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Chapter 3. The Power of the Sophist
To attack Plato, turn to his ancient enemies for advice. Those who want
to undermine Plato's quest for grounded systematic unity and certainty must
get along without the firm criteria sought in the traditional philosophical
discussions of knowledge, ethics, and politics. So thinkers such as Lyotard
give a sympathetic portrayal of the Sophists as useful for understanding our
own situation.
As in Plato's time so today the role assigned the Sophists is more
symbolic than historically accurate. They are cast as the Other even when
they are evaluated positively. This is not to deny that historical research has
dealt with the Sophists on their own and not exclusively as a foil for Socrates;
such discussions start as early as Hegel's lectures on the history of
philosophy, and recent scholarship has made them appear as thinkers
grappling with problems of knowledge and truth, inventing ways to talk about
language, and starting the kinds of ethical discussions that Plato and Socrates
continued in new ways (cf. Kerford 1981 and Feyerabend 1987). To some
extent this forces them into current debates in analytic philosophy, but it does
allow us to see them somewhat outside Plato's shadow.
My concern will not be with this search for the historical Sophists but
with how they are invoked as the Other. Whatever the dimensions of their
role in Greek intellectual life, it has passed, and their role in the wider
western tradition has been through portraits painted by other thinkers for their
own purposes.
Plato's Sophists
Plato painted the minor Sophists as fools and charlatans, the major
Sophists as earnest teachers, but all of them as devoted to a pernicious anti-
philosophy that endangered individual and social health. The Sophists offered
a new education to fit men for their role in the new democratic and
commercial world. They acquainted their students with current developments
and taught them a knack for rhetorical persuasion. When they spoke about
knowledge and reality they produced ideas drawn from Parmenides and
Heraclitus that licensed a facile relativism.
If Plato were speaking in today's terms he would call the Sophists
radical conventionalists about truth and morality, thinkers who in so far as
they talk about it at all measure truth in terms of individual or group
perception. They teach a grab-bag of persuasive methods without subjecting
them to any tests. Plato does not present Gorgias as cynically putting out
arguments he knows are bad, but as someone who cannot understand the
difference between a good and a bad argument. In the end Gorgias does not
care about such a difference; what matters is the immediate persuasive effect
of his words.
The Sophists travelled about Greece offering education to upwardly
mobile urban youth. Sophistic education stood in contrast with the traditional
education based on the great myths and aristocratic military values. As we
see the Sophists presented by Plato and Aristophanes, they tested the old
ways by the standards of their own desires. They delighted in pointing out
inconsistencies in the old stories, and they replaced them with a new story
about personal and social power: truths depend on personal perception,
norms depend on who is in power, rhetorical training can put power in your
hands.
Plato agreed with the Sophists that the traditional education was no
longer useful. Those old stories no longer helped people find their way in the
confusions of Athenian life, nor could they stand up to Socrates's demands
for grounded integrity of vision. But Plato feared the Sophistic education,
which he saw leading to opportunistic manipulation. At best the Sophists
produced a skilled speaker bent on shallow self-indulgence; at worst they
created dangerous leaders and a docile public; always they destroyed faith in
reason and moral virtue.
The reduction of Gorgias's cultivated tone to Callicles's frank will to
power set the mode for subsequent evaluations of the Sophists. In Plato's
Socratic story, discussions of value and truth cannot be polarized by any
desire short of the overwhelming desire for complete wholeness and integrity.
The search for truth and justice cannot be guided by a desire for success in
business, political influence, or prosecution of the war against Sparta. Such
goals would limit any discussion that might put the chosen purpose in
question. The Sophists dispense their teachings for pay; they make wisdom
something you can buy and use for your own purposes. Socrates takes no pay
and he stands ready to question your purposes.
Neither the tradition nor the Sophists tested their standards of belief
and conduct by the rigors of Socratic self-questioning. What was needed was
a commitment to the search for a guaranteed knowledge based on standards
that could put in question all our presuppositions and all our desires save the
desire for wholeness and truth. One must inquire until it becomes luminously
clear what the basic structures of the world are, and how these shape the
proper way human to live. Plato's theory of the forms filled in the ontological
details, but the quest for unity and grounded truth need not be tied to that
particular theory. As philosophy went on, other metaphysical systems took
over the foundational role, but the Socratic quest continued. That quest
contained its own internal goals.
