Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry

Lyotard and Greek Thought Sophistry

Keith Crome

Lyotard and Greek Thought

Lyotard and Greek Thought Sophistry Keith Crome Lecturer in Philosophy Manchester Metropolitan University

© Keith Crome 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1238–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crome, Keith, 1965– Lyotard and Greek thought : sophistry / Keith Crome. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1238–6 1. Lyotard, Jean François. 2. Sophists (Greek philosophy)

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Emma, Tilly and Rose

Contents viii

Abbreviations Acknowledgements

x

Introduction

1

Part I The Place of Sophistry in Philosophy

11

1

The Sophists

13

2

Hegel and the Sophists

42

3

Heidegger and Sophistry

62

Part II

Lyotard and the Sophistication of Philosophy

85

4

Lyotard and Sophistry

87

5

Lyotard and Kant: A Sophistical Critique

107

6

Lyotard and the Sophistication of Ontology

122

7

A Sophistical Differend

146

Conclusion

159

Notes

163

Select Bibliography

176

Index

184

vii

Abbreviations Full details of all texts can be found in the bibliography.

G. W. F. Hegel EL HP I HP II HP III

Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1, Greek Philosophy to Plato Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 2, Plato and the Platonists Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 3, Medieval and Modern Philosophy

M. Heidegger AWP BPP BT HG MFL N IV PS

‘The Age of the World Picture’ Basic Problems of Phenomenology Being and Time ‘Hegel and the Greeks’ The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic Nietzsche, Vol. IV, Nihilism Plato’s Sophist

J.-F. Lyotard D DF DMF DP JG LR NS OSW P PMC SFF TPM

The Differend Discours, figure Dérive à partir de Marx et Freud Des dispositifs pulsionnels Just Gaming The Lyotard Reader Cinq cours de 1975 sur Nietzsche et les Sophistes ‘On the Strength of the Weak’ Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event The Postmodern Condition ‘Sur la force des faibles’ Towards the Post-Modern viii

Abbreviations

ix

I. Kant CJ CPR

Critique of Judgement Critique of Pure Reason

Others DK EGP MXG OS

SP

Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker edited by H. Diels and W. Kranz Early Greek Philosophy edited by J. Barnes ‘On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias’ in Aristotle’s Minor Works The Older Sophists: A Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker edited by Diels-Kranz with a new edition of Antiphon and of Euthydemus Si Parménide: Le traité anonyme De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia by Barbara Cassin

Acknowledgements The support of a number of people has been indispensable to the writing of this book and it is a pleasure to acknowledge that here. I would like to thank my colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University for their encouragement and advice. I would like to thank Martin Bell who ensured that I was in a position to work on this book when without his help I might not have been. Mike Garfield persisted in asking awkward, but necessary questions about sophistry, and whilst he cannot be held in anyway responsible for the shortcomings of my account, without his forcing me to think about the matters he raised it would not be what it is. My thanks should also go to James Williams for his encouragement and inspiration. I would also like to thank Jennifer Nelson at Palgrave Macmillan for her support and understanding. I am deeply indebted to Mark Sinclair and Ulli Haase. What I owe to them both is difficult to measure. I doubt very much that either would subscribe unequivocally or without reservation to any of the views expressed in this book, but the many philosophical conversations that I have shared with them have shaped it, and their friendship has sustained me whilst writing it. My greatest debt is to my family, they have tolerated my prolonged unsociability and without their love this book could not have been written, and I would not have wanted to write it. An early version of Chapter 4 first appeared under the title ‘Retorsion: Jean-François Lyotard’s Reading of Sophistry’ in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XLI, No. 1, Spring 2003, 29–44. Parts of Chapter 6 were published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 32, No. 3, October 2001 as ‘The Sophistications of Philosophy’, 277–99.

