translation from the Greek to the English. And Plato himself could not anticipate this.
The Chimæra: Your qualifications are entirely acceptable. Proceed.
The Sphinx: The initial question raised by The Sophist is its raison d’être. Why should Plato have felt it necessary
to include such a dialogue as this in his philosophy at all? Was it truly because the included lines of
argument required exposure? Or did Plato intend the document rather as a gauntlet of sorts to be flung
before the Sophists themselves?
The Chimæra: I sense that the editors of this book ventured one explanation. Grasping it with a forepaw, he
turns to page #958. Yes, here it is:
The argument is hung on the figure of the Sophist quite arbitrarily. No real picture is given of the
men who were the professional instructors of Greece for many years. All Plato does is ascribe to
them every notion he disapproves. He detested the whole band of Sophists. To him they were
shallow-minded, pretentious, superficial, mercenary - they were really doing what Socrates was
charged with, corrupting the minds of the young.
And this appears to be reinforced by the dialogue’s concluding statement, which seems to be little more than
an outright vilification of Sophistry. He turns to page #1016 and quotes:
The art of contradiction-making, descended from an insincere kind of conceited mimicry, of
the semblance-making breed, derive from imagemaking, distinguished as a portion, not
divine but human, of production, that presents a shadowy play of words - such are the blood
and lineage which can, with perfect truth, be assigned to the authentic Sophist.
The Sphinx: Obviously that is not an objective philosophical statement. It is a deliberate insult reached through a
dialectical process which, in retrospect, seems a transparent parody of Plato’s more serious argumentative
style. In most of the Platonic dialogues one feels that Socrates is not “managing” the conversation towards
an end that he has conceptualized beforehand. But every twist and turn of The Sophist is designed only to
channel the conversation into providing a part of that final statement.
The Chimæra: But how would you have Plato compose such a definition, save by a summary of the component
arguments preceding it?
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The Sphinx: I quarrel not with the final assembly process, but rather with the fashion in which the components
themselves were forged. For, you see, there are many ways along which each of those component arguments
could have proceeded. Each, however, consistently follows a path derogatory to the Sophists. If the Sophists
were in fact personifications of all that is erroneous and destructive in teaching, all possible paths would
lead to the same conclusion, i.e. one derogatory to the Sophists. But this is not the case at all. See - He takes
the book from the Chimæra and turns to page #973:
STRANGER: They cross-examine a man’s words, when he thinks that he is saying something and is
really saying nothing, and easily convict him of inconsistencies in his opinions; these they then
collect by the dialectic process, and, placing them side by side, show that they contradict one
another about the same things, in relation to the same things, and in the same respect. He, seeing
this, is angry with himself, and grows gentle towards others, and thus is entirely delivered from
greater prejudices and harsh notions, in a way which is most amusing to the hearer, and produces
the most lasting good effect on the person who is the subject of the operation. For as the physician
considers that the body will receive no benefit from taking food until the internal obstacles have
been removed, so the purifier of the soul is conscious that his patient will receive no benefit from
the application of knowledge until he is refuted, and from refutation learns modesty; he must be
purged of his prejudices first and made to think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.
THEÆTETUS: That is certainly the best and wisest state of mind.
STRANGER: For all these reasons, Theætetus, we must admit that refutation is the greatest and
chiefest of purifications, and he who has not been refuted, though he be the Great King himself, is in
an awful state of impurity; he is uninstructed and deformed in those things in which he who would
be truly blessed ought to be fairest and purest.
STRANGER: Well, what name shall we give to the practitioners of this art? For my part I shrink
from calling them Sophists.
THEÆTETUS: Why so?
STRANGER: For fear of ascribing to them too high a function.
THEÆTETUS: And yet your description has some resemblance to that type (the Sophist).
STRANGER: So has the dog to the wolf - the fiercest of animals to the tamest. But a cautious man
should above all be on his guard against resemblances; they are a very slippery sort of thing.
Now let me rewrite the latter part of the dialogue. In doing so I shall move to eliminate the stranger’s
instinctive or preconceived notion of what Sophists actually are. The Sphinx gestures at the page, and the
wording changes:
STRANGER: Well, what name shall we give to the practitioners of this art?
THEÆTETUS: The characteristics you have enumerated are those the Sophists use to describe
themselves.
STRANGER: But I fear this ascribes too high a function to them.
THEÆTETUS: To say that individual Sophists may not achieve the standards they have set for
themselves does not disprove the nobility of their goal, nor their right to claim it as a standard and
hence an identifying characteristic of their profession.
STRANGER: I cannot find fault with that. But let us examine the Sophist from some other vantage-
points.