Both Plato and the Sophists agreed that the values and beliefs of the
past were not reliable guides for action. Both insisted on a reflectively critical
attitude towards tradition. For Plato this meant testing tradition against the
necessities revealed in the Socratic quest for knowledge. For the Sophists this
meant using tradition where it helped attain one's goals. Although Plato was
in the end more respectful of traditional values, neither he nor the Sophists let
students remain unquestioningly within the traditional ways. Athenian
conservatives were correct in classing Socrates with the Sophists insofar as
the effect on tradition was corrosive in both cases.
Knowledge, Opinion, and Metaphysics
The goal of grounded knowledge and guaranteed norms defined for
Plato the quest that came to be called philosophy. Lately the term
metaphysics has been used to describe the central activity of philosophy in
Plato's sense. Heidegger first made this use of the term popular in his
discussions of the "overcoming" of metaphysics and the "end of
philosophy" (Heidegger 1957, 1966). Since then, other thinkers have used the
term more freely than Heidegger but in the spirit of his discussions, which are
themselves now branded as too metaphysical.
In this context metaphysics denotes the attempt to base our lives on the
availability of true reality that grounds our knowledge and allows us to survey
the necessary structure of the world unified into a systematic whole that we
can represent to ourselves in a clear language. Plato had a particular theory
to offer, but rival theories that dispute his conclusions still keep the goal and
methods of metaphysics. The dogmatic materialist is in this sense as
metaphysical as Plato. Even the Logical Positivists who were bent on rooting
out what they called metaphysical views can be classified as metaphysical
thinkers in this other sense of the word because of their belief in a sure
ground that can be made present through psychology and logic.
The Sophists stand opposed to Plato's search for true knowledge and
so, it would seem, to metaphysics. It is their refusal of reason and their
reliance on opinion in matters of ethics and politics that interests
postmoderns. I might note in passing that the historical Sophists should be
judged metaphysical by those who like to apply that label. It is possible to be
a relativist or a conventionalist and still be metaphysical in Heidegger's
sense, if one believes that there is some central ground for our lives that is or
can be purely present to us, and on which the relativity of knowledge turns.
For the Sophists who invoke the distinction between nature and convention
(physis and nomos) that ground is nature as a field of contesting desires for
satisfaction and power. Opinions and norms are determined by the strength
of the desires and the skillful power of individuals who manipulate one
another. One can know one's desires and can know the power available.
There is among the Sophists nothing comparable to the subtle discussion of
the elusive nature of desire that is found in Plato's Philebus, to say nothing of
contemporary treatments of desire that have learned from Freud that desire
can never be encountered as full and unambiguously present.
The realm of opinion is described by Plato as the opposite of the realm
of knowledge. Opinion is fallible, changeable, ungrounded, linked to the
shifting sands of perception, and formed by persuasion. Knowledge is
infallible, fixed, grounded in the presence of its unvarying objects, and
formed by rational argument. Recent philosophy, however, tends to define
knowledge as justified true belief. The difference between opinion and
knowledge is to be found in how they are supported. This is a non-Platonic
way of supporting Plato's distinction since it dispenses with a separate realm
of secure entities to be the objects of knowledge. But this view is still
metaphysical in Heidegger's sense, since it seeks unified certainty based on
the presence of the justifications that turn opinion into knowledge.
Reason and Persuasion
As Plato pictures them the Sophists are not so much anti-rational as
pre-rational; they have not made the proper distinctions. They teach how to
achieve power by changing the ideas of one's fellow citizens. Manipulation
and argument are the same. If one lives in the realm of opinion, why should it
matter how opinions are changed, especially if people are happier and more
harmonious afterwards? Even Plato resorts to the noble lie, and he has
Protagoras give a noble defense of persuasion as healing people and
improving their adjustment to the city. It is not necessary that they agree with
the process; they will come to agree.
