Socrates or Sophism?

If we were to create a hall of fame of the greatest educators of all time, some debates would take place as to who should be included. Yet if anyone qualified for the hall of fame of educators, it would be Socrates. Socrates stands as a giant in the history of educational philosophy. In this chapter, we will explore the importance of Socrates and his ideas—not only for ancient history but for today.

This gadfly of Athens did not just pop up overnight in the streets of Greece. He was a man with a mission, passion, and profound concern. Socrates in his mission (for which he was ultimately executed by poison) was driven by a kind of salvation, but not in the religious sense. Socrates was trying to save Greek civilization.

Why was Socrates concerned about saving Greek civilization? In his day, a dreadful crisis had emerged that posed a danger to the ongoing stability of Greece. This crisis centered on education. To understand that crisis, we have to back up a little bit and go back to the sixth century BC, which is usually considered the beginning years of the science of Western philosophy in what is called the pre-Socratic era.

The earliest Greek philosophers were not simply abstract dreamers or speculative thinkers. In addition to being philosophers, they were also the leading scientists of the period. They were concerned about questions of biology, chemistry, astronomy, and above all physics. They didn’t make an absolute distinction between the study of physics and the study of metaphysics. The word metaphysics refers to the study of things above and beyond or underneath the realm of the physical.

The pre-Socratic philosophers were looking for ultimate reality. The Greek word that captures the essence of their quest is archē. If you’ve ever read the New Testament in Greek, you are familiar with that word. The beginning of the gospel of John says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Or in a Greek translation of the Old Testament, the book of Genesis begins with the words “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). The Greek word that is used in both passages for “beginning” is this word archē.

But archē does not simply mean “beginning.” It can also be translated into English as “chief ” or “ruler.” Here’s how we see it come into the English language. You’ve heard of bishops and archbishops. You’ve heard of angels and archangels. You’ve heard of heretics and arch-heretics. You’ve heard of enemies and archenemies. Here, archbishop means a chief bishop, one who stands at the head of supreme importance.

The Greek philosophers were looking for not just true ideas but the archetypal truth—the arch-truths of ultimate reality, the truths that would explain every subordinate truth that we study in science. Thales, for example, tried to find the ultimate stuff out of which everything in the universe is made—the archē principle or the driving force behind everything. He came up with the conclusion that it was water because everything in this world is either liquid, solid, or gaseous. So he looked for some substance that had the capacity to manifest itself in all three forms, and the most obvious was water. To our minds, that seems primitive and perhaps naive, but if you look carefully at the analysis that Thales gave to this subject, it was profound, to say the least.

So the philosophers in the beginning debated among themselves over this archē principle. What is ultimate reality? An impasse came when the best thinkers, people such as Parmenides and Heraclitus, failed to agree on what is ultimate truth. As a result of that impasse, a new school of thought emerged in Athens. To describe this school of thought, we would say that its adherents were first of all skeptics. That is, they reasoned something like this: if the greatest minds of our culture, people such as Parmenides, Heraclitus, Zeno, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Thales, and Anaximenes, can’t agree on what ultimate truth is, then it must mean that ultimate truth is beyond the scope of possible human learning.

The only knowledge that we can possess, this school stated, is the knowledge of what we can see and taste and smell and touch and hear—the knowledge of this realm, the knowledge of the immediate presence in which we live. We don’t know whether there are absolute truths of morality or of being or of anything else. That’s the philosophers’ dream. What really matters is the day-to-day experience of living, and so we must direct our attention away from this quest for ultimate truth and toward an understanding of practical living.

Greek education thus shifted away from a pursuit of truth for truth’s sake to a pursuit of technique, methodology, and ways that the person’s practical concerns could be strengthened. The name of this school of thought was Sophism. The word behind this naming of the school comes from the Greek word sophia, which means “wisdom.” In fact, the very word philosophy comes from that root and contains the idea of “love of wisdom.” Before the Sophists, the prevailing view was that wisdom was limited to problem-solving in this life and in this world and was not to be involved in a quest for ultimate truth.

Words have come into our language from the Sophists such as the word sophomore, which simply describes a person in his second year of high school or college in America. When this word becomes an adjective, however, it takes on a negative connotation. Somebody who is behaving in a sophomoric way is not being mature and enlightened, but rather he’s puffed up with one year’s worth of study and now he thinks he knows everything. There’s also the word sophisticated, which in our culture has a fairly positive connotation. When we say that people are sophisticated, we might mean that they’re well-rounded, that they have an appreciation for the fine points of life, that they’re cultural in their orientation, and so on. Yet to be called sophisticated by Socrates would have been a gross insult.

The word that carries the most negative baggage from this group is sophistry. You may hear that word bandied about in the halls of political debate when one side says, “You’re just engaging in sophistry.” Sophistry is superficial, uninformed, or simplistic reasoning, a reasoning that doesn’t ascend to the higher principles. The Sophists started schools such as “how to get along in business without really trying,” and the most important feature of their school was instruction in rhetoric, which had to do with public speaking. Initially, the concern for rhetoric was that people master the craft of vocabulary and the proper use of words in public speech and expression, which is a perfectly legitimate enterprise. Along with the concern for rhetoric in the Sophist stream was training in the art of persuasion.

Remember that the Sophists were people who believed that truth itself is unknowable, so they created a disjunction between proof and persuasion. Think about this for a moment. Proof involves the presentation of solid evidence by cogent reasoning whereby the premises are demonstrated by their logical conclusions, whereas persuasion has to do with an emotional response in which a person may acquiesce to a position without ever really thinking it through. In other words, instead of responding to carefully conceived and constructed arguments, people are responding to slick forms of persuasion. This is where Madison Avenue was born—not in New York City but in Athens. The Sophists concluded: It doesn’t matter whether our speech is true. What matters is this: Does it work? Will it sell?

Socrates came into this environment and said that if sophism triumphs in our culture, it will be the end of civilization because this kind of skepticism, this kind of superficial persuasion, rips life out of the context of truth. Nothing could be discerned as true, and ultimately, according to Socrates, it will destroy ethics and moral norms by which people determine what is good and what is evil. If we cannot know the good, Socrates warned, ethics will disintegrate and civilization will resort to barbarianism.

Socrates argued that the first step for anyone to acquire knowledge is the admission of ignorance. Knowledge and learning don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur when we realize that we don’t know all there is to know but that we want to know truth—and that there is such a thing as truth. We decide that we do not want to determine what is true just by polling people, by reading the bottom line to see what people purchase, or by seeing what ads work in terms of sound bites and impression.

We must begin with an understanding that even if we don’t know what the truth is, there is such a thing as truth. To deny that there is truth affirms that there is such a thing as truth, because to say that it isn’t true that there is such a thing as truth means that something else must be true, so there must be truth. This is the kind of discussion that Socrates would provoke with his students. He made them think deeply and not be satisfied with a mindless skating over the surface of life. For that approach, he was executed.