Sophist

“ You call me a sophist, and you allege that it is a sophist’s business to make small things great and great things small. And you maintain that the object of my letter was to prove yours a good one, when it was not a good one, and that it was no better than the one which you have sent last, and, in a word that you have no power of expression, the books which you have now in hand producing no such effect, and the eloquence which you once possessed having all disappeared. ”

“ For I am disposed awhile to play the sophist with you; not of their sort who nowadays boozle young men's heads with certain empty notions and curious trifles, yet teach them nothing but a more than womanish obstinacy of scolding: but I'll imitate those ancients who, that they might the better avoid that infamous appellation of sophi or wise, chose rather to be called sophists. Their business was to celebrate the praises of the gods and valiant men. And the like encomium shall you hear from me, but neither of Hercules nor Solon, but my own dear self, that is to say, Folly. ”

“ The pompous and empty Sophist is utterly helpless in the hands of the great master of dialectic, who knows how to touch all the springs of vanity and weakness in him. He is greatly irritated by the irony of Socrates, but his noisy and imbecile rage only lays him more and more open to the thrusts of his assailant. ”

“ This is a noble science, on which we have stumbled unawares; in seeking after the Sophist we have found the philosopher. He is the master who discerns one whole or form pervading a scattered multitude, and many such wholes combined under a higher one, and many entirely apart—he is the true dialectician. ”

“ For, inasmuch as philosophy was closely blended with their religion, the Sophist would seem to practise a sort of intellectual simony; tampering with and selling at a high price the divinest mysteries; holding the keys of knowledge themselves, but refusing to impart, except to such as came with full purses, those truths which were to the Greek as the very bread of life. ”

“ As if {takhu me orthos} were the reproachful comment of the sophist on the author's treatise. (11) i.e. "the arguments to be blameless at once and irrefutable for all time."
That is my point of view. The sophist has quite another—words with him are for the sake of deception, writing for personal gain; to benefit any other living soul at all is quite beside his mark. There never was nor is there now a sage among them to whom the title "wise" could be applied. No! the appellation "sophist" suffices for each and all, which among men of common sense (12) sounds like a stigma. ”

“ He called rhetoric the noblest of the arts, because it enabled an ignorant man to appear to know as much as one who was thoroughly master of his subject. Some of the people demanded what he had to say of the gods, since he had spoken so ably of men. With an unpleasant mixture of derision and feigned humility, the sophist replied, that he left such vast subjects to be discussed by the immortal Socrates. ”

“ Then, clearly, we ought as soon as possible to divide the image- making art, and go down into the net, and, if the Sophist does not run away from us, to seize him according to orders and deliver him over to reason, who is the lord of the hunt, and proclaim the capture of him; and if he creeps into the recesses of the imitative art, and secretes himself in one of them, to divide again and follow him up until in some sub-section of imitation he is caught. For our method of tackling each and all is one which neither he nor any other creature will ever escape in triumph. ”

“ Thirdly, he is a warrior, but his tongue is his sword with which he is eternally wrangling about right and wrong for money. Fourthly, since education purifies the soul by casting out ignorance or the false conceit of knowledge, men would have you believe that the Sophist does this; though, as a matter of fact, he is about as like the real "purger of souls" as a wolf is like a dog. ”

“ Like mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty drachmae (Crat.) , but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all mankind is reflected. ”

“ It was a disappointment if he was not interrupted by applause. “A sophist is put out in an extempore speech,” says Philostratus, [170] “by a serious-looking audience and tardy praise and no clapping.” “They are all agape,” says Dio Chrysostom, [171] “for the murmur of the crowd ... like men walking in the dark, they move always in the direction of the clapping and the shouting.” “I want your praise,” said one of them to Epictetus. [172] “What do you mean by my praise?” asked the philosopher. “Oh, I want you to say Bravo! and Wonderful!” replied the sophist. ”

“ A later German writer, of whom I will speak in a moment or two, Schopenhauer, has some excellent remarks on Self-reflection, and on the difference between those who think for themselves and those who think for other people; between genuine Philosophers, who look at things first hand for their own sake, and Sophists, who look at words and books for the sake of making an appearance before the world, and seek their happiness in what they hope to get from others: he takes Herder for an example of the Sophist, and Lichtenberg for the true Philosopher. ”

“ He, then, who traces the pedigree of his art as follows--who, belonging to the conscious or dissembling section of the art of causing self-contradiction, is an imitator of appearance, and is separated from the class of phantastic which is a branch of image-making into that further division of creation, the juggling of words, a creation human, and not divine--any one who affirms the real Sophist to be of this blood and lineage will say the very truth. ”

“ It would seem then, (1) that popular nomenclature included under the term “sophist” all teachers—whether professors, or like Socrates, amateurs—who communicated, not artistic skill, nor philosophical theory, but a general or liberal education; (2) that, of those who were commonly accounted sophists, some professed culture, some forensic rhetoric, some political rhetoric, some eristic, some (i.e. the Socratics) dialectic ”

“ The Sophists, those skirmishers of a new and as yet unrecognizable philosophy, scattered and put to flight the old guard of positive and doctrinal wisdom, but to the individual, who was bidden to depend upon his own resources, they offered stimulus to reflection in abundance but no permanent foothold in the shifting sands of opinion. ”

“ Further, I would have you consider that the hireling Sophist only gives back to the world their own opinions; he is the keeper of the monster, who knows how to flatter or anger him, and observes the meaning of his inarticulate grunts. ”

“ The term "Sophist," though in its original and wider sense it was applied to the professors of philosophy generally, had come to mean, in the popular language of Athens, those who, for pay, undertook to teach a method of rhetoric and argument by which a man might prove anything whatever. ”

