III
The Sophists and Fifth–Century Athens
1. THE PERSIAN AND PELOPONNESIAN WARS
. . . as a city we are the School of Greece . . .
Pericles speaking of Athens in the
“funeral oration,” Thucydides,
The Peloponnesian War II 41
In peace and prosperity both states and individuals are actuated by higher
motives, because they do not fall under the dominion of imperious
necessities; but war, which takes away the comfortable provisions of daily
life, is a hard master, and tends to assimilate men’s characters to their
conditions.
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War V 82
Herodotus published the last part of his history of the Persian Wars in Athens around 430 BCE
Thucydides finished his history of the Peloponnesian War in 401. These founding volumes in the Western
tradition of history spring from Ionian naturalism, and their view of human affairs reflects that origin.
Herodotus relates how the Persians, blessed with virtue and good fortune, gained control of all of Asia, but
then, in the pride and blindness born of success, recklessly sought to gain Europe too—and so overreaching
desire led to inevitable disaster. It is exactly what we might expect under the rule of Anaximander’s Justice,
given humanity’s illimitable urge for power, and Herodotus retells the story in a hundred variations of other
men and nations.
Thucydides takes a similar approach in his account of Athens. The city had fought with the utmost
heroism in repelling the Persian armies from Greece. The affair had begun when the city helped the Ionians
resist Persian rule, earning the enmity of King Darius. In 490 the Athenians, almost single handed, drove his
troops, who had landed on their coast at Marathon, back into the sea. When Darius’s son, Xerxes, renewed
the fight a decade later, with vastly greater forces, he seemed likely to conquer all Greece. But even though
he captured and burned their city, the Athenians evacuated the whole population to the offshore island of
Salamis, and the Greek ships, led by the Athenians, destroyed the Persian fleet in the straits. That victory gave
the Greeks control of the sea, and forced Xerxes to rely on inefficient overland supply lines to support a much
diminished army. In the following year, combined Greek forces, led by Sparta, destroyed his army utterly at
Plataea. As a naval power and the leader of the Ionian states, Athens continued to prosecute the war
enthusiastically, even though the other Greeks were glad to see the end of the fighting. Once Ionia was
liberated from its sixty years of Persian subjugation in 478, the Ionians, together with Athens, formed an
alliance against Persia, the Delian League. But the city’s successes led to that excess of prosperity that invites
reckless over extension. Athens became immensely wealthy as the center of administration for the League. The
fleet, built largely in Athens and manned largely by Athenians, kept in fighting trim by patrolling the eastern
Mediterranean for pirates, and sea-borne commerce flourished under its protection. A considerable portion
of the payments required from League members to support the fleet instead financed a great public
construction program, and the wooden temples of the Acropolis burnt by the Persians were rebuilt in marble.
Public moneys flowed into the hands of private citizens through a thousand channels, and Athenians became
accustomed to new standards of luxury and comfort, as citizens of the most prosperous city in Greece.
And, so Thucydides thought, this prosperity produced an inevitable imbalance in the city’s politics.
When Pericles came to power, he democratized the constitution in a series of reforms beginning in 462/1
BCE, resting his power on a coalition of the commercial classes, the wage earners they hired, and small
farmers. The first two groups were interested in trade and the economy. Poor harvests often drove the less
wealthy farmers deeply into debt, and they could be counted on to support a democratic regime that gave them
the power to effect public debt relief. The intention was to involve all the citizens, that is, all those who owed
military duty to the state, in decisions on internal affairs.
Participation in the assembly and the courts, was,
for the first time, made genuinely available to all free, adult males through the institution of subsidies for
service in public meetings, so that independent wealth was no longer necessary to participate. Access to many
public offices was provided to all through selection by lot rather than election, so that wealth and influence no
longer decided who served. Conservatives hated and ridiculed these features of Athenian government. Plato
complained that they produced a population of drones living off public subsidies rather than doing any useful
work, and ridiculed the irrationality of assigning by lot offices that should go to the qualified. But the power
of the old families really was broken by such measures, and despite the complaints of conservatives, offices that
required able men, and dealt more with foreign than internal affairs or involved military command, were filled
by election, and the choice usually came from the upper classes. Between 479 and 430, a good fifty years,
Athens enjoyed prosperity and relative peace at the center of the Greek world. Nonetheless, if we follow
Thucydides, the democratic government brought on the downfall of Athens, for demagogues easily swayed the
people this way and that, making the city incapable of firm and considered policy. As he saw it, once Pericles,
the one leader who could charm them to reason, was dead, the Athenians careened wildly toward disaster
without the steadying influence the old aristocracy might have provided.
Athens gained an empire when, like many another democracy, it discovered the commercial advantages
of imperialism abroad. The city became a tyrant to the other members of the Delian League, enforcing
membership, with its duty of monetary contributions to the League treasury, by military force. Then, in 431,
commercial rivalry with Corinth, an oligarchy of wealth, and fear in Sparta that the Athenian Empire would
soon become irresistibly strong, combined with a steadfast Athenian refusal to allow the oligarchic powers to
trade within its empire, led Athens into war. Its naval power opposed the land-based Peloponnesian alliance.
The conflict quickly became a class war between partisans of democracy and oligarchy. City after city was torn
apart by civil conflict. The decision came only with an Athenian disaster in Sicily in 413. Alcibiades, a young
and immensely popular democratic leader, representing the Athenian character at its most admirable and most
reckless, proposed that his city attack and occupy Syracuse in Sicily, the leading city among the Italian Greeks.
Given his military genius, he might have carried it off. But his enemies trumped up charges of impiety against
him, and after he had left for Sicily with the Athenian navy, taking most of the stauncher democrats in the
assembly with him, the oligarchic faction obtained a recall so that he might be tried. He fled into exile, and
Nicias, over cautious and superstitious, not at all the man for the job, was left in charge. The entire
expeditionary force, every ship and every man, was captured or destroyed. Within the year, Athens, left
defenseless, fell. The Corinthians proposed to level the city, kill all the men, and sell everyone else into slavery.
This was nothing more than Athens had done to smaller cities, but Sparta, to its credit, vetoed the proposal,
and Athens was allowed to survive, stripped of power. In 411 a group of oligarches, the Thirty, overthrew the
democracy and established an oppressive and murderous government that fell to a bloody counter stroke a few
years later. Things stabilized, and Athens became a third-rate power with a famous past, and then evolved in
new political conditions, created by Alexander the Great’s Empire and the eventual Roman conquest of
Greece, into a university town noted for its art and culture.