x

Introduction

The sophists are those who fought against philosophy, who did not accept what philosophy accepted. Jean-François Lyotard This book is the first volume of a two-part study of the significance of Greek thought in the work of Jean-François Lyotard. The second volume examines Lyotard’s interpretations of Aristotle. It is the aim of this book to examine Lyotard’s interpretations of sophistry. In part, it is my intention to show that Lyotard’s concept of the differend is articulated by way of a positive appropriation of sophistry. For reasons that I will make apparent in what follows, this, I hope, will in itself be of some importance to the continuing study of Lyotard’s thought and the deepening appreciation of its philosophical significance. Beyond this, however, my intention is to demonstrate that Lyotard attempts to determine the possibilities and limitations of philosophy as such by way of an interpretation of its relation to sophistry. The appeal to sophistry is a recurrent feature of Lyotard’s work. In the late 1960s Lyotard began a work on sophistic logic, wrote a brief analysis of Gorgias, and started a longer work which remains unpublished; between 1974 and 1976 Lyotard delivered a series of lectures at the university of Paris VIII on the subject of Nietzsche and the sophists; and in 1976 published an article entitled ‘Sur la force des faibles’,1 which took first place in the edition of the journal L’Arc devoted to him. The consideration of sophistry made in ‘Sur la force des faibles’ informs many of the articles published in the collection Rudiments païens (1977), and the short opuscule Instructions Païennes (1977). The considerable importance of the sophists to Lyotard is again made clear in Au juste: conversations (1979). That Lyotard should once more invoke the example of the sophists 1

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Lyotard and Greek Thought

in order to establish and clarify the stakes of Le Différend (1983) is sufficient to indicate the fundamental and enduring importance of the sophists within his work as a whole. Despite its constant and explicit presence, with the exception of a number of early articles by Jean-Michel Salanskis, 2 little attention has been devoted to the significance of Lyotard’s understanding of sophistry and the role that it plays in his writings.3 This neglect can partly be attributed to the fact that Lyotard never published a major work devoted to Greek philosophy or thought. This contrasts quite markedly with Lyotard’s interest in Kant, which issued in two major interpretative texts: L’enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire (1986) and Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (1991). It also contrasts both with his interest in Augustine, apparent from early in his career, and which finally, if posthumously, gave rise to La Confession d’Augustin (1998) and his interest in Malraux, to whom Lyotard again devoted two books: Signé Malraux (1996) and Chambre sourde: L’antiesthétique de Malraux (1998). By not publishing a major work on Greek thought, Lyotard differs quite significantly from his most notable contemporaries: Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault all came to publish important works on Ancient Greek thought and authors. Derrida published a major study of Plato – Plato’s Pharmacy; Deleuze, speaking of the reversal of Platonism, had, in the Logic of Sense, discussed the Stoics, Epicurus, Zeno, Lucretius and Chrysippus; Foucault had drawn attention to this aspect of Deleuze’s work in a major review ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’ published in Critique in 1970, and for his own part, devoted the second volume of The History of Sexuality – The Use of Pleasure – to the Ancient Greeks. Although The Use of Pleasure was only published in 1984, some eight years after the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault had already announced his intentions in that first volume, approached such subjects in his courses, and published work around this subject from at least as early as 1981. 4 It is perhaps for this reason that when Francis Wolff, in a volume of essays entitled Nos Grecs et leurs modernes, considers contemporary French philosophy in its relation to Ancient Greek thought, he treats Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, but not Lyotard.5 The fact that there has been little attention given to the significance of Lyotard’s accounts of Greek thought in general does not mean that this study emerges ex nihilo. The important advances that have been made in the understanding of Lyotard’s work in recent years stand behind this study, and have made it possible. However, because of the tendency to overlook the role that Greek thought plays in Lyotard’s work – and in particular the role of sophistry – it is necessary to say something about

