Discussing "Sophist" By Plato

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "Sophist," which is one of the dialogues of Plato, who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

The cover art for this episode is Plato as depicted in a portion of the oil painting The Death of Socrates, which French painter Jacques-Louis David completed in 1787.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Parmenides, Zeno, And The Eleatic School
• 4:40 Sophist, Statesman, Philosopher, And A Possible Origin Of The Socratic Method
• 5:43 The Familiar As A Guide For The Unfamiliar
• 6:57 The Method Of Division
• 11:09 A Definition Of Discord
• 12:03 Sickness And Ugliness In The Soul
• 16:18 A Large Difficult Kind Of Ignorance
• 19:16 Sophistry As The Imitation Of Truth; Likeness And Appearance
• 21:10 The Current Of Agreement
• 25:35 That Which Is Not
• 27:15 The Appearance Of Organisms
• 28:46 A Definition Of The Sophist

Transcript

Hello and welcome back. This week, we're going to be looking at another dialogue from Plato this one called the Sophist. This one is a bit unusual in that, it's the first of Plato's dialogues that we've looked at in which Socrates himself does not play a very big part. He appears a little bit at the beginning, but most of this dialogue is between Theaetetus who was also in the dialogue we looked at last week and a Visitor from the city of Elea, which was a Greek city on the Italian Peninsula Located about 80 miles south of what is now Naples. So it's positioned on the southwest side of The Italian Peninsula and Elea is also known as being home to the Eleatic  philosophers who are mostly Parmenides, Zeno and another guy named Melissus of Samos and the Eleatics are considered Pre-Socratic they come before Socrates Parmenides is a few generations before Socrates and Zeno is a little bit after that Maybe only one or two and Parmenides is mostly known for this one poem of his that is extant It's called on nature and it describes these two views of the world and one of them is the view of opinions or of appearances and the other one is that of reality or ultimate truth, which in his view is that reality is Unified it is singular monolithic. It's one thing. It's a mistake to perceive Multiple objects because everything is unified and also motion is an illusion Everything is actually fixed in place somehow and I said a poem but it's really only fragments of this poem Survive but it's easy to find online and it's not very long so you could read it if you're curious and then Zeno who came after Parmenides is mostly known for his paradoxes. They're called Zeno's paradoxes and these following after Parmenides they seek to demonstrate the impossibility of motion of multiple objects and maybe the most famous one is This paradox about Achilles and the tortoise about which we've definitely talked on this podcast But it's been a while so we can talk about it again a little bit It's this problem that Zeno puts forward where if there were a tortoise Up ahead and you had Achilles a very fast runner running toward the tortoise or racing against the tortoise if you had that initial starting point with Achilles and the tortoise up ahead you Would have a distance you could split that distance in half and then once Achilles Covered half of that distance you could split the remaining distance in half again And then he covers that amount of distance and then you could split the remaining distance in half again at infinitum And because this would require an infinite number of steps on Achilles part to reach the tortoise He would therefore never reach it, which is sort of a strange argument but it's interesting to get into Parmenides and Zeno because you can't necessarily dismiss something as Untrue because it sounds strange or unintuitive There are all kinds of things that are true But also sound unintuitive when you first hear them and also the idea of the whole universe being unified being somehow one is something that we think of as being associated with Eastern religions exclusively with maybe Buddhism or Hinduism and Parmenides doesn't necessarily go to the lengths that those other religions do in talking about that But there you do have a very old example Maybe a 6th century BC example of somebody talking about that in ancient Greece or what we would today call southern Italy So the notion of the universe being undivided or integral somehow is not foreign to European thought But all of that is really background on today's dialogue because we're not talking about either Parmenides or Zeno we're talking about this visitor from Elia and all of that is Talking about some of the philosophers who would have been in the background or the Training or education of this visitor from Elia whose name is never given and again as with Socrates It might be better to think of this as simply Plato talking through another person. It's hard to know to what extent he was transcribing some Discussion that he witnessed which he might have been doing but he also may have been using this visitor as a mouthpiece Through which to say some of his own ideas and maybe he felt that some of his ideas here could be a little bit Associated with that Eleatic school and so it might be appropriate to have somebody from there expressing those views as a character, but this dialogue is getting into talking about the definition of and the Relation between the sophist the statesman and the philosopher are these three different