As the 5th century BC ended a group of philosophers called the sophists appeared. The word sophiste means either one who makes wise or possibly one who deals with wisdom. These sophists were traveling itinerary teachers and lecturers travelling far and wide crisscrossing trading in Sophia. It was Sophia – Wisdom. It was arête – virtue. It was not because you were rich or better born. You just have to be wise.
Some of them were good teachers some of them were not. A lot of their teaching came down to teaching quickness of wit in arguments so that their students could win a case in court or score points in political debates. Many of the sophists were regarded as too clever, critical and subversive because they were prepared to follow an argument wherever it might lead them.
When you go all out in search for truth you cannot tell in advance what the truth you are searching will turn out to be. The sophist Thrasymachus for instance argued that rulers and government makes laws for their own advantage and that there is no justice except in the interest of the stronger.
Another sophist Calicles argued that institutions and moral precepts were not established in the help of god but men themselves. And that man is imperfect is subject to shifting of moods these laws could not be relied upon.
Plato was also one of these sophists. He was born around 427 BC in the city of Athens. Among other things Plato founded was school of philosophy called the Academy which evolved into a first real university. But Plato is best known for writing a number of dialogues in which philosophical questions were discussed. Because he was a conservative spirit Plato made other sophists to be more subversive than they were. He was particularly disturbed by their argument that man is the measure of all things and that man has no way of knowing whether gods exists.
But conservative as Plato was he too was going to subvert old ideas simply by teaching that man should use their own brains and come to conclusions based on observations and reasoning.
This was after all what his teacher Socrates taught him. Socrates whom Plato loved was probably one of the most notorious sophists even though he himself did not want to be considered a sophist and never accepted pay for his teaching as all other sophists did. Socrates’ favorite past time was to argue with fellow Athenians and sting them out of their conventions and accepted ideas.
Socrates questioned everything ordinary people took for granted or preferred to leave unquestioned. He questioned some of the gods that his countrymen believed in. Greek art is filled with gods who kidnap, lie, steal, cheat and murder, and commit adultery. So Socrates reasoned if these things are bad in a man how could they be good in a god?
Socrates said, better listen to your conscience, listen to the inner voice that tells you what is truly right. And if you don’t know keep asking questions of yourself and others until you find out. This kind of free thinking approach was particularly disturbing to many people. He was a poisonous old man asking people everything shaking people’s foundations and beliefs. And so after Socrates was barely tolerated for decades as an eccentric nuisance he was finally put on trial in 319 with specific charges of impiety, corrupting the young and asking too many questions. Convicted by a very close vote Socrates was offered exile but preferred a sentence of death by poisoning as a martyr to fee inquiry.
300 years after Socrates’ death Cicero the Roman philosopher and statesman said that Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens. By wrestling philosophy from the gods and bringing it down to earth, Socrates also helped precipitate a crisis in Greek Religion. You might broadly define the crises as questioning civic religion and civic laws. And worshipping was part of being citizen – part of being a member of a political community. But neither the gods nor the civic laws had nothing to say about morality, real justice let alone the soul or what happens to the soul after death. And those issues were precisely issues that Socrates and the other sophists were most concerned about. If your first duty to civil law or to your conscious? If public and private duty clash what are you supposed to do? Which is more important, the individual or the state? None of these questions has an obvious answer. The novelty was that they were being asked at all. And once you start asking questions it is very hard to stop; you might even end up questioning God.
As the philosopher Xenophon wrote that people suppose that gods are born and that they have voices and bodies like humans but if oxen or horses or lions had hands and could draw with their hands and paint pictures as man do, they will portray their gods as having bodies like their own. So horses would portray their gods as horses, oxen would portray their gods as oxen.
Further more you only have to look around in the streets to see that bad men prospers and good men sometimes suffer injustice so either life is a matter of luck and that they are no gods or the gods are stupid, nasty and unjust with a very twisted sense of humor. Every Greek knew that these gods particularly enjoyed imposing tests on innocent suffers. How can you respect and unjust god? All you can do is to bribe them or appease them with sacrifices or prayers but even that seem not to work very well. As a young man in one of Plato’s dialogue concluded: Either there are no gods or if they are they take no care of man.
Another set of difficult questions has to do with the order of the world. Greek philosophers of nature called the physicists have been trying to answer the riddle of creation since the 6th century BC. According to the philosopher Anaximander fish are the ancestor of human beings.
Xenophanes who died in 476 BC noticed fossils and understood what they were. These were first approaches for moving people forward by developing scientific approaches to knowledge.
