![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Traditionally, the Older Sophists were conceived as philosophical skeptics who rejected speculative inquiry to focus on rhetorical methods of being successful in practical life. More recently, this view has been complicated by studies revealing the Sophists to be a diverse group of intellectuals who practiced their art prior to the categorization of “rhêtorikê,” thereby rendering the very meaning of the general term “Sophist” far more problematic. Both perspectives conceal the common attitude that unites the Sophists as a group and is central to understanding their democratic ethos rooted in an experimental attitude that draws on the resources of speculative reason to serve the purpose of radical invention necessary for a democratization of the productive arts. Recovering the professionalism and experimentalism of the Sophists contributes to the democratic project of promoting the productive and collaborative arts—including rhetoric—that employ the resources of theoretical knowledge to inform collective practice and thereby assist in controlling the fortunes of humankind in a changing world.
Notes
1. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1958), 126.
2. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 15.
3. Edward Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 30.
4. Eric A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 60.
5. Michael Gagarin, “Did the Sophists Aim to Persuade?” Rhetorica 19 (2001): 289.
6. Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 41.
7. Susan C. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 98.
8. Scott Consigny, Gorgias: Sophist and Artist (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 209. The problem with this formulation is that during the Classical Age of Greece, the Sophists were largely without rival in their professional capacity. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the primary competitors of men like Gorgias were not foundationalist philosophers but other Sophists.
9. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 186.
10. Christopher Lyle Johnstone, “Sophistical Wisdom: Politikê Aretê and ‘Logosophia,’” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 282.
11. Johnstone, “Sophistical Wisdom,” 282.
12. See Plato, Sophist, trans. Nicholas P. White, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 231c–e, 254a.
13. On the question of whether the Sophists were skeptics, see Richard Bett, “The Sophists and Relativism,” Phronesis 34 (1989): 139–69.
14. For instance, Schiappa suggests that because of their diversity of thought and practice, “the Sophists deserve study as individual thinkers and not simply as a movement.” Consequently, Schiappa restricts the term “Sophist” to refer “specifically to those first professional educators who, more often than not, are associated with the technê (art or skill) of prose speech” (Protagoras and Logos, 12). Additionally, McComiskey narrows this definition even further, calling the Sophists simply “wise men with widely varying epistemological beliefs and political commitments.” Bruce McComiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), 6.
15. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 117.
16. On the notion of the Sophist as public intellectual, see Nathan Crick, “Rhetoric, Philosophy, and the Public Intellectual,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 39 (2006): 127–39.
17. This argument continues a line of thought in Nathan Crick, “‘A Capital and Novel Argument’: Charles Darwin's Notebooks and the Productivity of Rhetorical Consciousness,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 337–64.
18. Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1931), 94.
19. W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 66. An interesting case of “taking sides” in this binary is the work of British utilitarian George Grote, who takes great pains to emphasize that the Sophists did not represent a philosophical school but a professional class. Grote denies that there were any “common doctrines, or principles, or method, belonging to them,” instead emphasizing that their commonality derived from their shared goal, as paid teachers, to prepare young men eager for power and prestige in the new democratic empire “to think, speak, and act.” George Grote, History of Greece, vol. 8 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1869), 370.
20. All references to original Sophistical fragments will be cited directly in the text using the original numbering of H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, as compiled and translated in Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff, trans. and ed., Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
21. Bruno Latour offers a fine image of the so-called solution to the problem of dualism, which is to rapidly move back and forth between two opposing poles without altering the basic framework. He writes, “With circular gestures of the two hands turning faster and faster in opposite directions, it is possible to give an appearance of smooth reason to a connection between two sites whose existence remains as problematic as before.” What applies in Latour's case to the “actor/system” and the “micro/macro” debates applies equally to the “mind/body” debate. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 169.
22. Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 150.
23. Burke, Counter-Statement, 150.
24. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Vintage, 1957), 125.
25. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, 112.
26. Burke, Counter-Statement, 183.
27. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 110.
28. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 294.
29. Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 293.
30. Zeller, Outlines of the History, 19.
31. Guthrie, Greek Philosophers, 24.
32. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 93.
33. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 125.
34. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 125.
35. The reflective and abstract character of the pre-Socratics was probably itself a reflection of the new Greek literacy. As Marshall McLuhan puts it, “[o]ral cultures act and react at the same time. Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action. To act without reacting, without involvement, is the peculiar advantage of the Western man.” In this way, the difference between the pre-Socratic and Sophistical attitudes corresponds to the difference between those in a literate culture who value their skill in contemplation as an intrinsic good and those who value contemplation as a form of delayed action. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 86.
36. John Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 13.
37. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 150.
