In this dialogue Socrates discusses with his friend, Crito, the teachings of two Sophists, Euthydemus, and his brother, Dionysodorus. On the surface, Socrates seems to be praising their style of argumentation. He even recommends that he and Crito go to the brothers to take lessons in reasoning. Socrates states, “These two are first of all completely skilled in body, being highly adept at fighting in armor and able to teach this skill to anyone else who pays them a fee; and then they are the ones best able to fight the battle of the law court and to teach other people both how to deliver and how to compose the sort of speeches suitable for the courts…. They have now mastered the one form of fighting they had previously left untried; as a result, not a single man can stand up to them, they have become so skilled in fighting in arguments and in refuting whatever may be said, no matter whether it is true or false.” The reader might already question whether this is damning them with faint praise.
In the course of relating to Crito the back and forth between the Sophists and him, Socrates describes the preeminent value of the right kind of wisdom. He argues, “Even if all the gold in the world should be ours with no trouble and without digging for it, we should be no better off—no, not even if we knew how to make stones into gold would the knowledge be worth anything. For unless we also knew how to use the gold, there appeared to be no value in it…. Nor does there seem to be any value in any other sort of knowledge which knows how to make things, whether money making or medicine or any other such thing, unless it knows how to use what it makes…. Again, if there exists the knowledge to make men immortal, but without the knowledge of how to use this immortality, there seems to be no value in it, if we are to conclude anything from what has already been settled.”
Socrates also discusses with Crito those advisors to politicians who wish to dip their toes into both the worlds of knowledge and action. “These are the persons, Crito, whom Prodicus describes as occupying the no-man’s-land between the philosopher and the statesman. They think that they are the wisest of men, and that they not only are but seem to be so in the eyes of so many, so that no one else keeps them from enjoying universal esteem except the followers of philosophy…. They regard themselves as very wise, and reasonably so, since they think they are not only pretty well up in philosophy but also in politics. Yes, their conceit of wisdom is quite natural because they think they have as much of each as they need; and, keeping clear of both risk and conflict, they reap the fruits of wisdom…. Plausibility, is just what it does have, Crito, rather than truth. It is no easy matter to persuade them that a man or anything else which is between two things and partakes of both is worse than one and better than the other in the case where one of the things is good and the other evil; and that in the case where it partakes of two distinct goods, it is worse than either of them with respect to the end for which each of the two (of which it is composed) is useful…. Now if philosophy is a good, and so is the activity of the statesman (and each has a different end), and those partaking of both are in between, then these men are talking nonsense, since they are inferior to both.”
Socrates concludes by defending philosophy from the philosophers, not to mention the Sophists. “In every pursuit most of the practitioners are paltry and of no account whereas the serious men are few and beyond price…. Pay no attention to the practitioners of philosophy, whether good or bad. Rather give serious consideration to the thing itself.”
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