From the Beginning to Plato

228 THE SOPHISTS
on the other hand is what occurs when people are concerned to secure apparent
victory in argument without any concern for what is in fact the truth. Plato’s
charge against the sophists is that they developed the method of antilogic simply
for eristic purposes, and his concealed criticism is that this was because they
failed to use it in order to ascend by dialectic to an understanding of the Forms.
The opposition of one argument to another has a clear practical application,
namely the process of public debate whether political or philosophic. It
consequently provided an effective basis for sophistic teaching on rhetoric and
some have supposed that the teaching of rhetoric was not only an essential
element in the Sophistic Movement but constituted the whole of their intellectual
activity. 3 On this view the sophists were teachers of rhetoric and this is all that
needs to be said about them. They would then, it is argued, have no claims to a
place in this history of Greek philosophy.
Such a judgement raises conceptual issues of considerable importance. In
modern discussions it has long been a matter of convention to oppose rhetoric to
philosophy. Rhetoric is regarded as the art of persuasive or impressive speaking
or writing, or the use of language to persuade or impress often with the
implication of insincerity or exaggeration. Philosophy on the other hand is seen
as the love of wisdom or knowledge, especially that which deals with ultimate
reality or with the most general causes and principles of things. But it is probable
that no such opposition was to be found in the earliest Greek uses of the
expression ‘the art of rhetoric’; this was understood simply to refer to the best
and most correct use of language. Thus in Plato’s Gorgias (449erff.), when
Socrates asks the sophist Gorgias ‘what is rhetoric about?’ he receives the
answer that it is the art which makes men good at speaking and also makes them
good at thinking about the subjects on which it teaches them to speak. This raises
the possibility that on Gorgias’ view the most correct use of language will be
that which best expresses the nature and structure of reality or the way things
are. This is in no way inconsistent with the use of rhetoric as a means of
persuasion, and Socrates proceeds in what follows in the Gorgias to secure
admissions from Gorgias that persuasion was a major feature of rhetoric. But for
Gorgias, persuasion, at least when properly used, is based on the communication
of truth. For most or all of the sophists, however, truth is based on a
phenomenalistic view of reality, and this is something which Plato rejected. So in
Plato’s eyes the sophists were to be condemned because when they were
concerned with the art of persuasion they were not concerned with the
communication of non-phenomenalistic truth.
PROTAGORAS
Protagoras was the most famous of all the sophists and Plato seems to have
believed that he was the first to adopt the name of sophist and to charge fees for
the instruction which he offered (Protagoras 349a2–4). He was born in Abdera,
an Ionian colony on the coast of Thrace, probably not later than 490 BC, and he