The next stage of philosophical history is widely considered a wrong turn. Once philosophy has become focussed on the discovery and resolution of paradoxes using pure reason, it’s in danger of losing touch with the real world. Philosophers are mocked for ‘having their heads in the clouds’, seemingly pre-occupied with unrealistic and pointless nonsense.
And because philosophy is no longer focussed on the world that we can observe with our own eyes, finding the right answer becomes less about what is observably the case and more about what you can successfully argue for. Because of this, philosophers become very good at arguing their case, and this ability to argue starts to become their defining quality.
Being able to argue your case is very useful. It’s not only useful in a philosophical context, but also in a political, legal, or business context. At some point, philosophers realised that there was serious money (and fame) to be made from being able to argue your case, and in training others to do so.
Thus we get the ‘Sophists’: a generation of philosophers that market themselves as travelling all-purpose teachers. They teach a range of skills but their main focus is rhetoric: the skill of speaking or of arguing your case. They can train you to win the argument in a law court, such that the judgement falls favourably on you; they can train you to win political favour, helping you gain power and prestige; they can train you to conquer the business world and make a lot of money. Their services are available to the highest bidder. Their USP is that they can make the weaker argument the stronger. They can help you win the argument even when you are in the wrong.
The word ‘sophistry’ has been a dirty word in philosophy ever since. The sophists had no regard for the truth – many of them believed there was no such thing as the truth, only the beliefs of the powerful and the inability of the weak to say otherwise – and they turned philosophy into petty wordplay. They are the last generation of ‘pre-Socratic’ philosophers because it is with the entrance of Socrates that philosophy gets back on track. Many of the sophists feature as characters in the Platonic dialogues (much more on them later), acting as opponents for Socrates’ questions. They are not an exclusively bad bunch: many of the more philosophically able sophists made significant contributions to philosophy, when they weren’t busy selling out. But history has recorded most of them as being somewhere between pragmatic opportunists and ruthless con artists. What is clear is that they are not really philosophers.
What they are is show-offs, performers. They will argue for anything, no matter how ludicrous, just to show how good they are at arguing for things. For example, one particularly successful and renowned sophist, Gorgias, famously argued that ‘nothing exists’. His actual argument for this is somewhat lost to time, but the outline that survives shows it to rely mainly on clever wordplay. It’s all very impressive, but the conclusion is clearly false and probably not even Gorgias believes it. But of course it doesn’t matter that it’s false, because Gorgias is only trying to be impressive. In successfully arguing for a conclusion that is clearly false, he has turned the weaker argument into the stronger. How clever! Now quick, pay him some money so he can show you how to be clever too…
Many of the more robust philosophical contributions of the sophists have dubious and self-serving implications. A good example here would be Protagoras’s infamous statement that ‘man is the measure of all things: of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not’. Translation: there is no truth, there is only what you can convince someone to believe. What a good reason to hire a sophist to train you how to convince people of things…
We will encounter some of the other sophists as we cover the character of Socrates, in the next chapter. Socrates reminds the sophists that philosophy is about the pursuit of truth and wisdom, not just about winning arguments and playing with words. Petty wordplay will never find the truth, and the truth doesn’t care who wins the argument so long as the right argument wins. When it comes to finding the truth, whichever side we are on, if the wrong argument wins, we all lose; but if the right argument wins, we all win. Socrates would rather find the truth by losing the argument than miss it by trying to win. He would rather learn his errors than remain in them.
What Socrates adds to the development of philosophy, besides reclaiming its true nature from the sophists, is a new focus on the ethical. It’s possible that this was a reaction to the sophists’ ethically dubious approach to philosophy. After all, what good is philosophical ability, or being able to win an argument, if you use that ability for evil ends? If all you do with that power is use it to support injustice then it would be better if no one had such a power.
Socrates doesn’t just want to understand the world, like the early pre-Socratics, he wants to understand what is really of value in the world. He wants to understand things like ‘justice’, ‘goodness’, virtues like ‘courage’, ‘temperance’, or ‘compassion’. Socrates wants to understand what it is to live well in the world. And following Socrates, the question of what it is to live a good life becomes philosophy’s main focus, at least for a while, because what good is knowledge and understanding if it is put to the wrong purposes? What is the point of knowledge and understanding if it doesn’t enable us to live well? In truth, nothing is more important than living a decent life, not even philosophy.
But as it turns out, Socrates thinks philosophy is essential to living a decent life. As he says: ‘The unexamined life it not worthy of a human being.’ If he is anywhere near right about that, then we should all be terrified by the lack of philosophy in the everyday world.
We begin, therefore, with Socrates, the philosopher who, more than any other, defines the Western philosophical tradition: the first of the Ancient Greek philosophers to seriously investigate what it is to live well as a human being, and to his claim that philosophy is essential to a life well lived.
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