Democracy and Sophism

The work we read from the Classical Greek era is largely a response to – that is to say against – a philosophical movement or perspective called "sophism". 

Sophism
The Athenians didn’t have lawyers, yet, so when people went to court, citizens defended or represented themselves in a jury of their peers.  It didn’t take long for Athenians to realize that the better public speaker represented himself more successfully than the tongue-tied speaker, and that speaking well could save your life, or at least your property, and give you great political clout.  This gave rise to the need for  “Sophists” ("teachers" from "sophia": knowledge)  to teach public speaking.

During Socrates and Plato’s time, a man named Gorgias was the leading Sophist, and he wrote some how-to or textbooks on how to improve one’s “rhetoric”: ability to persuade.  In essence, what Gorgias taught is what you still learn in English 102 or law school: how to win arguments by speaking well and manipulating the law to your advantage.

What we know sophism also comes from one of Plato’s Socratic dialogue, named after Gorgias.  In this dialogue Plato has Gorgias admit that he is only interested in teaching students to win arguments, that his purpose is not to reach truth but rather victory, and that his students may therefore as easily use their skills to achieve immoral goals.  Of course Plato’s entire argument is that Gorgias’ school of teaching philosophy is both wrong and dangerous, so we need to be wary of accepting Plato’s representation of Gorgias.

Sophism is mostly associated with the phrase from another Athenian sophist, Protagorist, who famously said "Man is the measure of all things,” which we could take to mean: the jury of your peers, not God or the gods, not facts or objective Truth itself, will judge you; or that individual perspective is as close to truth as humans will ever get in this lifetime.  It means that when we mortals hear Agamemnon’s perspective on why he was killed, presented throughout the Odyssey, his perspective appears “true”, but when we learn Clyteamnestra’s perspective on the same act (in Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon) her perspective on the same act appears equally “true”, and then Orestes will offer up another equally compelling or “true” version of truth (in The Libation Bearers), and, according to the Sophists, that’s what we’re stuck with here on earth: not "truth" but endlessly competing perspectives on what happens and why it happens and what we should do about it. 

Sophism, Democracy and Courts
This is, basically, the view of “truth” we still use in the courtroom: we would certainly like to have all the facts when determining a legal case, but even when we don’t have those facts -- even when we don't have the "truth" -- we still need to render a verdict.

We see in the Oresteia that the Greeks were interested in how perspective seems to influence perceptions of thing like justice or even truth: if we learned Agamemnon’s story from chauvinistic Homer, we simply blamed Agamemnon’s death on Clyteamnestra’s inherent feminine weakness and sexuality; but if we learned the story from Clytemnestra’s perspective, we probably empathized with Clytemnestra and blamed Agamemnon himself, and so on.

We should recall that Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia when the Greeks were applying their system of governance – democracy – to their courts as well as to government, so Athenians would have routinely heard different people rise to defend their own perspectives before the courts.

The Problem With Sophism
When we debate the merits or problems with "sophism" today, we tend to use the term "cultural relativism" and discuss how "Truth" seems to be determined by perspective and culture.  The basic problem is obvious: if perspective determines truth, and there are infinite personal or cultural perspectives, how will we ever agree on the nature of anything? 

What I want you to see here is that the Greeks were already having this debate 2500 years ago.  Although the first play in the Oresteia (Agamemnon) is sophistic, the second (The Libation Bearers),examines (among other themes) the inherent problems associated with rooting "truth" in perspective, while the final play (The Eumenides) finds the solution that is still adopted by our own courts.

However, it will really be Plato who will make "sophism" a bad word, via his massively influential theory of Platonic Idealism.

On The Other Hand (note, that's ironic)
The fact that there are pragmatic problems with the sophistic perspective on knowledge does not invalidate the theory: although the theory makes it hard to get along in the world, that does not mean the theory is categorically or theoretically false.