THE SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY.
1. RELATION OF THE SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY TO THE ANAXAGOREAN
PRINCIPLE.—Anaxagoras had formed the conception of mind, and in this had
recognized thought as a power above the objective world. Upon this newly
conquered field the Sophistic philosophy now began its gambols, and with
childish wantonness delighted itself in setting at work this power, and
in destroying, by means of a subjective dialectic, all objective
determinations. The Sophistic philosophy—though of far more significance
from its relation to the culture of the age than from its philosophy—had
for its starting principle the breach which Anaxagoras had commenced
between the subjective and the objective,—the Ego and the external
world. The subject, after recognizing himself as something higher than
the objective world, and especially as something above the laws of the
state, above custom and religious tradition and the popular faith, in
the next place attempted to prescribe laws for this objective world, and
instead of beholding in it the historical manifestation of reason, he
looked upon it only as an exanimated matter, upon which he might
exercise his will.
The Sophistic philosophy should be characterized as the clearing up
reflection. It is, therefore, no philosophical system, for its doctrines
and affirmations exhibit often so popular and even trivial a character
that for their own sake they would merit no place at all in the history
of philosophy. It is also no philosophical school in the ordinary sense
of the term,—for Plato cites a vast number of persons under the common
name of “Sophists,”—but it is an intellectual and widely spread
direction of the age, which had struck its roots into the whole moral,
political, and religious character of the Athenian life of that time,
and which may be called the Athenian clearing up period.
2. RELATION OF THE SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY TO THE UNIVERSAL LIFE OF THAT
AGE.—The Sophistic philosophy is, theoretically, what the whole Athenian
life during the Peloponnesian war was practically. Plato justly remarks
in his Republic that the doctrines of the Sophists only expressed the
very principles which guided the course of the great mass of men of that
time in their civil and social relations, and the hatred with which they
were pursued by the practical statesmen, clearly indicates the jealousy
with which the latter saw in them their rivals and the destroyers of
their polity. If the absoluteness of the empirical subject—i. e. the
view that the individual Ego can arbitrarily determine what is true,
right and good,—is in fact the theoretical principle of the Sophistic
philosophy, so does this in a practical direction, as an unlimited
Egoism meet us in all the spheres of the public and private life of that
age. The public life had become an arena of passion and selfishness;
those party struggles which racked Athens during the Peloponnesian war
had blunted and stifled the moral feeling; every individual accustomed
himself to set up his own private interest above that of the state and
the common weal, and to seek in his own arbitrariness and advantage the
measuring rod for all his actions. The Protagorean sentence that “the
man is the measure of all things” became practically carried out only
too faithfully, and the influence of the orator in the assemblies of the
people and the courts, the corruptibility of the great masses and their
leaders, and the weak points which showed to the adroit student of human
nature the covetousness, vanity, and factiousness of others around him,
offered only too many opportunities to bring this rule into practice.
Custom had lost its weight; the laws were regarded as only an agreement
of the majority, the civil ordinance as an arbitrary restriction, the
moral feeling as the effect of the policy of the state in education, the
faith in the gods as a human invention to intimidate the free power of
action, while piety was looked upon as a statute which some men have
enacted and which every one else is justified in using all his eloquence
to change. This degradation of a necessity, which is conformable to
nature and reason, and which is of universal validity,—to an accidental
human ordinance, is chiefly the point in which the Sophistic philosophy
came in contact with the universal consciousness of the educated class
of that period, and we cannot with certainty determine what share
science and what share the life may have had in this connection,—whether
the Sophistic philosophy found only the theoretical formula for the
practical life and tendencies of the age, or whether the moral
corruption was rather a consequence of that destructive influence which
the principles of the Sophists exerted upon the whole course of
contemporaneous thought.
