SOFISTI (Sophists). – Representatives of a broad cultural-philosophical movement that flourished in Greece, particularly in Athens, during the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. The most notable masters of sophistry include 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. Of their writings, too little has survived to allow for a comprehensive understanding of this intricate and multifaceted period; nor can the tragedies of Euripides, the comedies of Aristophanes, or the dialogues of Plato be accepted as indisputable sources, given the inevitable subjectivism that inspires them.
The term *sophist* (σοφισμός, *sophism*) originally carried no pejorative sense: Herodotus (I 29, II 49, IV 95) referred to Solon, Pythagoras (v.), and the initiators of the Orphic mysteries as sophists; in Aeschylus (Prom., 62; cf. Plato, Prot., 312 c), Prometheus is called a sophist. By the 5th century, however, the term took on the meaning of a pedantic quibbler, and sophistry was defined by Aristotle (Soph. el., I, 165 a 21) as “apparent wisdom, not real; and the sophist is a merchant of apparent, not real, wisdom.” In reality, sophistry was the most striking outcome of a profound crisis in Greek society: it was the moment when the Greek man, under the pressure of new social and political upheavals, became aware of the conventionality of his institutions, the fragility of his beliefs, and the relativity of culture. He shattered the past with an ancient vigor, yet carried within himself the demand for what endures by nature; he proudly asserted himself at the center of his human world, yet looked upon life with sadness, “like a watchman on a fleeting dawn” (Antiphon, in Stobaeus, IV, 34-63). He saw the will to power as the condition of his destiny, yet acknowledged the necessity of good laws (ἐννομία) and the value of ethically heroic actions. The sophists were the Enlightenment thinkers of their time: they discovered man—or rather, they discovered in man that point where he is more than nature and not yet conscious spirit; they concluded an era and announced, amid a whirlwind of contradictions, theatrical gestures, scandalous propositions, and noble intentions, a new age, from whose unrest Socrates and Plato would emerge.
As for transcendence, their attitude was one of cautious agnosticism: “As for the gods, I have no way of knowing whether they exist or do not exist, since many things stand in the way: the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life” (Diogenes Laertius, IX, 51). Prodicus went even further, attempting an explanation of religious origins: the gods are the objectification of things useful to man (Sextus Empiricus, Adv. math., IX, 18), while Critias saw the gods as an invention of cunning politicians to terrify the people and more easily bend them to the coercion of law (Sextus Empiricus, ibid., IX, 54).
The dilettantish naturalism of the sophists exhausted its historical function in the critical revision of values that it provoked in contemporary thought; it was not the cause of the immoralism of the age, but a concomitant phenomenon, even if it may have contributed, perhaps through the authority of its most famous representatives, to justify and elevate it to a principle. In the crisis of Greek society in the 5th century, sophistry accelerated the pace of evolutionary progress by decisively confronting the Hellenic man with himself and his moral condition. A sign of new times in the making, rich in turbulent ferment, it suggested, prepared, and sketched, but did not construct anything positive, for it lacked a sense of universality, a reverence for values, and the seriousness of inquiry. Not even in the field of artistic theory, despite Gorgias’ valuable reflections on “speech,” did it succeed in finding a criterion for authentic interpretation, since it misunderstood language (v.) as communication and the spirituality of the expressive act. Among its doctrinal contributions, relativistic subjectivism would fertilize not only the skepticism (v.) of Pyrrho or Aenesidemus but any other historical form of skepticism; individual and political immoralism would reappear in the pages of Hobbes’ *Leviathan* (v.) as well as in the aphorisms of Larochette Foucault (v.); the theory of the Übermensch would Nietzsche (v.), who, driven by the same naturalism (v.), leveled all values.