Protagoras and Logos
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Protagoras and Logos

A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric

Edward Schiappa, Thomas W. Benson

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Protagoras and Logos

A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric

Edward Schiappa, Thomas W. Benson

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About This Book

Reassesses the philosophical and pedagogical contributions of Protagoras

Protagoras and Logos brings together in a meaningful synthesis the contributions and rhetoric of the first and most famous of the Older Sophists, Protagoras of Abdera. Most accounts of Protagoras rely on the somewhat hostile reports of Plato and Aristotle. By focusing on Protagoras's own surviving words, this study corrects many long-standing misinterpretations and presents significant facts: Protagoras was a first-rate philosophical thinker who positively influenced the theories of Plato and Aristotle, and Protagoras pioneered the study of language and was the first theorist of rhetoric. In addition to illustrating valuable methods of translating and reading fifth-century B.C.E. Greek passages, the book marshals evidence for the important philological conclusion that the Greek word translated as rhetoric was a coinage by Plato in the early fourth century.

In this second edition, Edward Schiappa reassesses the philosophical and pedagogical contributions of Protagoras. Schiappa argues that traditional accounts of Protagoras are hampered by mistaken assumptions about the Sophists and the teaching of the art of rhetoric in the fifth century. He shows that, contrary to tradition, the so-called Older Sophists investigated and taught the skills of logos, which is closer to modern conceptions of critical reasoning than of persuasive oratory. Schiappa also offers interpretations for each of Protagoras's major surviving fragments and examines Protagoras's contributions to the theory and practice of Greek education, politics, and philosophy. In a new afterword Schiappa addresses historiographical issues that have occupied scholars in rhetorical studies over the past ten years, and throughout the study he provides references to scholarship from the last decade that has refined his views on Protagoras and other Sophists.

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Information

Publisher
University of South Carolina Press
Year
2013
ISBN
9781611171815
Topic
Theologie & Religion
Subtopic
Religionsphilosophie

PART I

PROLEGOMENON TO
THE STUDY OF EARLY
GREEK RHETORICAL THEORY

1

WHY A STUDY OF PROTAGORAS?

An important part of comprehending the place of Protagoras, the first and most influential of the Older Sophists, is understanding how the profession he helped to spawn was perceived in ancient Greek thought and in subsequent histories of thought. So many of the issues concerning the Sophists are shrouded in controversy that it is difficult even to begin to describe who the Sophists were, let alone to discuss the content and significance of their work. My purpose in what follows is to summarize how the meaning of the word “sophist” has undergone successive redefinition by ancient and contemporary philosophers. Such a summary is appropriate since the term currently suffers from distinctly pejorative connotations, despite the fact that it originally was considered honorific. Understanding why such a transformation has taken place sheds light on how to interpret the role of the Sophists in their own time and explains the disparate treatment the Sophists have often received at the hands of historians and philosophers.

DEFINING “SOPHIST”

