SOFISTS. – Representatives of a vast cultural-philosophical movement that flourished in Greece, particularly at Athens, in the fifth and fourth 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 a comprehensive understanding of this intricate and multiform period; nor can the tragedies of Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes, or the Platonic dialogues, because of the inevitable subjectivism that inspires them, be accepted as indisputable sources.
The term «s.» (σαφιστής: wise man) did not originally have a derogatory meaning: Herodotus (I 29, II 49, IV 95) called Solon, Pythagoras (v.) and the instructors of the Orphic mysteries s.; Prometheus is called s. in Aeschylus (Prom., 62; cf. Plato, Prot., 312 c); in the fifth century the term acquired the meaning of pedantic quibbler; and sophistry is defined by Aristotle (Soph. el., 1, 165 a 21): «an apparent, not real wisdom; and the s. is a merchant in apparent, not real wisdom». In reality, sophistry is the most conspicuous outcome of a profound crisis in Greek society: it is the moment in which the Greek, under the pressure of new social and political upheavals, becomes aware of the conventionality of his institutions, the groundlessness of his beliefs, and the relativity of culture; he shatters the past with an acrid antihistorical animosity, while nevertheless carrying within himself the demand for that which exists «by nature»; he asserts himself proudly at the centre of his human world, yet looks sadly upon life, «like a brief vigil» (Antiphon, in Stobaeus, IV, 34, 63); he sees in the will to power the condition of his destiny, yet acknowledges the necessity of good laws (εὐνομία) and the value of ethically heroic actions. The s. are the Enlightenment thinkers of their age: they discover man, or rather they discover in man that point at which he is more than nature and not yet conscious spirit; they bring an epoch to its close and announce, amid a whirl of contradictions, theatrical gestures, scandalous propositions, and noble purposes, a new era, from whose disquiet Socrates and Plato will arise.
Protagoras (born 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 those that are, that they are, and of those that are not, that they are not» (Diogenes Laertius, IX, 51). The world is reduced to a phenomenality relative to the sentient and opinion-forming subject; it is impossible to transcend the immediate given except through the imagination and arbitrariness that create the fictitious world of human conventions; our thought has no metempirical powers: either it stops at the limit of appearances or, if it transcends them, ventures into the tangle of antilogies and loses sight of the immutable. Every empirical individuality is an unrelated subjectivity, closed to any genuinely spiritual relation. The polemic grows heated against the pretensions of the sophists, especially against the Eleatics: the One, eternal, immutable Being, object of pure in-
telligence, does not exist, Gorgias maintains (born around 484); non-being, that is, phenomenal becoming, fluid and mutable, exists, and we are nothing other than what we become from moment to moment. Even if Being existed, we could not know it, since it would always remain «beyond»; to touch it would mean subjectivizing it, that is, annihilating it as being. And even if cognitive contact were possible, we could not then communicate it to others, since the spoken word would once again bind us to subjective phenomenality. The word does not reveal Being, but only the thousand fleeting aspects of becoming: it is a great force (λόγος δυναστης μέγας εστίν) that seduces souls (φυγαγωγία), arousing passions, determining actions, creating ideologies—in short, constructing the human world: it is an amoral force that establishes natural, not spiritual, relations among souls. Hence rhetoric is the art par excellence, which the s. claim to teach, directed toward dominating, confusing the adversary, and making the false appear true. The very investigations of homonyms and synonyms, of which Prodicus boasted, aim less at illuminating the logical structure of language than at ensnaring thought and closing every avenue before II. Now, if the true is what appears, if the word is no longer a function of intelligence and intelligence of being, then the good too falls under the same criticism: the good is what appears good to the individual; that is, what is useful, or pleasant, or expedient. Apart from this relation to empirical individuality, the good has no meaning whatsoever. And if, on the one hand, Thrasymachus exalts the man who unscrupulously satisfies all his desires and suddenly places himself above every law (Plato, Resp., I, 