things? Are they one thing? How should we think about these different types if they are different and I couldn't find a clear date about when Parmenidesdied, but it seems that he died in the fifth century BC. And Socrates was born in either 470 or 469 BC. So he was born in the fifth century BC. And early in this dialogue, Socrates mentions a conversation that he had with Parmenides in which Socrates was very young and Parmenides was old. And Parmenides guided the discussion by asking questions. And that's, of course, what Socrates is doing all throughout all of these dialogues. And so that makes me wonder if that might've been part of where Socrates got this method from, is that he learned it from Parmenides. Though it might've also sort of been part of the practice at the time and Socrates developed it further in some way. So Theaetetus and the visitor get into this conversation about what is a sophist. And the visitor proposes the approach of using something familiar in order to look at something unfamiliar. Using something that's easier to understand as a guide for something that's harder to understand. And the visitor uses this initially as a way to demonstrate his method of division is what it's called. And we'll get into that in a minute. But in general, I've said this before, you have to be very careful with metaphors. Using something easier to understand as a guide for something harder to understand may clarify certain things, but it can also cause you to rush over an assumption without noticing it. Because the assumption applies in the familiar case, but it doesn't apply in the unfamiliar case. And because you are expecting these two things to be similar in some way, you assume that what's true for the former is also true for the latter, but that's not necessarily true and it can waste you a lot of time if you miss it. So you want to be careful about doing this, but it is useful in the limited way that he uses it here. And that is to demonstrate this thing that I mentioned earlier, which is the method of division, which is dividing different topics and subtopics and sub-subtopics into different categories. So he talks about expertise and then he says there are two types of expertise. There's production and acquisition. And then within acquisition, there is acquisition by wages and purchase and acquisition by actions and words. And then he breaks down those subcategories further and further. And this is kind of an interesting thought tool. And one is tempted to map out how these different things are categorized and then maybe try to fill in some of the blanks because in these discussions, the visitor is trying to head toward where he thinks the softest is going to be. So at each level, it usually branches out into two and he takes one path. So he says acquisitions, and then there's two kinds of those. And then he takes one of those two types and divides that into two categories. And then he takes one of those two types and divides it further. But at each level, there is one side that is not explored. And it would be interesting to try to fill in those blanks just for fun. But you could challenge this approach by saying, how do you know at each level that there are only two ways to subdivide it? Why aren't there three or five? And so you could look at each level and say, well, these don't really account for everything. You'd also need this, or you need these two more categories. And the categories that he gives are often pretty good. It's not as if he's very obviously leaving things out. But it seems that if you thought about them, you might be able to expand them beyond two. And this approach does echo Parmenides in a way in that it gives a picture of all of the different objects in reality, not even just professions. Right now, we're in the branch of this tree that has to do with professions and human activity because we're trying to figure out what a sophist is. But just as you can go downward in this branching tree, getting more and more specific, for some reason, I'm imagining that as downward, or it could just as easily be upward. But let's think of it as downward. You could also go in the reverse direction and try to get more and more general. So we started at expertise here. What are the other things that might sit beside expertise? If we were to think of expertise as one of two branches, of what would it be one of two branches? And in a way, as I said, this does unify anything you could think of, apparently, because somewhere in this branching tree is also the true philosopher. If we are going to end up thinking of the philosopher as distinct from the sophist and the statesman, then the philosopher must be somewhere in here as well. And that means he's just one of these different things that people do. Some people are traders, and some people are hunters, and some people are blacksmiths, and some people are philosophers. And this branching tree doesn't put a value judgment on any of the objects in it, but just having them positioned this way seems a bit egalitarian, as if to say these are all more or less on the same level. We're just describing them based on what makes them different from everything else. And when you look at Aristotelian logic,which comes later, one of the five aspects of something to consider, besides genus and species, those are two, and those are obviously relevant here if you're talking about categories and subcategories. There's also the differencia, the