Sophist

Summary

The Sophist opens the morning after the Theaetetus. Theodorus returns to keep his appointment with Socrates and brings a visitor from Elea, a disciple of Parmenides and Zeno whom the dialogue never names. Socrates half-seriously wonders whether the guest is a god in disguise come to cross-examine them, and then asks him a question that sounds easy: do the people of Elea regard the sophist, the statesman and the philosopher as one kind of man, two or three? The Stranger takes up the sophist first, chooses the young mathematician Theaetetus as his answerer, and Socrates falls silent for the rest of the conversation. The first half is a hunt. The Stranger practises his method of division on a humble example, the angler, splitting the arts into acquisitive and productive, acquisition into exchange and capture, and so on until fishing with a hook is pinned down. He then runs the same procedure on the sophist and catches him six times over: a paid hunter of rich young men, a wholesale merchant in learning, a retailer of the same wares, a manufacturer of his own, an athlete of eristic debate, and, more doubtfully, a purifier of souls who clears away false conceit by refutation. That the quarry keeps changing shape is itself a clue. The Stranger settles on what the sophist really sells: the appearance of knowing everything, an image of wisdom rather than wisdom. That answer opens the dialogue's central difficulty. To call anything an image or a falsehood is to say that what is not somehow is, and Parmenides had forbidden that path of inquiry. The Stranger asks Theaetetus not to think him a parricide and sets out to test his philosophical father. He shows that being is as puzzling as not-being, surveys the materialists and the friends of the Forms in a 'war of Giants and Gods', proposes that being is the power to act or be acted upon, and then examines five 'greatest kinds': being, rest, motion, sameness and difference. Some kinds blend and some do not, as some letters combine and others will not. Not-being turns out to be difference, not the opposite of being, and a false statement such as 'Theaetetus, with whom I am now speaking, is flying' says of a real subject things that are other than what is true of him. With falsehood made possible, the hunt resumes. The Stranger divides image-making into the making of true likenesses and the making of appearances, and ends by tracing the sophist's pedigree to a conscious, dissembling imitator who produces contradiction in private by short arguments: a juggler with words. For students who have studied some logic, the dialogue repays slow attention to how a definition is built, why a careful account of error protects truth, and why the counterfeit of wisdom is harder to unmask than plain ignorance.

Plot or Argument

• A stranger from Elea and Socrates' threefold question

  Theodorus introduces the Eleatic visitor; Socrates jokes that he may be a 'cross-examining deity' and asks whether sophist, statesman and philosopher are one, two or three. The Stranger agrees to proceed by question and answer with Theaetetus (opening pages, c. 216a-218b).

• Practice on the angler

  To learn the method on something small, the Stranger divides the arts until he isolates angling with a barbed hook by daylight. The exercise models the procedure the rest of the hunt will use (c. 218b-221c).

• Six catches of a shape-shifting quarry

  The sophist is defined as a hireling hunter of wealthy youth, a merchant and retailer of learning, a maker of his own wares, an eristic debater, and a 'sophist of noble lineage' who purges souls by refutation. The Stranger then reckons up the six forms and notes that one practitioner with many names signals a muddle (c. 221c-232a).

• Purification of the soul

  Within the sixth division the Stranger distinguishes vice, a discord or disease of the soul, from ignorance, a deformity; chastisement answers the first and instruction the second. Refutation is called the greatest of purifications because it humbles a man into knowing only what he knows (c. 226b-231b).

• Image-making and the scandal of falsehood

  The sophist claims to know everything and teaches others to dispute; what he offers is an image of wisdom. The Stranger distinguishes likeness-making from appearance-making, then admits that to speak of images and false speech one must say that not-being is, which Parmenides prohibited (c. 232b-237b).

• Testing father Parmenides

  After showing that not-being cannot even be consistently denied, the Stranger asks not to be thought a parricide and turns to being itself. Earlier thinkers who counted the elements of being, the monists, the materialists and the friends of the Forms all prove to have an account no clearer than the account of not-being (c. 237b-249d).

• The greatest kinds

  Being, rest, motion, sameness and difference are examined as kinds that may or may not blend, on the model of letters and vowels. The knowledge of which kinds combine belongs to the free man's science of dialectic, the philosopher's own region. Not-being is shown to be the kind 'difference' (c. 249d-259d).

• Speech, thought and false statement

  A sentence weaves a name with a verb and is always about something. 'Theaetetus sits' is true and 'Theaetetus is flying' is false, because the second says of its subject what is other than what is. Thought is the soul's silent conversation with herself, so false opinion and false appearance are possible too (c. 259d-264b).

