The Sophists’ Justification of Power
20
Aug
The sophists were intelligent men who educated
and influenced young people in Classical Antiquity, using oratory and rhetoric, to use speech to justify power, regardless of moral aspects.
They were fought first by Socrates, we only know about him through Plato, and then by Plato (428 BC – 347 BC) and Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) who defended education for true citizenship, considering the sophists merely mercenaries of the powerful.
As we read in Plato, Protagoras was one of these sophists, he was born in 490 BC and thus can be considered the first sophist, another famous one was Hippias who would have debated with Socrates about natural and conventional laws, he was versed in astronomy, mathematics, painting and poetry which gave him great “authority”.
They have their origins in the pre-Socratics: Protagoras would be a disciple of Democritus (the famous phrase “man is the measure of all things”), Thrasymachus, the main figure in the beginning of Plato’s Republic, argued that “justice would be only the advantage of stronger”, and Gorgias, who is not considered a sophist by Socrates, creates a controversy with Parmenides (being is and non-being is not), according to this “sophist” one cannot communicate what is not known.
Two criticisms can be considered fundamental to the sophists, creating relative truths and this has a strong relationship with modern narratives, and the fact that they considered that virtues were not things that could be taught, thus dismissing moral values.
They, however, did not ignore the questions of the “soul” (what idealism calls subjectivity) in Gorgias’ speech we can read:
“[T]here is the same relationship between the power of speech and the disposition of the soul, the device of drugs and the nature of bodies: just as such a drug causes such a mood to leave the body, and that some cause illness to cease, others life, so Also, among the speeches, some afflict, others enchant, make fear, inflame the listeners, and some, due to some bad persuasion, drug the soul and bewitch it.”
Modern sophists go beyond disregarding the soul, as they praise drugs, drunkenness and temporal pleasures, education for citizenship and replaced by pure ideologisms, today little thought out and organized, are vague promises of a better future.
Thus the logic of power is inverted, Thrasymachus’s “strongest” speech makes sense again, the lack of reasonable moral values has been extinguished in exchange for momentary and fleeting happiness, and rhetoric and oratory are used to convince of many, but true moral discourse says: “the last will be first and the first will be last” (Mt 19:30) because this logic only leads to destruction and empty promises.
Plato. A república (The republic). Trans. And notes Maria da Rocha Pereira, 9th. ed. Colouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, s/d.
