The Temple of Set II Read online

  translation from the Greek to the English. And Plato himself could not anticipate this.

  The Chimæra: Your qualifications are entirely acceptable. Proceed.

  The Sphinx: The initial question raised by The Sophist is its raison d’être. Why should Plato have felt it necessary

  to include such a dialogue as this in his philosophy at all? Was it truly because the included lines of

  argument required exposure? Or did Plato intend the document rather as a gauntlet of sorts to be flung

  before the Sophists themselves?

  The Chimæra: I sense that the editors of this book ventured one explanation. Grasping it with a forepaw, he

  turns to page #958. Yes, here it is:

  The argument is hung on the figure of the Sophist quite arbitrarily. No real picture is given of the

  men who were the professional instructors of Greece for many years. All Plato does is ascribe to

  them every notion he disapproves. He detested the whole band of Sophists. To him they were

  shallow-minded, pretentious, superficial, mercenary - they were really doing what Socrates was

  charged with, corrupting the minds of the young.

  And this appears to be reinforced by the dialogue’s concluding statement, which seems to be little more than

  an outright vilification of Sophistry. He turns to page #1016 and quotes:

  The art of contradiction-making, descended from an insincere kind of conceited mimicry, of

  the semblance-making breed, derive from imagemaking, distinguished as a portion, not

  divine but human, of production, that presents a shadowy play of words - such are the blood

  and lineage which can, with perfect truth, be assigned to the authentic Sophist.

  The Sphinx: Obviously that is not an objective philosophical statement. It is a deliberate insult reached through a

  dialectical process which, in retrospect, seems a transparent parody of Plato’s more serious argumentative

  style. In most of the Platonic dialogues one feels that Socrates is not “managing” the conversation towards

  an end that he has conceptualized beforehand. But every twist and turn of The Sophist is designed only to

  channel the conversation into providing a part of that final statement.

  The Chimæra: But how would you have Plato compose such a definition, save by a summary of the component

  arguments preceding it?

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  The Sphinx: I quarrel not with the final assembly process, but rather with the fashion in which the components

  themselves were forged. For, you see, there are many ways along which each of those component arguments

  could have proceeded. Each, however, consistently follows a path derogatory to the Sophists. If the Sophists

  were in fact personifications of all that is erroneous and destructive in teaching, all possible paths would

  lead to the same conclusion, i.e. one derogatory to the Sophists. But this is not the case at all. See - He takes

  the book from the Chimæra and turns to page #973:

  STRANGER: They cross-examine a man’s words, when he thinks that he is saying something and is

  really saying nothing, and easily convict him of inconsistencies in his opinions; these they then

  collect by the dialectic process, and, placing them side by side, show that they contradict one

  another about the same things, in relation to the same things, and in the same respect. He, seeing

  this, is angry with himself, and grows gentle towards others, and thus is entirely delivered from

  greater prejudices and harsh notions, in a way which is most amusing to the hearer, and produces

  the most lasting good effect on the person who is the subject of the operation. For as the physician

  considers that the body will receive no benefit from taking food until the internal obstacles have

  been removed, so the purifier of the soul is conscious that his patient will receive no benefit from

  the application of knowledge until he is refuted, and from refutation learns modesty; he must be

  purged of his prejudices first and made to think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.

  THEÆTETUS: That is certainly the best and wisest state of mind.

  STRANGER: For all these reasons, Theætetus, we must admit that refutation is the greatest and

  chiefest of purifications, and he who has not been refuted, though he be the Great King himself, is in

  an awful state of impurity; he is uninstructed and deformed in those things in which he who would

  be truly blessed ought to be fairest and purest.

  THEÆTETUS: Very true.

  STRANGER: Well, what name shall we give to the practitioners of this art? For my part I shrink

  from calling them Sophists.

  THEÆTETUS: Why so?

  STRANGER: For fear of ascribing to them too high a function.

  THEÆTETUS: And yet your description has some resemblance to that type (the Sophist).

  STRANGER: So has the dog to the wolf - the fiercest of animals to the tamest. But a cautious man

  should above all be on his guard against resemblances; they are a very slippery sort of thing.

  Now let me rewrite the latter part of the dialogue. In doing so I shall move to eliminate the stranger’s

  instinctive or preconceived notion of what Sophists actually are. The Sphinx gestures at the page, and the

  wording changes:

  STRANGER: Well, what name shall we give to the practitioners of this art?

  THEÆTETUS: The characteristics you have enumerated are those the Sophists use to describe

  themselves.

  STRANGER: But I fear this ascribes too high a function to them.

  THEÆTETUS: To say that individual Sophists may not achieve the standards they have set for

  themselves does not disprove the nobility of their goal, nor their right to claim it as a standard and

  hence an identifying characteristic of their profession.

  STRANGER: I cannot find fault with that. But let us examine the Sophist from some other vantage-

  points.