Herodotus and Thucydides were very different men, but both are children of the Greek
Enlightenment. Herodotus, a congenial polytheist, much of whose material seems to have come from records
in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, loved any good story, particularly if it involved the gods. He tells us, for
instance, of Apollo’s prophecy that Croesus would destroy a great nation if he went to war with Persia, and
Croesus’s grim discovery that the nation to be destroyed was his own. His book is full of wise men who
understand the work of Justice, counseling self-restraint and warning against the corrupting influence of too
much prosperity. That soft countries make soft men is but one of his variations on this theme. Thucydides, a
more severe and scientific historian, would never countenance such priests’ tales,
but in the end, the structure
of his story is the same. It is a morality tale of success, pride, reckless injustice, and the inevitable reversal of
fortune, with ample opportunity to regret one’s merciless and inhuman behavior when the wheel comes round
to one’s own disaster. This is not the only way to view the events. What was it about the Athenian character,
and the city’s constitution, that led to defeat? Was Athenian indecision due to the democracy, or a milder form
of the ideological warfare that plagued the other cities in Greece, a conflict actually attenuated by Athenian
political institutions? Thucydides is fiercely biased against the demagogues who came after Pericles, whom he
represents as a model of restraint, though Pericles in fact seems just as arrogant and unrestrained as any who
came after him. But he was successful, and looked likely to continue to be successful, so he could not be
arrogant and unrestrained and fit Thucydides’s theory. On the same lines, it can be observed that Sparta’s
restraint arose chiefly, not from the natural wisdom of an oligarchy of merit, but from the awareness that too
much foreign adventuring might overextend the resources of the Spartan army, inviting the fiercely oppressed
Helots at home to revolt. Sparta was far more oppressive in its domains than Athens ever was toward its allies
in the empire. Again, might random events early on, such as the great plague of 431 that carried away so many
citizens, Pericles among them, have had as much to do with the eventual defeat of Athens as any failure of
virtue? Not every disaster is due to excessive ambition. Why was no modus vivendi arrived at during the several
truces that punctuated the conflict? Was this due to Athens’ refusal to moderate its goals, or rather to class war,
irreconcilable ideologies and the bitterness generated by civil conflict? Sometimes a nation finds itself unable
to break off a conflict through no fault of its own. Not that our historians’ analyses of events lack all merit—for
instance, that the Persian assault on Greece overextended Xerxes’s lines of communication seems clear enough.
But on many points their account is far from the only one possible, and however comforting one finds it to see
justice working itself out in events, history may not honor our moral values as much as we hope, and
compliance with those values may not be so sure a road to national security. Balance of power politics does not
always work, and where Athens failed to gain empire in Greece, Macedon would, soon enough, succeed. The
self-restraint, and appropriate boldness, needed to conduct a state is only in part a product of good character.
It also requires accurate (and lucky) calculation, and it may even require injustice and other elements of bad
character if one aims at successful statesmanship as the world accounts success.
2. THE REPUTATION OF THE SOPHISTS
We Athenians will use no fine words... We should not convince you if we
did; nor must you expect to convince us by arguing that... you have never
done us any wrong... For we both alike know that into the discussion of
human affairs the question of justice only enters where the pressure of
necessity is equal, and that the powerful exact what they can, and the weak
grant what they must.
The Athenians, addressing the Melians,
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War V 89.
Even though Thucydides says almost nothing about them, the Sophists of the fifth century
have often
been characterized with his history in mind, and given a position in events that suits Thucydidean moral drama.
They corrupted men, teaching them to ignore the gods, the old values, and the truth, substituting persuasion
by any means for honest argument, making the worse appear the better case, and all in the service of injustice
and naked self-interest. They educated the leaders of the Greeks, and convinced them that justice is only the
interest of the stronger, that all values, even truth itself, are relative, destroying conscience and concern for
others.
Now it might seem odd that this group of men should have it in their power to destroy their culture.
The Sophists seem harmless enough at first blush. Most of them were itinerant professional teachers,
specializing in rhetoric and politics, and professing a kind of pragmatic relativism in ethics, nothing more. The
name “Sophist” (“sophistes” in Greek) originally meant “wise man.” Protagoras seems to have introduced it, well
after the profession was established, to express his belief that he and his fellows enjoyed a special knowledge
of the most important things, including the nature of human happiness, humanity’s place in the world, and the
role of such major institutions as religion and the state in fulfilling human aims. In short, the name laid a claim
to a practical philosophical wisdom. It comes as no surprise that some mocked these pretensions, and for many
the name must have carried ironic overtones from the beginning. Can this figure of fun, the fusty professor,
really be responsible for his culture’s view of the world? No one was forced to hand their children over to the
Sophists. As Socrates makes it clear in his own case, the parents of the young men who associated with him
approved of the association.
Otherwise they would have been told to find some other way to occupy their
time. The Sophists were not public school teachers, or college professors, whom you might have to study under
willy nilly. Surely it is more likely that the Sophist’s thinking, like his students’, is no more than a symptom
of new attitudes arising from new economic and political conditions. Plato himself, no friend of the Sophists,
argued that those who studied under them were only getting the education fitting their own ideals. One
became a student of the Sophists because one wanted to know how to persuade and how to manage affairs to
his own benefit—that is, one wanted to know how to gain wealth and power, and perhaps how to justify
himself in his own mind, and in the law courts. Neither student nor teacher was thinking to seek out impartial
truth or understanding for its own sake, nor did most want to know how to meet the legitimate demands of
morality. The Sophists probably did little to change anyone’s values.
The Sophistic profession was invented in southern Italy, and it quickly spread until Sophists were found
everywhere in the Greek world, but Athens became the center of the movement in the course of the 5th
century. There were a number of reasons for a Sophist to go to Athens. First of all, the education he provided
was sought out by aspiring office-holders in this new, open political environment, in which always the task was
to persuade, whether one sought power and influence in the assembly, or election to public office, or success
at law. Nothing beyond reading and writing, arithmetic, and some literature, was taught in the basic education
of the time, which ended around the age of fourteen. The Sophists stepped into the gap and offered a secondary
education oriented to rhetoric, the art of persuasive speaking. In the second place, Athens stood at the forefront
of the new economy. A trading nation, ruled by its commercial classes, it provided the most plentiful and stable
currency in the eastern Mediterranean. So Athenians had money to spend on luxuries such as education, and
sufficient liquidity so that a Sophist could expect pay in specie. Democracy, sea power and commerce, and the
new money-based economy went together, and the Sophists fit well into the mix. In the third place, Pericles,
the leader of the Athenian democracy, was strongly interested in philosophy and the arts. Damon, an Athenian
Sophist, as well as Anaxagoras, were said to have been Pericles’s teachers, and Pericles entrusted Protagoras,
the greatest of the Sophists, with writing the laws for Thurii, an Athenian colony in southern Italy. He also gave
Hippodamus, a Sophist from Miletus, the job of planning the new Athenian port at Piraeus. Not only work
teaching rhetoric was available at Athens, but also patronage and occasional odd jobs paid out of the public
treasury. And finally, once a number of Sophists had settled in the city, Athens became an intellectual center
that one might visit simply to hear the most noted thinkers of the age.
