The Case for the Sophists

A defense read in Oxford

Suppose you are asked to judge a man you never met, and the only account of him was written by his chief rival. The rival is brilliant. He quotes the man at length and even writes out a speech in his defense. How far should you trust the portrait?

In November 1907 a philosopher read a paper to the Oxford Philological Society, a gathering of scholars of ancient languages. He argued that this was exactly our position with Protagoras, whom we know mostly through the writings of his fiercest critic. The accused was Protagoras, whose saying about human beings as the measure we met on Day 1. The rival was Plato. The speaker was F.C.S. Schiller.

Schiller (1864–1937) was a British philosopher who taught at Oxford and was the most prominent English ally of William James, whom we met yesterday. He called his version of pragmatism humanism: the view that knowledge is made by human beings, for human purposes, and tested in human experience. His books include Humanism (1903) and Studies in Humanism (1907). Why would such a man take the side of someone whose name had become a byword for clever fraud? Schiller thought the old quarrel was still alive. He described it as turning on “essentially the same point as the modern issue between Humanism and Absolutism” (F.C.S. Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, in Studies in Humanism, 1907). By ‘Absolutism’ he meant the belief in a truth that stands beyond all human experience.

What the sophists taught

Almost nothing Protagoras wrote survives. The fullest statement of his position is a speech in Plato’s Theaetetus (166–168) in which Socrates imagines Protagoras answering his critics. The usual view was that Plato invented it. Schiller argued that it largely preserves Protagoras’s real arguments. He reasoned that Plato was a teenager in Athens when Protagoras’s book appeared and must have known its substance, even if no copy reached him. Schiller also thought Plato had shaped Socrates for a purpose: “Plato has made him into a stalking horse in his campaign against his own professional rivals, the Sophists” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907).

On Schiller’s reading, the speech shows a teacher with a practical aim. Each person’s experience is true for that person. Even so, one person’s state of mind can be far better than another’s, and the wise person is the one who can bring about the better state. Schiller paraphrased the speech this way: “Thus the sophist’s task is practical like the doctor’s; but his ministrations use words, instead of drugs, to produce a better state of mind” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). That sentence is Schiller’s rendering of Plato’s Greek, not a translation. He also found in the speech a defense of being paid for teaching and a warning against arguing for its own sake. He took it as the work of a serious educator preparing citizens for democratic life.

The core, Schiller said, was “the distinction between the formal claim to truth which every judgment makes and its value” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). Every belief presents itself as true. Whether it is any good is a separate question, and experience answers it. Consider a nurse who works out a way of turning patients that spares her back. Other nurses watch, try it, and copy it. Within a year it is simply how the ward does things. Schiller used an image of bricks: many are badly made and thrown out, and a useful design spreads. “But this validity is the reward of value and the result of selections based on experience” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). In short, Schiller says: a belief earns its standing by proving its worth.

Where Plato was unfair, and his reply

Schiller did not call Plato a liar. His theory, he wrote, “credits Plato with an honest desire to state his opponent’s case and assumes merely that he has not fully grasped an alien point of view for the appreciation of which his whole type of mind unfitted him” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). The unfairness lies in what follows the speech. At 169 D Socrates returns to the bare saying as though no defense had been given. At 169 E he sets the defense aside because Protagoras is not there to confirm it. “For it is worth noting that though the Speech is evicted, it is never refuted” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). Later, Schiller argued, Plato misquotes it and substitutes ‘healthful’ and ‘diseased’ for ‘better’ and ‘worse’, so that a general principle shrinks to a point about medicine.

Plato’s objection deserves its due. Most people believe Protagoras is wrong. If each belief is true for the one who holds it, Protagoras must grant that his critics are right. There is a deeper worry, and Schiller credits Plato with seeing it clearly. If every opinion is true, false opinion is impossible, and a theory that cannot explain error cannot tell error from truth. Many readers still think this objection lands against any view that ties truth to the believer.

Schiller answered that the objection runs together a claim to truth and its validity. A view can be claimed as true by one person before anyone else accepts it, and “all new truth necessarily starts in a minority of one.” He added: “‘Universal consensus’ is a consequence and not a cause of truth” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). Error, on this account, is a failed test: “Every judgment is a claim to ‘truth,’ i.e., an experiment with ‘reality’ as it appears to us” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). When the experiment fails, we withdraw the claim. Scholars remain divided on whether the Theaetetus speech preserves Protagoras’s own arguments, and I do not think the surviving evidence settles it.

A forerunner of humanism

Schiller called the age of the sophists “This first outburst of Humanism” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). He noted one difference. Protagoras called the better beliefs ‘better’ but not ‘truer’, while Schiller held that truths are themselves values. He judged that “the difference between Protagorean and modern Humanism concerns only a subordinate point of terminology” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). When Plato’s Socrates asks who can be the measure of what the future will bring, Schiller replied that the future decides between theories by their consequences: “That is precisely the meaning of the pragmatic testing of truth by its consequences” (Schiller, “Plato or Protagoras?”, 1907). A journal that took its name from the sophists has an obvious stake in whether they earned their reputation.

If truth is made by tests that are never finished, we have to ask whether inquiry ever reaches an end. Tomorrow’s theme, “Inquiry Without End”, takes up that question.