Introduction

3

the particular nature of the reception of Lyotard’s work in order to further clarify the status and stakes of this particular study. The reception of Lyotard’s work in the Anglophone world was skewed by the pre-eminence of a relatively short study that Lyotard wrote in the late 1970s and that was translated into English in 1984 as The Postmodern Condition. In the same year a collection of articles by Lyotard was released by Semiotext(e) under the title of Driftworks. Although some essays and extracts from Lyotard’s longer works had been translated into English in the mid-1970s, these two works together marked the first time that Lyotard appeared as the named author of an English language book. The Postmodern Condition had the distinction, however, of being the first complete work by Lyotard to be translated into English. Of the texts that Lyotard himself regarded as his major works – his ‘real books’ – Discours, figure (1971), Économie libidinale (1974) and Le Différend (1983), the latter was the first to appear in English under the title The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988). It was followed by Libidinal Economy (1993), whilst Discours, figure is yet to be published in translation. Thus, considered simply in terms of the order of its publication, Lyotard’s work was received into the Anglophone world in a disordered fashion. Moreover, it was not through his early work – Lyotard had already published more than ten books in French by the time he published La Condition postmoderne in 1979 – nor by his major publications – Discours/figure or Économie libidinale – that Lyotard was made known to an English-speaking audience, but primarily by way of what was an occasional piece, a ‘report’ written at the behest of the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec on the subject of the condition of knowledge in the most highly developed societies. The success that The Postmodern Condition enjoyed, being taken up in, and contributing to, fashionable debates over ‘postmodernity’, ensured that this disorder affected the understanding of his work. For whilst it was certainly not the case that prior to the publication of The Postmodern Condition there were not texts available by Lyotard in English, it was this one text that established Lyotard’s reputation, and so great was the attention devoted to it, that Lyotard’s other, earlier works were neglected. It would perhaps not be any exaggeration to say that Lyotard became identified as a postmodernist and – as the editors of later, important collection of Lyotard’s writings remark – at best was seen simply as ‘an heir of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, and a philosopher of science and technology’.6 This understanding of Lyotard was a partial understanding, but the problem was not so much that the book that it was based on was itself

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Lyotard and Greek Thought

only partially representative of Lyotard’s concerns as has been claimed,7 but that the very prominence of this work carried Lyotard’s work over into disciplines and debates that abstracted certain themes and problems from it, and concentrated critical attention on those themes and problems alone. In other words, the principal concern following the publication and success of The Postmodern Condition was less with what Lyotard said than with what particular aspects of this one work contributed to certain fashionable controversies. The consequence of this was that, in large part at least, the philosophical significance of Lyotard’s work became obscured and for a time remained obscure. In response to the overwhelming concentration upon The Postmodern Condition there emerged a concern to look beyond the issue of the postmodern to other aspects of Lyotard’s work. The more philosophical appreciations of The Postmodern Condition had focused on the dispute between Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas over the status of the idea of communicative rationality, of discursive consensus, propounded by the latter as a corrective to the fragmentation of experience in modernity. 8 Lyotard’s critics and commentators now, however, began to appreciate that behind this dispute there lay a ‘systematic engagement with Kant’.9 In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard had appeared to appeal to Kant when he spoke of the role of paralogy in contemporary scientific discourses10 in order to expose the violence that Habermas’ ideal of discursive consensus entailed. Whilst whatever Lyotard owed to a reading of Kant remained more or less implicit in The Postmodern Condition itself, the influence of Kant on Lyotard was more obviously marked in the essay ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’ In that essay, which was published as an appendix in the English translation of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard employed the Kantian notion of the sublime in order to distinguish postmodern from modern art. The series of conversations with Jean-Luc Thébaud, published in English in 1985 under the title Just Gaming, gave further and more explicit evidence of Lyotard’s appropriative engagement with the critical philosophy of Kant. In particular, commentators and critics were interested in Lyotard’s appeal to and understanding of what Kant called ‘reflective judgement’. In contrast to ‘determinant judgement’ – a judgement so-called because it determines or prescribes the nature of the particular object that it judges according to categorial concepts – a ‘reflective judgement’ is a judgement made without criteria, a judgement in which ‘only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it’ (CJ IV). Aesthetic judgements, comprising of both judgements of the beautiful and the sublime, are reflective rather than determinant in nature. There