But even in Periclean Athens, and before the disasters began, the Sophists suffered from public hostility
both to themselves and the naturalistic world view they represented. Athens prided itself on allowing freedom
of speech, but in the second half of the 5th century a series of actions were brought against intellectuals in the
city, generally on the charge of impiety. Aside from Socrates, Anaxagoras, Protagoras (whose book On the Gods
was burnt publically), Aspasia, Diagoras, and the noted playwright Euripides were all prosecuted, though the
prosecution failed in the last case. The sculptor Phidias was condemned for embezzlement, and Damon,
Pericles’s teacher, went into exile. Exile, the usual penalty, would probably have been imposed in Socrates’s
case, too, had he not been excessively stubborn, and brought the death penalty on himself. Some of this
represented attempts by Pericles’s enemies to get at him through his friends, but a conservative backlash of this
sort often occurs in the midst of an ongoing intellectual enlightenment. Always, the intellectual architects of
a new society promise more than can be delivered, and the poor form a natural ally of the older conservative
forces driven from power, given their natural resentment of the new rich and fancy education, and their
disappointment when promised improvements in their lives do not materialize. These resentments form the
root of such movements as Fundamentalism and Fascism in our own time. They find ready expression under
a democratic constitution. Moreover, although the Sophists were at first associated with democratic tendencies,
the potential of their doctrines for self-justification, as well as the utility of their instruction for a political career
in the new environment, soon connected them with aspiring oligarches. The Greek Enlightenment was seen,
using its own favorite myth, as human reason overreaching itself, expecting to do more than it possibly could,
and suffering disaster in the end for its reliance on its own strength and its rejection of traditional ways.
The Sophists were blamed on all sides for the Athenian loss of morality and restraint. Moderates and
democrats blamed the Sophists for the career of Critias, an intellectual member of the Thirty. The
conservatives blamed them for the career of Alcibiades. The real targets, of course, were not the Sophists, but
their students. The trick is to associate one’s enemy with the well-known atheists and moral relativists, drawing
attention away from the fact that one has no more morality or restraint than the opposition. Once the word
is out that the Sophists corrupt their students, all one’s enemies, especially those who are least reputable, and
so most vulnerable to this sort of attack, must be identified as their students.
There were other reasons for politicians to attack the Sophists. The human desire for wealth and power
does its work whatever philosophers teach, and politicians in no time and place have been much moved by high
ideals. But it is convenient and useful, and perhaps necessary for self-esteem, to profess high ideals, and the
scholar’s tendency to look at the realities of politics, even if it is with the practical intent of learning how to
succeed in the business, is for that reason embarrassing to the politician. It is a nice move, then, to besmirch
the teacher as a cynic who corrupts the youth when he gives an objective description of your own policies and
behavior. After all, one must be a cynic, and an altogether nasty fellow in general, to doubt others’ good
intentions.
This is all familiar from our own politicians. Other, and even more important reasons for attacking the
Sophists are a little harder for us to see. Perhaps most important—it irked the better class of person that the
Sophists should accept pay from anyone who might offer it. Philosophy and science had ceased to be entirely
a hobby of upper class intellectuals, and begun to be, for the Sophists, at least, a profession. One made a living
at it chiefly by taking on private students and giving public lectures, sometimes with the help of patronage from
the wealthy. Usually one had to move from city to city seeking out students, though fixed schools, like that of
Democritus in Abdera, could be established around a medical curriculum. In any case, most Sophists could not
afford to be picky about whom they taught. They had a living to make. By contrast, in the old days a
philosopher would have made a living, if he were poor enough to need to make one, by joining a rich
household, serving his patron as advisor, tutor, perhaps as scholar or poet in residence. He might, like
Xenophanes, maintain a certain independence by moving from one patron to another, but it would remain clear
that he was a satellite of the landed classes he served. But old ways were changing. Now even poets lived off
commissions and public performances, and advertised their wares by reciting at large public festivals. The
economy was developing apace with increased availability of liquid capital (coinage was only recently invented),
and even established landed wealth tended more and more to hire labor rather than retain householders. The
rise of teachers for hire was natural enough, then, but it engendered considerable hostility among the old
aristocracy, nonetheless.
Plato, generally a sophisticated spokesman for the aristocratic viewpoint, complained that a truly wise
man would want to make others wise out of love of the good for its own sake, and would never demand a fee
for the work. The good teacher’s students, having been made good by him, would support him out of gratitude
and friendship for the good, since friends have all things in common—but the teacher would not request this
support, and it is the only honorable way for him to live off his wisdom. This idealizes the old practice in
wealthy families of keeping a wise man as a household retainer. Though Plato is not being entirely realistic in
his criticism of the Sophist, it is well to remember that the relation of patron to client remained fundamental
in every area of life despite the new liquidity, and something like what Plato recommended was possible, with
luck. Socrates, with more than a touch of irony, hinted that the Sophist might do well to educate all the citizens
free of charge, for one can expect justice only from neighbors who are wise. He suggests, moreover, that one
who could make citizens wise might be kept at public expense, out of a just gratitude from his students.
Thus,
the whole state becomes the wise man’s patron, in the way that modern democracies become patrons of
scholarship and the arts when the disadvantages of relying on aristocratic wealth become apparent. The
reasoning in both thinkers, of course, is reinforced by the view that a truly wise man does not require much
in the way of riches, and will ask for nothing, so noble is his pure love of his craft. He’s cheap to keep around.
This is generally the view in modern democracies, too, and artists and scholars kept at state expense are often
expected to be devoted enough to their work not to require much personal wealth.
Plato and Socrates might have thought a truly wise man would not cheapen his vocation by offering
his wisdom for sale, though he would accept modest support freely offered in gratitude for his teaching, but
this was not what really bothered the ordinary conservative member of the upper classes. His objection was
that the Sophist sells, and is obliged to sell, to all sorts of people, to whoever comes along with the requisite
fee.
The Sophist’s new status as a wage earner made his rhetorical and political expertise available even to the
nouveau riche, those commercially successful upstarts from the lower classes with their bad taste, overbearing
manner, and democratic tendencies. (There was no danger of the Sophist imparting his skills to the
impoverished, of course. The contest was between the old landed wealth and the new commercial wealth.)
This may be personally distasteful, since it means a rather personal connection, that of teacher to student, with
low people, but chiefly, it posed a threat to the old distribution of power, aiding and abetting the merchant
classes, and the mass of poorer citizens led by them, those who served in the fleet, in gaining control of the
state.