It would be, however, to mistake the spirit of history if we were only
to bewail the epoch of the Sophists instead of admitting for it a
relative justification. These phenomena were in part the necessary
product of the collective development of the age. The faith in the
popular religion fell so suddenly to the ground simply because it
possessed in itself no inner, moral support. The grossest vices and acts
of baseness could all be justified and excused from the examples of
mythology. Even Plato himself, though otherwise an advocate of a devout
faith in the traditional religion, accuses the poets of his nation with
leading the very moral feeling astray, through the unworthy
representations which they had spread abroad concerning the gods and the
hero world. It was moreover unavoidable that the advancing science
should clash with tradition. The physical philosophers had already long
lived in open hostility to the popular religion, and the more
convincingly they demonstrated by analogies and laws that many things
which had hitherto been regarded as the immediate effect of Divine
omnipotence, were only the results of natural causes, so much the more
easily would it happen that the educated classes would become perplexed
in reference to all their previous convictions. It was no wonder then
that the transformed consciousness of the time should penetrate all the
provinces of art and poesy; that in sculpture, wholly analogous to the
rhetoric art of the Sophistic philosophy, the emotive should occupy the
place of the elevated style; that Euripides, the sophist among
tragedians, should bring the whole philosophy of the time and its manner
of moral reflection upon the stage; and that, instead of like the
earlier poets, bringing forward his actors to represent an idea, he
should use them only as means to excite a momentary emotion or some
other stage effect.
3. TENDENCIES OF THE SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY.—To give a definite
classification of the Sophistic philosophy, which should be derived from
the conception of the general phenomena of the age, is exceedingly
difficult, since, like the French “clearing up” of the last century, it
entered into every department of knowledge. The Sophists directed the
universal culture of the time. Protagoras was known as a teacher of
virtue, Gorgias as a rhetorician and politician, Prodicus as a
grammarian and teacher of synonyms, Hippias as a man of various
attainments, who besides astronomical and mathematical studies busied
himself with a theory of mnemonics; others took for their problem the
art of education, and others still the explanation of the old poets; the
brothers Euthydemus and Dionysidorus gave instruction in the bearing of
arms and military tactics; many among them, as Gorgias, Prodicus, and
Hippias, were intrusted with embassies: in short the Sophists, each one
according to his individual tendency, took upon themselves every variety
of calling and entered into every sphere of science; their method is the
only thing common to all. Moreover the relation of the Sophists to the
educated public, their striving after popularity, fame and money,
disclose the fact that their studies and occupations were for the most
part controlled, not by a subjective scientific interest, but by some
external motive. With that roving spirit which was an essential
peculiarity of the later Sophists, travelling from city to city, and
announcing themselves as thinkers by profession—and giving their
instructions with prominent reference to a good recompense and the favor
of the rich private classes, it was very natural that they should
discourse upon the prominent questions of universal interest and of
public culture, with occasional reference also to the favorite
occupation of this or that rich man with whom they might be brought in
contact. Hence their peculiar strength lay far more in a formal
dexterity, in an acuteness of thought and a capacity of bringing it
readily into exercise, in the art of discourse than in any positive
knowledge; their instruction in virtue was given either in positive
dogmatism or in empty bombast, and even where the Sophistic philosophy
became really polymathic, the art of speech still remained as the great
thing. So we find in Xenophon, Hippias boasting that he can speak
repeatedly upon every subject and say something new each time, while we
hear it expressly affirmed of others, that they had no need of positive
knowledge in order to discourse satisfactorily upon every thing, and to
answer every question extemporaneously; and when many Sophists make it a
great point to hold a well-arranged discourse about something of the
least possible significance (_e. g._ salt), so do we see that with them
the thing was only a means while the word was the end, and we ought not
to be surprised that in this respect the Sophistic philosophy sunk to
that empty technicality which Plato in his Phædrus, on account of its
want of character, subjects to so rigid a criticism.
4. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SOPHISTIC PHILOSOPHY FROM ITS RELATION TO THE
CULTURE OF THE AGE.—The scientific and moral defect of the Sophistic
philosophy is at first view obvious; and, since certain modern writers
of history with over-officious zeal have painted its dark sides in
black, and raised an earnest accusation against its frivolity,
immorality, and greediness for pleasure, its conceitedness and
selfishness, and bare appearance of wisdom and art of dispute—it needs
here no farther elucidation. But the point in it most apt to be
overlooked is the merit of the Sophists in their effect upon the culture
of the age. To say, as is done, that they had only the negative merit of
calling out the opposition of Socrates and Plato, is to leave the
immense influence and the high fame of so many among them, as well as
the revolution which they brought about in the thinking of a whole
nation, an inexplicable phenomenon. It were inexplicable that _e. g._
Socrates should attend the lectures of Prodicus, and direct to him other
students, if he did not acknowledge the worth of his grammatical
performances or recognize his merit for the soundness of his logic.
