The sophists brought new energy and excitement to the intellectual scene in Greece in the mid-fifth century BCE. But did they introduce an intellectual revolution? There is a temptation to treat them as offering an intellectual revolution, revealing the naivete of traditional conceptions which based knowledge on ancient myths and inherited ways of thinking. They did indeed tend to emphasize new ways of thinking, and they did promise to give their students the tools to challenge inherited customs and to overthrow traditions.
But at the same time that they offered new attitudes and powerful techniques of argument and analysis, their very commitment to questioning customary truths and challenging accepted patterns of behavior were hollow. They seemed to be based more on a love of innovation for its own sake than on any secure theory of what-is. It is one thing to criticize the status quo, another thing to improve on it.
In fact, there was no single sophistic theory about government, or about any other field they inquired into. What the sophists offered was not a unified theory or even a single approach to the world, but a curriculum, or perhaps better, a set of curricula, designed to give their students advantages in the competitive world of an open social system and democratic politics. The sophists’ appeal to students was not their possession of an integrated system of knowledge, but their ability to answer all questions and confound all opponents, and to teach their students the secrets of verbal combat.
In short, sophistic was not a unified theory but a movement. It aimed at practical success in the forum and the marketplace: how to impress friends and influence people. But there were some tendencies that marked the sophists off from previous generations of sages and philosophers.
2.1.2.1 Convention vs. Nature
The earliest philosophers focused on nature, phusis. In its earliest uses, ‘phusis’usually denotes not Nature as a whole, but the natural tendencies certain objects have to function in certain ways. Plants grow in place, animals move around, heavy objects fall, light objects rise. But there seems to be a realm in which natures operate, the realm of Nature. Moreover, there seem to be laws of nature which are inviolable. If I walk off a cliff, no matter what I may want to happen, I can expect to plummet to the ground and go splat.
On the other hand, there is a realm of convention or custom, nomos, which is the product of human invention. Society decides that some human actions are good, some bad, some indifferent, and decrees these either by custom or (as in fifth century) by a code of laws. It is right to grow crops and to keep them; it is wrong to steal them from another. It is right to bury dead human bodies, but wrong to eat them. To use a modern example, it is right to drive on the right side of the road in some countries, but to drive on the left side in other countries. Here, we might suspect, what is crucial is not some inescapable law of nature, but some arbitrary imposition by custom or law, nomos (which can denote either custom or law).
On the basis of this dichotomy, we can infer that the proper realm of political science is that of Convention, whereas the proper realm of physics or biology is that of Nature.
Antiphon the Sophist draws some powerful and unsettling conclusions from this basic dichotomy. He observes,
Justice is not to transgress the laws of the city in which one is a citizen. Thus a man would use justice in a way most advantageous to himself if, in the presence of witnesses, he held the laws in esteem, whereas, when he was alone, he valued the works of nature. For the works of law are factitious, whereas those of nature are necessary; and the works of nature, being conventional, are not natural, while those of nature, being natural, are not conventional. Thus one who transgresses the laws, if he eludes those who agreed on them, also escapes shame and punishment, but if not, he does not. But if he undertakes to violate what is possible of things innate in nature, even if he eludes all men, the evil that results is no less; even if all observe, it is no more. For he is harmed not because of opinion, but in truth.[1]
In other words, since human laws constrain us only to the extent they can be enforced, whereas laws of nature are inescapable, it is best to pretend to obey human laws when in the company of other citizens, and to break those laws when it is to our advantage and no one knows we are breaking them. For, as Antiphon notes few lines later, “The advantages accruing from [human] laws are chains upon nature, but those from nature are free.”
Not all sophists went along with this radical attack on human laws,[2] but we can see from this sophist’s writings the revisionary tendency that some sophists pursued. And we may say that the notion of a strong contrast between convention and nature, whatever its implications, was a tendency in sophistic thinking. There was the further tendency to see the scope of the sophists’ inquiries as the realm of convention, where concepts were up for grabs, in contrast to the scope of the natural philosophers’ inquiries, which of course was the realm of nature.
And in the world of human society, it was best to do unto others before they could do it unto you. For human laws do not do a good job of protecting the victims of crime, and they give the clever perpetrator the opportunity escaping punishment by defending himself in court.[3]
[1] Antiphon B44.
[2] Anonymus Iamblichi 6-7.
[3] Antiphon B44.