Introduction

5

can be no statement of what beauty is; but, to follow Lyotard’s account, beauty is said to exist when a certain case – an object, a work of art – given first by the sensibility without any conceptual determination, elicits a sentiment of pleasure that appeals to a principle of universal consensus. An undetermined agreement, an agreement without rules, thereby gives rise to a reflective judgement of ‘taste’ – the judgement that the object is beautiful. The sublime, however, ‘is different’, for ‘it takes place, on the contrary, when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept’ (PMC, 78). The sublime sentiment is felt, or perhaps suffered, on the occasion of an impossibility of showing, or presenting, an idea: ‘we can conceive the infinitely great, the infinitely powerful, but every presentation of an object destined to “make visible” this absolute greatness or power appears to us as painfully inadequate’ (PMC, 78). Such ideas provide no knowledge of reality, they give rise to no cognition; they also prevent the undetermined union of the faculties that gives rise to the sentiment of the beautiful, and so prevent the formation of ‘taste’. They simply testify that there is that which, although unpresentable, exceeds both cognition and taste. What was seen to be at stake in Lyotard’s attention to reflective judgement was the recovery of the initial indeterminancy of all thought, recurrently covered up in the history of philosophy by way of its appeal to an arche or first principle which grounds and determines thinking.11 Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that the judgement demanded by this indeterminancy ‘cannot consist in a choice between possibilities, but only and each time in a decision for that which is neither real nor possible’. It is thus a judgement that announces the irruption of the new and unforeseeable, by ‘means of which the Kantian idea of freedom defines itself in relation to the world’.12 The attempt to determine the philosophical significance of Lyotard’s work in relation to Kant was in part sustained by Lyotard’s continued engagement with the Königsberg philosopher. The Differend published in translation in 1988 was prefaced by the declaration that ‘two thoughts’ had ‘beckoned to the A[uthor]: the Kant of the third Critique and the historico-political texts (the “fourth Critique”); the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations and the posthumous writings’ (D, xiii), and contained several important analyses of Kant’s writings that appeared to many to determine the sense of Lyotard’s arguments. Peregrinations, also published in 1988, comprising of Lyotard’s three Wellek Library lectures from 1986, and ostensibly defining Lyotard’s ‘“position” in the field of criticism and the path that led [to it]’ (P, 4) concluded with an

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Lyotard and Greek Thought

elaboration of his work on Kant.13 In addition to these works, and the two monographs on Kant, L’enthousiasme and Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, there had also been a colloquium on Lyotard’s work at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1982, which found its ‘centre of gravity’ in the question of judgement and justice.14 The volume of essays drawn from the conference, published under the title La faculté de juger, comprised essays by Jacques Derrida, Vincent Descombes, Garbis Kortian, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Lyotard himself. Once more the contributions tended to emphasise the connection between Lyotard’s philosophical concerns and those of Kant. In addition to the influence of Lyotard’s own output and interests of the 1980s, the concentration of critical attention upon Lyotard’s relation to Kant was also informed by the developing interest in Kant on the part of other major French thinkers. The critical philosophy of Kant ‘became a major reference point in the publications’ of the 1980s.15 Thus not only did Lyotard’s reading of Kant provide commentators with a basis from which they could attempt to determine the philosophical significance of his work, but it also provided them with a potential point of focus by way of which they could assess his relation to the other major thinkers of his generation.16 Reading Lyotard through Kant was, then, both necessary and important, and work on this aspect of Lyotard’s oeuvre is ongoing, as is testified by the publication in 2001 of a special edition of Yale French Studies: ‘Jean-François Lyotard: Time and Judgment’. Yet such an approach has carried with it its own distortions and omissions. The concentration on the relation to Kant meant that the attempt that has been made to determine the philosophical significance of Lyotard’s work was made almost solely in terms of that relation, even when, and perhaps particularly when other influences than Kant were apparent. In his two important essays on Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy argued that in appealing to the irreducible heterogeneity of language-games, the multiplicity and diversity of the various utterances ‘constitutive of language’, 17 Lyotard had effected a reversal of Kant’s appeal to a unity of ends to guide or regulate reflective judgements. However, beyond Kant, or at least in addition to Kant, what informs Lyotard’s thinking at this point is his encounter with, and reading of, the sophists. It is the sophistical legein logou kharin as Aristotle characterises it (Metaphysics, IV, 1011b, 2), the sophists’ ‘pleasure in speaking’, or their ‘speaking for the sake of speaking’, that re-emerges in Lyotard as the basis for his thinking of language and – as this book seeks to make clear – complicates his engagement with Kant.