Moreover, it cannot be denied that Protagoras has hit upon many correct
principles of rhetoric, and has satisfactorily established certain
grammatical categories. Generally may it be said of the Sophists, that
they threw among the people a fulness in every department of knowledge;
that they strewed about them a vast number of fruitful germs of
development; that they called out investigations in the theory of
knowledge, in logic and in language; that they laid the basis for the
methodical treatment of many branches of human knowledge, and that they
partly founded and partly called forth that wonderful intellectual
activity which characterized Athens at that time. Their greatest merit
is their service in the department of language. They may even be said to
have created and formed the Attic prose. They are the first who made
style as such a separate object of attention and study, and who set
about rigid investigations respecting number and the art of rhetorical
representation. With them Athenian eloquence, which they first incited,
begins. Antiphon as well as Isocrates—the latter the founder of the most
flourishing school of Greek rhetoric—are offshoots of the Sophistic
philosophy. In all this there is ground enough to regard this whole
phenomenon as not barely a symptom of decay.
5. INDIVIDUAL SOPHISTS.—The first, who is said to have been called, in
the received sense, Sophist, is _Protagoras_ of Abdera, who flourished
about 440 B. C. He taught, and for wages, in Sicily and in Athens, but
was driven out of the latter place as a reviler of the gods, and his
book concerning the gods was burnt by the herald in the public
market-place. It began with these words: “I can know nothing concerning
the gods, whether they exist or not; for we are prevented from gaining
such knowledge not only by the obscurity of the thing itself, but by the
shortness of the human life,” In another writing he develops his
doctrine concerning knowing or not-knowing. Starting from the Heraclitic
position that every thing is in a constant flow, and applying this
preëminently to the thinking subject, he taught that the man is the
measure of all things, who determines in respect of being that it may
be, and of not-being that it may not be, _i. e._ that is true for the
perceiving subject which he, in the constant movement of things and of
himself, at every moment perceives and is sensible of—and hence he has
theoretically no other relation to the external world than the sensuous
apprehension, and practically no other than the sensuous desire. But
now, since perception and sensation are as diverse as the subjects
themselves, and are in the highest degree variable in the very same
subject, there follows the farther result that nothing has an objective
validity and determination, that contradictory affirmations in reference
to the same object must be received as alike true, and that error and
contradiction cannot be. Protagoras does not seem to have made any
efforts to give these frivolous propositions a practical and logical
application. According to the testimony of the ancients, a personal
character worthy of esteem, cannot be denied him; and even Plato, in the
dialogue which bears his name, goes no farther than to object to his
complete obscurity respecting the nature of morality, while, in his
Gorgias and Philebus, he charges the later Sophists with affirming the
principles of immorality and moral baseness.
Next to Protagoras, the most famous Sophist was _Gorgias_. During the
Peloponnesian war (426 B. C.), he came from Leontium to Athens in order
to gain assistance for his native city against the encroachments of
Syracuse, After the successful accomplishment of his errand he still
abode for some time in Athens, but resided the latter part of his life
in Thessaly, where he died about the same time with Socrates. The
pompous ostentation of his external appearance is often ridiculed by
Plato, and the discourses through which he was wont to exhibit himself
display the same character, attempting, through poetical ornament, and
florid metaphors, and uncommon words, and a mass of hitherto unheard of
figures of speech, to dazzle and delude the mind. As a philosopher he
adhered to the Eleatics, especially to Zeno, and attempts to prove upon
the basis of their dialectic schematism, that universally nothing is, or
if there could be a being, it would not be cognizable, or if cognizable
it would not be communicable. Hence his writing bore characteristically
enough the title—“_Concerning Not-being or Nature_.” The proof of the
first proposition that universally nothing is, since it can be
established neither as being nor as not-being, nor yet as at the same
time both being and not-being, rests entirely upon the position that all
existence is a space-filling existence (has place and body), and is in
fact the final consequence which overturns itself, in other words the
self-destruction of the hitherto physical method of philosophizing.