38. The “working-class” ethos of the Sophists is indicated by the curious—even if fictitious—biographical detail that Protagoras “used to be a porter” and was witnessed by Democritus “tying up bundles of wood.” Aristotle also credits him with having “invented as well the so-called shoulder pad, on which porters carry their loads.” Rosamond Kent Sprague, ed., The Older Sophists: A Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Edited by Diels-Kranz with a New Edition of Antiphon and of Euthydemus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1972, 80A.1. (For common reference, many of the classical interpreters of the Sophists will be cited from this source using Sprague's numbering. Any such references, of course, should be read with appropriate skepticism regarding their accuracy, as some were made hundreds of years subsequent to the sophistical era.) More than any other example, this shows how closely aligned were the Sophists with the attitude of the artisan—indeed, even the common laborer—who dwelled in the contingent world of adapting means to ends and ends to means. Regardless of the actual truth of the story, the fact of its existence demonstrates something about the sophistical ethos. Nobody would ever believe, after all, that Plato or Aristotle would have lowered themselves to finding methods of making labor less laborious.
39. As indicated by Steven Mailloux, it is perhaps more appropriate to credit F. C. S. Schiller with this acknowledgement. For it was Schiller who first began to turn away from the “negative, skeptical interpretation” of the Sophists and toward a view that sees them “arguing positively for the human origin of truth and thus affirming, not rejecting, mankind's ability to know it.” Steven Mailloux, “Introduction: Sophistry and Rhetorical Pragmatism,” in Rhetoric, Sophistry, Pragmatism, ed. Steven Mailloux (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 9; see also F. C. S. Schiller, Studies in Humanism (New York: Macmillan, 1907).
40. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 126.
41. John Dewey, Logic—The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938), 72.
42. It is surprising that even such an astute critic such as Jacques Ellul writes the Sophists out of his history of technology. According to Ellul, the Greeks never were able to bridge science and technology because they believed that “technical research was considered unworthy of the intellect, and that the goal of science was not application but contemplation.” This may have been true for Plato and many pre-Socratics, but it was most definitely not accurate for the Sophists. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964), 28.
43. Sprague, Older Sophists, 86A.1, 86A.12.
44. Gagarin and Woodruff, Early Greek Political Thought, 292.
45. Sprague, Older Sophists, 82A.1.
46. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 29.
47. Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008), 20.
48. Sprague, Older Sophists, 84A.19.
49. Gagarin and Woodruff, Early Greek Political Thought, 187.
50. Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 162.
51. Michael Leff, “The Idea of Rhetoric as Interpretive Practice: A Humanist's Response to Gaonkar,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 97.
52. Leff, “Idea of Rhetoric,” 97.
53. Plato, Protagoras, trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 339a.
54. Leff, “Idea of Rhetoric,” 97.
55. Sprague, Older Sophists, 82A.1a.
56. Sprague, Older Sophists, 86A.12.
57. Sprague, Older Sophists, 86B.6.
58. Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric, 58.
59. Plato, Protagoras, 321c–d.
60. Plato, Protagoras, 322b–c.
61. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. M.J. Levett, Myles Burneat, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 167c.
62. Sprague, Older Sophists, 85A.9.
63. Kerferd, Sophistic Movement, 47.
64. Sprague, Older Sophists, 82B.31 (from Sopater), 82A.17 (from Plutarch).
65. E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 94.
66. Gagarin and Woodruff, Early Greek Political Thought, 187.
67. Sprague, Older Sophists, 82A.26.
68. Poulakos, Sophistical Rhetoric, 67.
69. Sprague, Older Sophists, 82A.9.
70. Consigny, Gorgias, 167.
71. Edward Schiappa, The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 126–27.
72. Burke, Counter-Statement, 31.
73. Sprague, Older Sophists, 82A.1.
74. Sprague, Older Sophists, 85B.6.
75. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 1934), 113–14.
76. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 27.
77. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 51.
78. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 257n.
79. Identifying the experimental tenor of the sophistical attitude also helps clarify the meaning and legacy of the term “Sophist.” First, it clearly denies Xeniades and Critias the label “Sophist.” From what little we know of Xeniades, he appears nothing more than a radical skeptic who believed that “everything is false” and that “every sense-image and opinion lie” (Sprague, Older Sophists, 81). Critias, meanwhile, appears to have been classified a Sophist primarily because he was a poet who concerned himself with politics. However, nothing in his fragments demonstrates that he was ever a professional teacher or was concerned at all with anyone's affairs but his own. Indeed, when he came to power as a member of the Thirty he actually included in the laws “a provision against teaching the art of speech” (Sprague, Older Sophists, 88A.4). If a selfish tyrant who bans education and independent thought can be classified a Sophist simply because he wrote plays, then the term has almost no meaning. Second, the experimental reading of the Sophists clearly places Isocrates within their tradition insofar as he taught his students the ability to adapt the best available knowledge, particularly the knowledge of history and precedent, to changing circumstances of the present. See Takis Poulakos, Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates’ Rhetorical Education (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997).
80. Jarratt, Rereading the Sophists, 107.
81. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 184.
82. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 14. Arendt also opens the possibility that Socrates, too, is a Sophist: “If the quintessence of the Sophists’ teaching consisted in the dyo logoi, in the insistence that each matter can be talked about in two different ways, then Socrates was the greatest Sophist of them all. For he thought that there are, or should be, as many different logoi as there are men, and that all these logoi together form the human world, insofar as men live together in the manner of speech” (19).