Introduction

7

If the attention that was given to Lyotard’s reading and use of Kant led beyond the narrow and intense focus on the issue of the postmodern, and provided a means to assess the philosophical significance of his work, it nevertheless still restricted critical attention to a part – no matter how significant – of Lyotard’s oeuvre. As James Williams has remarked in Lyotard and the Political, prior to Just Gaming there was little mention in Lyotard’s works of Kant.18 A question, then, for critics was if it was possible to discover a basis, a common thread, by means of which it would be possible to organise and assess Lyotard’s many apparently disparate works. Such a basis has been sought in the idea of the differend. For Lyotard the differend named a conflict between at least two parties that, lacking any common measure or means of expression, could neither be settled nor articulated as such. Elaborated in the eponymous Le Différend the idea of the differend was utilised by Lyotard in many of his subsequent writings. But for many commentators, the principle embodied by the differend, namely that of an incommensurability that manifested itself through, or as, conflict and suffering, could be retrospectively discerned as operative in Lyotard’s earlier works. Mohammed Ramdani, the editor of La Guerre des Algériens (1989), a collection of some of Lyotard’s earliest essays, written between 1956 and 1963 for the radical Marxist group Socialisme ou Barbarie concerning the Algerian struggle for independence, has suggested that Lyotard’s intention can, from the perspective of his later work, be seen to have been to expose a series of differends occasioned by the Algerian situation. In a text entitled A Memorial of Marxism: For Pierre Souyri,19 first published in 1982 under the title ‘Pierre Souyri: Le Marxisme qui n’a pas fini’, Lyotard himself described his drift away from Marxism, in part a result of his own analyses of the Algerian situation, by way of his experience of a differend with Marxism. The case for according the idea of the differend a centrality in the interpretation and understanding of Lyotard’s work is further strengthened by a number of remarks made by Lyotard. In an interview first published in 1994, Lyotard declared that his task in the future would be to ‘try to elaborate what could be called The Differend II’.20 This elaboration, he continued, made on the basis of the idea of the differend, would concern everything left out of The Differend, namely ‘the body, the sexual, space and time, the aesthetic’. Two of Lyotard’s posthumous publications – La Confession d’Augustin (1998) and the collection of essays presented under the title Misère de la philosophie (2000) – testify to his intention to make such an elaboration. But, in so far as these topics form the concerns of much of Lyotard’s earlier writings, this declaration

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already gives a foundation for unifying all of Lyotard’s work, both that preceding and that subsequent to The Differend itself. However, two other comments attributed to Lyotard have proved even more influential in establishing the centrality of the idea of the differend to Lyotard’s work as a whole. The first, reported by Geoffrey Bennington in Lyotard: Writing the Event, is Lyotard’s avowal that he had written ‘three “real” books (Discours, figure; Économie libidinale and Le Différend)’.21 The second remark, linking to the first, is Lyotard’s claim that The Differend is his ‘book of philosophy’. This claim, found, or at least found reproduced, on the rear cover of the French edition of The Differend,22 is confirmed and recited by Dolorès Lyotard in her foreword to the posthumous collection Misère de la philosophie. There she says that Lyotard declared ‘in a decisive, and to tell the truth, definitive manner that [The Differend] was “his book of philosophy”’.23 If the first of these two remarks serves to establish the priority of those three ‘books’ in relation to which Lyotard’s other writings are preparatory sketches and exercises, then the second has been held to announce a certain philosophical priority accorded by Lyotard to The Differend. Thus the motivation that informs the concentration upon the idea of the differend can be seen to be two-fold. On the basis of Lyotard’s remarks, the idea of the differend offers a means for both grasping the unity of Lyotard’s work and at the same time of clarifying what was his singular contribution to philosophy. For Jean-Claude Milner, the co-editor of a recent and important collection of essays on Lyotard’s work, it is just this exemplarity of the idea of the differend that permits a clarification of what in Lyotard’s ‘own eyes, merited the name of philosophy’.24 For Milner the fundamental thesis of The Differend concerns being, and the differend itself is primarily an ontological principle. In a far-reaching thesis, Milner suggests that the differend bespeaks a conflict at the heart of being and – in and by its inability to present itself as such, and thus make itself known – a confusion of what is originally established by Parmenides as a difference between that which is and that which is not. The radicality of such a thesis is to promise an interpretation, via the idea of the differend, of all Lyotard’s work in terms of its ontological import. In the same vein, and thus pointing to an important broadening of the identification of the significance of Lyotard’s work amongst critics, is an essay by Rodolphe Gasché, ‘Saving the Honour of Thinking’.25 In this essay Gasché identifies as a central concern of Lyotard’s work, a concern with ‘thinking itself’. In setting out to illuminate this concern by meditating on what it might possibly mean for Lyotard to attempt, as he has