In fear of manipulation, Plato insists on a strong distinction between
acts of Sophistic persuasion, with their hidden violence against the nature of
reason, and acts that lead to rationally motivated agreement among
participants in argumentation. Sophists influence our beliefs; Socrates seeks
mutual understanding based on shared reasons.
Plato claims that these two kinds of communication should be mixed
only in a "true rhetoric" that would be firmly based on rational argument. In
his dialogues, though, Plato is more flexible than his sharp division might
seem to allow. The Socrates he portrays is in his way a supreme Sophist; he
tells myths and uses many tactics of persuasion. Plato the author is even more
protean and difficult to hold to the standards he enunciates. But his official
doctrine emphasizes the search for unities, foundations, and system in the
constant presence of true reality.
Those who uphold Plato's distinction today usually appeal to method,
but there is no agreement on what methods are acceptable. The first step in
distinguishing between forceful persuasion and rational agreement has often
been to cite deductive logic. If we look at a pattern of sentences we can
measure them against the logically valid patterns. Rational argument must
follow these patterns while persuasion need not do so. This is a necessary but
not a sufficient condition, since logical arguments could be employed with
false premises for persuasive effect. The next step is to require logical
arguments to guarantee the premises, but as both Plato and Aristotle point out
this strategy fails since it would be impossibly circular to justify deductively
all statements.
These problems are compounded in the real world where we want to
judge not patterns of sentences so much as speech acts. A perfectly logical
pattern of sentences can be used in an irrational way, by emphasis on its
complications, by speed of delivery, by using it as a badge of expert status,
and so on. It would be good if we could distinguish Sophistic persuasion
from rational argument by their purposes, but this begs the question. Each is
trying to bring the other person to agree; it is the way the purpose is specified
which differs, and it is just that difference that is being questioned.
Since Plato, mathematics has served as the best example of purely
rational argument. It seems to need no other discursive modality.
Mathematics can be such a clear discourse as long as there is no
disagreement about its basic definitions and premises. But this should not be
the model for philosophical or practical discourse where the problem is to
arrive at acceptable definitions and principles and classifications, not to start
with them. Kant makes this point in the Canon of Pure Reason in the first
Critique, and Hegel makes a similar point in the Preface to the
Phenomenology of Spirit.
In discussions where principles are in question, we have to switch to
another more flexible mode of discourse that speaks about the basic premises
and criteria being used.
As I said in the previous chapter, much of what Plato and Aristotle
wrote falls into this other type of discourse, which Plato calls the upward way
to principles and Aristotle calls dialectic, a mode of discourse about basic
principles and concepts that is not yet explicitly structured by those
principles.//Footnote Plato seems to reserve the term "dialectic" for the entire
ensemble of the wandering way to principles and the structured way back
down to the particular issues in question. In this mode it is more difficult to
distinguish rational agreement from persuasion because there are fewer
shared rules to rely upon.
A promising way to talk about different kinds of discourse is to look at
the different intellectual virtues required. Plato and Aristotle cite virtues
whose practice makes this discourse good in its kind. So we have the portrait
of Socrates contrasted with the portrait of the Sophists, and Aristotle's
discussion of intellectual virtue in book VI of his Ethics. Socrates and the
Sophists both share the ability to see possibilities, to size up their audience,
to put words together well. But Socrates's willingness to question everything
and to be proven wrong, his tolerance for indefinitely postponed conclusions
coupled with his dedication to the search for grounds and principles make a
picture quite different from the Sophist in a hurry to persuade. On the other
hand, in real life situations when conclusions must be reached without the
infinitely extendible time frame of the Platonic dialogues the picture of
Socrates begins to blur.
Judgments about whether a given act embodies a given virtue are
notoriously difficult to agree upon. And can we be sure that the intellectual
virtues are unchanging? The end of metaphysics is accompanied by the
promotion of new intellectual virtues. Nietzsche offers his counter-images to
Socrates. Derrida, Lyotard, and others try to persuade us of new intellectual
virtues. Aristotle's phronesis is now joined by irony, playfulness, a spirit of
transgression, and sensitivity to occasions for the creation of new language
games. These cannot be simply added to the older lists, nor are the new
promoted by the sort of communication and texts that are in accord with the
old. If there are such new virtues, the problem of delimiting acceptable
means of persuasion becomes even more difficult.