The wording reverts to normal, and the Sphinx closes the book.
I do not say that the dialogue should have proceeded in a different direction. I merely demonstrate that it
would have been possible. This fact - that it is possible -testifies to the looseness of Plato’s logic in this
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instance. Rather than refining the definition of the Sophist by the careful elimination of inconsistent
characteristics, Plato simply ignores implications which do not support his preconceived notions.
The Chimæra: I’m beginning to see what you mean.
The Sphinx: There are other examples which I could take from the text. But I think this demonstration sufficient
proof of the principle involved. The entire dialogue is not an attempt to understand what a Sophist is. It is
an attempt to denigrate Sophists. As such it is of no value as an exercise in logic or in the true process of
reduction.
The Chimæra: But now we are back where we started, enriched only by an irony of Socratic logic: We know what
The Sophist is not, but we don’t know what it is. So we must consider why Plato felt it necessary to attack
the Sophists at all. Why did he not feel it possible merely to coexist with them in friendly competition for
men’s minds?
The Sphinx: Here we must depart from the dialogue as a universe in itself. We must try to place it in context
amidst a larger and more complex universe. The reason for doing this is that, viewed in isolation, The
Sophist is logically invalid; this we have just proven. Seen against a larger background, however, it may
indeed be significant. We attempt, like Archimedes, to move a world. For a p
lace to stand we have the
existence of The Sophist; for a lever we have its bias. The world need move only a little, and we who push
against the lever may count ourselves satisfied.
The Chimæra: I follow you, but beware of unsubstantiated speculation.
The Sphinx: The proponent of a viewpoint who feels secure in his position will not find it necessary to attack the
mere existence of opponents. He may point out the fallacies in their arguments in an effort to hasten their
understanding of his “correct interpretation”. But he will not see their “incorrect” views as a threat to the
truth of his own. An attack against the very existence of competition is mounted when one is uncertain of
the invulnerability of one’s own position. Permitted to exist, competition might pose a mortal challenge.
Hence it must be destroyed without delay. Such a preemptory strike is justified by the rationalization that,
while one has glimpsed an ultimate truth, more time is needed to refine the ideas to a form which may be
understood by those of lesser intellectual acumen.
The Chimæra: You are suggesting, then, that Plato may not have felt secure in his philosophy - that he feared the
axioms upon which he based his logic to be false?
The Sphinx: Let us not say that he feared them to be false. It is enough to say that he may not have been
completely certain of their truth. Had he been, he would have ignored the Sophists.
The Chimæra: Why should Plato have attacked the Sophists in particular? Was it simply because they were his
only Athenian competition? That would make his motives rather materialistic.
The Sphinx: Here we should bear in mind that we have no precise catalogue of individuals whom Plato considered
Sophists. At various times he took issue with the ideas of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, and Protagoras, to
name but a few theorists. Whether he considered the Sophists as comprising only specific individuals, or
whether he considered Sophism more broadly to be composed of all challengers to his own philosophy, is an
issue we cannot decide. If we are to look through Plato’s eyes via The Sophist, we can establish only that the
Sophists were guilty of teaching according to methods too close to those of Plato himself.
The Chimæra: You mean, I take it, by the process of cross-examination described by the stranger in the passage
we considered earlier?
The Sphinx: Precisely. I ask you to consider both the praise that the stranger accords the system itself and his
unsubstantiated reluctance to credit that system to the Sophists. History contains many examples pointing
to the fact that the most dangerous threats are those akin to the favored philosophy in all ways save one -
which is considered to be crucial. Wars have been fought simply because men were unable to agree upon
one name for the same god, or, later, because they could not agree upon the same meanings for words such
as “freedom”, “democracy”, and “equality”.
The Chimæra: Only two wars that I recall strike me as having made any sense: the Trojan War, which was fought
for sex, and the Carthaginian Wars, which were fought for money.
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The Sphinx: Very funny. But to return to the issue at hand, we have the evidence of that passage in The Sophist to
substantiate this point. Plato regarded the process of teaching through cross-examination to be a standard
of excellence in itself. Its use to teach anything other than pure philosophy, accordingly, would have been
intolerable to him. Hence his extraordinary anger at the Sophists.
The Chimæra: But we do know more about the Sophists than that. Even if we limit our scope to the school of
Protagoras, we know that Sophistic thinking disavowed absolute knowledge. Despairing of attaining such
knowledge, they regarded even its pursuit as worthless. So they taught a sort of relativistic pragmatism as
the only sound basis for human affairs. Hence Protagoras’ famous statement that man is the measure of all
things.
The Sphinx: That is right. And we know that Plato was firmly opposed to this view. Perhaps our most convincing
evidence of this is the inscription above the entrance to his Academy: Let no one ignorant of
mathematics enter here.
