So what did the sophists contribute to the intellectual world of what is sometimes called the Greek Enlightenment? They clearly were men of the hour, who offered something that a great many ambitious young men were after: education in practical matters relating to politics and business. In the mid-fifth century BC, democracy had emerged as an exciting new political experiment. Athens in particular, led by reformers such as Pericles, was opening the door to ordinary citizens to fill more, and eventually all, the positions of government. In Athens and other cities influenced by Athenian practices, a young man of modest means and no family connections could envisage stepping up and becoming a leader in the government of his city. But in order to do that, he would need skills he had never learned, including an ability to speak persuasively to large bodies of citizens, to formulate plans and policies, to balance budgets and manage government agencies. The sophists offered short courses in these very important skills at a moderate expense (considering the potential value of their services). They arose as the first experts who would offer education to anyone (with the tuition money). They were the first professors of adult education in the world, at least the Western world. And students, like Hippocrates in Plato’s Protagoras, flocked to them in hopes that the sophists would launch them into glorious careers in public service.
Before the sophistic movement, there was no public education. To be sure, there had been sages, perhaps since Thales, who had accepted individual followers, evidently those of the upper classes who lived a life of leisure as owners of land worked by peasants and slaves. The Pythagorean brotherhood in southern Italy controlled the governments of some Italian city-states.[1] But, however exactly the brotherhood acted, it was a closed religious society operated by and for members only, which in no way invited individuals of the general public to participate in government.
The sophists did, then, fill a need for able leadership in an increasingly democratic society. Yet they claimed to do more than that. Some of them, at least, claimed to know everything about everything, and certainly to have practical answers for all real-world needs. Some sophists portrayed themselves as jacks-of-all-trades, as, notably, did Hippias.[2] Some, like Protagoras specialized in, roughly, political science and related areas.[3] Some, like Gorgias, however, seem to have made more modest claims. In the Gorgias, Plato has Socrates ask the sophist, “Tells us, Gorgias, what to call you and of what craft you are an expert.” Gorgias answers, “Of oratory, Socrates.”[4] Gorgias claims expertise in public speaking (rhetorikē). Socrates pushes Gorgias to define his art further. Socrates describes oratory as a creator of persuasion (peithous dēmiourgos), and Gorgias accepts the characterization.[5] Gorgias goes on to describe oratory as a competitive skill that can in principle be used for moral or immoral purposes, though it should, of course, be used only for moral ends.[6] Socrates goes on to press Gorgias to make virtue a prerequisite for oratory rather than an incidental concomitant.[7] Plato, at least, sees Gorgias as a teacher, not of a craft (technē), which aims at some good, but of a routine or knack (empeiria, tribē).[8]
If this is so, then Gorgias is not a philosopher in any sense that Plato or Socrates would recognize, but just a teacher of a low-level competitive skill. He is like a coach of a debate team rather than the professor of a science.
Now this account of Gorgias seems to ignore another side of the sophist. Gorgias, as we have mentioned, wrote a treatise On What-Is-Not that was apparently designed to refute Parmenides and his school, by arguing for the incoherence of a science of what-is or being. If that is what Gorgias accomplished, or even attempted to accomplish, it seems that he deserves the title of philosopher. Now it is true that if his thesis is right, then what-is is not, nor is it knowable, nor is it communicable. This would seem to make Gorgias a skeptic or proto-skeptic with serious philosophical credentials.
It may, however, be the case Gorgias is not offering us a refutation of being, but presenting an alternative to the philosophical thesis that what-is is and is the only thing that is. Like a good debating coach, he presents the opposing argument, and shows that it is no less plausible than the original. That, of course, is a strategy approved by skeptics to support a general rejection of philosophical theses. It becomes difficult to sort out whether Gorgias is a real philosopher or just a clever rhetorician playing games with philosophers.
In the case of Protagoras, Plato seems to take him a committed to an extreme form of relativism on the one hand (in his Theaetetus), and yet to give a very conventional (non-relativized) account of virtue in his speech and discussion with Socrates in the Protagoras. Given the opportunity to define virtue and defend its teachability, he goes off on a tangent of literary criticism rather than pursuing the philosophical question to its possible conclusion. Plato portrays him as a dilettante intellectual rather than a philosopher.
All of this may be unfair to the sophists themselves. Yet we do not find in their students and followers, such as Isocrates, any strong philosophical positions or schools of thought. They are gifted intellectuals who make contributions to practical education and to fields such as rhetoric and philosophy of language. They often compose textbooks known as technai (from their titles, The Art of Public Speaking), which Plato criticizes as lacking a theoretical basis, and Aristotle criticizes as offering more in the way of examples of oratory than of helpful approaches to composition.[9] They no doubt raised the level of public speaking, but without necessarily changing the level of discourse about government or social science or natural philosophy.
They fall short, however, in the business of identifying what Being really is, and, consequently what reality is or is made out of, what knowledge of reality consists of, and what we can learn from this for the improvement of our lives.
[1] Von Fritz 1940.
[2] Plato Hippias Minor 363c-368e.
[3] Plato Protagoras 318d-319a.
[4] Plato Gorgias 449a.
[5] Plato Gorgias 453a.
[6] Plato Gorgias 456c-457c.
[7] Plato Gorgias 459d-460c.
[8] Plato Gorgias 463a-c, 464b-d.
[9] Plato Phaedrus 266b-267d, 269b-270c; Aristotle Sophistical Refutations 183b34-184a8.