Metaphysical Fear
At the beginning of the modern age when Descartes started his
examination of method, he made explicit his fear that he had been persuaded
by custom, education, and social pressure to believe what a true method
would find to be false. A proper method would let him start over and avoid
the persuaders. But method for Descartes is more than logic; it is an attempt
to replace the Platonic and Aristotelian discussion of first principles with a
disciplined intuition of self-evident clear and distinct ideas. A distinction
between the logically valid and the psychologically persuasive was not
enough for him; it had to be supplemented by the appeal to intuition. Since
his time debate over proposed methods that will render unnecessary the
discourse about first principles has often replaced that discourse, without
conclusive effect.
Today we have techniques of manipulation on a scale that would have
done Callicles proud. They are not playful transgressions; we do well to fear
the link between such power and what passes for knowledge. If there is only
persuasion, Plato warns us, there is no discourse except the confrontation of
power and propaganda. If we cannot draw the line, he says, all means of
persuasion will be acceptable. Violence may be done to us, in crude or subtle
ways and we will not be able to stop it. Even worse, we may not be aware of
it.
We fear violence: on the largest scale, nuclear war, on the national
scale, the violence of social disintegration, the war of all against all. We fear
as well the calm created by power making us behave. We fear especially the
insidious violence of a false consciousness that would make us believe. We
fear we will behave not because we have reached a consensus, nor because
we have calculated threats and rewards, but because we have had our
opinions changed. The government, the capitalists, the church, our own
unconscious needs may play the Evil Genius, and we may live a lie without
being aware that we have been (re)programmed. But if there is only opinion
and our opinions are the result of persuasion, what's the difference between
being programmed by our upbringing and being reprogrammed by
Protagoras's clients?
For all that Plato's metaphysical quest is out of fashion, do we still
share his fears enough to need his remedy? Must we keep a distinction in
kind between Sophistic persuasion and acts of rational convincing?
Postmoderns say no, and I want to make a preliminary argument that will
have the effect of weakening the need for such a distinction.//Footnote It may
seem that the we are faced with only two choices: either there is a distinction
of degree or one of kind between persuasion and rationality. A continuum or
a sharp division. But these are not the only kinds of distinctions available. It
would be interesting to work out a distinction between persuasion and
rationality along the lines of the medieval distinction between two aspects
that can distinguished but never exist separately. End Footnote//
In what follows I take for granted the end of metaphysics in the
traditional Platonic sense of a search for secure foundations in a constantly
present basic reality. There is more to be said about that "end" but I want to
limit these remarks to how it involves the Sophists and the fears they
symbolize. My point will be that if we reject Plato's description of the realm
of knowledge we should also balk at his description of the realm of opinion.
If we take for granted that Plato's quest is flawed, then Plato's fears of
Sophistic persuasion should be weakened as well. It is not enough to
challenge his metaphysical cure; we need to examine how he has described
the disease. In doing so we can perhaps soften the current debate about
rationality, which is fueled by Plato's hopes and fears. In a way I am
reiterating the Nietzschean point that to deny one half of a conceptual
dichotomy does not always leave us with the other half exactly as previously
described.
Plato is wrong on both sides of his dichotomy between philosophy and
rhetoric. If philosophy is the search for an unshakeable presence of true
reality, the realm of rhetoric and opinion is described as if it were completely
malleable: beware the Sophist who can persuade you of anything he wishes.
Behind this description is another metaphysical presupposition, a pure power
of persuasion capable of being applied at will against opinions that are
passive and yielding. Like philosophy that soars above space and time, so
Sophistry for Plato involves a power of persuasion that lies outside the limits
of context and history.
