Assignment task: Sophists and Socrates Today as Professionals
Instructions:
1. Look at the philosophers studied in this module.
2. Prepare a table including the names of all the philosophers from the module.
3. Assign a professional field to each philosopher based on what you learned about them.
4. Explain why who chose the field you did for each philosopher.
5. Comment on at least two students with whom you disagree on what they wrote and explain why.
In this module we explore what happened after Athens developed its democracy and its citizens became more interested in participating in governing themselves. This is the period in philosophy dominated by the Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This is the historical moment in which the fundamental bases of philosophy are born. Philosophy through the next 2,500 has evolved, but it keeps going back to these origins, when philosophy was part of the common conversation to decipher truth and reality.
We find ourselves in Athens, around the 500s BCE. Democracy is being tried for the first time ever. Before Athenian democracy, people all over were ruled by kings that had to be obeyed and feared just because they were in power. Athenians started an experiment. Athenians didn't like to be ruled by anyone. They were individuals. They just fought the Persian empire and they won. Now, they wanted every (male) citizen to participate actively in governing themselves. The word democracy derives from two Greek words "demos", which means "the people", and "kracia", which means "power". So now Athenians are trying to place power in the hands of the people. It is important that we clarify that Athenian democracy, like any democracy, was not perfect. In the Athens of the time, only male citizens over eighteen years old and who owned property were able to participate in Athenian democracy. This excluded women, slaves, and non-citizens, which meant that most people who lived in Athens at the time could not participate in Athenian democracy.
Democracy - Government by the people
The Sophists
This is the perfect historical combination for the Sophists to dominate the scene. The Sophists were philosophers who started asking questions about knowledge, the meaning of life and death, and morality. At the beginning, they were considered respected thinkers, but as time passed, they became obsessed with earning money for their teaching, and their philosophy became more relativistic. They were there to teach anyone to win arguments, not so much to search for truth. For the right fee, the Sophists taught any citizen willing to pay how to defend their points even if they might be wrong. For the Sophists, knowledge is impossible. You just needed to develop the art of rhetoric for political discussion. The truth is a relative matter. Let us look at three of the most significant Sophists: Protagoras, Gorgias, and Thrasymachus.
Protagoras
Protagoras is famous for his quote, "Man is the measure of all things". This has been interpreted in many ways. Let us try it. It seems that Protagoras wants to say that we look at the world and reality and interpret it based on our individual perspective. It sounds like it might be almost impossible for two people to see, feel, hear, taste the same thing, and share the exact way of experiencing it. Maybe Protagoras had a point here. Today, we have discovered through technological advances in medicine that we in fact perceive the world in different ways based on our neurological composition. Knowledge is limited to our various perceptions - knowledge, therefore, is relative. Thus, we can't say we have knowledge. We can only say we have a specific perspective on something.
Another concern of Protagoras, or maybe we should say, something that Protagoras was not concerned at all with, was the existence of the gods. Protagoras considered life too short, and the subject too profound or dark. There was no use for Protagoras to spend life trying to figure out something for which (even today) we wouldn't be able to find a definitive answer.
Protagoras also considered that we should obey the laws, not because they were good laws, but because the State made them, and it is recommended for society to follow the State. It keeps harmony. He even thought that the young should be educated to accept and support tradition because it makes a stable society possible. It would be interesting to find Protagoras in a democracy today like the one found in the United States, a country which prides itself on, among other things, freedom of speech, and in which protest sometimes is needed to force the State to listen to the people.
Gorgias
For Gorgias nothing exists. If anything exists, it is incomprehensible. Even if it is comprehensible, it cannot be communicated. This might remind you of a game we used to play as children called "the message" or "the telephone", in which a first messenger would pass a message to the person next to her and so on until it came back to the first person totally changed. Gorgias is willing to give a change to the existence of something (Well, at least he should admit that he, Gorgias, exists.). But the fact that something exists does not mean that we could comprehend it. And let's say that we were able to comprehend it, when we try to communicate the existence or being of it to another person, what we are communicating is not the thing anymore. We might be scratching our heads right now, but think: Have you ever been in a situation in which you were trying to communicate something to someone, and they say they understand you, but when they explain it back to you it is different from what you were trying to say? That might be helpful in explaining what Gorgias was trying to say. No symbol can ever be the same as the thing that it symbolizes (Stumpf, 2003). Gorgias realized that there was no way to obtain knowledge, so he decided to perfect the art of persuasion. Since there is no knowledge accessible to us, what counts is winning within the real environment we find ourselves in.
Thrasymachus
When asked by Socrates in Plato's Republic what is just, Thrasymachus answered, "the interest of the stronger party". Although we think that justice is a good thing, Thrasymachus consider it foolish to be just. We should take advantage of the weaknesses of the others. Those who know how to fool the majority into following the rules are the winners. Those in power don't have to be just, but they need to make the majority think that justice is a good thing, so they stay in check. For Thrasymachus, injustice is better than justice. If you are unjust, you will enjoy living off the majority who are always trying to be just. That is why Thrasymachus thought that the unjust person is positively superior (Stumpf, 2004). The motto for this Sophist is, "might is right". In the The Prince by Machiavelli it is said that the wise politician or prince is the one who learns how to fool his subjects. In a way, Thrasymachus was around two thousand years ahead.
Socrates Debates Thrasymachus
Souce: Imgur, 2020.
Socrates
Enter Socrates, an ex soldier, economically poor, and just interested in finding the fundamental meaning of all concepts and ideas discussed as he and his followers visited different places around Athens. Socrates is against the Sophists. He considers them sellers of half truths who were willing to defend any perspective no matter how wrong it might be. Socrates attracted younger men that had time to think and philosophize about everything they encountered. The Oracle at Delphi had told someone that Socrates was the wisest man alive. Socrates understood by this that he was the only one to admit his own ignorance. When went around asking "experts" what justice, or freedom, or goodness was, they gave him answers that through a process of asking questions called maieutic or dialectic, showed they did not know what they were talking about. Some people started despising Socrates because he exposed them and showed that they were not experts.
For Socrates, philosophy was all. "An unexamined life is not worth living" is a famous saying attributed to him. He preferred to die condemned in prison than to escape. He was not going to give away philosophy to live a life outside of his beloved Athens. For Socrates, we needed to search within to discover our truths, but we had to challenge what we already thought about everything to expose ourselves to the scrutiny of the dialectic. Our soul could tell us what the truth about the world was, but we needed to reach that truth intellectually, using reason. He proposed that being good meant knowing the good. If we did not know the good, we couldn't do the good. For Socrates, there weren't bad people at all, but people who ignored what was good, and since they did not know the good, they couldn't choose it.
References:
Moore, B.N. & K. Bruder. (2002). Philosophy: The Power of ideas (5th. ed.). McGraw Hill.
Stumpf, S.E. & J. Fieser. (2003). Socrates to Sartre and beyond: A history of philosophy (7th ed.). McGraw Hill.