One often sees the Sophistic doctrine characterized from the portrayal of the negotiations between the
Athenians and the Melians in Thucydides’s history of the war. As Thucydides presented it, skepticism about
the gods, and a self-interested rejection of the absolute authority of ethical principles in favor of a frank
recognition that the strong do what they will, led the Athenians to deal out harsh and unjust treatment, which
they could now expect to receive in return in their own moment of disaster. The reasoning runs purely in
terms of national self interest, with no recognition of moral obligations to others. But such reasoning is typical
of politicians and public servants, whose jobs hang on serving the public interest, not on making morally
required public sacrifices on behalf of the state in the interest of other peoples.
Moreover, Thucydides
represents the teacher here not as enlightened philosophy, but as the harsh exigencies of war, which leads men
to distrust just and conscientious behavior when they see it so often ineffective, and prompts them to set aside
every aim other than the welfare of their own state, seeking total victory, at any cost, as the only source of
national security. These lessons, moreover, had been much reinforced by the plague of 430-429, which killed
upwards of a third of the population of Athens while everyone crowded within the walls to avoid the raids of
the Spartan army. Thucydides tells us that
fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them. As for the first, they judged it to
be just the same whether they worshiped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing; and for
the last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his offenses, but each felt that a far
severer sentence had been already passed upon them all and hung over their heads, and before
this fell it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little.
The Sophists, if they taught the relativistic opportunism they are often supposed to have taught, told people
nothing more than what they wanted to hear. At the worst, they provided them with a rationalization for doing
what they were determined to do anyway.
But we might still hold the Sophists responsible for providing that rationalization, one might still accuse
the Sophistic doctrines of undermining self-restraint and reasonable behavior, or at least one might accuse the
oversimplified and distorted version of these doctrines held by cynical politicians of doing so. After all, our
theoretical views surely have some effect on our behavior. Even if we use them only for justification after the
fact, we are more likely to do something if we trust we can justify it after the fact than if we suspect we can’t.
We shall see that many of the Sophists argued in favor of traditional moral constraints, and, in particular, in
favor of the Delphic ethic of self-restraint, but they nonetheless based their defense of traditional views on
rational, pragmatic considerations alone. Perhaps ordinary men need the restraints of religion and an
ungrounded sense of moral obligation to keep their behavior reasonable. Once they are allowed to reason each
point out for themselves, confident that a purely pragmatic justification for their actions is acceptable, a natural
curb on their excessive actions is lost, and they succumb readily to the natural tendency to overestimate their
chances of success and underestimate the chances of disaster. Reason, perhaps, ought not to govern people’s
actions, since people are such bad reasoners. Or perhaps pragmatic calculations of the sort the Sophists
suggested in fact lead to the conclusions drawn by the Athenians before Melos, even if the Sophists themselves
did not draw those conclusions, and another sort of rational calculation is needed to justify our traditional
ethical rules. Or it may be that no form of rational calculation does better than the Sophistic form, so that
moral restraint cannot be rationally justified at all. In that case, should moral restraints, or reason itself, be
abandoned? The questions raised here are fundamental both for ethics and for the whole program of the Greek
Enlightenment. Does reason lead to the acceptance of traditional moral values? And however we answer that
question, should we allow ourselves to be guided by reason, or rely instead on tradition and properly formed
passions such as the moral sense? Is the reliance on human reason, in the end, just another form of
overreaching, bound to lead to disaster?
3. PLATO ON THE SOPHISTS
...let us reckon up between ourselves in how many guises the Sophist has
appeared. First, I think he was found as the hunter of rich young men to hire
him... And secondly as a sort of merchant of learning as nourishment for the
soul... Thirdly... as a retail dealer in the same wares... fourthly as selling
products of his own manufacture... His fifth appearance... an athlete in
debate, appropriating that subdivision of contention which consists in the art
of eristic... sixth... as a purifier of the soul from conceits that block the way
to understanding.
Plato, The Sophist 231 d-e.
In the philosophical sphere, as well as the political, the relativistic pragmatism of the Sophists drew fire,
especially from later thinkers influenced by the thought of Plato and Aristotle, both dyed-in-the-wool Absolute
Realists. Aristotle has nothing but scorn for those who would deny the existence of reality and truth, or the
possibility of knowing either, and, following Plato without Plato’s restraint, he defines a Sophist as one who
makes money from apparent, not real, wisdom. Plato, though more often cited for his hostility to the Sophists,
is actually more tempered in his criticism.
In his dialogue, The Sophist, Plato professes to succeed in saying exactly what a Sophist is only on his
seventh attempt, but his inadequate preliminary definitions remain instructive. They do not reveal the essence
of the Sophist, Plato thinks, but they do identify characteristics that follow from the essence, and so give a clue
to what that essence is. The first five all emphasize that the Sophist is one who makes a living by selling
something, in itself a rather shameful activity to a member of an old landed family such as Plato. Traditionally,
the best citizens, the backbone of the city, were supposed to be gentlemen farmers living off their estates.
Commerce was considered intrinsically corrupting and dishonest. So Plato describes the Sophist as a kind of
hunter, whose prey is young men with sufficient wealth to pay him.
But this is an inadequate definition, for what makes one a Sophist is not his skill at selling, but what he
sells. What, then, are the Sophist’s wares? Perhaps he sells goods that are not of his own making, that he has
picked up in foreign cities, that is, doctrines that he has learned from other Sophists abroad. But what sort of
doctrines? The arts that could be taught are, first, practical arts such as theater and music, second, perhaps,
virtue, and third, theoretical disciplines such as astronomy. Now the Sophist sells the art of rhetoric, the means
to political power. Where is rhetoric found among these three? Plato identifies it as virtue rather than a
practical art, since the Sophists claim that rhetoric will make one a fine person, someone to be respected. Now
that may seem crazy, but Plato is never just crazy. A landed aristocrat would not identify the knowledge of
rhetoric as virtue, of course, but this is because he thinks of virtue as something that cannot be taught.
Essentially, he thinks of virtue, the means to political power, as something inherited. Good enough, we might
say, wealth and connections are inherited, and political skills are learned from one’s parents and their
friends—but that would be too close to the naked truth for comfort, and the aristocrat would insist that one
also inherits character, a character that makes one worthy of wealth and connections, and which, in one’s
ancestors, no doubt first created them. The Sophist’s virtue is only the aristocrat’s virtue redefined for new
circumstances. Inherited land and influence no longer suffice for political effectiveness. They no longer make
one a fine person to be respected. Nowadays it takes a knowledge of rhetoric to do that. Plato thinks this
conception of virtue as whatever it is that makes one a fine person to be respected, that is, gives one power,
influence and a good reputation, is the ordinary person’s conception of the thing. The Sophist need only state
our everyday thoughts baldly, and he makes his point.
