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FOUR Sophistical Wisdom, Socratic Wisdom, and the Political Life Of all things the measure is the human—of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not. Protagoras (DK 80 A 14) For the human being, the unexamined life is not a proper way of life. Socrates (Plato, Apology 38a) How should one live one’s life? What are the values that one should seek to realize in one’s conduct? By what moral standards should our actions be judged, and how are these standards to be discovered? What legitimizes the laws that govern society? Are law and morality rooted in the nature of things, or are they merely matters of custom and convention? What forms of wisdom are involved in making sound moral choices in one’s personal and social conduct? Such questions mark a shift in the foci of intellectual inquiry, away from the sorts of cosmological and metaphysical questions that preoccupied Presocratic thinkers and toward a concern with matters of praxis, politics, and morality. This shift had some extent been anticipated in the writings of Archelaus and Democritus, who represent a bridge between the naturalistic and cosmological speculations of the “physicists” and the ethical inquiries of Socrates and the Sophists. During the second half of the fifth century, however, some thinkers and teachers who appeared in the Greek world abandoned naturalistic speculation altogether, centering their investigations on moral, political, and epistemological questions instead. This shift in philosophical interest brought with it new conceptions of wisdom that built on, enlarged, and in many ways departed from the legacy of the Presocratics. The fifth century b.c.e. witnessed an intellectual movement toward the human individual and the practical demands of civic and personal life. These “First Humanists,” as Guthrie (1968) has called them, realized both that the cosmological investigations of the natural philosophers might never culminate in “truth” and that all epistemological and ontological claims must be attenuated Sophistical Wisdom, Socratic Wisdom 87 by the role of the knowing subject. Consequently they concentrated instead on the nature of practical knowledge, particularly on the role of language in deciding practical, moral questions. I include in this group both the older Sophists and Socrates, although we will not find uniformity of opinion among these thinkers. Even so, several shared an interest in questions concerning moral or practical wisdom, the role of language and speech in acquiring it, and the sources of principles that can guide practical decisions, both personal and communal . The pursuit of such questions led to distinctively humanistic and practical conceptions of wisdom and to a preoccupation with logos—understood as speech and as reasoned argument—as the principal instrument of practical judgment. Here we find the emergence of a distinctive “art” of persuasive speech and the beginnings of the distinction between rhetoric and dialectic later articulated by Aristotle. We also find roots of the antagonisms between rhetoric and philosophy that become explicit in Plato’s writings and that persist into our own time. The conflict rests on radically differing conceptions of “moral truth,” “moral knowledge,” and the responsible use of persuasive speech. Since we have only fragmentary evidence for the actual writings of the Sophists, much of the available information about sophistical teachings comes from secondary sources, most particularly including Plato and Aristotle. Similarly , since Socrates apparently never wrote a book or otherwise recorded his convictions and teachings, we must depend on others, especially on Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle, for insight into what he believed and taught. The issues associated with this dependence are considered below, but as with the Presocratics, we must be cautious in any effort at reconstructing the thinking of these figures. We should have at least a general picture of the period in which they thrived and of the salient social, intellectual, and political conditions that engendered and shaped their thought. The older Sophists and Socrates cannot be understood or appreciated except in the context of Hellenic culture of the fifth century b.c.e., especially the culture of Athens. It was at Athens, more than anywhere else in the Greek world, that the philosophical speculations initiated by Presocratic thinkers converged and intermingled with other social and political events, so as to create the rich intellectual stew that nourished new ideas and new ways of viewing the relationship between individual, community, and nature.1 Several factors led to fifth-century Athens’s ascendancy as the center of philosophical activity, intellectual innovation, and instruction in the...

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