  The wording reverts to normal, and the Sphinx closes the book.

  I do not say that the dialogue should have proceeded in a different direction. I merely demonstrate that it

  would have been possible. This fact - that it is possible -testifies to the looseness of Plato’s logic in this

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  instance. Rather than refining the definition of the Sophist by the careful elimination of inconsistent

  characteristics, Plato simply ignores implications which do not support his preconceived notions.

  The Chimæra: I’m beginning to see what you mean.

  The Sphinx: There are other examples which I could take from the text. But I think this demonstration sufficient

  proof of the principle involved. The entire dialogue is not an attempt to understand what a Sophist is. It is

  an attempt to denigrate Sophists. As such it is of no value as an exercise in logic or in the true process of

  reduction.

  The Chimæra: But now we are back where we started, enriched only by an irony of Socratic logic: We know what

  The Sophist is not, but we don’t know what it is. So we must consider why Plato felt it necessary to attack

  the Sophists at all. Why did he not feel it possible merely to coexist with them in friendly competition for

  men’s minds?

  The Sphinx: Here we must depart from the dialogue as a universe in itself. We must try to place it in context

  amidst a larger and more complex universe. The reason for doing this is that, viewed in isolation, The

  Sophist is logically invalid; this we have just proven. Seen against a larger background, however, it may

  indeed be significant. We attempt, like Archimedes, to move a world. For a p
lace to stand we have the

  existence of The Sophist; for a lever we have its bias. The world need move only a little, and we who push

  against the lever may count ourselves satisfied.

  The Chimæra: I follow you, but beware of unsubstantiated speculation.

  The Sphinx: The proponent of a viewpoint who feels secure in his position will not find it necessary to attack the

  mere existence of opponents. He may point out the fallacies in their arguments in an effort to hasten their

  understanding of his “correct interpretation”. But he will not see their “incorrect” views as a threat to the

  truth of his own. An attack against the very existence of competition is mounted when one is uncertain of

  the invulnerability of one’s own position. Permitted to exist, competition might pose a mortal challenge.

  Hence it must be destroyed without delay. Such a preemptory strike is justified by the rationalization that,

  while one has glimpsed an ultimate truth, more time is needed to refine the ideas to a form which may be

  understood by those of lesser intellectual acumen.

  The Chimæra: You are suggesting, then, that Plato may not have felt secure in his philosophy - that he feared the

  axioms upon which he based his logic to be false?

  The Sphinx: Let us not say that he feared them to be false. It is enough to say that he may not have been

  completely certain of their truth. Had he been, he would have ignored the Sophists.

  The Chimæra: Why should Plato have attacked the Sophists in particular? Was it simply because they were his

  only Athenian competition? That would make his motives rather materialistic.

  The Sphinx: Here we should bear in mind that we have no precise catalogue of individuals whom Plato considered

  Sophists. At various times he took issue with the ideas of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, and Protagoras, to

  name but a few theorists. Whether he considered the Sophists as comprising only specific individuals, or

  whether he considered Sophism more broadly to be composed of all challengers to his own philosophy, is an

  issue we cannot decide. If we are to look through Plato’s eyes via The Sophist, we can establish only that the

  Sophists were guilty of teaching according to methods too close to those of Plato himself.

  The Chimæra: You mean, I take it, by the process of cross-examination described by the stranger in the passage

  we considered earlier?

  The Sphinx: Precisely. I ask you to consider both the praise that the stranger accords the system itself and his

  unsubstantiated reluctance to credit that system to the Sophists. History contains many examples pointing

  to the fact that the most dangerous threats are those akin to the favored philosophy in all ways save one -

  which is considered to be crucial. Wars have been fought simply because men were unable to agree upon

  one name for the same god, or, later, because they could not agree upon the same meanings for words such

  as “freedom”, “democracy”, and “equality”.

  The Chimæra: Only two wars that I recall strike me as having made any sense: the Trojan War, which was fought

  for sex, and the Carthaginian Wars, which were fought for money.

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  The Sphinx: Very funny. But to return to the issue at hand, we have the evidence of that passage in The Sophist to

  substantiate this point. Plato regarded the process of teaching through cross-examination to be a standard

  of excellence in itself. Its use to teach anything other than pure philosophy, accordingly, would have been

  intolerable to him. Hence his extraordinary anger at the Sophists.

  The Chimæra: But we do know more about the Sophists than that. Even if we limit our scope to the school of

  Protagoras, we know that Sophistic thinking disavowed absolute knowledge. Despairing of attaining such

  knowledge, they regarded even its pursuit as worthless. So they taught a sort of relativistic pragmatism as

  the only sound basis for human affairs. Hence Protagoras’ famous statement that man is the measure of all

  things.