difference. What is the trait of this object that distinguishes it from other things that are like it? So you have a triangle, but there are different types of triangles, and a right triangle has a right angle. So in that case, the differencia of a right triangle is its right angle. So this method of division may not be perfect, but there is something to thinking about objects based on what makes them different and what categories they fall into, this kind of conceptual taxonomy. But so using this method, the visitor eventually gets toward where the sophist is, and he says that a sophist, among other things, is somebody who hunts wealthy young people on land. Hunts, obviously not in the literal sense, but seeks them out in order to have them as students and to take wages from them and to teach them. And among other things, he is an expert in persuasion, and he deals in words that have to do with virtue. And at one point, he gives an interesting definition of discord. He says that discord is dissension among things that are naturally of the same kind. And of course, he's using an ancient Greek word, but the translator chose discord for the English word for it. And that was probably a good choice of translation because it applies very readily to this modern word discord. Dissension among things that are naturally of the same kind. You don't talk about discord between enemy nations, two countries that are fighting each other in a war. You wouldn't necessarily call that discord. Discord is something closer to civil strife. Something that should be in harmony has gotten out of harmony. Dissension among things that are naturally of the same kind. And if we're talking about what makes things different, that is a different type of conflict. And we can use the word discord more precisely by thinking about it in those terms. And later, the visitor is talking about two kinds of badness in the soul. And he says, one is like bodily sickness, and the other is like ugliness. And you have to be a little careful talking about the sickness of things that you can't measure. We can't necessarily agree on the existence of such a thing as a soul. But I think pretty much everybody would agree that there is some kind of inner state. You can be physically healthy and feel bad internally. There's some awareness that is distinct from the body. It's not completely isolated from it. It's definitely affected by your body, but it is not a one-to-one correspondence with your body. Because the reverse is true. You can feel good internally, but your body is actually very sick. You don't know that you have cancer or you're using some kind of chemical that's very harmful, but it feels good. Whatever you would call it, maybe just consciousness. And a lot of ancient Greek philosophy has to do with caring for that other part properly or cultivating it or developing it. And here, the visitor again describes two kinds of badness in the soul. One is like bodily sickness, and the other like ugliness. And he doesn't go further with it. But if we wanted to branch off on those two, we might say that the badness that resembles ugliness has to do with malice or bad intention or jealousy. Whereas the one that resembles bodily sickness maybe is something more like depression or despair. But I'm not even sure I would agree with that characterization because certain types of malice may come from a lack of something. If you've met people who are very jealous, and there are people like this, if you are not naturally a jealous person and you haven't met anybody who is very deeply jealous, like they don't like it when other people succeed, even if it doesn't hurt them in any way, then you think those people don't exist because it seems so strange and pointless. If you don't lose anything from somebody else gaining, why not just say, oh, good for them? That's good. They got a promotion or they graduated from wherever or they presented their such and such at that place and everybody liked it. Good for them, especially if it's somebody who's not your arch nemesis or a rival of you in some way. There are people who can't stand it when the people around them who are neutral to them or even who are their friends have success that they don't have. And that looks like a kind of malice. That's something that we might say is more associated with the ugliness that the visitor is talking about here, the badness in the soul that resembles ugliness. But I think people like that are lacking a kind of contentment, a being pleased with themselves and what they've done. And I don't even mean that they haven't succeeded enough to be able to be happy with what they're doing. I mean, somebody could have a very normal life. You could be married, two kids, work at a gas station, live in a small town, go camping, have your circle of friends and never do anything that would haveimpress other people, and you could still not be jealous the way that those people that I described are, if you are content with your position. But if you're not, then no matter how much stuff you have, whatever degrees from wherever, whatever income, whatever vacations you go on, if somebody does a little bit more than you, and there are always people who will surpass you in any field, there is always someone who makes more money, who, by whatever metric you want to use, is a bit further than you. And if you are somehow the richest person in the world, then there are other people who are physically stronger than