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The Sophists and Socrates

In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE the name of the activity was itself in dispute. “Sophists was another name for the wise men, and not only for philosophers but for the poets also” (Diogenes Laertius 1.12, tr. Hicks), and Plato’s Protagoras claims the name as an old one: “sophistry is an ancient art”, whose earlier practitioners disguised it as poetry, rites or athletics (Protagoras 316d, tr. Lamb).

Protagoras says plainly what he teaches. “That learning consists of good judgement in his own affairs, showing how best to order his own home; and in the affairs of his city, showing how he may have most influence on public affairs both in speech and in action.” Socrates answers, “you appear to be speaking of the civic science, and undertaking to make men good citizens”, and Protagoras agrees: “That … is exactly the purport of what I profess” (318e–319a). Isocrates claimed the word philosophia for his own teaching and refused it to others: “I hold that what some people call philosophy is not entitled to that name”. Since “it is not in the nature of man to attain a science by the possession of which we can know positively what we should do or what we should say”, he held “that man to be wise who is able by his powers of conjecture to arrive generally at the best course, and … that man to be a philosopher who occupies himself with the studies from which he will most quickly gain that kind of insight” (Antidosis 270–271, tr. Norlin).

Socrates, as his followers and Cicero remembered him, turned the inquiry from nature to life. “Socrates was the first who brought down philosophy from the heavens, placed it in cities, introduced it into families, and obliged it to examine into life and morals, and good and evil” (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.10, tr. Yonge). Xenophon: “He did not even discuss that topic so favoured by other talkers, ‘the Nature of the Universe’ … His own conversation was ever of human things. The problems he discussed were, What is godly, what is ungodly; what is beautiful, what is ugly; what is just, what is unjust” (Memorabilia 1.1.11, 16, tr. Marchant). Aristotle records the same turn, Socrates “disregarding the physical universe and confining his study to moral questions”, and credits him with “two innovations …: inductive reasoning and general definition” (Metaphysics A.6, M.4, tr. Tredennick).

In Plato’s Apology Socrates describes the activity as a daily practice and a duty. It begins from knowing what one does not know: “what I do not know I do not think I know either” (21d). Its method is questioning: of anyone who says he cares for wisdom and truth and his soul, “I shall question and examine and cross-examine him” (29e); in the account Cicero gives to Varro, he affirms nothing himself and refutes others, nihil se scire dicat nisi id ipsum, saying he knows nothing except that very thing (Academica 1.16). It is commanded: “the god commands me to do this” (30a), and “I shall never give up philosophy or stop exhorting you” (29d). Its point is the good of the one who does it: “to talk every day about virtue … is the greatest good to man, and … the unexamined life is not worth living” (38a, tr. Fowler).

For Plato’s Socrates and for Aristotle, what divides the philosopher from the sophist and the orator is the life chosen. In the Gorgias Socrates puts the question to Callicles: “what course of life is best; whether it should be that to which you invite me … speaking in Assembly and practicing rhetoric … or this life of philosophy; and what makes the difference between these two” (500c, tr. Lamb). Callicles had already given the other side: philosophy “is a charming thing, if a man has to do with it moderately in his younger days; but if he continues to spend his time on it too long, it is ruin to any man” (484c). Aristotle drew the line in the same place. “Sophistry is Wisdom in appearance only”; sophistry and dialectic deal with the same subjects as philosophy, “but this differs from dialectic in the nature of the faculty required and from sophistic in respect of the purpose of the philosophic life” (Metaphysics Γ.2, tr. Ross), where the Greek, tēi prohairesei tou biou, is “in the choice of life”. The sophist, he adds elsewhere, “is one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom” (Sophistical Refutations 1, tr. Pickard-Cambridge).