  The Sphinx: That is right. And we know that Plato was firmly opposed to this view. Perhaps our most convincing

  evidence of this is the inscription above the entrance to his Academy: Let no one ignorant of

  mathematics enter here.

  The Chimæra: I thought it was “geometry”.

  The Sphinx: Unfortunately for purists it has been recorded both ways. But either serves to illustrate the point.

  Plato saw in mathematics unshakable evidence that there was an absolute standard for the Universe. And

  where one such standard existed, it was logical to assume that there were others. Today humans regard

  mathematics principally as an applied science, but in Plato’s time it was considered by the Pythagoreans to

  be “pure”, having nothing to do with the gross and imperfect everyday world.

  The Chimæra: I presume that Plato would have been somewhat upset to learn of the Theory of Relativity, which is

  inconsistent with the notion that mathematics adhere to a fixed standard. But do I understand you to say

  that Plato was a Pythagorean?

  The Sphinx: Not in the sense that he had any connections with one of the Pythagorean schools as such. He was

  born in Athens in 427 BCE, and he was a disciple of Socrates from 409 to 399. Following Socrates’ execution

  in that year, Plato traveled abroad, absorbing Pythagorean doctrines in many of the Greek cities located in

  Italy and Africa. It was not until 387 that he returned to Athens to found his Academy.

  The Chimæra: That is interesting, but it does not constitute evidence that Plato endorsed the views of the

  Pythagoreans.

  The Sphinx: No, and for that one must turn to the Timæus, wherein Plato presents his concept of the Universe.

  Here he describes the five possible regular solids - that is, those with equivalent faces and with all lines and

  angles equal. Four of those represented the four elements, he said, while the dodecahedron represented the

  Universe as a whole. He also postulated that the various stellar/planetary bodies move in exact circles (the

  perfect curve) along with the crystalline spheres (the perfect solid) holding them in place. All of these

  theories were originally Pythagorean, as one may see from the writings of Philolaus and other avowed

  Pythagoreans. But we wander too far afield. Let us return to Plato’s conviction that the Universe was based

  upon absolute, not relative standards.

  The Chimæra: I presume that the Sophists did not consider mathematics as an invalidation of their relativism.

  The Sphinx: Whether the issue centered around mathematics or not is something we cannot know. We do know

  that the Sophists considered whatever evidence Plato offered insufficient to dislodge them from their

  position. From their point of view, the Sophists were champions of logic. They based their arguments upon

  what they understood to be “obvious” realities. And they drew “common sense” conclusions. What so

  antagonized Plato was not that they held different views than his concerning the primal forces of the

  Universe. Rather it was the intolerable insult - in Plato’s eyes - that they were not interested in that topic as

  a field for rational inquiry. Plato must have felt somewhat akin to Noah building his Ark in the midst of an

  ignorant and unconcerned society.

  The Chimæra: The Noah legend is not in our myth-cycle, if you please.

  The Sphinx: My apologies.

  The Chimæra: And so Plato wished to identify the primal forces of the Universe. This resulted in his famous


  Theory of the Forms, if I am correct. But I sense a weak point here. Plato was a finite being, and yet he

  desired to comprehend Universal absolutes. As perfect standards they would necessarily be infinite, since

  any measure of perfection must extend in all dimensions without limitation. It would be possible for a finite

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  entity like Plato to comprehend the infinite without distortion only if the infinite reveals aspects of itself to

  and through the finite. But the finite must have faith or trust that the aspects are undistorted in their

  presentation.

  The Sphinx: Precisely, and now we are getting to the crux ansata of the matter. For, you see, assumptions based

  upon faith or trust are logically indefensible, otherwise there would be no need to base them upon faith or

  trust to begin with. Plato, being a man of no mean intellect, was certainly aware of this. He feared that an

  intelligent Sophist might see it as well and proceed to attack the foundations of his entire philosophy as

  illogical. And so, in the dialogues, he constructed a very elaborate defense of his concepts according,

  apparently, to the most rigorous standards of the cross-examination system of the Sophists.

  The Chimæra: Statements like that are liable to get you into a great deal of trouble, I hope you know.

  The Sphinx: Only with those who underestimate Plato and interpret this as a slur against him. Quite the contrary,

  it is all the more indicative of his brilliance. The entire process of “logical reasoning” is ultimately circular.

  What humans loosely tern “cause and effect” relationships are not really that at all. They are rather

  observations of phenomena believed to occur consistently under identical environments. But logic cannot

  explain why electrons circle protons, or why the color red and the color blue are distinct, or why the

  Universe exists at all. Yet every one of our senses tells us that these things are so, and if we, as Descartes,

  deny the validity of our sensory input, we resign ourselves to insanity. Plato’s faith derives from no greater

  and no lesser observation that things are what they seem to be. Once that consistency is granted, all else

  follows.

  The Chimæra: If that is so, why should Plato have gone through all the trouble to create the dialogues? Merely as a