you, for example. So if you have that discontentment in you, it will always find a justification to come out. And if you don't, you can be steady in your equanimity, whatever your circumstances are. And that sounds a bit more like a sickness than an ugliness to me. That line stood out to me because I like to think about that kind of thing, about what is badness in the soul. But you have to be very careful with it because we are dealing with abstractions at that level. We're talking about things that are very difficult, if not impossible to measure. So it's very easy to mischaracterize them. And the visitor talks about how an ignorant soul is ugly and out of proportion. So that's an interesting argument for knowledge and wisdom, is that it's about getting away from a spiritual ugliness, that if you're ignorant, your soul is ugly in a certain way. And then he talks about, quote, a large, difficult kind of ignorance, marked off from the others and overshadowing all of them, not knowing, but thinking that you know. That's probably what causes all the mistakes we make when we think, end quote. That one's so good that I'm gonna read it again. He mentions, quote, a large, difficult kind of ignorance, marked off from the others and overshadowing all of them, not knowing, but thinking that you know. That's probably what causes all the mistakes we make when we think, end quote. And if you think about that, that really might be true. That when you know that you don't know something, it doesn't cause you problems because you have to go and get the information. It could, if you're under some kind of constraint where you can't get it and you need it right now, and you have to make a decision or take some action on incomplete information, which is pretty much always the case. But if you're talking through something and you make a mistake, it's probably because somewhere along the way, you assumed something. Modern parlance talks about assumptions a lot and the dangers of assumptions. But an assumption is thinking you know something when you don't. That's one way to think about it. You relied on a friend because you thought you knew what they were going to do and then they did something that surprised you, and so you made a mistake. And the way to avoid that can only be to be so careful in your thinking that you avoid all assumptions. When you say a sentence, you stop at the first word whose definition you don't feel that you very clearly know, or more importantly, whose meaning you don't feel that you very clearly know and you drill down on it. You go, what do we mean by that? And the result of an approach like that is something like what we today call philosophy. And you might say, well, that's much too time consuming. I have all these things going on in my life. I can't sit and analyze every word and every sentence that I say and think and ensure that it's reflecting some real and true object. I've got other stuff to do. And on the one hand, you're exactly right. Even Socrates says in the Apologia, or the Apology, that his doing what he did took up his whole life. So he didn't have time for public affairs or for other work. He had to give all of his time just to this. So we're talking about something difficult and time consuming. But when you avoid doing it, you pretty much guarantee that there are mistakes in your thinking. You think you know certain things that you don't know. You think you are certain of certain facts or realities and they're not true. But that's why for me, I feel that it's valuable to do a podcast like this because I try to give some of my time to this sort of thing. And you clearly think it's valuable also because you're spending some time listening to it. So we're trying to balance having some semblance of what's called a normal life, whatever that is. But it involves money moving around and a house and a family. And the family is certainly very good and valuable. And in order to have that, you need the other stuff. But so we're trying to balance the demands of truth and right thinking with other things we value in life. We try to keep that list short because everything you add to it takes away from everything else on the list. But unless you're gonna live like Socrates, then you also have to keep the machine running too. You can't let the wheels fall off. But so later the visitor is talking about Sophists and he says they're able to appear wise on every topic and they have knowledge about everything, but not truth. And he talks about drawing. He says that drawing is an art that allows you to make an image of something such that if children look at that image from a distance, they might think that it's the real thing. So if an artist draws a big image of a horse and places it far away and children look at it, they might think that it's a real horse. And he says that a Sophist does something similar with truth. A Sophist creates an imitation of truth that looks real at a distance and some people might be fooled by it. But when you come up close and examine it, you can see that it's not the real thing. And he talks about likeness making and appearance making.making, the difference between making something that is a likeness of something else and something which has the appearance of something else. And the difference is that he talks about large statues or columns or buildings that if you build them proportionally, if they're big enough, when you're on the ground, they look out of proportion