Introduction

9

claimed in a number of places, ‘to save the honour of thinking’, Gasché is led to observe that the very idea of saving the honour of thinking implies, or at least can be understood to imply, that thinking having lost or abandoned its honour, has lapsed into ‘self-disgrace’. This observation leads Gasché to show that Lyotard’s own thought takes the form of an engagement with the fate of thinking as it has been determined in the Occident by way of philosophy. Accordingly Gasché is led to address Lyotard’s genealogy of philosophical thinking as it is instantiated in the ‘Reading Notices’ of The Differend and, in particular, those ‘Notices’ that concern Protagoras, Gorgias and Plato. It is perhaps one of the merits of Gasché’s article that it draws attention to, and even attempts to offer an account of, the role of these notices which otherwise have not been much commented on is assessments of The Differend. More broadly, however, the chief merit of Gasché’s article is that it brings forth the important role that Greek thought plays within Lyotard’s work, and thus it invites a sustained and systematic critical treatment of this topic. It is in relation to this growing appreciation of the broader philosophical significance of Lyotard’s work that Milner’s thesis is significant, and in terms of The Differend it has the value of making clear the ontological bearing of that work. The clarification of the ontological implications of the differend made by Milner is indirectly and directly taken up here. It is most directly taken up in so far as it has made it possible to recognise the central significance of one of the shorter ‘Reading Notices’ that punctuate the main text of The Differend, a ‘Reading Notice’ on the sophist Gorgias which proposes an interpretation of his treatise On Not-Being. More generally, however, and informed by a recognition of the overall importance of this brief Reading Notice, it is possible to pose the question of the ontological significance accorded to sophistry in The Differend. Similarly Gasché’s argument, which brings forth the importance of Greek thought in general to Lyotard’s work, also stands behind this work, most importantly perhaps in that it has made it possible to appreciate that Lyotard is a profoundly historial thinker, who engages the finitude and failure of thinking – or at least that form of thinking that is shaped by philosophy – from out of concern with its origins in Greece. The recognition of the role of sophistry in Lyotard’s work can be understood to build on both Milner’s and Gasché’s arguments – and indeed on the general appreciation of the broader philosophical significance of Lyotard’s work – and to complicate its terms. It is also important to recognise the contribution that has been made to the appreciation of Lyotard’s thought by the work of James Williams. In contrast to the privileging of The Differend evident in much recent

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Lyotard and Greek Thought

work on Lyotard, Williams’ has re-established the significance of Lyotard’s earlier writings – in particular Libidinal Economy. He has also shown that in its entirety Lyotard’s work is to be understood as a confrontation with nihilism. My account does accord a certain privilege to The Differend, but only in the sense that I argue that it provides a radicalisation of Lyotard’s account of sophistry. I do not make a claim for its singular importance amongst all of Lyotard’s works. Although I do not treat the question of nihilism as directly as Williams does, the last two chapters are implicitly directed to this problem, which is the political and philosophical problem of our time. This book sets out to examine Lyotard’s interpretation of sophistry. It is in this sense selective. I do not consider all of his works nor do I consider all aspects of those works that I do examine. I seek to read Lyotard’s readings of sophistry, and thereby show that Lyotard challenges – upsets even – the traditional philosophical account of sophistry. However, I also offer an argument for the importance of sophistry to the understanding of The Differend. Given the constant recurrence of the idea of the differend in Lyotard’s later writings, it would be possible to advance the arguments here beyond the works I treat, but that would require another book. Given that the argument that I present here attempts to show that Lyotard wrests sophistry from the traditional philosophical understanding it has enjoyed and that by way of this effects a delimitation of philosophy itself, I have found it necessary to set out in the first part an account of the philosophical treatment of sophistry. In Chapter 1, I examine the Platonic determination of sophistry; Chapters 2 and 3 consider the approaches to and evaluations of sophistry that are to be found in the work of Hegel and Heidegger. It is necessary to examine what Hegel and Heidegger say about sophistry not only because of its intrinsic importance, but also because both philosophers consider the historicality of philosophy and articulate a necessity to return to the origins of that form of thinking in Greece. In Part II I trace Lyotard’s engagements with sophistry, with ‘dialektike, the theses, arguments, objections, and refutations that Aristotle’s Topics and On Sophistical Refutations analyse and seek to bring within norms’ (LR, 360), and which Lyotard, reading with and against Aristotle and the tradition, seeks to restore to themselves.