But, of course, Plato did not think the Sophist really taught virtue, so he does not want to define him
as one who sells virtue. Trying again, Plato suggests that the Sophist sells goods that he has fabricated for
himself out of material provided by his customers. The point here is that the Sophist only systematizes the
opinions of ordinary men, teaching virtue as ordinary men conceive it, not as it is in itself. The Sophist’s
techniques of investigation give the central place to “eristics” or “elenchic debate,” a game of question and
answer in which the respondent is to defend a view, and the questioner is to seek out any inconsistency or
absurdity he can in what his respondent says. The questioner may ask any question that can be answered with
a yes or no, and the respondent must answer, allowing any valid inferences from his answers the questioner
might draw. The game provides excellent training for the law courts, and we shall see it was used by Socrates
for investigation into the truth. But Plato noted that the end result of this game is not usually the discovery of
truth, but only the systematization of whatever it is that one most strongly believes. The reason for this is that
the game works from our existing beliefs, and even if our beliefs are found to be consistent with one another,
or are made consistent after questioning, this does not guarantee that we have the truth, for a set of beliefs
containing falsehoods might well be consistent with itself. So if the Sophist teaches men that they should seek
only their own self-interest, defending his view through elenchic debate, and succeeds in convincing them he
is right, he can have done nothing more than say what they already implicitly believed. If they had strongly
believed anything else to start with, they would have been faced with the inconsistency between those stronger
beliefs and the proposition that they should seek only their own self-interest, and they would have chosen to
reject the latter position. So they had believed it all along, but had not realized they did, or had been ashamed
or afraid to utter it aloud. The Sophist does not introduce corruption, then, but he may make it more acute
by removing the restraints of traditional belief inconsistent with it, and that is no small damage. Most men,
Plato thought, are fundamentally wrong about what is in fact valuable and good, and are prevented from the
worst crimes only by their inconsistencies.
The Sophist, then, is like a cook who sells men what they like, unhealthy pastries and the like, rather
than what is good for them. Every retailer, of course, must look to his customer’s taste to make a living. There
is more to the landed aristocrat’s bad opinion of commerce than one might think at first. At least the gentleman
farmer can live on his own, and need not associate with low types he doesn’t respect, or worse, pander to their
false conceptions of the good. The Sophist sells people what they take to be virtue, namely power, not virtue
as it really is, knowledge of what is truly good. When the Sophist uses elenchic debate for a noble end, the
pursuit of truth, he can purge the soul of a false opinion of its wisdom, but he cannot, having made his student
properly modest, then go on to impart true wisdom without introducing new techniques, for he cannot
introduce anything into the student’s mind that is not already there. Such a noble Sophist might well rest in
skepticism, satisfied for the moment with his new-found modesty and willing to grant that only the gods truly
know anything,
but most Sophists are not of the noble sort. Instead, seeing that their techniques will not
obtain the truth, and seeing no other technique that will help, they deny the existence and relevance of
objective truth altogether, and retreat to a relativism that makes whatever works for a given person, whatever
seems true, the truth for that person. Plato’s last word is that the Sophist is to be defined by his belief that we
deal only with appearances. He is someone who sees the pursuit of consistency in the appearances, while
holding on to our most strongly held beliefs, as the only way to approach the truth, and sees that it is
inadequate to obtain the truth. He might then be of the noble species, who continues to believe in the truth,
and admits his ignorance, or of the less noble species that opts for relativistic pragmatism. In the first case he
may prepare the ground for true philosophy, chastening his student and bringing him to a recognition of his
ignorance. In the second, he effectively inoculates the student against true philosophy, and confirms him in his
own bad opinions while removing any possibility of their correction. This is true even if, like Protagoras, he
is himself a noble fellow who believes in self-restraint and justice.
Let us compare the Sophist to the Philosopher. A teacher of true philosophy might well hunt young
men, but the goods he sells are truths that grow of themselves in his own soil, not opinions he manufactures
from the contributions of others. Moreover, he grows them first of all for his private use, not for sale. The art
of question and answer is only a preparation for what he has to teach, which requires a direct insight into reality
itself. (We shall see later how Plato thought such insight possible.) The corruption of the Sophist rests in the
denial that such a direct insight can happen, or that such a reality can be found. In the end, Plato thinks, unless
we grant that ethical norms can be grounded in genuine knowledge how things really are, we wind up
abandoning such norms altogether, for the only other effective standards for our behavior lie in our strongest
opinions about what is good, whatever those opinions might be, and almost always those opinions suggest that
it is better not to be too punctilious about such things as the obligations of justice.
4. THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOPHISTIC RHETORIC
Socrates: Tell me, then... What is the subject matter of the words
employed by rhetoric?
Gorgias: The greatest and noblest of human affairs, Socrates... for it brings
freedom to mankind in general and to each man dominion over others in his
own country.
Plato, Gorgias 451d, 452d.
Rhetoric as a self-conscious craft was invented in Syracuse, we are told, by Corax and Tisias in the first
half of the fifth century. With the death of the tyrant Hieron in 466, a spate of legal activity broke out in a
newly established constitutional democracy. Corax had been influential in Hieron’s court, and so, having lost
his position of influence, he may have decided to trade on his skills in presenting a case, skills which had
decayed in the general population, by taking up theory and teaching. Empedocles followed them in the art, and
then Gorgias of Leontini (b. ca 490-480 bce), who studied under Empedocles, and Gorgias’s student, Polus.
Gorgias’s brother, like Empedocles himself, was a physician, and Gorgias is said to have assisted physicians by
using the art of persuasion on their patients. He held public displays at public games, speaking impromptu on
whatever question was proposed by the audience. In Athens in 427 on a diplomatic mission, he much impressed
the citizens with his address to the Assembly. His rhetoric was of the flowery sort typical of Sicily. He never
claimed to teach virtue, but only to make men persuasive speakers. His pupils included the distinguished
Athenian rhetorician, Isocrates (436-338 bce), who, like his teacher, consistently urged that the Greeks refrain
from their internecine warfare with one another and unite against common enemies, whether Persia or
Macedon. Other pupils included Alcidamas and Antisthenes, and even Socrates appears to have been influenced
by his thought as much as anyone else’s. Though he moved about a good deal, and never married or became
a citizen, he lived in Athens for quite a while. He died very old at the court of Jason of Pherae in the north,
some time in the 380’s.
The study of rhetoric among the Sophists involved attention to all the sciences of language, grammar,
philology, etymology and usage,
and semantics. Indeed, it seems clear that it presupposes in its students a
knowledge and perhaps a habit of reading, with the awareness of language that comes along with that. By the
end of the 5th century it seems that booksellers were successful enough in Athens to have their own section in
the agora for their stalls, though most of their customers must have been fairly well off. In the following
century an overseas market for Athenian books in philosophy had developed, and a member of the Platonic
Academy in Athens could pick up a bit of money by selling copies of Plato’s dialogues in Syracuse, and private
libraries were to be found in wealthy houses.
