Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece

By John Poulakos

An expert in rhetoric offers a new perspective on the ancient concept of sophistry, exploring why Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle found it objectionable.

In Sophistical Rhetoric in Classical Greece, John Poulakos argues that a proper understanding of sophistical rhetoric requires a grasp of three cultural dynamics of the fifth century B.C.: the logic of circumstances, the ethic of competition, and the aesthetic of exhibition. Traced to such phenomena as everyday practices, athletic contests, and dramatic performances, these dynamics defined the role of sophistical rhetoric in Hellenic culture and explain why sophistry has traditionally been understood as inconsistent, agonistic, and ostentatious.

In his discussion of ancient responses to sophistical rhetoric, Poulakos observes that Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle found sophistry morally reprehensible, politically useless, and theoretically incoherent. At the same time, they produced their own version of rhetoric that advocated ethical integrity, political unification, and theoretical coherence. Poulakos explains that these responses and alternative versions were motivated by a search for solutions to such historical problems as moral uncertainty, political instability, and social disorder. Poulakos concludes that sophistical rhetoric was as necessary in its day as its Platonic, Isocratean, and Aristotelian counterparts were in theirs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781611171808

Book preview

Introduction

During the last twenty-four centuries, the story of the Greek sophists has been told many times over by historians, philosophers, philologists, and others. Today, the narrative repertoire on Hellas' early rhetoricians includes stories about a suspect epistemological and moral doctrine (Plato), a necessary moment in the history of philosophy (Hegel), a unique cultural phenomenon (Nietzsche), and a profound intellectual movement (Jaeger, Kerferd). From the outset, one is struck by the story's variations, variations that can be attributed to the personal preoccupations and intellectual orientations of their authors or the peculiar concerns of the epochs in which the authors and their readers lived. But the most remarkable feature of the story is its persisting appeal despite several kinds of adversity, including the loss of original texts, hostile reviews by unsympathetic commentators, and the scholarly excesses of literal-mindedness on the one hand and overinterpretation on the other.

Even though each version of the story highlights some things while shading others, all versions converge on one point—the story is important enough to be taken into account. Regardless of the interests each version serves, the sophists of the fifth century B.C. have proved time and again provocative enough to have attracted both detractors and defenders. At present, they are enjoying considerable popularity as their defenders seem to outnumber their detractors. This was not always so. But the scholarship of the last one hundred and fifty years seems to have restored the sophists' tainted reputation of intellectual dishonesty and moral indecency. For example, Plato's questionable tactics of dismissing them all too easily have been exposed repeatedly (Havelock, Irwin, Vickers), while some sophistical fragments have been shown to be intellectually meritorious (Untersteiner, Guthrie, Kerferd). As a result of this studied emancipation, the sophists are being read more receptively today than in the past. So much so, in fact, that sophistry is in danger of becoming the new orthodoxy in the study of Hellenic and other rhetorics.

Although sympathetic to the sophists, I am not interested in rehabilitating them once more. Hegel, Grote, Nietzsche, and others in the nineteenth century did that, and there is no sense in repeating their admirable work. Nor am I interested in crying foul in the face of the pre-nineteenth-century unflattering portrayals of the sophists. Plato and his disciples said what they had to say. If, as a result, the sophists and their rhetoric were slighted, the injury has been identified and redressed. The fact is that the sophists are no longer dismissed or ignored in the histories of Western thought; and this fact must be the starting point of any contemporary study about them. But if this is so, there is little to be gained by arguing, once again, that Plato was wrong or unfair when it came to the sophists. There is even less profit in the reactionary argument that the only kind of rhetoric is the sophistical. The first argument suffers from the conservative safety of language without history¹ while the second suffers from the reverse. If we are to make some sense out of the sophists today, we need to ask why their rhetoric turned out the way it did, not whether Plato was right or fair. Perhaps this question could not have been asked before some of Plato's awesome power had been challenged; but today it can. As I pointed out earlier, the sophists are presently being read more sympathetically than ever before.

