Sophist
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SOPHIST
By Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.
The dramatic power of the dialogues of Plato appears to diminish as
the metaphysical interest of them increases (compare Introd. to the
Philebus). There are no descriptions of time, place or persons, in the
Sophist and Statesman, but we are plunged at once into philosophical
discussions; the poetical charm has disappeared, and those who have no
taste for abstruse metaphysics will greatly prefer the earlier dialogues
to the later ones. Plato is conscious of the change, and in the
Statesman expressly accuses himself of a tediousness in the two
dialogues, which he ascribes to his desire of developing the dialectical
method. On the other hand, the kindred spirit of Hegel seemed to find in
the Sophist the crown and summit of the Platonic philosophy--here is the
place at which Plato most nearly approaches to the Hegelian identity of
Being and Not-being. Nor will the great importance of the two dialogues
be doubted by any one who forms a conception of the state of mind and
opinion which they are intended to meet. The sophisms of the day were
undermining philosophy; the denial of the existence of Not-being, and
of the connexion of ideas, was making truth and falsehood equally
impossible. It has been said that Plato would have written differently,
if he had been acquainted with the Organon of Aristotle. But could
the Organon of Aristotle ever have been written unless the Sophist
and Statesman had preceded? The swarm of fallacies which arose in the
infancy of mental science, and which was born and bred in the decay of
the pre-Socratic philosophies, was not dispelled by Aristotle, but
by Socrates and Plato. The summa genera of thought, the nature of
the proposition, of definition, of generalization, of synthesis and
analysis, of division and cross-division, are clearly described, and
the processes of induction and deduction are constantly employed in the
dialogues of Plato. The 'slippery' nature of comparison, the danger of
putting words in the place of things, the fallacy of arguing 'a dicto
secundum,' and in a circle, are frequently indicated by him. To all
these processes of truth and error, Aristotle, in the next generation,
gave distinctness; he brought them together in a separate science. But
he is not to be regarded as the original inventor of any of the great
logical forms, with the exception of the syllogism.
There is little worthy of remark in the characters of the Sophist. The
most noticeable point is the final retirement of Socrates from the field
of argument, and the substitution for him of an Eleatic stranger, who
is described as a pupil of Parmenides and Zeno, and is supposed to have
descended from a higher world in order to convict the Socratic circle of
error. As in the Timaeus, Plato seems to intimate by the withdrawal of
Socrates that he is passing beyond the limits of his teaching; and in
the Sophist and Statesman, as well as in the Parmenides, he probably
means to imply that he is making a closer approach to the schools of
Elea and Megara. He had much in common with them, but he must first
submit their ideas to criticism and revision. He had once thought as
he says, speaking by the mouth of the Eleatic, that he understood their
doctrine of Not-being; but now he does not even comprehend the nature
of Being. The friends of ideas (Soph.) are alluded to by him as distant
acquaintances, whom he criticizes ab extra; we do not recognize at
first sight that he is criticizing himself. The character of the Eleatic
stranger is colourless; he is to a certain extent the reflection of his
father and master, Parmenides, who is the protagonist in the dialogue
which is called by his name. Theaetetus himself is not distinguished
by the remarkable traits which are attributed to him in the preceding
dialogue. He is no longer under the spell of Socrates, or subject to the
operation of his midwifery, though the fiction of question and answer is
still maintained, and the necessity of taking Theaetetus along with him
is several times insisted upon by his partner in the discussion. There
is a reminiscence of the old Theaetetus in his remark that he will not
tire of the argument, and in his conviction, which the Eleatic thinks
likely to be permanent, that the course of events is governed by the
will of God. Throughout the two dialogues Socrates continues a silent
auditor, in the Statesman just reminding us of his presence, at the
commencement, by a characteristic jest about the statesman and the
philosopher, and by an allusion to his namesake, with whom on that
ground he claims relationship, as he had already claimed an affinity
with Theaetetus, grounded on the likeness of his ugly face. But in
neither dialogue, any more than in the Timaeus, does he offer any
criticism on the views which are propounded by another.
The style, though wanting in dramatic power,--in this respect resembling
the Philebus and the Laws,--is very clear and accurate, and has
several touches of humour and satire. The language is less fanciful and
imaginative than that of the earlier dialogues; and there is more of
bitterness, as in the Laws, though traces of a similar temper may also
be observed in the description of the 'great brute' in the Republic,
and in the contrast of the lawyer and philosopher in the Theaetetus.