when you look up at them. So that when people are building those things, they actually build them slightly out of proportion so that when you're on the ground, they look like they're in proportion. So ironically, the more accurate depiction or the more proportional one appears to be out of proportion, while the one that is out of proportion appears to be in proportion. And that has the added dimension of favoring the one that seems more beautiful. Sometimes there are competing explanations for something, and there might be one that sits better in our mind. It's more coherent. It's more balanced. It's more symmetrical. It's somehow more aesthetic. It's more pleasing. But none of that means that it's more true. So you have to watch out for that also. The question is not which answer do we like more? The question is which answer is true? And we can be very on guard against that in certain contexts, but completely vulnerable to it in others due to inconsistencies in how we think. And at one point, the visitor asks Theotitis something and he agrees. And the visitor says, quote, are you agreeing with me because you know that? Or is the current dragging you, so to speak, into agreement so quickly because the discussion has given you a habit of agreeing? End quote. So that's something else that's important to be on guard against. There's an aspect of human psychology that you learn about in business, which is that people are more likely to say yes to something that they've already said yes to. So if you're doing sales or something, you might hand somebody a magazine or a catalog and they're just taking the catalog in their hands and starting to flip through it, even though they might feel that they're not going to buy from you. They have taken an affirmative step. They've gone along with something that you've recommended. You, in an unspoken way, said, here, take this catalog. And then they did. They are now more likely to buy from you. And the broader principle, there is a heuristic here, and I can't remember what it's called. It's the something halo. But it's this idea that people have a unified image of things. If they already like something, they're much more likely to like anything associated with it. And if they already dislike something, they're much more likely to already dislike anything associated with it. This is why you can take a sentence said by a politician, and if you attribute it to this party, then a certain voter will like it. And if you attribute it to that party, the same voter won't like it. And it's the same sentence in both cases. And this is another laziness of thought. It's a way that the brain can kind of turn itself off and say, well, I already like most of the things that this source is telling me, so I don't need to evaluate each one. But that's another way that you can be deceived. It's harder for people to disagree with something that they've already agreed with or disagree with a source that they usually agree with because it involves a contradiction that we don't like. We don't like to contradict ourselves. And we think that if we agree with something, what we're doing is saying that that is a good source. It is ethically good. And that's not what that agreement suggests at all. All you're saying is, I agree with you up to that statement right there and not an inch further. The next thing you say, I have no idea if it's going to be true or not. I will evaluate that separately, but I am with you on that one. That's all you're saying. But our psychology, some deeper part of our brain thinks we're saying the person saying this is a good, trustworthy person. And to then disagree with the next thing that they say would mean that you were incorrect in your first assessment. And we don't like to feel that internal contradiction. So we are more likely to agree with a source once we have started to agree with it. It can be a heavier emotional and cognitive load to say, no, that thing that I've trusted for years and that my parents trusted is mistaken about this, or maybe is actively deceiving us about this as the context requires. And while I do think that the visitor is alluding to an aspect of human psychology that meets that description, he may also be talking about something similar, which is that you can just get into a rhythm of agreeing, especially in these dialogues where they're written so that most of the time, the other speaker is just agreeing with what the main speaker is saying. You can get into a pattern of assuming that all of it is correct, or all of it is true, or all of it makes sense, but it might be better to evaluate each individual assertion, each inference as if it were an exam question. And the question is, is this statement true? Yes or no? Explain why or why not? And that's the only question on the exam. And you have two hours to complete it. You have a functionally unlimited amount of time to evaluate this question, and it is very high consequence. That is the way that we should assess truth claims whenever we can. Because the problem is that our psychology and the circumstances of life are usually such that we do the opposite. We feel that we don't have enough time, and maybe that the question is inconsistent.Consequential that I can go along with what this person is saying for now and I'll see if I like the conclusion or not And if I don't like the conclusion, I'll come back and address this here But if we're being honest that obviously can't be the