Even so, recent readings vindicating them share a remarkably similar set of assumptions with earlier readings vilifying them. Like their predecessors, many modern commentators assume that the discourses attributed to the sophists are stable objects of investigation; objects, that is, that can be explored disinterestedly, examined closely, and possessed epistemologically. Second, they assume that we, the present interpreters, can indeed recover and have access to the past-as-it-was and can disregard, untroubled, the distance separating our times, our society, and our culture from that of the ancients. Third, they assume that human understanding remains constant from one period of history to another, and, therefore, some aspects of the past inform parallel aspects of the present. Fourth, they assume that knowledge of something from the past is good either in itself or because it can enable us to imitate the splendid achievements of our ancient predecessors and avoid their errors. On the basis of these assumptions, most commentators have sought to inform us about the sophists and their doctrines, to offer us access to what is inaccessible to the untrained eye and thus enlarge our learnedness and deepen our appreciation on a matter whose significance is presumed by virtue of its location in the very distant past.

Perhaps these assumptions were useful during the nineteenth century, a time during which the pioneers of classical philology organized and codified the materials of antiquity. But in the light of recent developments in historical and literary studies, these assumptions are at least questionable. In particular, historians are no longer regarded as disinterested observers who simply describe how things were, but rather as interested parties who, consciously or unconsciously, affect the shape of their investigations. Similarly, the notion that human understanding remains unaltered from one historical moment to another and from one society to another has in more recent times been superseded by the notion of time- and place-dependent understandings. Third, the view that the past is recoverable as it really was has yielded to the view that any discussion of the past constitutes an interpretive construction from a particular perspective of the present. Fourth, the idea of timeless history has been replaced by that of present histories (historical statements are always made from and are influenced by one's life in the present).

My own biases as a commentator are informed by these latter preferences. Accordingly, I treat past texts not as fixed monuments to be consumed cognitively but as elusive documents that can stimulate readers to rethink the constitution of their own lives and to entertain possibilities for their reconstitution. As I discuss the sophists and their early receptions, I seek neither to add to an already crowded store of detailed scholarship about their doctrines nor to deepen our sufficiently deep appreciation of Hellas' first intellectuals. Approaching sophistical rhetoric as a fertile field of study, I attempt to cultivate perspectives on such interrelated issues as the cultural situatedness of rhetoric, the production of belief, the meaning of authority, the linguistic empowerment or enfeeblement of the individual, the structure of sociopolitical relations, and the complexities of human communication. As I do so, I assume that one studies the past not in order to become familiar with it, and thus learned, but in order to make sense out of and come to terms with some of the irresolutions of the present. At the same time, I assume that one looks at the past futuristically, so as to go beyond it, to forget it even temporarily, to work against its burdens, and thus to become able to express the hitherto unexpressed. This is not to say that one can appropriate the past as one pleases; nor that the past can be imported intact into the present. Rather, it is to say that a given look into the past is motivated by considerations grounded in the present. At the same time, such a look constitutes an attempt to encounter what opposes and problematizes one's motives and understandings. In short, the past provides neither ready-made solutions to the problems of the present nor hard-won understandings that can be twisted at will. If it is true that the past offers assistance and comfort, it is also true that it offers resistance and discomfort. In view of these considerations, past works are valuable not in themselves but because they can prompt subsequent readers to see themselves doubly: first, as vulnerable subjects susceptible to the forces of the world before them and around them, and second, as active agents capable of influencing the shape and direction of their own worlds.

On these terms, a thorough discussion of sophistical rhetoric requires that we consider the sophists' cultural predicament, their fragmentary texts (Diels and Kranz), and representative instances of the history of their early reception. The purpose of such a project, however, is not to correct prior views on the sophists and offer truer interpretations, nor is it to resolve conflicts between competing interpretations. As I have said, my intention is to treat the rhetoric of the sophists so as to stimulate some new thinking on our own rhetorics. But because the sophists' discourses are generally recounted by non-sophists, sophistical rhetoric can only be the result of derivation and extrapolation.

This book situates the sophists in the cultural environment of the latter half of the fifth century B.C., and argues that their rhetoric was shaped by the logic of circumstances, the ethic of competition, and the aesthetic of exhibition. Second, it examines the preserved textual materials of and about the sophists, and derives a rhetoric that can be called sophistical. Third, it considers three major receptions of sophistical rhetoric: the Platonic, which sought to eliminate it by exposing its disregard for ethical and epistemological criteria; the Isocratean, which tried to harness its energy by putting it in the service of pan-Hellenism; and the Aristotelian, which attempted to temper its excesses by correcting its errors in reasoning and readjusting its direction and purposes in the name of theory. Insofar as echoes of these three receptions can still be heard, I argue that the Platonic, Isocratean, and Aristotelian receptions are not simply three isolated individualistic reactions, but three typical responses to sophistical rhetoric.

