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DOI: 10.7330/9780874219364.c005 5 E x p r e s s i v i s t Rh e to r i c The Sophists The early Greek sophists, whom Aristophanes called “a ruffianly race of tongue-twisters” (The Birds 1694, qtd. in Dillon and Gergel 2003), had the misfortune of dying three times, each time more definitively than before. These itinerant teachers of the arts of discourse, who roamed democratic Athens in the age of Pericles selling their pedagogical services , died first of course in the customary way, generally between the later-fifth and mid-fourth centuries, BCE. But their reputations died as well, primarily at the hands of Plato, who argued successfully that a self-serving, manipulative relativism lay at the black heart of sophistic education, that his own conservative philosophy had greater intellectual integrity, and that, besides, it was unseemly to teach for money. Later, the sophists died a third time, their voices all but wholly effaced as their writings disappeared through lack of the custodial care that saw Plato and Aristotle through the “dark” ages until Arab scholars at Toledo could canonize them for the European Renaissance. All that remains of early sophistic writing, as a result, is some provocative fragments of theory, a few speeches, and some second-hand reconstructions of their thought in the work of other writers, many of whom, like Plato, introduce them mostly for critique or disparagement. The first sophists included such figures as Protagoras of Abdera (490–420 BCE), Gorgias of Leontini (485–380 BCE) (targeted in the Platonic dialogue discussed earlier), Prodicus of Ceos, Antiphon, and Hippias of Elis, among others, and the very unfamiliarity of their names testifies to the thoroughness of their erasure from European history. But had these early rhetoricians died less definitively, they might deserve recognition for composing a story about the meaning of meaning whose dominant themes are far different from the Platonic and Aristotelian certainties of ontological rhetoric, and different also from the word power of magical rhetoric, or the empiricism of objectivist rhetoric. It isn’t easy to say what sort of alternative story they might have told simply because it’s too easy to read 104   C. H. Knoblauch their pitiful fragments in whichever way one prefers. But putting my own interpretive spin on Protagoras’s famous assertion that “man is the measure of all things,” I propose that sophistic rhetoric offers an early rendering of the expressivist story, which conveys the view that discursive knowledge is subjective in origin, comprised of verbal and other representations whose meanings derive from autonomous acts of mind and are therefore more responsive to human need and desire than to whatever may lie beyond human consciousness. Let’s pretend, for example, that Protagoras’s version of the expressivist story can be found in Plato’s Theaetetus, which relates a conversation between Socrates and an Athenian mathematician, after whom the dialogue is named, in which the two debate the merits of different views concerning the nature of knowledge. To be sure, whatever the substance of Protagoras’s argument may originally have been, it is, in Theaetetus, at best a fragmented reconstruction that Socrates relates for his own reasons , shorn of Protagoras’s explanatory context. Hence, while Plato and Socrates could be trying their best to represent Protagoras’s sophistic point of view, a reader cannot gauge the strength of their determination to speak fairly about a theory with which they strongly disagree. But that said, let’s proceed as though Socrates’s motives are pure. According to his account, Protagoras claims that man is the measure of all things, “of those which are, that they are, and of those which are not, that they are not.” The meaning of this assertion, Socrates says, is that “however each thing appears to me to be, this is how it is for me, and likewise, each thing is how it appears to you.” Hence, in Protagoras’s view, the wind is cold for the person who feels chilly but not for another who feels comfortable. The appearance of things, therefore, as perceived, felt, and understood by an individual, constitutes knowledge, “for however each man perceives them to be, it’s likely that this is the case for him.” Socrates immediately objects to Protagoras’s contention, protesting the absurdity of a proposition that “nothing is one thing itself in itself,” that things can be simultaneously large and small, heavy and light, warm and cold, “that nothing ever is but...

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