• The sophist's final pedigree

  Returning to image-making, the Stranger separates divine from human production and the knowing imitator from the one who imitates by opinion. The sophist is the ironical, dissembling imitator of appearance who, in private and by short arguments, forces others into contradiction (c. 264b-268d).

Characters

• The Eleatic Stranger, leader of the inquiry

  An unnamed visitor from Elea, trained in the school of Parmenides and Zeno. Courteous and methodical, he prefers the slow procedure of division and is willing to correct his own teacher when the argument requires it.

• Theaetetus, respondent

  The gifted young Athenian mathematician examined by Socrates the day before. He answers patiently, admits confusion when he feels it, and is praised for keeping up with an argument that grows steadily harder.

• Socrates, host, then silent listener

  He frames the question and asks the Stranger to choose a method, then says nothing for the remainder of the dialogue, which makes his silence part of the drama.

• Theodorus, mathematician from Cyrene

  Theaetetus' teacher, who brings the Stranger and vouches that he is 'divine' though not a god, a title Theodorus gives to all philosophers.

• Parmenides, absent authority

  The Eleatic philosopher whose verse forbidding the way of not-being sets the central problem. The Stranger treats him with filial respect while testing his doctrine.

Lessons

• Hunting a definition by division

  The Stranger refuses to argue about a name until the thing named has been pinned down. He begins with an easy case, the angler, so that the method can be seen working before it is aimed at something slippery. Each division splits a class in two and follows one branch. Students learn that a good definition is earned by comparison and exclusion, and that a quarry who turns up in six different places has probably not yet been understood.

  • Why does the Stranger practise on the angler before hunting the sophist?
  • The six early definitions all describe something true about sophists. Why does the Stranger still count them as a failure?
  • Choose a word that is often used loosely (for example 'expert' or 'influencer') and try to define it by division in four or five steps.

• Refutation as a cleansing of the soul

  In the sixth catch the Stranger describes an art that looks like the sophist's but is closer to Socrates': cross-examination that shows a man his own contradictions, so that he grows angry with himself and gentle toward others. As a physician must clear obstructions before food can nourish, the teacher must clear false conceit before knowledge can be received. The Stranger's warning that the likeness between this art and sophistry is like that of a dog to a wolf is a lesson in discernment: a good thing and its counterfeit can look alike.

  • Why does the Stranger say that even the Great King, if never refuted, is in a state of impurity?
  • What is the difference between being refuted and being humiliated? Find the words in the text that mark the difference.
  • How might the 'dog and wolf' warning apply to people who are skilled at winning arguments?

• How a false sentence can mean something

  If what is not simply is not, then saying what is false would be saying nothing, and the sophist could never be caught lying. The Stranger's way out is to treat not-being as difference. 'Theaetetus is flying' is about a real Theaetetus; it is false because flying is other than what is true of him. The careful account of error turns out to be a defence of truth: only if false speech is possible can one person correct another.

  • Why does the Stranger need to explain falsehood before he can finish defining the sophist?
  • What is the difference between saying 'X is not' and 'X is not Y'? Use the Stranger's two sentences about Theaetetus.
  • Why might a teacher of persuasion find it convenient to claim that false speech is impossible?

• The courage to test a teacher

  The Stranger asks Theaetetus not to think him a parricide when he examines the doctrine of 'father Parmenides'. He keeps his reverence and still follows the argument where it leads. The scene gives students a model for receiving tradition: one honours a teacher by understanding him exactly, by stating where he seems mistaken and why, and by refusing both easy dismissal and blind repetition.

  • Does the Stranger's respect for Parmenides make his criticism stronger or weaker?
  • In the 'war of Giants and Gods', which side does the Stranger think needs to be made 'better' before it can be argued with, and why?
  • Name a teacher or tradition you have received. What would it look like to test one of its claims without contempt?

• The philosopher hidden by light

  The Stranger notes that the philosopher and the sophist are both hard to see, but for opposite reasons. The sophist hides in the darkness of not-being and has learned to feel his way there; the philosopher is dazzled by the brightness of being, which the eyes of the many cannot bear. The image asks students to consider that difficulty in understanding can come from obscurity in the speaker or from the greatness of the subject, and that the two must not be confused.

  • Read the passage about darkness and light. Why is each figure hard to find?
  • How could a listener tell whether a difficult speaker is hiding something or reaching for something too large to say easily?
  • Theodorus calls philosophers 'divine'. Does the Stranger's image support that title, or qualify it?