During the time between the fifth century B.C. and the present, many a commentator of Hellenic antiquity has touched upon the sophists. But as I have indicated, contemporary understanding is not simply a function of an exhaustive list of prior works on a given subject—representative receptions do suffice. The conceptual lines I have drawn, then, provide primarily a background against which I put forth my views of sophistical rhetoric. As I discuss the three fourth-century receptions and the three corresponding understandings to which they point, I show that sophistical rhetoric opposes regulative practices, resists appropriation, and frustrates corrective schemes. So conceived, the perspective I am proposing helps explain why previous scholarship has, with few exceptions, sought to discredit sophistical rhetoric, or deny it the role of shaping human agency and affecting the public sphere.

Since the sophists' own texts have not survived, and since all we have are second-hand accounts and critical commentaries about them, reception theory provides a convenient theoretical framework for the available material. A particular reception tells us not only how a given commentator has construed the sophists but also under which version of rhetoric the commentator was toiling, what questions (s)he was trying to answer, and what specific tasks (s)he was attempting to accomplish. Moreover, a given set of receptions indicates how sophistical rhetoric fared in a given epoch and invites us to explain why it was treated in a particular manner during a particular historical moment. Finally, the various receptions at our disposal not only present us with several historical vantage points from which to see sophistical rhetoric; they also demand that we take them into account as we formulate our own reception. Thus, it would not be unfair to say that this book constitutes a reception of receptions.

As first advanced by Hans Robert Jauss,² reception theory sought to provide an alternative to the two most dominant approaches to literary studies during the late 1960s—Marxism and Formalism. Jauss argued that while Marxism focuses on how a work was produced and Formalism on how a work is represented, neither approach pays adequate attention to the way the work was received by its initial as well as its subsequent audiences. Asserting that literature's impact is a significant part of its social function, Jauss noted that the historical life of a literary work is unthinkable without the active participation of its addressees. In so doing, he linked the historical study of literature to the rhetorical tradition, a tradition whose principal concern has always been the influence of an address on its audience.

Objecting to the notion of objectivity in history, Jauss rejects attempts to ground the history of literature on a collection and classification of past literary data. His rationale is that a literary work is not an object in itself but something that acquires an eventful character every time it is read by a reader who realizes its uniqueness when comparing it to other works (s)he has read. In his words, a literary work is more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers and that frees the text from the material of the words and brings it to contemporary existence. Still, a work's impact will fade with the passage of time unless future readers rediscover and respond to it or unless future authors undertake to imitate, outdo, or refute it.

Jauss points out that the reception of a literary work takes place not in a vacuum but within a system of expectations determined in part by the reader's pre-understanding of the work's genre and his/her understanding of the forms and themes of already familiar works. Through implicit or explicit allusions, overt or covert signals, and hints or announcements, the work evokes the reader's horizon of expectations and then proceeds to vary, correct, alter, or reproduce it. To the extent that a work is received in ways that meet the audience's horizon of expectations, it can be said to perpetuate the prevailing aesthetic norms, to reinforce familiar literary practices, and to fulfill the need for their confirmation and reproduction. But insofar as it is received in ways that deny, negate, frustrate, or surpass the audience's expectations, it can be said to call into question familiar experiences, to demand the apprehension of yet unthought thoughts, and to create a distance between itself and the existing horizon of expectations. In either case, the worth of a work and the status of the horizon of expectations at a given time and place are determined by the ways in which a work is received both by its earliest as well as its later audiences.

Attempting to specify how a work is understood, Jauss discounts the idea that a work possesses a timeless objective meaning that can be discovered by its readers through mere absorption in the text. At the same time, he dismisses the notion that a work can be understood from the perspective of the past, or that of the present, or that of the verdict of the ages. Because a past work was produced within one system of expectations and because a present interpreter exists within another, the proper understanding of a text always entails a fusion of the two horizons. In this way, reception theory argues for placing oneself within a process of tradition in which past and present are constantly mediated. In doing so, it avoids the extremes of classical philology, which claims to interpret ancient texts objectively, and modernist criticism, which often disregards their historical character.

