Rhetoric A–Z / Sophistics

Sophistics σοφιστική

Sophistics is the art of the sophists, the travelling teachers who in fifth-century Greece promised to teach oratory and political skill. Since Plato, sophistics has been rhetoric’s rival and double, a name for the speech that only appears to be true.

The sophists

The sophists were travelling teachers of wisdom who charged a fee for teaching the young what was needed for a life in the city, above all the ability to speak. Among the best known are Protagoras and Gorgias. We know them almost only through their opponents, and above all through Plato, who made them the counter-image of philosophy.

Protagoras is known for the statement that man is the measure of all things. Plato interprets it to mean that things are for me as they appear to me, and for you as they appear to you. Truth becomes bound to the situation: what is true in one place can be false in another.

Plato’s accusation

In the dialogue Gorgias, Plato likens rhetoric to cosmetics: it gives the appearance of health without giving health itself, and it is a knack rather than an art. In the Sophist he calls the sophist an imitator of the wise man. The accusation has followed sophistics ever since: that it cares about what seems true, doxa, rather than what is true, and about winning rather than knowing.

Aristotle and the meaning of words

Aristotle gives the accusation a new form. In On Sophistical Refutations he observes that we cannot argue with things themselves, but use words in their place. But words are limited, while things are infinite in number. The same word must therefore mean several things, and it is in that gap that the sophist lives as a parasite.

The answer is the principle of non-contradiction: the same thing cannot at the same time and in the same respect both be and not be. It is aimed at sophists such as Gorgias, who in On Nature or On the Non-Existent showed that even what is not, in a certain way is. Whoever refuses to accept the principle is, according to Aristotle, no better than a plant. The philosopher Barbara Cassin has shown that the principle is at bottom about the meaning of words: that whoever speaks must at least mean something, and one single thing, for themselves and for someone else. She has even called Aristotle’s exclusion of the sophists the invention of modernity.

Three views of language

One can say that three ideas of language contend over politics in fifth- and fourth-century Athens. Plato seeks a true speech that through dialectic can say the essence of things. Aristotle seeks truth in the univocal meaning of words and wants to wash away ambiguity. And the sophist emphasises the social character of language: that words are conventions, constantly changing, as when Hermogenes in Plato’s Cratylus claims that names rest only on agreement.

The sophist today

The charge of sophistry has never gone away. In the twentieth century it was directed at the French philosophers Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, who questioned Truth with a capital T. What is loosely called postmodernism has often been dismissed as a new sophistics, and Derrida himself let an imagined critic say that he ought to be locked up in an institution for sophistics.

For Derrida, the line between sophist and philosopher cannot be drawn once and for all, since it rests on the ambiguity of language, the very thing that threatens every claim to truth. For Alain Badiou, by contrast, the sophist is philosophy’s necessary counterpart: the one who reminds us that being is multiple and that language has limits. Philosophy begins not in spite of the sophist, but thanks to him.

Perhaps that is why sophistics is still needed. Not as an excuse for saying anything at all, but as a reminder that words can always mean more than one thing, and that it is in that gap that both rhetoric and politics become possible.

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