.) as much as in the aphorisms of La Rochefoucauld (v.); the theory of the superman would find a congenial interpreter in Nietzsche (v.), led by the same naturalism (v.) to level all values.

Giuseppe Faggin