The word “sophist” has been defined in important ways by ancient and modern writers. These definitions have altered the interpretive frameworks within which Sophists have been studied and understood. To comprehend scholarship concerning the Sophists in general, and Protagoras in particular, one must be able to place that scholarship in its proper context and interpretive tradition.1
The most familiar definition of “sophist” is pejorative: “one who makes use of fallacious arguments; a specious reasoner.” This sense of “sophist” is clearly the sense that enjoys the most popular use, as almost any pocket dictionary will show. This negative sense of “sophist” is what guided the initial construction of such pejorative terms as “sophisms,” or “sophistical” arguments. The oldest and broadest definition of the word is “one who is distinguished for learning; a wise or learned man.”2 This definition has roots in the Greek term sophia, meaning wisdom or skill. Accordingly, as George Grote and G. B. Kerferd have pointed out, a wide variety of people in ancient Greece were called Sophists, including poets, musicians, rhapsodes, diviners, and persons now called philosophers.3 Even Socrates and Plato were called Sophists (Aristophanes, Clouds; Isocrates, Against the Sophists). Protagoras, in the Platonic dialogue of the same name, claims that Sophists have a long-standing tradition, and he names as his predecessors the poets and prophets of the past, including Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, Orpheus, and Musaeus (316d). Protagoras went on to claim that current teachers of music and physical training also practice the “sophist's art” (316e). It is clear then that the broadest notion of “sophist” would include almost anyone who demonstrates and imparts wisdom (sophia).
Beginning in the mid-fifth century BCE, the word “sophist” began to take on narrower and more technical meanings. The definition listed first in the Oxford English Dictionary describes a Sophist as “one specially engaged in the pursuit or communication of knowledge; esp. one who undertook to give instruction in intellectual and ethical matters in return for payment.” So conceived, the Sophists were the first professional teachers in Western history. Missing from this definition is any reference to the practice and teaching of rhetoric, which, for Heinrich Gomperz, was the distinguishing characteristic of the Sophists.4 Gomperz exaggerated a point that was otherwise well taken. Virtually every person considered a Sophist by posterity was concerned with instruction in logos. According to most accounts, the teaching of the skills of public argument was the key to the Sophists' financial success,5 and a good part of the reason for their condemnation by Plato.
Where did the modern negative definition of “sophist” originate? Karl Popper claimed that Plato “by his attacks on the ‘Sophists’ created the bad associations connected with the word.”6 Grote claimed that Plato “stole the name out of general circulation” and connected with it “discreditable attributes.”7 W. K. C. Guthrie opposed that view, claiming that the term already possessed negative connotations in pre-Platonic writings such as Aristophanes' Clouds.8 Eric A. Havelock has offered the most plausible explanation: prior to Plato, the term “sophist” could be given either a respectful or a contemptuous meaning, not unlike the word “intellectual” today. The playwrights of the “Old Comedy” of Plato's youth played upon, and perhaps fostered, an anti-intellectual prejudice in the populace which helped to diminish the respectability of the title SophistĂȘs.9
The fact that the term sophistĂȘs was used disparagingly prior to Plato's writings does not, however, decrease the significance of his role in reconceptualizing the word. Plato's dialogue Sophist is the first recorded attempt to provide a systematic definition in answer to the question “What is a Sophist?” Plato's interlocutors agree that a Sophist is 1) a paid hunter after the young and wealthy, 2) a kind of merchant of knowledge of the soul, 3) a retailer of these same wares (perhaps implying that the knowledge is sold in small quantities), 4) a seller of his own productions of knowledge, 5) an athlete in contests of words—specifically disputation (eristikĂȘ), and, though the speakers are dubious, 6) a purger of souls, who removes opinions that obstruct learning through elenchus (231d-e).10
The conclusion of Plato's analysis is that a Sophist does not offer true knowledge, but merely an opinion (doxa) of things (Sophist 233c). The dialogue concludes with the following summary: “The art of contradiction making, descended from an insincere kind of conceited mimicry, of the semblance-making breed, derived from image making, distinguished as a portion, not divine but human, of production, that presents a shadow play of words—such are the blood and lineage which can, with perfect truth, be assigned to the authentic Sophist” (268c–d).
To this rather reprehensible character Plato contrasts the philosopher, the “lover of wisdom” (Phaedrus 278d). It is important to recognize, however, that the term “philosopher” was not common prior to Plato. As Havelock pointed out, “The noun philo-sophia appears in Plato's Charmides and philo-sophos in his Apology
. It is likely that these words first became professionalized in Plato's Academy. It is reasonably certain that Athenians would regard Presocratic intellectuals such as Anaxagoras or Diogenes as ‘sophists,’ or as ‘meteorologists,’ never as ‘physicists’ or ‘philosophers’.”11