Rhetoric also included practical logic, in particular, the use of
probable arguments to show a conclusion most likely true. For instance, if a big, strong fellow is accused of
assaulting someone, then he should say that he would be crazy to do such a thing since he would be the first
to be accused. If he is small and weak, then he should point out that he would be crazy to do such a thing since
he would most likely get beaten up for his trouble. Tisias and Corax and those after them prepared handbooks
of such arguments, usually taking both sides of set questions, and an orator was expected to have such
arguments at hand no matter what question was raised. We can see excellent examples of such argumentation
in the speeches put in the mouths of his characters by Thucydides, when he wants to lay out the considerations
for and against the actions and policies that shaped the events he reports. Clever argumentation of this sort
remained a part of oratory until quite recently, and could be enjoyed not only in political speeches, but as part
of fine literature. Shakespeare’s characters, like the characters of Euripides, indulge in many a rhetorical
combat, cleverly constructing plausible arguments on either side of a question, for the pleasure of the audience.
Among politicians, the imitation of the common man and common sense, and among writers, the desire for
natural and realistic dialogue, reflecting psychological processes believed to have little to do with reason, have
rendered this aspect of fine writing largely obsolete in our own day, considerably impoverishing popular
thought. The handbook of Corax and Tisias may be taken as the first book of “commonplaces,” standard
arguments to be memorized by the student and applied to whatever topic might come along. The point of
learning the commonplace arguments in a field is, of course, not to find out the truth, but to learn to defend,
sophistically, if need be, whatever viewpoint one wishes to defend.
We have already noted the use of elenchic debate in rhetorical training to teach quick thinking as well
as the composition of formal speeches. Such debates were generally conducted under a time limit, so that the
respondent could win by avoiding entrapment in an absurdity for half an hour, say, and rules were developed
to govern the exchange. The respondent had to answer every question, though he was allowed to divide a
question, giving different answers to its different parts, or to raise objections to trick questions of various sorts.
In particular, he could demand that any ambiguity in the question be clarified. Inferences had to be stated so
that the respondent could agree that they followed or else maintain that they did not follow. The aim was to
learn how to avoid contradicting oneself or drifting into implausible positions that the audience would reject,
while driving one’s opponent into precisely those errors. Socrates was a master at this sort of thing, and such
debates form the center of most of Plato’s dialogues.
The widespread influence of Sophistic developments in rhetoric is revealed in a number of medical
treatises in the Hippocratic tradition.
The extreme cases are On the Art, a defense of the practice of scientific
medicine, and On Breaths, a treatise defending the view that all diseases are caused in one way or another by
bad air. These works seem to target an inexpert audience, and their medical knowledge is superficial—it has
even been suggested that they were not written by medical practitioners at all, but by Sophists as exercises in
rhetorical technique. However that may be, the science in them has certainly been suborned by rhetoric, filling
them with exchanges with imaginary opponents, studied antitheses, and stock arguments. But these are
extreme cases, and many of the best medical writings of the 4th and 5th centuries also display Sophistic rhetoric,
for instance, On Ancient Medicine, On the Nature of Man, On Regimen in Acute Diseases, and On Diseases I. Such
treatises discuss rhetorical techniques for building a clientele and increasing the prestige of the profession, as
well as persuading patients to follow the regimens prescribed them. They also reveal the use of rhetoric in
public debates between doctors, and between doctors and their priestly competitors in the healing temples.
The debates between doctors seem to reflect a more general practice of public discussion of philosophical and
scientific topics.
Scholars of this literature have remarked on both positive and negative influences from the
study of rhetoric. On the one hand, the necessary habit of responding to the other view is fostered, so that
competing explanations are considered together, each on its merits. On the other hand, these works betray
the Sophistic habit of sharply criticizing one’s opponent while turning a blind eye to problems in one’s own
views, as though a scientist, no different from a lawyer, should be chiefly concerned to persuade, and would
do well to make as little trouble for himself as he could.
Plato must have followed many of the other critics of the Sophists when he complained that they were
more interested in persuasion, making things seem to be true, than they were in discovering what is in fact
true. Such complaints were often nothing more than the grumblings of those unable to stand up to the Sophist’s
arguments, but Plato himself cannot be accused of such motivation. In fact, he has little use for the fellow who
cannot handle himself in sophistic debate, and insists that anyone who really knows something to be true will
consistently avoid refutation by the Sophist. Plato’s worry is that the art of rhetoric gives one power, but really
does not tell one how to use that power. Gorgias had emphasized that rhetoric enables one to soothe the
passions and perform other valuable services, but Plato asks how one knows when a service is valuable. The
art of argument taught in rhetoric does not help here, since its only aims are the appearance of truth, and the
apparent refutation of one’s opponent. Knowledge of what is good is the master art, which should rule the use
of rhetoric, and cannot be arrived at by rhetorical technique. But the Sophists and their students think of
rhetoric itself as the master art, as though power itself, even when unregulated by a correct conception how
it should be used, were a good in itself, and not the greatest of evils.
It is with Protagoras of Abdera (ca. 490 - ca 420 bce) that we first find a frank defense of the position
that rhetoric, rather than Plato’s knowledge of the absolute good, is the master art. Protagoras was the first
to call himself a “Sophist” and charge fees for his instruction, and it seems he first advanced the claim to
philosophical wisdom, as opposed to mere skill in rhetoric. He was a friend of Pericles, and is said to have spent
an entire day with him discussing the question who would be responsible if a man were accidentally struck and
killed by a javelin in an athletic contest. Would it be the one who hurled the javelin, the organizer of the
games, or perhaps the javelin itself? (A javelin could be tried and convicted under Athenian law, and this
amounted to denying that it was anyone’s fault. Something had to be responsible since removal of the pollution
resulting from the killing required exile of the one responsible, and so a legal fiction was developed. One
would exile the javelin if everyone seemed guiltless in the affair.) In Plato’s dialogues Protagoras comes off
well, displaying urbanity and self-control in the face of real provocation, including some openly sophistical
arguments, from Socrates. His morality is high, and his contributions to the discussion, if somewhat marked
by vanity, are all intelligent. He professes to remit his fees if a student is dissatisfied with what has been
learned, and he carefully avoids association with any political party.