It is quite possible that a work may not be understood properly by its first readers, even if they realize the need for a fusion of the horizons of the past and the present. Once in a while, a work deviates from the horizon of expectations of its time so greatly that its first audience cannot grasp its virtual significance. In such cases, the work either recedes into oblivion or reemerges at a later time, when the horizon of expectations has been constituted so as to accommodate now what it previously could not. As Jauss puts it: The distance between the actual first perception of a work and its virtual significance…can be so great that it requires a long process of reception to gather in that which was unexpected and unusable within the first horizon. Insisting that the new must be treated not only as an aesthetic but also as a historical category, reception theory analyzes literature diachronically and seeks to find how a given work was first received, during which period was its newness first realized, or under what pre-understandings it was made to reemerge from the past.

A strictly diachronic analysis of a literary work, however, runs the risk of ignoring the fact that every work always exists in the present, alongside other works from other areas (i.e., art, law, economics, science, politics). On the other hand, a strictly synchronic analysis runs the risk of treating works whose understanding has been conditioned by a long history of reception as if they were products of the present. Dismissing the notion that everything that happens contemporaneously is equally informed by the significance of this moment, Jauss argues that the historicity of literature comes to light at the intersections of diachrony and synchrony. Endorsing Kracauer's notion of the non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous, Jauss theorizes that the horizon of expectations in a given historical moment can be conceived as that synchronic system in relation to which literature that appears contemporaneously could be received diachronically in relations of noncontemporaneity, and the work could be received as current or not, as modish, outdated, or perennial, premature or belated.

Jauss concludes his theory by returning to the rhetoricity of literature, its capacity to affect its readers by modifying their horizon of expectations and, consequently, their actions. Convinced that the imitative presuppositions of traditional literary sociology and of contemporary structuralism miss the "socially formative function of literature, he posits that reception theory emphasizes that very function by considering the difference between the literary and the historical horizons of expectation. The historical horizon is mainly determined by and seeks to preserve actual experiences, while the literary goes beyond this preservation as it also anticipates unrealized possibility, broadens the limited space of social behavior for new desires, claims, and goals, and thereby opens paths of future experience."

This brief account of Jauss' theory of reception is not meant as a preview of a mold within which all that follows in this book is made to fit. Rather, it is meant as an announcement of my understanding of and approach to the task before me. As will become evident, however, Jauss' theory is helpful only part of the time.

Although I do not wish to advance a lengthy critique of reception theory, I nevertheless must point out that my gravest reservation about Jauss' formulation regards his conceptualization of reading. Reading is far from a disinterested activity. Because human perception is highly selective and active in constructing meaning, because we as readers are taught to read in certain ways, and because we exist within a sociopolitical milieu, we read guided not only by a particular horizon of literary expectations; we also read with specific interests in mind. This means that the impact of a given work is not simply received or felt by its readers—it is also made by them. That is at least one reason why the readings of a work, both within a period and across periods, are often less uniform than conservative methodologists would like.

With this reservation in mind, I want to touch on some areas of Jauss' theory that do not fit my subject matter exactly. To begin with, it seems that a proper discussion of sophistical rhetoric would require access both to the sophists' works themselves and to the receptions of these works. But while we have access to a great many receptions, we have only a few, secondhand specimens of sophistical texts. To complicate things further, we do not know what of the sophists' writings their commentators from antiquity had read. Therefore, we can only go by the commentators' accounts of what the sophists said, even if those accounts may be the result of reputation, hearsay, or memory rather than close readings. In this book, then, sophistical work refers not to an autonomous text written by one sophist or another but to a title of a work, a phrase, a statement, or a speech whose authorship is attributed to a particular sophist. The problem, however, is not so much one of authenticity as one of response—I am concerned less with verification and more with critical reception. Accordingly, I do not intend to discern whether the sophists did in fact say what is attributed to them; rather, I intend to examine the responses the so-called sophistical materials drew. In this regard, I pay more attention to those who undertook to imitate, outdo, or refute the sophists (Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle), and less attention to those who sought to chronicle their lives and report their doctrines (Xenophon, Philostratus, Diogenes Laertius).