Context

The Sophist belongs to a group of late dialogues in which Socrates gives up the leading role. It is dramatically set the day after the Theaetetus, in 399 BC, shortly before Socrates' trial, and it promises a trilogy on the sophist, the statesman and the philosopher; the Statesman follows, but no dialogue called the Philosopher survives. The word 'sophist' had earlier meant simply a wise or skilled man; by the late fifth century it named paid itinerant teachers such as Protagoras and Gorgias, and Plato's dialogues did much to fix its later meaning of a dealer in clever but deceptive argument. The Stranger's problem arises from Parmenides of Elea (early fifth century BC), whose poem denied that what is not can be thought or spoken.

Composition

Usually dated to the 360s or 350s BC on stylistic grounds, after the Theaetetus and before or near the Statesman, Timaeus and Laws; no exact date is known. The library's text is Benjamin Jowett's translation from the third edition of The Dialogues of Plato (1892), preceded in the Gutenberg file by Jowett's long Introduction and Analysis.

Reception

Aristotle took up its themes in his own accounts of predication, being and falsity; Neoplatonist commentators read the five greatest kinds as a map of reality. Medieval Latin readers knew the dialogue chiefly at second hand. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it became central to the study of Plato's later metaphysics and to analytic discussions of negation, predication and the meaning of false statements. It was included in the second edition of Great Books of the Western World (1990), volume 6.

Comparisons

• Theaetetus

  The Theaetetus ends unable to explain false judgment: the wax tablet and aviary images fail. The Sophist, set the next day with the same respondent, supplies what was missing by locating falsehood in the combination of a name and a verb, and by treating not-being as difference.

• Statesman

  The sequel, with the same Stranger and a younger Socrates as respondent, applies the method of division to the ruler and adds the myth of the reversed cosmos and the weaving image. Reading both shows the method tried on a deceiver and then on a guardian.

• Parmenides

  In the Parmenides the young Socrates is examined by Parmenides himself and the Forms come under attack. The Sophist returns the favour: an Eleatic heir examines Parmenides' ban on not-being and proposes kinds that blend, an answer to some of the earlier dialogue's puzzles.

• Categories

  Aristotle places truth and falsity in combinations of terms, as the Stranger does with 'Theaetetus sits', but replaces the five blending kinds with ten ways of being predicated of a subject.

• Gorgias

  The Gorgias attacks rhetoric as a knack of flattery set against true arts such as medicine; the Sophist builds a fuller classification of imitation and makes the counterfeit of wisdom a problem for metaphysics as well as ethics.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The dialogue is not about medicine, but its account of education borrows the structure of Greek medicine. The Stranger pairs two evils of the soul with two evils of the body: vice is like disease (a discord among kindred elements), ignorance like deformity (a want of proportion). Medicine treats the first in the body and gymnastic the second; in the soul, chastisement and instruction correspond. The purifier of souls is compared to a physician who clears internal obstructions before food can benefit the patient. These are analogies for moral and intellectual formation, an early instance of philosophy framed as a therapy of the soul, not a clinical account.

• Sixth division, c. 226d-227a

  Purification is divided into the cleansing of living bodies inwardly by medicine and gymnastic, outwardly by the bath-man, and of inanimate things by fullers and similar trades.

  Ancient Medicine
• Sixth division, c. 227d-229a

  Vice is defined as disease or discord of the soul and ignorance as deformity; chastisement and instruction are set beside medicine and gymnastic.

  Mind Body Ancient Medicine Philosophy AS Therapy
• Sixth division, c. 230c-d

  The purifier of the soul is likened to a physician who knows the body cannot profit from food until internal obstacles are removed; refutation plays the role of the purge.

  Philosophy AS Therapy Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Working in pairs, define a common profession (for example 'referee' or 'librarian') by division, writing each split as a fork in a tree diagram. Then swap trees with another pair and try to find a person who fits the definition but should not, or should fit and does not.

• Dialogue

  Write a short exchange in which a student uses the Stranger's distinction between 'Theaetetus sits' and 'Theaetetus is flying' to answer a classmate who insists that 'nobody can really be wrong, because everyone is saying something'.

• Essay

  The Stranger warns that the purifier of souls and the sophist resemble each other as a dog resembles a wolf. In 600 words, describe two practices in your own world that look alike but differ in aim, and explain how a careful observer could tell them apart.

Further Reading

• Theaetetus, Plato

  The dramatic prequel with the same respondent; its failure to explain false judgment sets up the Sophist.

• Statesman, Plato

  The second part of the planned trilogy, led by the same Eleatic Stranger.

• Parmenides, On Nature (fragments), Parmenides

  The surviving verses that forbid the way of not-being, quoted by the Stranger.

• Introduction and Analysis to the Sophist, Benjamin Jowett

  Printed before the dialogue in the library's Gutenberg text; a Victorian scholar's summary and commentary.

• Plato's Theory of Knowledge, F. M. Cornford

  A translation of the Theaetetus and Sophist with a running commentary (1935), long a standard guide for students.