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.
- 203 -
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.
THEÆTETUS: Very true.
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?
- 204 -
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 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
- 205 -
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 place 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
- 206 -
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 log
ic 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
- 207 -
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 elephants.
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
- 208 -
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?
- 209 -
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.
- 210 -
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 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.
- 211 -
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.
- 212 -
The Chimæra: If that is so, why should Plato have gone
through all the trouble to create the dialogues?
Merely as a blind for Sophist critics who might
have interfered with his Academy or accused him
personally of being irrational or illogical?
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