Sophists and relativism
25
Sep
The political issue and the current polarization
involve an age-old problem: sophistry. Its origin in ancient Greece is when Plato started a school for training philosophers to create men of the “polis” who would serve not only authoritarian governments, but the Greek city-states.
The speech in Theaetetus on the nature of knowledge, written in 369 BC, is where the confrontation between truth and relativism appears, at least clearly for the first time in philosophy.
In it, a character called “the Stranger from Elea”, who would have been a companion of both Parmenides and Zeno”, elaborates on three important figures in the Platonic school: the sophist, the politician and the philosopher, but in it he only did not write about the definition of the philosopher that would be investigated in other texts, but the politician for him, par excellence, would be the philosopher, who among other things should have ‘Aretê’, that is, virtues.
The reason there is a coincidence with current political discourse, and this origin of relativism, can be seen in the explanation he gives about reality and the image they seek to represent, both of which are not what they represent, but are clearly something else, for example the image of a house can look like and show very well what a house is, without being one.
Just as the image of a dog is characterized by not really being a dog, the content of a false speech is characterized by not being what it really is, both say something about the truth, but are in essence different things.
Despite this, an ontological contradiction remains in the discourse, as the Stranger emblematically announces: “such a statement presupposes being and not being”, Parmenides’ classic thesis, although the root of his thought is logical and not ontological.
Thus, appearance and image do not coincide with the real truth, although they may confuse an inattentive viewer, they are not the same thing, discerning them is an essential condition for exercising truth, so we may not remain in the truth when we embark on “images”.
There is a popular saying, it is not known who first said it, but in war the first thing that dies is the truth, and its more than tragic consequences lead to a crisis of who we really are as humanity and with our inalienable rights that are stolen.