“ SOPHISTS (from Gr. σοφιστής, literally, man of wisdom) , the name given by the Greeks about the middle of the 5th century B.C. to certain teachers of a superior grade who, distinguishing themselves from philosophers on the one hand and from artists and craftsmen on the other, claimed to prepare their pupils, not for any particular study or profession, but for civic life. For nearly a hundred years the sophists held almost a monopoly of general or liberal education. Yet, within the limits of the profession, there was considerable diversity both of theory and of practice. ”

“ I would not, however, be understood to share the opinions of those, who can discern nothing but evil in the doctrines of the sophists. On many points their notions harmonised altogether with those of the wisest philosophers. Accordingly it was not precisely what they inculcated, but the principles which regulated their teaching, that rendered them sophists. They taught with a view to enrich themselves, which is wholly incompatible with a strict allegiance to truth; since, with such views, men will always be found to prophesy agreeably in order that they may effect their purpose. ”

“ After giving the generic deduction of the angler from the comprehensive idea of Art, distributed into two sections, constructive and acquisitive, Plato proceeds to notice 192the analogy between the Sophist and an angler: after which he deduces the Sophist also from the acquisitive section of Art. The Sophist is an angler for rich young men.15 To find his place in the preceding descending series, we must take our departure from the bisection — hunters of walking animals, hunters of swimming animals. ”

“ I was astonished at her words, and said: 'Is this really true, O thou wise Diotima?' And she answered with all the authority of an accomplished sophist: 'Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;—think only of the ambition of men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame. They are ready to run all risks greater far than they would have run for their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of toil, and even to die, for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall be eternal. ”

“ After thus preparing himself by travelling and varied study, Eudoxus took up the profession of a Sophist, at Kyzikus and the neighbouring cities in the Propontis. He obtained great celebrity, and a large number of pupils. M. Boeckh says, “Dort lebte er als Sophist, sagt Sotion: das heisst, er lehrte, und hielt Vortrage. Dasselbe bezeugt Philostratos.”
I wish to call particular attention to the way in which M. Boeckh here describes a Sophist of the fourth century B.C. Nothing can be more correct. Every man who taught and gave lectures to audiences more or less numerous, was so called. ”

“ That innocent word "Sophist" has survived in common language, to indicate some constantly recurring viciousness, in the treatment of one's own and of other minds, which is always at variance with such habits of thought as are really worth while. ”

“ It might be that the teaching ‘philosopher’, whose concern was with the soundness of the morals, had his quarrel with the teaching 9‘sophist’, whose business was with the rhetoric and its excellence for exhibition purposes or for the gaining of various forms of influence. The philosopher might think the sophist superficial, showy, and often actually pernicious, while the sophist might look upon the philosopher as visionary, pedantic, and often a positive clog upon practical efficiency. ”

“ Now the art of the Sophist is, as I believe, of great antiquity; but in ancient times those who practised it, fearing this odium, veiled and disguised themselves under various names, some under that of poets, as Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides, some, of hierophants and prophets, as Orpheus and Musaeus, and some, as I observe, even under the name of gymnastic-masters, like Iccus of Tarentum, or the more recently celebrated Herodicus, now of Selymbria and formerly of Megara, who is a first-rate Sophist. Your own Agathocles pretended to be a musician, but was really an eminent Sophist ”

“ The sophistical discourse is not (as Aristotle would have us believe) generically distinguishable from the dialectical;65 nor is Sophistic an art distinct from Dialectic while adjoining to it, but an inseparable portion of the tissue of Dialectic itself.66 If the Sophist passed himself off as 399knowing what he did not really know, so also did the Dialectician; as we know from the testimony of Sokrates, the most consummate master of the art. ”

“ Secondly, for the sake of novelty they extended their range, including scientific and technical subjects, but handling them, and teaching their pupils to handle them, in a popular way. In this stage of sophistry then, the sophist, though not a specialist, trenched upon the provinces of specialists; and accordingly Plato (Prot. 318 E) makes Protagoras pointedly refer to sophists who, “when young men have made their escape from the arts, plunge them once more into technical study, and teach them such subjects as arithmetic, astronomy, geometry and music.” ”

“ This, as might be expected, is what happens to them in regard to the sophists; for when a sophist gets down from his pulpit and puts aside his MSS., in the real business of life he seems but a small man, and under the thumb of the majority. They do not understand about real philosophers that both seriousness and play, grim looks and smiles, and above all the direct personal application of what they say to each individual, have a useful result for those who are in the habit of giving a patient attention to them. ”

“ It was the age of the Sophists,--those popular but superficial teachers who claimed to be the most advanced of their generation; men who were doubtless accomplished, but were cynical, sceptical, and utilitarian, placing a high estimate on popular favor and an outside life, but very little on pure subjective truth or the wants of the soul. They were paid teachers, and sought pupils from the sons of the rich,--the more eminent of them being Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, and Prodicus ”

“ And, according to this view, he is the perfect and accomplished Sophist, and the great benefactor of the inhabitants of the other world; and even to us who are upon earth he sends from below exceeding blessings. ”

“ The word Sophistes means either "one who makes wise," or, possibly, as some scholars think, "one who deals in wisdom." The difference is slight. In any case it was in answer to this call for sophia that the Sophists arose. Doubtless they were of all kinds; great men and small, honest and dishonest; teachers of real wisdom and of pretence. Our tradition is rather bitter against them, because it dates from the bitter time of reaction and disappointment, when the hopes of the fifth century and the men who guided it seemed to have led Athens only to her fall. ”