Protagoras defended the autonomy of rhetoric by arguing that ethical and political standards are
established by convention, not nature. The problems that arise in a community are not due to having the
“wrong” standard, but due to lack of agreement on a standard, a lack of agreement best remedied by the
rhetorician, who can persuade all to the same standard. Given his political views, discussed below, Protagoras
probably held that some standards were better than others, but not because they could be discovered to be the
true standards through some Platonic science of the good, but rather because people could agree on them and
stick to them. That is, they did not decisively work against the desires of any major group, and their general
adoption would result in social harmony. He may well have thought it was precisely the rhetorician, used to
considering all sides of a question and the perceived interests of everyone concerned in it, that could best
discover such standards, and persuade others to adhere to them. The seeker after the absolute good would tend
to tell at least some people that what they sought was simply bad or wrong, that they just couldn’t have it, and
that is no recipe for removing conflict. It only intensifies it.
Protagoras’s defense of rhetoric as the master art becomes even more interesting when we turn to his
reasons for saying there are always good arguments on both sides of every question. He points out that the good
appears in different ways to different people, and if he is right that there is no absolute truth about what is
good, then there is no way to judge which of the appearances are correct. One can only judge concerning the
strength of appearances, that is, which appearances are likely to maintain themselves, and which are likely to
be rejected, when arguments are presented against them, and this is the province of the rhetorician. The
rhetorician realizes, moreover, that the same appearance may prove very strong in one person’s mind, and
rather weak in another’s. If the first person is more willing to reject anything that contradicts the appearance
than the appearance itself, and the second finds himself in the opposite condition, the very same arguments may
prove convincing to one and not the other. In the absence of any objective truth about the matter to be referred
to, one can only say that the arguments on one side prevail for one person and those on the other for the other.
One cannot decide which set of arguments is correct, but only which set is correct for oneself. Truth is relative.
5. PROTAGORAS AND RELATIVISM
Man is the measure of all things—alike of the being of things that are and of
the not-being of things that are not.
Protagoras, quoted in Plato, Theaetetus 152a.
He says too that the explanations of all the appearances are present in the
matter, so that the matter is capable, as far as lies in its own power, of being
everything that appears to everybody.
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Empiricism
I 218-219.
Relativistic themes were, from the beginning, commonplace in Greek ethical thought. It was generally
assumed that nothing is good without qualification—to be good is to be good for someone or to a certain end,
though usually some agreement was expected on the good among judges of the same kind. All fish find water
good, and all men need air. One might expect a defense of relativism in values, then, even in thinkers who
insisted on an absolute truth when it comes to facts about the world, and no doubt most Greek intellectuals
took such a view of things. But the Sophists took advantage of the developments we have seen already in the
philosophy of science to assert relativism in a wider context.
Protagoras was the most noted defender of relativism among the Sophists,
though he did not reject
the notion of a fixed reality. In fact, he assumed that there is a real sensible world that produces all the
appearances of which we become aware, including contrary appearances in various people, or in the same
person at different times. He did not question reality, but our ability to express reality in language. He asked,
in particular, how it is that anyone could assert a falsehood. Say I am talking about Socrates, and I maintain that
Socrates is honest. Perhaps you know better, and see that it is Socrates’s skill as an actor that makes me think
him honest, not his honesty. In order to make your case, you will have to show how Socrates’s skill as an actor
might produce the appearance of honesty. This is easy enough, of course, but the “reality” here might well be
considered as nothing but further experience, that is, as those experiences of Socrates that would verify that
he is indeed only a good actor. Consider now how we might do the thing when one attempts to assert
something, not about some “reality” that occurs within our experience, but about the ultimate reality lying
behind our experience. We never experience ultimate reality just as it is in itself. We only experience
appearances of this reality, gained through the senses, and it is the senses that lie behind all our opinions about
it. Now how do we know what reality might produce a given sensible appearance, say, sweetness? Is it the
presence of large, smooth, round atoms that produces that appearance, or a certain mixture of fire and water,
or the dominance of the quality sweetness? Surely we cannot know without at some time checking on what the
reality is like in itself and then seeing what appearances it produces. But we can never check on what the reality
is like in itself. We assume that the same reality, whatever produces the sweet taste, is there whenever we
experience that taste, but the taste does not tell us what reality that is. Indeed, we cannot even tell if it is the
same reality each time. We can form no notion at all what sort of reality might produce the various appearances
we deal with. So what reality do I mean to refer to when I say the apple is red? Clearly, I cannot say, but we
can assume that I mean to indicate whatever it is that produces the appearance that it is red. And what I indicate
or refer to is there. It must be, since the appearance is there.
In fact, even if we could somehow tell what reality is like in itself, whether Democritus or Empedocles
is right, say, we have not yet done so, and most people are ignorant of physics and have not even formulated
the possible theories. They do not mean to refer to configurations of atoms, or any other such thing, when they
say something is red. If they are honest, they will recognize that they don’t know what they are talking about,
they have no idea what it really is to be red. To understand them we must employ the principle of charity, the
principle of interpretation that tells us to read a person’s intentions in the way that makes them most
reasonable. This principle suggests that what they mean to speak of is whatever it is that produces the
appearance of redness on which they rely for their evidence that the thing is red.
There are three independent lines of argument to three different conclusions mixed up in Protagoras’s
considerations. In the first, and more plausible, Protagoras argues that whatever appears to us through the senses
is so,
that is, whatever proposition receives support directly from a sensory appearance, its meaning being
tied, as it were, to a sensory image, is true, for whatever reality produces the confirming sensory appearance
is sufficient to make it true. So, if something appears blue to us, it does not matter what reality produces the
blue appearance, that is the reality we must mean to refer to when we say it is blue, and so it is in fact blue,
despite the fact that the reality is, perhaps, nothing like the appearance (the visual image) it produces.
The second argument has a more adventurous conclusion, namely that whatever seems to be true to us at
all, that is, whatever we believe, is in fact true, for it can only have reference to the reality that produced the
belief, which must, of course, exist. So, if it appears to us that Socrates is honest, he must be so, for whatever
the reality is that causes us to believe that, that is the reality we must mean to refer to when we say he is. Here
it might readily be objected that his skill as an actor is not at all what we meant to refer to, it was rather his
possibly nonexistent honesty. What that honesty is, exactly, we perhaps do not know, but if it turns out he was
acting, his honesty was not to be found in reality, so it is not true that whatever reality produced the
appearance of honesty must be accounted honesty.
This line of response might be turned to account in the
appearance that the object is blue, as well, if it turned out the appearance was produced by stage lighting, and
the object was white. We shall see how Protagoras might have responded to such arguments shortly.
In the third place, Plato reports in the Euthydemus that Protagoras held that whatever can be said
meaningfully is true, on the ground that it cannot be meaningful unless it has some reference in reality, but that
reference is sufficient to make it true. This line seems to be in direct imitation of Parmenides, who had argued,
of course, that the subject of whatever we say meaningfully must exist. In place of the subject, the new line
of argument takes the whole sentence, and figures that, like the subject, it has meaning only if it refers to
something, presumably some state of affairs. This argument misconstrues how a sentence means, and we shall
see Plato straighten it out in his later dialogues.