If, however, our opinions are not passive effects but are themselves
ways in which we are in motion, and if powers of persuasion derive not from
some pure will but from those motions and projects we find ourselves
among, then the fear of the Sophists may be cut down to human scale. The
realm of opinion turns out to have considerably more resistance than is
apparent in the descriptions we get from Plato (or in those from postmoderns
who reproduce that free power of persuasion, now as a free movement of
transgression or ironic re-creation).
I call this power pure because it is of its nature unarticulated and so
able to assume an indefinite number of forms. It has no limits that we can
find, no defined strengths and weaknesses. It has no shape that can be gotten
around, and by its subtlety it can get around behind and influence us without
our knowing. Any normal power of persuasion or force has a shape and limits
that allow us to begin to deal with it, to confront it or to avoid it. But this
power is outside history, able to use tradition or depart from it as seems most
persuasive. It is the shadow of Plato's pure love of truth, which also can
overreach any historical situation, but unlike Plato's love of truth, this power
has no natural goal to give it a measure.
This power resembles some modern definitions of free subjectivity as
self-moving towards arbitrary goals. Followers of Leo Strauss and others who
want to use Plato's polemic against the Sophists to analyze the modern
situation play up this parallel, seeing the cure to be a return to natural
measures. Yet by taking steps against it they concede the possibility of a
power without form or measure. I am arguing that no such power is possible,
that all power, both the power of persuasion and our power of creation and
choice, is found already in particular motion. Our powers and projects are
definite in a way which is not a limitation on some prior pure power. Our
measures are historical but they are not easily escaped, because they hide no
pure drive within them.
We are horrified by the fantasy of a subtle use of violence that could
change us without our knowing it. This would be the ultimate weapon of
offense or defense. But whether this pure power appears in its positive role as
The Method for finding truth, or in its negative role as the Sophistic power of
persuasion, the same mistake occurs.
It may seem I am making Plato into too much of a Manichean who
imagines the love of truth and the desire for persuasion at war for our souls.
Sometimes Plato's rhetoric does make it sound that way, but he does not
mean it literally. According to Plato's metaphysics there is only one such
power, the desire for order and truth. Sophistry is possible because of the
disorder in the world and in the human soul. That disorder is inherent in the
realm of change; our task is to bring our inner world to order and stability.
Sophism has no unitary origin, only the chaos of impulses that makes us
manipulable. But Plato writes more wisely than his metaphysics allows. Just
as Plato has trouble accounting for the possibility of willful evil, so he needs
more than the turmoil of desires to account for the Sophist. The master
Sophist is not just a desiring man flailing about, but a calculating person of
skillful means. Plato's official psychology is based on the contrast between
order and disorder. If your life is not polarized by the love of truth and reality,
you have no unified personality. He means to portray Callicles in the Gorgias
as less a unified person than a collection of stray desires. But the portrait
takes on a life of its own and the Sophist comes to us with his own principle
of unity, a counter-personality for which there is no real room in Plato's
theory. Instead of being within the movement from disorder to order, we are
caught between rival sources of order.»
Fears of Sophistic persuasion in public life resemble the fear of being
deceived in private opinion that have played such a role in modern
philosophy since Descartes worried about whether the material world was
really there. We fear that we have been already persuaded, without a chance
to compare, judge, and assent. Some power has twisted our world so that we
live a lie that we cannot identify as such. Descartes's deceptive God or Evil
Genius was a perfect persuader, since he operated outside any context.
In its original, epistemological form this fear has long come under
attack in texts such as Hegel's Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit,
Nietzsche's "How the Real World Became a Myth," Peirce's writings on
Cartesian doubt, various texts of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Austin, Bousma,
and, more recently, the attacks of Putnam, Davidson, and Rorty that question
whether it is even meaningful to think of us as totally deceived. This is an
impressive litany of names, and it testifies to widespread scepticism about the
effectiveness of epistemological scepticism. It is not so easy to make this fear
sound plausible today. The corrective has been to convert global to partial
doubt, to look at situations piecemeal, and to ask what practical difference it
would make if the sceptical story were accepted. In its theoretical form
sceptical doubts can be reduced to a combination of the everyday doubts we
ought to have about our opinions in detail and the overall attempt to improve
our pictures of the world. When we give up the dream of being perfectly sure
we can give up the fear of being perfectly deceived.