Second, the horizon of expectations within which a particular reception of sophistical rhetoric was produced is not especially easy to reconstruct. If, as Jauss argues, a critical response is shaped in part by the reader's pre-understanding of, and familiarity with, certain genres or the forms and themes of other works, it would seem that a given reception requires that we have some idea of its author's acquaintance of other works. However, it is virtually impossible to know with any degree of certainty what other works a particular author had read before writing a reception of the sophists. And even if we did know, it would be equally impossible to establish how those other works colored the author's reading of sophistical rhetoric. Thus we are faced with a difficult methodological issue: Can we realistically reconstruct the horizon of expectations within which an author's reception was shaped by becoming familiar with all the author might have read before writing a particular reception? And even if we were to grant that we might be able to in the case of a single author, the problem seems insurmountable when many authors are involved. On the assumption that we write not only in response to what we read but also in response to our own circumstances, the reception of each author discussed in this book will be treated as a response to both his view of the sophists' discursive practices and to the prevalent issues of his time. What these issues were will be construed from the author's own allusions to them and from historians' commentaries on the period under study.

Third, whether we are looking at a past work or its past reception, the perspective of the present is unavoidable. And even though we may not disregard the historical character of the work or its reception, our understanding of either can only be from the perspective of the present. What follows in this book is the result not so much of a perfectly controlled fusion of different horizons as of a present reception informed by three receptions from the past—Plato's, Isocrates' and Aristotle's. If I seem to privilege the present, I do so out of necessity, not out of presumption. I do not believe that the most recent interpretation of a work is also necessarily the best. In other words, I do not claim to understand sophistical rhetoric more correctly or better than my predecessors. I only claim that, insofar as my reception is the beneficiary of their labors, it covers more ground than theirs. I also claim that to the extent that my reception is conditioned by some of the concerns of our modernity, it may prove more useful to my contemporaries. When another period dawns, this reception, too, will have to make room for others.

Notes

1. Edward W. Said, Beginnings (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 13.

2. All quoted material in the following discussion is from Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 19–41.

Chapter 1

Sophistical Rhetoric and Its Circumstances

The first generation of sophists burst on the scene of the Hellenic culture some time in the middle of the fifth century B.C. and exited some time during the early part of the fourth, leaving behind an ambiguous legacy, many disciples, and a host of thorny questions. On account of their moment in history, the sophists can be said to have been both the beneficiaries and benefactors of an age of cultural exuberance, political expansion, economic growth, intellectual experimentation, and robust artistic expression. By most standards of historical judgment, the fifth century was a remarkably exciting age, and it was the sophists' good fortune to have been part of it. Still, some scholars of Hellenic antiquity insist on studying the sophists apart from the culture, focusing simply on their brief biographies, essential doctrines, or unique contributions to the edifice of Western thought. In so doing, these scholars inevitably assign the sophists doctrines that, in themselves, make little or no sense unless they are forced to fit the design of such trans-historical frameworks as the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of education, or, more recently, the history of rhetoric. While such a compromise may be necessary when we cut across many centuries and thinkers, it is, nevertheless, a compromise that lacks the texture and the color afforded by a focus on the specific cultural setting of a particular group of thinkers. If we are to go beyond the limits of a set of sketchy biographies, essentialized doctrines, or contested contributions to posterity, we need to follow the sophists' trails in Hellenic antiquity. More specifically, we need to look for their starts and stops, instances of convergence with and divergence from others, the overall pattern of their movement, as well as their collective predicament within the cultural terrain in which they lived and achieved notoriety.¹

Still, studying a group of intellectuals exclusively in the light of their age has its limitations. Although an age is more than the sum of the events and notions that can be said to have made it an age, it is still mainly an abstraction that leaves its makers out of account. But if this is so, the point is to favor neither an age nor its makers as individuals. Rather, the point is to show a reciprocal influence between the two, to ask, that is, how the age shaped the makers and how they, in turn, helped shaped it. Only then can we advance a sensible understanding of either.

Prior scholarship on the sophistic movement has sought to explain its emergence by account of the favorable intellectual climate in Periclean Athens, the Hellenic cultural center to which most celebrated sophists were drawn.² Although plausible, this explanation is too general and as such can account for the emergence of virtually everything (i.e., sculpture, drama, philosophy, architecture, science) in the Athenian culture. More importantly, such an explanation overlooks three crucial points. First, intellectual movements are born not in vacuo, but in the midst of a set of cultural givens of practice and thought already in motion. Second, they spring up not simply as a result of a conducive climate but in order to address particular circumstances and to fulfill certain societal needs. Third, they inadvertently grow alongside some established cultural practices and against others, producing innovative results despite the resistance of the tradition or the potential risks of criticisms that may eliminate them.

To understand sophistical rhetoric, then, means to specify the