parameters for assessment Something's either true or not true Independent of whether you like the conclusion that it gets you to and if you are genuinely Pressed for time then you do what Descartes recommends and you suspend judgment. You say I don't know I'm not gonna drop the axe one way or the other on that one But anyway, that's a nice reminder from the visitor not to get into a pattern of agreeing with a given source Just because that's what you've done up to that point and a big part of this dialogue that we're not really going to have Time to get into Has to do with being and not being and the visitor talks a lot about this question of the phrase That which is not whether it's possible to say anything that is true about The object that which is not and he'll say you can't even say that which is not because you can't say that it's a singular Thing and nor can you say those which are not because if it doesn't exist It can't be plural either and he defines being as having the capacity to do something or to have something done to it And of the sophist the philosopher and being he says quote the sophist runs off into the darkness of that Which is not which he's had practice dealing with and he's hard to see because the place is so dark and quote and then later Quote the philosopher always uses reasoning to stay near the form being end quote So he says that the sophist is more likely to use these tangled and difficult and perhaps fruitless questions about that Which is not whereas the philosopher stays near that which is near being and later He says quote we should leave pointless things like this alone Instead we should be able to follow what a person says and scrutinize it step-by-step End quote and one of the points that he gets to around this is that the sophist denies that anyone ever thinks or says That which is not on the grounds that that which is not never in any way has any share in Being that anything that you can think or say Must be in the category of that which is Because it has some relation to being if only in the form of it having been spoken or thought and at one point They're talking about How all of the different organisms that are in the world have come to be did God create them or were they created in some? other way and the visitor mentions quote the widespread belief that Skipping ahead nature produces them by some spontaneous cause that generates them without any thought and quote now He doesn't talk about spontaneous generation and natural selection. That's not specifically talking about evolution But in the 5th century BC, he mentions the widespread belief He calls it a widespread belief that nature produces them by some spontaneous cause that generates them without any thought So widespread doesn't necessarily mean a majority belief but there were many people at that time when Plato was writing at least in the 5th or 4th century BC that Animals were not created by God, but they were somehow Generated by nature and if you're a religious person, you might say well, look, this is not a new argument from the 19th century This goes way back There were people saying that a long time ago and if you're not a religious person you would say isn't that interesting? People way deep in the past Didn't just say God made everything and leave it at that one of the thoughts that really annoys me the most and which is Thoroughly extinguished by reading old books is this idea that before modern technology people were just dumb They didn't think about things and really the only differences between people in the 4th century BC and us Are maybe that they were apparently a little bit shorter than us, though I'm not sure that that's true and they didn't have smartphones and that Ironically maybe made them a little bit smarter because they had to use their brains more and the dialogue closes out with the visitor giving A definition of the sophist and all of this is a reference to different things that they've touched on Throughout the dialogue relating to the method of division that we talked about earlier this branching off into different categories and subcategories So to understand all of this in detail, you'll have to read the dialogue But this is the definition of a sophist that the visitor comes to he says quote imitation of the contrary speech producing insincere and unknowing sorts of the appearance making kind of copy making the word-juggling part of production that's marked off as human and not divine Anyone who says that the sophist is of this blood and family will be saying it seems the complete truth End quote and I wrote this in my notes and it's outside of a quote but I couldn't find exactly where it came from but the visitor talks about the sophist as Someone who knows that he does not have the answer but acts like he does and that made me think of how by that Definition you can't even use the word sophist as an insult for most people for most TV pundits for example Because many of them would have a long way to go before they even Reach the level of sophistry in that they don't have the right answer and they don't even know that they don't have the right answeranswer. Whereas a sophist is somebody who knows that they don't know the truth about something, that it's too complicated, that it's too hard to get at, but they act as if they do. Most pundits don't even know that they don't know. But I think we can leave it there for now. Farewell until next time, take care, and happy reading.