Fear of a practical power of persuasion that we could never locate or
resist is a version of epistemological scepticism. The fear of the Sophist
should be reduced to a combination of our everyday detailed attempts to
avoid being manipulated and the attempt to make our social arrangements
more open. We should give up the fantasy of a totally manipulative, or a
totally un-manipulative, society. As Plato would say, we are creatures of the
middle, neither being nor non-being.
Those who oppose postmodernism claim that if we accepted the
postmodern descriptions of our situation we would be opening the gates to
Sophistic persuasion and relativism. On the other hand, some of those
promoting the various postmodern moves so praise our power of creating
new language games, or of making free with historical materials, that they
assign us some floating position beyond history. Both the fear and the praise
assume pure power: Plato's erotic quest for certainty, modern context-free
reason, Sophistic persuasion, and much postmodern play have all too much
in common.
Crude power and attempts to manipulate us are always present; we
learn to see them, to recognize new ploys, and to take steps. This is not easy,
but it is not impossible. We know what to do, even if we do not always do it.
It makes sense to be worried about the persuasive efforts of the capitalists or
the military or the government or the media or the advertisers or our own
unconscious desires. But we are neither a pure energy struggling to free itself
from a prison of circumstance nor purely malleable clay waiting to be shaped
by the forces about us.
We find ourselves in historical situations we did not create, with goals
and values we did not choose. We work at revising and correcting as we
build new places for ourselves. There are no impermeable walls keeping us
in, just as there are no magic methods of escape. There is no pure power to
know or create or persuade which is being resisted by inert opinion or
society. Our powers come from the historical situation; they are already
shaped.
We are at once in motion in different ways. Our world is multiple and
conflicts give us plenty of occasions to examine or redo our values and
opinions. No magic is needed, only some sensitivity that our daily life keeps
alive by rubbing us raw all too often. We need vigilance to clear a space for
examination and thought. And if modern society especially tries to close that
space we must work against that pressure. But it is a pressure, not an
irresistible force, or we could not discuss it. Our task is not to out-think or
out-feel the Sophists but to keep alive the questions and conflicts that we find
ourselves among, and keep alert to new dimensions of pressure and
opportunity.
One might object that I should not compare the Sophist, whose
persuasive efforts are directed by a will towards a goal, with the more
impersonal influences implied in modern theories of culture, language, and
ideology. But fear of these more diffuse influences should be reduced by the
same gestures. If the influence on us of language or history or culture is in no
way traceable but only to be feared, without that fear ever being in any way
capable of being substantiated and worked against, then that influence has
become a power so subtle that it makes no discernible difference.
It is tempting to locate the ultimate deceiver in our own unconscious.
We have all experienced the shock of discovering that our own motives were
not what we had thought. But of all the sources, our unconscious is least like
a focused power. Evasive and eternally ambivalent it may be, and protean in
its always being elsewhere, but these very same qualities prevent it from
being a modern embodiment of the concentrated power of the Sophists. It
makes our inhabitation of the world uneasy and ambivalent, but just for that
reason it does not create a seamless web of deception.
Later I will discuss what might appear to be yet another version of the
Sophist's power, the distorting effects of the "system" on the "lifeworld" that
Habermas discusses.» The next several chapters discuss the place and limits
of self-criticism, so that we later we can investigate building together in
history and context.
This deflationary, pragmatic approach to the Sophist's power takes the
drama away but returns us to the world of real confrontations and struggles.
The reality is more humdrum, which is not to say easy. Indeed it may be more
difficult than it would be if Plato's positive or negative fantasy were realized.
Crude power and persuasion we know how to deal with, but we have to be
continually alert as these take new forms or we discover kinds we did not
know were operative. The worries are less threatening, but they demand more
continued effort. Self-reflection can help, and a whole frontier of ethical and
political philosophy opens out when we resist the fantasies of totality. We
return to the in-between, but, both science and scepticism aside, that is
where we have always known that we were.