To clarify the first line of argument, consider once more the question what the sentence, “the apple
is red,” says. We could approach this from the side of its descriptive content—it says that the apple is red. In
that case we might decide it is true just in case there is a real apple and it has the real quality of redness.
Let
us say in such a case that the sentence is “descriptively true.” The problem with descriptive truth is that we have
discovered that the appearances here may be entirely misleading, for they may be produced by a reality very
different from them, and what reality produces them, we cannot say. If we think of truth as descriptive truth
we can never have any idea if a statement is true or not. Truth is utterly unknowable, so utterly useless and
uninteresting. How should we think of the truth of “the apple is red,” then? We could set aside the descriptive
content of the statement, and look to its reference for its truth. What is it that is being talked about if the
statement is uttered, say, by a sophisticated atomist? He will confess that he does not know precisely, since he
does not know exactly what configuration of atoms is involved here, but what makes the statement true is not
that there is a red apple, since that is just appearance, illusion. What makes it true is that configuration of atoms
which in fact produces the appearance of a red apple. Let us call this sort of truth “referential truth.” But, of
course, we do not even know if it is a configuration of atoms that lies behind the appearances here. Perhaps
it is something else. All right, then, what makes the statement (referentially) true is whatever produces the
appearance of its truth. The truth of the statement has been tied to its reference. But a true description of its
reference, it is argued, is something we can never have good reason to believe we possess, even if we did
happen to get hold of it by some accident. So a statement’s (referential) truth has nothing to do with its
descriptive content.
One upshot of this referential view of truth embraced by Protagoras is that two statements with
contradictory descriptive contents can both be true, as long as each appears to be true (on the second line of
argument) or is meaningful (on the third line), and so refers to something that produces the appearance of its
truth. Such statements are not in fact contradictory at all, considered as regards their truth. They cannot be.
They have contradictory descriptive contents, but the descriptive content of a statement has nothing to do with
its truth. In fact, one cannot deny the truth of what someone says at all, one can only deny its descriptive
content. Any attempt to deny the existence of the reality referred to in the statement, the reality that makes
it true, must fail, since one cannot describe that reality as it really is in order to deny it, and one’s denial cannot
refer to any reality except that which produces the appearance that the denial is true, which is necessarily a
different reality than the statement denied refers to.
Now if all beliefs are true, as Protagoras sometimes says, with an eye on referential truth, truth is a
useless property.
What interests us is not true appearances, but appearances that it would be useful to accept,
not the unknown reference of our statements, but the descriptive content, which tells us only how things
appear, not how they are. We substitute trust in one appearance for trust in another because the new
appearance, that the apple is yellow and the stage lighting did it, or that Socrates is dishonest, but a good actor,
leads us more reliably to future appearances. To put it differently, we try to accept statements with descriptive
content that will lead us to other statements with descriptive content that in fact matches the appearances we
experience. What the reality is, I cannot say. Perhaps atoms, perhaps the four elements of Empedocles, perhaps
something else. But if I take the appearances as the basis of my calculations, I may be able to anticipate other
appearances. I choose the more useful appearance, the one that will enable me, given my other opinions and
the ways in which I predict appearances from my various opinions, to predict future appearances reliably.
At this point we have laid out Protagoras’s chief opinions and his arguments for it, but it remains
possible to take all of this in two different ways, in application to the beliefs of individuals, which is the way
our sources, especially Plato, insist on taking it, and in application to beliefs natural to humanity in general.
In their application to the beliefs of humanity in general, Protagoras’s views may well have amounted to a
sophisticated and not implausible form of pragmatism well designed for meeting the skeptical challenges
emerging from 5th-century thought. If we trust our sources, we must conclude that Protagoras moved on from
here, though, and applied his doctrines to individual beliefs as well, where it becomes much less plausible.
Perhaps we ought not to trust our sources. Individuals using Protagorean arguments to justify themselves might
easily have confused the two applications. It would not be the first time that a master got a bad reputation from
the behavior of his students. Moreover, Plato and others might have felt it reasonable to make this second
application because they felt it was implicit in what Protagoras said (Plato certainly shows no compunction in
the Theaetetus about attributing to Protagoras views he thinks implicit in his doctrine). But it also seems that
Protagoras might have seen that the extension of his arguments to individual beliefs could be pulled off, with
enough cleverness, without involving oneself in contradiction or opening up any possibility of decisive
refutation. The shock value of this new move, and perhaps a confused misapprehension that it was unavoidable,
might have led him to make it.
How would the more reasonable application of his views, to the beliefs natural to mankind in general,
work? First of all, as I have laid out his doctrine, Protagoras should not be said to hold to a pragmatic theory
of truth, though he does reject the Correspondence Theory (which I have called the Descriptive Theory here).
He holds to what I have labeled a referential theory of truth, and as a result, he thinks that considerations of
truth have no practical consequences, and should be ignored. We should, instead, work within the appearances,
and aim to have things come to appear to us in ways that are most useful, because they enable us to predict best
how things will appear in the future, given the various things we might choose to do. The world we live in is
not a world of truths (or perhaps it is, but that is of no use to us), it is a world of appearances, and we need to
manipulate and predict appearances, not realities. (Of course, we do affect realities in dealing with
appearances, but we have no idea how we do so, and it doesn’t matter as long as the appearances come out
right.) The problems raised by the causal theory of perception have been resolved by withdrawing from any
attempt to understand the real world, and pointing out that nothing we ever actually did to understand the
world was really an attempt to understand the real world to start with. All we were ever concerned with was
the appearances.
The most famous argument against Protagoras is the “table-turning argument,” which, it seems, was
first proposed by Democritus, but is best known to us in Plato’s formulation in the Theaetetus.
Protagoras was
wont to say that each thing is to a person as it appears to him to be, and that what appears true to someone is
true for him. Let us call this “Protagoras’s principle.” Plato suggested that Protagoras cannot be right in
claiming that whatever appears to be the case to someone is the case for him, since it appears to Plato that
Protagoras is wrong about this. Since it appears to Plato that he is wrong, he is, by his own principle. How
would Protagoras answer this? An answer can be developed out of his referential view of truth. It appears to
Plato that Protagoras’s principle is wrong. That appearance must have a cause, and the statement that
Protagoras is wrong has reference to that unknown cause, and so is true. But Plato’s opinion does not in fact
contradict Protagoras’s. It simply reports a different reality than Protagoras’s does.
But that way with the argument may be too quick. Protagoras’s principle uses the notion “true-for-X,”
which is not at all the same as the notion of referential truth. Whereas referen