The Sophistic Movement

"The book which really puts the sophists on the map as serious and interesting thinkers, and not just as specious fraudsters, is my second selection: G. B. Kerferd’s The Sophistic Movement which was published in 1981, but is still, I think, the finest book on the subject . Again, it’s clear without remotely dumbing down, it gives you subtle nuances of position, and is at times challenging to read, but it’s also accessible and enjoyable. He’s very good, for instance, on two characters who appear in Plato’s Gorgias and Republic . One of them, Callicles in the Gorgias , is said to have been trained by sophists, and the other, Thrasymachus in the Republic , is himself a sophist, based on a genuine historical figure. Their positions are very often just lumped together in the secondary literature as ‘might is right,’ but Kerferd distinguishes them beautifully. He shows that although both Callicles and Thrasymachus think that conventional morality is a hypocritical and cynical cover for self-interest and not to be trusted, there are nevertheless important differences in their positions about who’s exploiting whom. Callicles argues that morality is a cover in which the majority who are individually weaker but collectively stronger hide behind their invention of conventional morality in order to suppress and exploit the naturally stronger few, whereas Thrasymachus in the Republic says that the only test of strength is whether you actually possess political power, and those who have political power make the laws in their own interest, and then they say that obeying these laws is justice and conventional morality. In this way they hoodwink the populace into being conventionally moral: the people think that being ‘moral’ is a good thing to be when actually all they’re doing is serving the interests of the ruling party who made the laws in their own interest. Kerferd makes it clear that, whereas for Callicles morality is a device of the weak majority to suppress the naturally stronger few, for Thrasymachus morality is a device of the de facto strong — those who are in power — to suppress the weak majority. So, there are different kinds of cynical exploitation going on, there are subtle differences. Kerferd applies the same care to all the sophists and shows them to be very important and substantive philosophers in their own right. Well, I would add two caveats to that. First, in one of Plato’s dialogues in particular, the Theaetetus , which we’ll discuss in a moment, the sophist Protagoras has a major part, and though he’s ultimately defeated by the character Socrates (or at least defeated to Socrates’s own satisfaction), Plato does take him seriously. Secondly, the sophists are important in Nietzsche’s thought, and we do teach and read Nietzsche . We know that Nietzsche was lecturing on the sophists when he was at Basel in the late 1860s; we know he lectured on Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias ; and we know that he spoke very approvingly of Callicles. E. R. Dodds has an edition of Plato’s Gorgias in which he gives us a very interesting appendix where he notes precise similarities between phrases in Callicles’s speeches and phrases in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals and other works, such as Thus Spake Zarathustra . Dodds very persuasively argues that Nietzsche’s study of the sophists, and particularly his study of Callicles, hugely influenced the development of his own theory of the Overman, the Übermensch . The detailed linguistic similarities are very compelling. So, actually, we may not always know we’re studying the sophists, but if we read and study Plato’s Theaetetus, which a lot of people do since it’s one of the seminal works in western epistemology, we are actually engaging with some sophistic ideas. And if we read Nietzsche we certainly are. So they’re not exactly lost: they’re just a bit hidden."