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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified 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.

• 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.

• 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.