The later Sophists with reckless daring carried their conclusions far
beyond Gorgias and Protagoras. They were for the most part free
thinkers, who pulled to the ground the religion, laws, and customs of
their birth. Among these should be named, prominently, the tyrant
Critias, Polus, Callicles, and Thrasymachus. The two latter openly
taught the right of the stronger as the law of nature, the unbridled
satisfaction of desire as the natural right of the stronger, and the
setting up of restraining laws as a crafty invention of the weaker; and
Critias, the most talented but the most abandoned of the thirty tyrants,
wrote a poem, in which he represented the faith in the gods as an
invention of crafty statesmen. Hippias of Elis, a man of great
knowledge, bore an honorable character, although he did not fall behind
the rest in bombast and boasting; but before all, was Prodicus, in
reference to whom it became a proverb to say—“as wise as Prodicus,” and
concerning whom Plato himself and even Aristophanes never spoke without
veneration. Especially famous among the ancients were his parenetical
(persuasive) lectures concerning the choice of a mode of life
(Xenophon’s Memorabilia, II. 1), concerning external good and its use,
concerning life and death, &c., discourses in which he manifests a
refined moral feeling, and his observation of life; although, through
the want of a higher ethical and scientific principle, he must be placed
behind Socrates, whose forerunner he has been called. The later
generations of Sophists, as they are shown in the Euthydemus of Plato,
sink to a common level of buffoonery and disgraceful strife for gain,
and comprise their whole dialectic art in certain formulæ for entangling
fallacies.
6. TRANSITION TO SOCRATES AND CHARACTERISTIC OF THE FOLLOWING
PERIOD.—That which is true in the Sophistic philosophy is the truth of
the subjectivity, of the self-consciousness, _i. e._ the demand that
every thing which I am to admit must be shown as rational before my own
consciousness—that which is false in it is its apprehension of this
subjectivity as nothing farther than finite, empirical egoistic
subjectivity, _i. e._ the demand that my accidental will and opinion
should determine what is rational; its truth is that it set up the
principle of freedom, of self-certainty; its untruth is that it
established the accidental will and notion of the individual upon the
throne. To carry out now the principle of freedom and self-consciousness
to its truth, to gain a true world of objective thought with a real and
distinct content, by the same means of reflection which the Sophists had
only used to destroy it, to establish the objective will, the rational
thinking, the absolute or ideal in the place of the empirical
subjectivity was the problem of the next advent in philosophy, the
problem which Socrates took up and solved. To make the absolute or ideal
subjectivity instead of the empirical for a principle, is to affirm that
the true measure of all things is not _my_ (_i. e._ the individual
person’s) opinion, fancy and will; that what is true, right and good,
does not depend upon my caprice and arbitrary determination, or upon
that of any other empirical subject; but while it is _my_ thinking, it
is my _thinking_, the rational within me, which has to decide upon all
those points. But my thinking, my reason, is not something specially
belonging to me, but something common to every rational being; something
universal, and in so far as I am a rational and thinking being, is my
subjectivity a universal one. But every thinking individual has the
consciousness that what he holds as right, as duty, as good or evil,
does not appear as such to him alone but to every rational being, and
that consequently his thinking has the character of universality, of
universal validity, in a word—of objectivity. This then in opposition to
the Sophistic philosophy is the standpoint of Socrates, and therefore
with him the _philosophy of objective thought_ begins. What Socrates
could do in opposition to the Sophists was to show that reflection led
to the same results as faith or obedience, hitherto without reflection,
had done, and that the thinking man guided by his free consciousness and
his own conviction, would learn to form the same judgments and take the
same course to which life and custom had already and unconsciously
induced the ordinary man. The position, that while the man is the
measure of all things, it is the man as universal, as thinking, as
rational, is the fundamental thought of the Socratic philosophy, which
is, by virtue of this thought, the positive complement of the Sophistic
principle.
With Socrates begins the second period of the Grecian philosophy. This
period contains three philosophical systems, whose authors, standing to
each other in the personal relation of teacher and pupil, represent
three successive generations,—SOCRATES, PLATO, ARISTOTLE.