5: PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

Now the key to Plato's view of the Sophists, Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, with their less brilliant followers--chosen educators of the public--is that they do but fan and add fuel to the fire in which Greece, as they wander [106] like ardent missionaries about it, is flaming itself away. Teaching in their large, fashionable, expensive schools, so triumphantly well, the arts one needed most in so busy an age, they were really developing further and reinforcing the ruinous fluidity of the Greek, and especially of the Athenian people, by turning it very adroitly into a conscious method, a practical philosophy, an art of life itself, in which all those specific arts would be but subsidiary--an all-supplementing ars artium, a master-art, or, in depreciatory Platonic mood one might say, an artifice, or, cynically, a trick. The great sophist was indeed the Athenian public itself, Athens, as the willing victim of its own gifts, its own flamboyancy, well-nigh worn out now by the mutual friction of its own parts, given over completely to hazardous political experiment with the irresponsibility which is ever the great vice of democracy, ever ready to float away anywhither, to misunderstand, or forget, or discredit, its own past.--

     Or do you too hold like the many (asks Socrates in the sixth
     book of The Republic) that a certain number are corrupted
     by sophists in their youth; and that certain sophists,
     irresponsible persons, corrupt them to any extent worth noting;
     and not rather that those who say these things are the greatest
     sophists; that they train to perfection, and turn out both old
     and young, men and women, just as they choose them to be?--When,
     pray?  He asked.--When seated together in their thousands at the
     great assemblies, or in the law-courts, or the theatres, or the
     camp, or any other common gathering of the public, with much
     noise the majority praise this and blame [107] that in what is
     said and done, both alike in excess, shouting and clapping; and
     the very rocks too and the place in which they are, echoing
     around, send back redoubled that clamour of praise and blame.
     In such case, what heart as they say, what heart, think you,
     can the young man keep? or what private education he may have
     had hold out for him that it be not over-flooded by praise or
     blame like that, and depart away, borne down the stream,
     whithersoever that may carry it, and that he pronounce not
     the same thing as they fair or foul; and follow the same ways
     as they; and become like them?  Republic, 492.+

The veritable sophist then, the dynamic sophist, was the Athenian public of the day; those ostensible or professional Sophists being not so much its intellectual directors as the pupils or followers of it. They did but make it, as the French say, abound the more in its own sense, like the keeper (it is Plato's own image) of some wild beast, which he knows how to command by a well-considered obedience to all its varying humours. If the Sophists are partly the cause they are still more the effect of the social environment. They had discovered, had ascertained with much acuteness, the actual momentum of the society which maintained them, and they meant only, by regulating, to maintain it. Protagoras, the chief of Sophists, had avowedly applied to ethics the physics or metaphysics of Heraclitus. And now it was as if the disintegrating Heraclitean fire had taken hold on actual life, on men's very thoughts, on the emotions and the will.

That so faulty natural tendency, as Plato holds [108] it to be, in the world around them, they formulate carefully as its proper conscious theory: a theory how things must, nay, ought, to be. "Just that," they seem to say--"Just that versatility, that mutable spirit, shall become by adoption the child of knowledge, shall be carefully nurtured, brought to great fortune. We'll make you, and your thoughts, as fluid, as shifty, as things themselves: will bring you, like some perfectly accomplished implement, to this carrière ouverte, this open quarry, for the furtherance of your personal interests in the world." And if old- fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better than they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that was not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for the control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent to it, in regard to one's self? "It will break up,--this or that ethical deposit in your mind, Ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear, when exposed to the action of our perfected method. Of credit with the vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to know their place."

Yes! says Plato (for a moment we may anticipate what is at least the spirit of his answer) but there are some presuppositions after all, which it will make us very vulgar to have dismissed from us. "There are moreover," [109] those others proceed to say, "teachers of persuasion (peithous didaskaloi)+ who impart skill in popular and forensic oratory; and so by fair means or by unfair we shall gain our ends." It is with the dêmos,+ with the vulgar, insubordinate, tag-rag of one's own nature--how to rule that, by obeying it--that these professors of rhetoric begin. They are still notwithstanding the only teachers of morals ingenuous Greece is aware of; and wisdom, as seems likely, "must die with them!"--

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