Hippocrates who founded the medical school applied the new approach to what was known then as the sacred disease – the phrase used for epilepsy. Hippocrates charged: I don’t belief that the sacred disease is more divine or sacred than any other disease but on the contrary the sacred disease has specific characteristics and definite cause. It is my opinion that those who first called this disease sacred were the sought of people we call witch doctors, faith healers, quakes or charlatans. If the patient is cured their reputation for cleverness is enhanced if the patient dies they can excuse themselves by explaining that the gods are to blame.
At the same time mathematicians like Thales borrowed geometry, arithmetic and astronomy from the Babylonians and Egyptians and improved on them. They found that the application of geometrical rules could help locate ships at sea and stars in the heavens.
Thales himself predicted the eclipse of 585 BC He was also military engineer and adviser to kings and other royals. He used geometry to divert a river. Other 6th century BC engineers used geometry to plan a tunnel 1 third of a mile long which conveyed water through a mountain. But even if the application of science could be such of this practical use and benefit, the discoveries were really made in pursuit of higher ends. The Greek philosophers thought that the universal truths of mathematics could reveal an immutable eternal reality behind the passing drama of everyday life. They believed that geometry could provide a model of timeless nature, just as pyramids were supposed to do. Plato suggested that the truths of geometry were not reasoned deductions of man from experiments from figures that people drew or constructed, but that they were ideal memories of the properties of ideal geometric shapes that existed in some timeless realms which reason could barely apprehend or understand.
Plato argued further that there is an eternal world of ideas – prototypes of the debased reflections of things that we have glimpses here on earth. This theory that we do not experience reality in the so called real world but only its dim shadow, this theory has haunted philosophy ever since.
At the same time the physicists were also asking what was behind life. Did everything start with fire or water or with other elements? The sophist Thales thought it all started with water and by successive evolutions it became other elements. Anaximander on the other hand thought it started with a spiritual force whose activity produced movement and order.
From these ideas there grew a tradition which is regarded as the “first principle” or if you put it another way, the prime mover of life which was regarded as the prime mover of life – in fact as God: A cosmic God who was not just responsible for creation of things but who stood for the ultimate truth and wisdom and harmony of things that you could not find on earth. And that you could not find either among the traditional gods on Olympus. This sought of the transcendent God was rather abstract and hard to imagine. And so Plato tried to produce a more accessible version. He began with the view that the ideal reality is perfect because it is immutable and changing. The objects that we see all around us on the other hand are inferior because they change all the time.
A perfect object would not need to change precisely because it was perfect. They were one kind of visible object however that was not inferior and that was the heavenly bodies. They change but they always change the same way all the time and their movement is always constant. To Plato such regularity, such constancy was very special and they could not happen simply by accident. They presuppose and signify a moving soul endowed with mind. Therefore Plato reasoned they must be a divine mind that moves the heavens. And this mind is God.
At the same time the traditional Greek gods and the civic religion were beginning to decline. This was partly because of wars they were losing their autonomy and increasingly becoming part of a bigger world state which told them what to do. So the local Greek gods were no longer having influence and appeal.
And as the city religion lost their hold at least over the elite, the Platonic religion of a cosmic God kept increasing in influence. Plato in one of his dialogues suggested that the human soul was akin to the stars. We come from the stars, he argued. And after death we return to them – to the celestial city of the stars.
This was a very attractive appealing idea one which had worldly implications. Because if there was such place as a celestial city then why should we not conceive its counterpart on earth less perfect naturally but something for the wise and educated men should strive for. And this became the prototype of what we now call the ivory tower, where as once a social active life was the aim and ideal of life, now the ideal was an escape to a contemplative life. As the 4th century BC ended Aristotle followed Plato in pointing to the value of the theoretical and celebrating a life of study that the philosophers and scholars enjoyed – the meditations on eternal things not the practical daily activities that have no permanency.
By the time of Aristotle who died in 322 BC Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander had totally ended the autonomy of Greek cities. The earthly city no longer offered the kind of noble aim which the wise man might live for. And so the sage took refuge and recluse in the heavenly city. This is where he will find consolation and strength to bring the movements of his soul into harmony with the movements of the heavens. And so the disillusioned citizens of Greece (disillusioned because of daily life of sorrows and wars) strove to make their escapes towards the city of the sky. This religion of the cosmic forces and the cosmic God was going to become part of Greek Paidei – the intellectual equipment that everyone who aspired to be educated had to have, so long after the 3rd century BC that is still very well with us in the form of universities and other academies of learning.
The search for wisdom by the Greeks was the search for perfection and repose of human spirit. In searching for wisdom, the Greeks were to undo or find themselves wrestling with accepted traditional customs and laws. Before Plato could ultimately reach wisdom he had to face an earthly struggle with traditions of men.
