Plato 8.6.1 Sophistic Education
After Socrates’ eventful day in the world of the sophists we can make some observations. The sophists are self-assertive and self-confident. They are, as they profess, experts in a number of important areas. Some are polymaths, some more limited in their areas of expertise and instruction. But they all offer education in the arts of leadership and communication. They are offering to the young men of Athens and the other major cities they visit skills to make them a success in business dealings and in government. The new democratic landscape offers unbounded opportunities to intelligent and ambitious young men. What they lack are the skills of management, communication, and leadership. The sophists offer these for a (relatively) reasonable price. Protagoras, a master salesman, even offers a money-back guarantee.[19]
Socrates, by contrast, does not profess to be a teacher. He is a searcher for truth. Since he does not teach, he does not charge for his services. He does not solicit students or followers, yet he seems, like the pied piper, to attract followers, such as Hippocrates. He is tireless in his pursuit of answers to philosophical problems. Unlike Protagoras, who, when he was allowed to lead the discussion with Socrates, veered off into a piece of literary criticism,[20] he keeps going back to the original philosophical question, trying to resolve it.
The sophists are by necessity also salesmen. They must promote themselves to foreign audiences where they travel. They must advertise their abilities, compete with other sophists, and promote their own brand of education. Hippias is a polymath, Prodicus a wordsmith, Gorgias a master of style, while Protagoras maintains a narrow focus on the practical arts of speech and leadership. They typically offer free lectures and symposia to generate interest in their courses. Then they charge tuition and gather a group of eager followers to receive their teachings. However brilliant they are, though, they cannot escape the odor of being hucksters and hustlers in a world where overt moneymaking is seen as crass and plebeian.
In Socrates’ time, the term ‘philosopher’ was not yet an honorific title. Indeed, the terminological distinction between ‘philosopher’ and ‘sophist’ was fuzzy at best. Plato himself would do a great deal to exalt the former term (as applied to himself and similar thinkers) and disparage the latter (as applied to mercenary educators). But Plato’s (slightly older) contemporary Isocrates, who also favored the former term over the latter, applied them to almost opposite classes: for Isocrates, student of Gorgias, the practical-minded teachers of rhetoric are philosophers, while the would-be wisemen who pursued logical games and unfounded speculations were the sophists.[21]
What was clear was the fact that to be a gentleman of leisure was considered far superior to working for a living. Never mind that being a gentleman entailed exploiting large numbers of slaves to work one’s property. The natural philosophers who were the early independent thinkers of the Greek tradition were mostly aristocrats who, having the leisure to do what they would, studied nature and theorized about the origin and functioning of the cosmos. Socrates behaved as a man of leisure but lacked the resources to do so comfortably. He made up for his financial deficit by living simply and frugally.
To be fair to the sophists as well as the philosophers (as we designate them), both groups contributed to the intellectual flourishing of the fifth-century enlightenment. There was a need for adult education in a world where citizens were often literate and could assist in the governing of a complex state, and where knowledge was exploding, in part because of the speculations of aristocratic dilettantes. Curiosity was a powerful driver of culture in a world where, even centuries later, “all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.”[22]
[19]. Plato Protagoras 328b-c.
[20]. Plato Protagoras 338e-339e.
[21]. Isocrates Against the Sophists 1–2; Helen 1–9.
[22]. The observation of St. Paul, Luke 17: 21, KJV.