The following are characteristic passages: 'The ancient philosophers,
of whom we may say, without offence, that they went on their way rather
regardless of whether we understood them or not;' the picture of the
materialists, or earth-born giants, 'who grasped oaks and rocks in their
hands,' and who must be improved before they can be reasoned with; and
the equally humourous delineation of the friends of ideas, who defend
themselves from a fastness in the invisible world; or the comparison of
the Sophist to a painter or maker (compare Republic), and the hunt after
him in the rich meadow-lands of youth and wealth; or, again, the
light and graceful touch with which the older philosophies are painted
('Ionian and Sicilian muses'), the comparison of them to mythological
tales, and the fear of the Eleatic that he will be counted a parricide
if he ventures to lay hands on his father Parmenides; or, once more,
the likening of the Eleatic stranger to a god from heaven.--All these
passages, notwithstanding the decline of the style, retain the impress
of the great master of language. But the equably diffused grace is gone;
instead of the endless variety of the early dialogues, traces of the
rhythmical monotonous cadence of the Laws begin to appear; and already
an approach is made to the technical language of Aristotle, in the
frequent use of the words 'essence,' 'power,' 'generation,' 'motion,'
'rest,' 'action,' 'passion,' and the like.
The Sophist, like the Phaedrus, has a double character, and unites two
enquirers, which are only in a somewhat forced manner connected with
each other. The first is the search after the Sophist, the second is the
enquiry into the nature of Not-being, which occupies the middle part of
the work. For 'Not-being' is the hole or division of the dialectical
net in which the Sophist has hidden himself. He is the imaginary
impersonation of false opinion. Yet he denies the possibility of false
opinion; for falsehood is that which is not, and therefore has no
existence. At length the difficulty is solved; the answer, in
the language of the Republic, appears 'tumbling out at our feet.'
Acknowledging that there is a communion of kinds with kinds, and not
merely one Being or Good having different names, or several isolated
ideas or classes incapable of communion, we discover 'Not-being' to be
the other of 'Being.' Transferring this to language and thought, we have
no difficulty in apprehending that a proposition may be false as well
as true. The Sophist, drawn out of the shelter which Cynic and Megarian
paradoxes have temporarily afforded him, is proved to be a dissembler
and juggler with words.
The chief points of interest in the dialogue are: (I) the character
attributed to the Sophist: (II) the dialectical method: (III) the nature
of the puzzle about 'Not-being:' (IV) the battle of the philosophers:
(V) the relation of the Sophist to other dialogues.
I. The Sophist in Plato is the master of the art of illusion; the
charlatan, the foreigner, the prince of esprits-faux, the hireling who
is not a teacher, and who, from whatever point of view he is regarded,
is the opposite of the true teacher. He is the 'evil one,' the ideal
representative of all that Plato most disliked in the moral and
intellectual tendencies of his own age; the adversary of the almost
equally ideal Socrates. He seems to be always growing in the fancy
of Plato, now boastful, now eristic, now clothing himself in rags of
philosophy, now more akin to the rhetorician or lawyer, now haranguing,
now questioning, until the final appearance in the Politicus of his
departing shadow in the disguise of a statesman. We are not to suppose
that Plato intended by such a description to depict Protagoras or
Gorgias, or even Thrasymachus, who all turn out to be 'very good sort
of people when we know them,' and all of them part on good terms with
Socrates. But he is speaking of a being as imaginary as the wise man
of the Stoics, and whose character varies in different dialogues. Like
mythology, Greek philosophy has a tendency to personify ideas. And the
Sophist is not merely a teacher of rhetoric for a fee of one or fifty
drachmae (Crat.), but an ideal of Plato's in which the falsehood of all
mankind is reflected.
A milder tone is adopted towards the Sophists in a well-known passage of
the Republic, where they are described as the followers rather than
the leaders of the rest of mankind. Plato ridicules the notion that
any individuals can corrupt youth to a degree worth speaking of in
comparison with the greater influence of public opinion. But there is
no real inconsistency between this and other descriptions of the Sophist
which occur in the Platonic writings. For Plato is not justifying the
Sophists in the passage just quoted, but only representing their power
to be contemptible; they are to be despised rather than feared, and are
no worse than the rest of mankind. But a teacher or statesman may be
justly condemned, who is on a level with mankind when he ought to be
above them. There is another point of view in which this passage should
also be considered. The great enemy of Plato is the world, not exactly
in the theological sense, yet in one not wholly different--the world as
the hater of truth and lover of appearance, occupied in the pursuit of
gain and pleasure rather than of knowledge, banded together against the
few good and wise men, and devoid of true education. This creature has
many heads: rhetoricians, lawyers, statesmen, poets, sophists. But the
Sophist is the Proteus who takes the likeness of all of them; all other
deceivers have a piece of him in them. And sometimes he is represented
as the corrupter of the world; and sometimes the world as the corrupter
of him and of itself.
Of late years the Sophists have found an enthusiastic defender in the
distinguished historian of Greece. He appears to maintain (1) that the
term 'Sophist' is not the name of a particular class, and would have
been applied indifferently to Socrates and Plato, as well as to Gorgias
and Protagoras; (2) that the bad sense was imprinted on the word by the
genius of Plato; (3) that the principal Sophists were not the corrupters
of youth (for the Athenian youth were no more corrupted in the age of
Demosthenes than in the age of Pericles), but honourable and estimable
persons, who supplied a training in literature which was generally