[MD] The trouble with Sophists

[david buchanan]

Ron and any interested MOQers:

I appreciate your efforts, Ron, but now that the specifics are on the table I'm even more skeptical. If fact, I'd say the passage you dished up would count as a classic example of Platonic rationalism and the slander of Sophists as pandering pastry chefs by comparison to "real" philosophers. Notice, for example, the Visitor makes the classic Platonic distinction between appearance and reality, between mere opinion and the truth. We see this right off the bat when he says "the Sophist has been shown to have a sort of conjectural or apparent knowledge only of all things, which is not the truth?" 

In the next lines, notice how the Sophists are denigrated in the exact same way that artists are denigrated. It might be worth reminding you that, as Plato saw it, knowledge of the Forms was real knowledge. These were conceived as transcendent and eternal, as opposed to the empirical realities down here on earth. The things of this world are like fleeting instances or imitations of the real Reality. And then the painter, according to this Platonic view, is one who merely makes imitations of the imitations. He does the same thing to the Rhapsodes, play writers, poets, as well as the Sophists. On this view, none of them have any real knowledge because they only deal with empirical realities, not eternal Ideas. See, this is why Plato is considered a rationalist, as opposed to an empiricist. 


Visitor: We know, of course, that he who professes by one art to make all things is really a painter, and by the painter's art makes resemblances of real things which have the same name with them; and he can deceive the less intelligent sort of young children, to whom he shows his pictures at a distance, into the belief that he has the absolute power of making whatever he likes.  And may there not be supposed to be an IMITATIVE ART of reasoning? Is it not possible to enchant the hearts of young men by words poured through their ears, when they are still at a distance from the truth of facts, by exhibiting to them fictitious arguments, and making them think that they are true, and that the speaker is the wisest of men in all things?

dmb resumes:
As I read it, the visitor is accusing the Sophists of practicing an imitative art of reasoning and in Plato's world them's fightin' words, a huge insult. On this view, the Sophist's truths are just pictures that resemble the shadows on the cave wall, which is just that much further removed from the things of the upper world and the sun that illuminates them all. 

Theodorus: Here we are, Socrates, true to our agreement of yesterday; and we bring with us a stranger from Elea, who is a disciple of Parmenides and Zeno, and a true philosopher. .., he is not one of the disputatious sort-he is too good for that. And, in my opinion, he is not a god at all; but divine he certainly is, for this is a title which I should give to all philosophers. 

dmb says:
This bit is telling. I mean, Zeno's name jumped out at me because Henri Bergson and William James both use him as a prime example of what James called "vicious intellectualism". James said it was Bergson's work that finally allowed him to reject rationalism entirely and this immediately led James to formulate his radical empiricism. Zeno, you may recall, was the one who used logic and math to "prove" that all motion and change is impossible and that all appearances to the contrary are an illusion. These guys did not trust empirical reality at all and they not only could but did explain it all away as unreal, as mere appearance and ignorance. That's pretty much the attitude that turns intellectualism into vicious intellectualism; when ideas and abstractions are taken as more real than the empirical reality from which they were abstracted in the first place. The effect is to de-realize and denigrate empirical reality, which is the only reality we can ever experience. As I understand it, James and Pirsig are radical empiricists precisely because they think the rationalists have it exactly backwards.