The Chimæra: I thought it was “geometry”.
The Sphinx: Unfortunately for purists it has been recorded both ways. But either serves to illustrate the point.
Plato saw in mathematics unshakable evidence that there was an absolute standard for the Universe. And
where one such standard existed, it was logical to assume that there were others. Today humans regard
mathematics principally as an applied science, but in Plato’s time it was considered by the Pythagoreans to
be “pure”, having nothing to do with the gross and imperfect everyday world.
The Chimæra: I presume that Plato would have been somewhat upset to learn of the Theory of Relativity, which is
inconsistent with the notion that mathematics adhere to a fixed standard. But do I understand you to say
that Plato was a Pythagorean?
The Sphinx: Not in the sense that he had any connections with one of the Pythagorean schools as such. He was
born in Athens in 427 BCE, and he was a disciple of Socrates from 409 to 399. Following Socrates’ execution
in that year, Plato traveled abroad, absorbing Pythagorean doctrines in many of the Greek cities located in
Italy and Africa. It was not until 387 that he returned to Athens to found his Academy.
The Chimæra: That is interesting, but it does not constitute evidence that Plato endorsed the views of the
Pythagoreans.
The Sphinx: No, and for that one must turn to the Timæus, wherein Plato presents his concept of the Universe.
Here he describes the five possible regular solids - that is, those with equivalent faces and with all lines and
angles equal. Four of those represented the four elements, he said, while the dodecahedron represented the
Universe as a whole. He also postulated that the various stellar/planetary bodies move in exact circles (the
perfect curve) along with the crystalline spheres (the perfect solid) holding them in place. All of these
theories were originally Pythagorean, as one may see from the writings of Philolaus and other avowed
Pythagoreans. But we wander too far afield. Let us return to Plato’s conviction that the Universe was based
upon absolute, not relative standards.
The Chimæra: I presume that the Sophists did not consider mathematics as an invalidation of their relativism.
The Sphinx: Whether the issue centered around mathematics or not is something we cannot know. We do know
that the Sophists considered whatever evidence Plato offered insufficient to dislodge them from their
position. From their point of view, the Sophists were champions of logic. They based their arguments upon
what they understood to be “obvious” realities. And they drew “common sense” conclusions. What so
antagonized Plato was not that they held different views than his concerning the primal forces of the
Universe. Rather it was the intolerable insult - in Plato’s eyes - that they were not interested in that topic as
a field for rational inquiry. Plato must have felt somewhat akin to Noah building his Ark in the midst of an
ignorant and unconcerned society.
The Chimæra: The Noah legend is not in our myth-cycle, if you please.
The Sphinx: My apologies.
The Chimæra: And so Plato wished to identify the primal forces of the Universe. This resulted in his famous
Theory of the Forms, if I am correct. But I sense a weak point here. Plato was a finite being, and yet he
desired to comprehend Universal absolutes. As perfect standards they would necessarily be infinite, since
any measure of perfection must extend in all dimensions without limitation. It would be possible for a finite
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entity like Plato to comprehend the infinite without distortion only if the infinite reveals aspects of itself to
and through the finite. But the finite must have faith or trust that the aspects are undistorted in their
presentation.
The Sphinx: Precisely, and now we are getting to the crux ansata of the matter. For, you see, assumptions based
upon faith or trust are logically indefensible, otherwise there would be no need to base them upon faith or
trust to begin with. Plato, being a man of no mean intellect, was certainly aware of this. He feared that an
intelligent Sophist might see it as well and proceed to attack the foundations of his entire philosophy as
illogical. And so, in the dialogues, he constructed a very elaborate defense of his concepts according,
apparently, to the most rigorous standards of the cross-examination system of the Sophists.
The Chimæra: Statements like that are liable to get you into a great deal of trouble, I hope you know.
The Sphinx: Only with those who underestimate Plato and interpret this as a slur against him. Quite the contrary,
it is all the more indicative of his brilliance. The entire process of “logical reasoning” is ultimately circular.
What humans loosely tern “cause and effect” relationships are not really that at all. They are rather
observations of phenomena believed to occur consistently under identical environments. But logic cannot
explain why electrons circle protons, or why the color red and the color blue are distinct, or why the
Universe exists at all. Yet every one of our senses tells us that these things are so, and if we, as Descartes,
deny the validity of our sensory input, we resign ourselves to insanity. Plato’s faith derives from no greater
and no lesser observation that things are what they seem to be. Once that consistency is granted, all else
follows.
The Chimæra: If that is so, why should Plato have gone through all the trouble to create the dialogues? Merely as a