338 d-348), while, on the other, Prodicus, in the account of Heracles at the crossroads preserved by Xenophon (Mem., II, 1), celebrates the hero who prefers virtuous and laborious glory to a soft happiness, this is not a contradiction: in both cases, man as will to power always remains at the centre, not an objective and universal value; virtue is still stripped of its ethical essence and conceived as skill, as constructive force. The distinction between φύσις (nature) and νόμος (convention; cf. Plato, Prot., 337 c-d; Gorgias, 482 a-484 b; Theset., 172 b) likewise aims at the same conclusions. By nature man is free, released from every moral and juridical bond, superior to every law: his strength is his right. Then convention placed a limit upon the original impulses of instinct and trampled upon the rights of nature, establishing the distinctions between good and evil, virtue and vice, justice and injustice. The laws of the State, with the aim of preventing a greater evil, restrained the natural right of the stronger, thereby committing the gravest injustice. Thus the s., in investigating what is «by nature», that is, the original and irreducible element in man, showed that relativism (v.) subjectivism (v.): beyond conventions, laws, civilization, and history, they sought man in his unalloyed naturalness, and recognized only in him the right to rule. 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 naturalness rather than spirituality in man, their solution could not but be inadequate. It would fall to later speculation to discover man; yet the problem was an inheritance of sophistry. Meanwhile, the distinction between φύσις and νόμος led not only to unrestrained immoralism, but also affected the structure of Greek society and its prejudices, fought social privileges, condemned slavery, and branded as false and conventional the distinction between Greeks and barbarians (Antiphon, pap. Oxyrh. 1364, fr. II). Nor was there any lack of those who, like the unknown author of the fragment preserved by Iamblichus (Proptr., 20; and therefore remembered as the «anonymous author of Iamblichus»), traced a common humanity even in the alleged superman (v.) and saw good laws as the primary condition of human society: for «even force, insofar as it is force, cannot be preserved except through law and justice» (5th ed., edited by E. Pistelli, Leipzig 1894, p. 100). Their critical and destructive fervour was also directed against popular religion and the religious phenomenon in general. With Protagoras, sceptical in the face of ad
in the face of every transcendence, the attitude was one of prudent agnosticism: «as for the gods, I have no means of ascertaining either that they exist or that they do not, since many things stand in the way: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life» (Diog. Laetzio, IX, 51). Prudico went still further and attempted an explanation of the genesis of religion: the divinities are the objectification of things useful to man (Sesto Emp., Adv. math., IX, 18), whereas Crizia saw in the gods the invention of astute politicians for the purpose of terrifying the people and bending them more easily to the coercion of the law (Sesto Emp., ibid., IX, 54).
The dilettantish naturalism of the s. exhausted its historical function in the critical revision of values, to which it urged contemporary thought; it was not the cause of the immorality of the age, but a concomitant phenomenon, even though it perhaps contributed, through the authority of its most famous representatives, to justifying it and raising it to the status of a principle. In the crisis of Greek society in the 5th century, sophistry accelerated the rhythm of the evolutionary process, decisively confronting the Hellenic man with himself and with his moral condition. A sign of new times in the process of maturation, rich in troubled ferment, it suggested, prepared, and sketched out, but built nothing positive, since it possessed neither a sense of universality, nor a cult of values, nor the seriousness of inquiry. Not even in the field of artistic theories, despite Gorgia’s valuable opinions on the «word», did it succeed in finding the criterion of an authentic interpretation, language (v.) as communication and the spirituality of the expressive act. Of its doctrinal insights, relativistic subjectivism would fertilize not only the scepticism (v.) of a Pirenne or an Enesidemo, but every other historical form of scepticism; individual and political immorality would be renewed both in the pages of Hobbes’Leviathan (v.) and in the aphorisms of Larochefoucauld (v.); the theory of the superman would Nietzsche (v.), naturalism (v.) to level all values.