Plato’s Counterfeit Sophists (review)

What is at stake in sophistry, in determining who is or was a sophist? Håkan Tell fashions a sobering and persuasive story that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and implicitly almost all those since who call themselves philosophers have dripped poison from their mouths after returning to Plato’s cave, the drip-page forming human-shaped stalagmites that the philosophers labeled Sophists, versions of ancient golem. This rendition of the tall tale about the Sophists permits the philosophers to capture the chronological high ground, as well as the ground of autochthony.¹ The distinction between philosophers and Sophists did not exist in fifth-century texts, according to Tell (19). Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle worked overtime to insist on the distinction and to set boundaries.

The philosophers were here first—according to the philosophers. The lie about chronology is then compounded by a charge that the Sophists are interlopers in Athens, interested in filthy lucre instead of the truth. They are depicted as strangers to Athens rather than as figments of philosophical discourse within Athens, within the Platonic cave. The ancient Athenian philosophers decide to stain the Sophists, for example, through defamatory stories that the foreigners “hunt” the young men of Athens, and, like prostitutes, charge money for their interactions with the young men. Think here of the way in which Socrates/Plato characterizes Phaedrus’s erotic association with Lysias. The self-proclaimed philosophers’ counteroffer to the young, aristocratic men of Athens is a life that might be less than human, if we heed the words of Gerald Bruns, who describes a side of the philosophical life that is meant to function as a model for the disciples of Athenian philosophy, that outlines what one can expect by renouncing sophistry: “Socrates, barefoot in the snow, standing for hours in meditation without the slightest bother, drinking the night through without getting drunk, spending the night in bed with the most beautiful man in Athens without getting an erection” (2011, 14).

Before moving on to Tell’s evidence for his wide-ranging case in favor of the Sophists, I want to return to the opening question to address another relatively recent answer to it offered by Susan Jarratt in Rereading the Sophists (1991), since she recapitulates one of the key problems in this matter, and her arguments can still be heard in the hallways where teachers of the history of rhetoric and/or composition roam. In fact, Jarratt characterizes the audience for her work as teachers of writing. It is not clear that Tell knows Jarratt’s work. Her book does not appear in his bibliography— perhaps a case of people from different disciplines reading past one another. Similarly, Louis Gernet’s “The Origins of Greek Philosophy,” an essay from 1945 that makes a powerful case for avoiding the mistake of seeing the “new” philosophy in ancient Greece as bracketed from the old, is not listed in Jarratt’s bibliography.

Jarratt reveals that a motivation for her work had its genesis in a reaction to the power of negation rather than in an attraction to the strength and content of the Sophists’ work: “I was drawn to the sophists by the vituperation poured on them by their successors” (1991, xii). Like Tell, Jarratt works to undo what she declares is a false picture of the Sophists, a picture painted by Plato and the master classifier Aristotle (1991, xvi), both of whom are responsible for “discounting the ‘philosophic’ seriousness of [the Sophists’] project.” Jarratt points out that Aristotle in particular exerts a great deal of energy to make the case that the Sophists fall on the side of mythmakers in the muthos/logos dichotomy.² Jarratt corroborates, on a more general plane, Barbara Cassin’s assertion that the Gamma book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is a “war machine against the ancient Sophists” (1991, 13). Tell, too, picks Aristotle out of the philosophical lineup as a prime culprit in the smearing of the Sophists: “Aristotle will not allow philosophy’s origin to stretch back to the...