Plato 10.4 Pushback: The Educator
In the intellectual world of Athens, too, things were looking up. Since the death of Socrates in 399 BC, the Socratics had been flooding Athens with Socratic dialogues, portraying Socrates as a thinker dedicated to improving the lives of his fellow Athenians. In these dialogues, Socrates continued to urge people to think first of their souls, how to make them as good as possible, and how to practice virtue.
If the followers of Socrates did not agree on how exactly their master went about making the world a better place, they did agree that he was committed to a life in pursuit of moral improvement for all. It now appeared that the Socratics were winning the propaganda war, convincing the citizens of Athens, and of Greece at large, of the benevolence of their master and of the value of centering philosophical inquiry on the character of the good life and how to attain it. The aim of the enlightened citizen should be to live a life of moral rectitude rather than, as the sophists supposed, to pursue reputation, fortune, and power at all costs.
But just as it appeared that the tide of public opinion was changing from hostility towards philosophy (as Socrates understood it) to acceptance, a new threat appeared. At roughly the same time, two prominent Athenian intellectuals struck back at the Socratic movement. The first figure was Isocrates. Born in 436 BC, and thus about nine years older than Plato, he studied under Gorgias the great sophist, who taught in Thessaly for many years. The son of a successful businessman who manufactured flutes, Isocrates became impoverished by losses during the Peloponnesian War, and turned to writing speeches for citizens involved in trials. For in Athenian courts, individuals could not hire an advocate to speak for them, but they could hire a writer to compose their speeches. Eventually, Isocrates turned from ghost-writing to teaching the art of public speaking to others. Though he was not a good orator himself, he was successful at writing down his essays with rhetorical flourish and publishing them in Athens and eventually to the Greek world. He set up a permanent school in Athens about 392 BC, and he published a pamphlet to advertise it: Against the Sophists.[2]
In the fragment of this work that has come down to us, Isocrates attacks not only the teachers of political rhetoric, but also the teachers of ethical theory.[3] They focus on debating and winning arguments, but pretend to knowledge they do not have and charge an insignificant fee for their tuition. Here Isocrates seems to be criticizing some, at least, of the Socratics, with their focus on dialectical argumentation and moral instruction. They search for contradictions and claim knowledge of the future, but they have no wisdom to offer even of present actions.[4] In another work, the Helen, a display speech in which he defends Helen of Troy against the slanders against her, he rails against “those who hold that courage, wisdom, and justice are identical, and by nature we possess none of them, but there is a single science of all of them,” evidently attacking the Socratic view that virtue is knowledge.[5]
Here we meet a question of word usages. The terms ‘sophist’ and ‘philosopher’ were both relatively new coinages, and their sense and reference were not fixed. Isocrates calls his opponents ‘sophists,’ though in some contexts he counts himself among this group of would-be experts.[6] But he prefers to call himself by the relatively honorific title of ‘philosopher,’ as standing above the fray of the money-grubbing educators of his day. In the late Antidosis, which he presents in a fictional defense speech, his apologia pro vita sua, he explains,
Inasmuch as it is not in the nature of men to possess a science by which we could know what to do and say, I consider those persons to be wise who by the application of their convictions (tais doxais) are for the most part able to arrive at the best outcome, and those persons to be philosophers who pursue the practice which immediately leads to such understanding.[7]
Isocrates consistently rejects the possibility of having some sort of certain knowledge of contingent events that deliberation deals with. The best we can do is to have a firm grasp of what is likely to happen, based on our considered judgment of the way things are.
At his best, Isocrates provides an argument for the value of a liberal education that will allow individuals to make plausible assessments of the best options to pursue in a given situation. He is not interested in winning arguments at any cost, nor does he believe thinkers can arrive at an algorithm that will make the future accessible to human reason. He is a man of common sense who resists the siren song of a social science.
What Plato sees is a wholesale rejection of the path that Socrates pursued, of asking what is right, what is wrong, what is just, what is unjust. True, Isocrates offers a level-headed approach to rational decision-making and social and political deliberation. But he leaves out what is essential: the moral dimension. The thing that everyone had ignored or downplayed until Socrates appeared. That is what real philosophy is all about. That is what everyone misses but philosophers.
Philosophy, in Plato’s sense, is not just judicious appraisal; it is moral evaluation. That is why the sophists, the professional educators with their focus on getting ahead, winning arguments, showing off one’s intellectual prowess, are doomed. Philosophy is not about saying to the world, Look at me! It is about finding out what the world needs, and going after that. If Isocrates avoids the worst vices of the sophists, he still fails to see what makes life worth living: the ultimate good, namely, the moral good. And there is, according to Plato, a science of that.
[2] Isocrates Antidosis 193.
[3] Isocrates Against the Sophists 9; 1–8. The fragment is preserved as an excerpt in Isocrates’ later Antidosis, after ch. 194.
[4] Isocrates Against the Sophists 7–8.
[5] Isocrates Helen 1.
[6] Isocrates Antidosis 218–220.
[7] Isocrates Antidosis 271.
