SOPHISM AND PRESOCRATICA

The rest of my PreSocratica section (except for the last three entries on Socrates, building a bridge of sorts to the Magnificent Shadows section) will be devoted to philosophers who are known to history as sophists. It goes without saying that their inclusion may raise some eyebrows, due to their tattered historical reputation, but I intend to stand by my decision, and in order to explain it in general terms, this entry will provide a proper ground.

Taking the cue from Plato and Aristotle, sophism and sophist have been among the most maligned words in the philosophical lexicon, despite the fact that some later philosophers (like Hegel, who was conspicuously adamant about its rehabilitation) had gone on record trying to right the wrong.

So what does the conventional bias tell us about the sophists? First of all, that they were not at all worthy of the name philosopher, being merely a bunch of hacks who taught not the gospel of truth but the lowly trade of success in spinning any kind of argument in the spinner’s favor; that they most shamefully charged their students money for their services; and that they all stand as far from the noble profession of philosophy as a crude craftsman stands from an artist.

There is truth in all these prejudices, but they do not tell the whole story. To start with, in the old times of pre-Socratic Greece, there was no stigma attached to the word sophism. One might even say that it denoted all pre-Socratic philosophy from Thales to Socrates. The renowned Seven Sages of Greece/hoi hepta sophoi had been called Sophists, and it goes without saying that nobody minded to be called this name. Herodotus used this name in such positive sense, indicating a man of wisdom and experience in worldly affairs. Thus, starting with Protagoras, the sophists, when they appropriated this name, did not invent it just to contrast themselves to other philosophers, but took a familiar word, wise man, and used it so to describe themselves. It was only after Plato had ridiculed and condemned them as greedy mind manipulators, that this otherwise reputable word would acquire its highly disreputable connotation.

Having said that, we shall not allow Plato and Aristotle, honorable men, but loaded with many such biases, to dictate their personal likes and dislikes, thus affecting our ability to make up our own mind. Sophism to us, even when taken narrowly to describe Protagoras and his brethren, is above all a legitimate pre-Socratic philosophical development which undoubtedly belongs with everything pre-Socratic, and furthermore, our PreSocratica Sempervirens would surely dry up and wither should we bypass Sophism as its indispensable and legitimate branch. Hegel calls Sophism in the narrow sense the antithesis of the previous pre-Socratic thesis, which had raised the perplexing Anaximandrian question about the many coming out of the one, and in trying to answer it at all costs had failed and drowned in the Parmenidean absurdity. As Hegel sees it, the failure to answer the question about Nature compelled the Sophists to shift their philosophical inquiry to Man, making him “the measure of all things.” Was this radical shift a negative or a positive philosophical development? Definitely positive, if we stay within the Hegelian realm of concepts, because no thesis can progress without its antithesis, and the essence of progress is thus the existence of both, and their nascent synthesis.

This is not only true in the Hegelian universe, but anywhere where commonsense is in existence. Therefore the omission of Sophism in any discussion of the PreSocratica would be a deficiency of such a discussion. I am thus gratified to include Sophism in this section not only as a vindication of its philosophy, but also as a rightful tribute to the glory of the pre-Socratics, whose pre-Sophistic achievements would necessarily lose sharp relief without the emergence of the whole picture.