The significance of such a contrast is not inconsequential. Plato was attempting to enact what Chaim Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca describe as “dissociation.”12 Dissociation is a rhetorical strategy whereby an advocate attempts to break up a previously unified idea into two concepts: one which will be positively valued by the target audience and one which will be negatively valued. A definition functions as an “instrument” of the dissociation of a concept, “especially whenever it claims to furnish the real, true meaning of the concept as opposed to its customary or apparent usage.”13 In this instance Plato was attempting to dissociate the general and traditional meaning of sophistĂȘs as a wise person or teacher into two concepts, one of which (the Sophist as possessor of counterfeit knowledge) would be negatively valued, the other (the philosopher as the seeker of true wisdom) would be positively valued.
As Charles L. Stevenson has noted, many of Plato's dialogues can be described as promulgating persuasive definitions: “The purport of the definition is to alter the descriptive meaning of the term, usually by giving it greater precision within the boundaries of its customary vagueness; but the definition does not make any substantial change in the term's emotive meaning.”14 One of the rhetorical objectives of the dialogues was to dissociate the usual or “commonsense” usage of a term such as “knowledge,” “justice,” or “sophist” from what Plato believed should be the correct usage. Thus, by giving the terms “sophist” and “philosopher” more precise technical meanings and portraying his characters as more or less attractive—depending on the objective of the dialogue—Plato provided a favorable emotive and technical meaning for “philosophers” and a negative emotive and technical meaning for “sophists.” To be sure, at times even Socrates was presented as obnoxious, as in the Protagoras, while the title character was treated with respect. But there can be no question, even in the Protagoras, about what Plato's final verdict was. It is important to keep in mind that Plato apparently planned to write a companion dialogue to his Sophist and Statesman to define the “philosopher” (Statesman 257a, Sophist 217a).15 Despite the absence of such a dialogue, there is no doubt of how, in Plato's overall system, the Sophist and the philosopher compare.
Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca have suggested that rhetors rarely offer dissociations in isolation. Rather, “the philosopher will establish a system that will lead essentially to the relating of the various philosophical pairs with each other.”16 The authors illustrate their claim with examples of sets of “philosophical pairs” drawn from various philosophers' works. From Plato's Phaedrus they extracted the following pairs: appearance/reality, opinion/knowledge, sensible knowledge/rational knowledge, body/soul, becoming/immutability, plurality/unity, and human/divine (Phaedrus 247e, 248b). In each pair the second term is preferred by Plato over the former, and with each pair one can find in the pages of such dialogues as Gorgias, Sophist, and Thaeatetus the second term associated with philosophy and the first term linked to sophistry.
The effect of Plato's giving “sophist” a more precise and technical meaning, combined with his powerful prose style, was nothing short of overwhelming.17 For over two thousand years our understanding of who the Sophists were has been dominated by Plato's writings.
Aristotle's treatment of the Sophists paralleled Plato's. As C. J. Classen has argued, Aristotle grasped the Sophists' ideas and practices by means of his own conceptual scheme.18 As a result, his description of the Sophists' thoughts is almost always in contrast to his own superior system. In modern terminology, one can say that Aristotle differentiated his system from the Sophists' supposed system epistemologically, ontologically, and ethically. In On Sophistical Refutations Aristotle described what “appear to be refutations but are really fallacies” (164a), and claimed that “the art of the Sophist is the semblance of wisdom without the reality, and the Sophist is one who makes money from an apparent but unreal wisdom” (165a). In his Metaphysics he said that “dialectic is merely critical where philosophy claims to know, and Sophistic is what appears to be philosophy but is not” (1004b). In his discussion of the different meanings of “being” in the Metaphysics Aristotle stated that Plato was correct (in the Sophist) to claim that Sophists dealt with “that which is not” or “nonbeing” since the Sophists' arguments dealt with “accidental being” (1026a–b). Finally, Aristotle in several places claimed that what defined a Sophist was his deficient moral purpose, rather than his practice of the art of rhetoric or dialectic.19 According to W. M. A. Grimaldi, Aristotle considered a Sophist as one who “misuses” the art of dialectic in order “to deceive.”20
So powerful was the combined indictment by Plato and Aristotle that their judgments concerning the Sophists remained the standard view in most modern histories of ancient Greece. Plato's and Aristotle's respective rhetorical definitions became accepted as accurate descriptions of the Sophists. According to Grote, the Sophists came to be understood as
ostentatious imposters, flattering and duping the rich youth for their own personal gain, undermining the morality of Athens public and private, and encouraging their pupils to the unscrupulous prosecution of ambition and cupidity. They are even affirmed to have succeeded in corrupting the general morality, so that Athens had become miserably degenerated and vicious in the latter years of the Peloponnesian war, as compared with what she was in the time of Miltiades and Aristeides. Socrates, on the contrary, is usually described as a holy man combating and exposing these false prophets—standing up as the champion of morality against their insidious artifices.21
The next significant redefinition of “sophist” did not take place until the nineteenth...

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