Part I The Place of Sophistry in Philosophy

1 The Sophists

The antithesis between Socrates and the Sophists belongs in the main to the Platonic dialogues – not to the historical Socrates. It is the literary form in which the philosophy of Plato works out its development through the criticisms of contemporary opinions and doctrines. And even in Plato’s writings the antagonism is very unlike what later interpretations have made out of it. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic

Introduction: the problem of sophistry In a certain sense the question of who the sophists were, and for that matter what sophistry itself is, does not appear to pose any problem. That this is the case, however, is due to the constancy of a long-established and sedimented tradition which, stretching from the time of the sophists themselves until now, stands behind and conditions an almost uniform understanding of sophistry. For the most part sophistry is known by way of its bad reputation. According to this reputation sophistical argument is vain argument. It is vain argument both in the sense that, empty of any real content, it is without purpose, and also in the sense that, lacking any real content, such argument is motivated only by the desire for esteem. In short, the sophists are primarily known to us as quibblers who by playing on words make problematic issues that are not problematic, who indulge in mere logical argumentation simply for its own sake, and who indulge their own vanity in clever rhetorical displays. Indeed, from the end of the fifth century BC onwards, such is the weight of condemnation and scorn poured on the sophists that it is perhaps unsurprising that even the most eminent scholars of the period still accede to such judgements today.1 Scholars of the sophistic movement 13

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The Place of Sophistry in Philosophy

itself are, however, quick to point out the paradox: the period in which sophistry developed and flourished, 450–400 BC, was, it has been said, ‘in many ways the greatest age of Athens’,2 and, as the extant writings of the period testify, the sophists played a not inconsiderable role in the life of this politically and intellectually thriving city, helping to shape its culture. Perhaps there is no more pointed contrast to the traditional denigration of the sophist than the view expressed by Hegel, who in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy declared them ‘the teachers of Greece’. In the Athens of Pericles – Athens at the height of its political and intellectual influence over Greece – the sophists were prominent as itinerant teachers who sold their wisdom, who could sway an audience and assembly with their words and in particular, given the litigious Athenian environment, persuade a judge by way of argument. Indeed their legal competence was such that not only were they fabled for their courtroom rhetoric, but one of them – Protagoras – is said to have been called upon by Pericles to draft the laws for the Greek colony that was to be established at Thurii, in Southern Italy. No less significant than their political and juridical impact was the involvement of the sophists in the artistic and intellectual culture of Greece. The tragic dramatist Euripides was reputed to have been a pupil of Protagoras, the historian Thucydides a ‘disciple’ of Gorgias, and Socrates, if not himself taught by the sophists, was certainly familiar with their works, arguments and methods. In view of all this, and as varied as their particular motives might be, what is at stake for all those who devote themselves specifically to the study of sophistry is to rescue the movement from its bad reputation, and, as Lyotard has said, effect its restoration.3 As has often been noted the problem involved in any such attempt at restoring sophistry to itself, of disentangling it from its common, traditional, condemnation, is inevitably linked both to what has been handed down to us of the sophists’ work, and the manner in which it has been handed down. Even the relative privilege enjoyed by Aristotelians is not enjoyed by those who study sophistry: if the Aristotle known to us is certainly not the Aristotle who lived in the fourth century BC, philosophising among men, but a philosophical and philological construct, produced from a more or less anonymous body of work, compiled and edited in the first century AD without any definitive information of its order of composition and its philosophical structure, then at least there exists a corpus of work, amongst which it is possible to establish correspondences, transformations, and against which spurious interpellations can be discerned. In contrast, what remains of the work of the sophists is fragmentary, and the original fragments are embedded in testimonies

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or even interpretations of other authors, some near contemporaries, others not. In fact, of all the material that is available concerning the work of the sophists very little, almost nothing can be attributed directly to the sophists themselves. What has been passed down to us reaches us in a form that is abstracted from its original context, and more often than not it is set within the work of authors concerned not to preserve the sayings of the sophists but to establish their own philosophical arguments. It is perhaps tempting to imagine that the task of restoration would be akin to the labour of the picture restorer: the delicate removal of the additions of later hands – the various veils imposed by more censorious eras – or the stripping away of accretions of dirt and discoloured varnish, in order to lay bare the original painting in the naked glory of its original colours. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With the sophists, to strip away the additions and accretions would simply leave nothing. Thus, in this context ‘restoration’ can only mean something other than attempting an objective recovery of the work of the sophists; at best one is not simply condemned to interpretation, but condemned to the interpretation of interpretations. Given that without such interpretative testimonies there would be nothing left of the work of the sophists, it is possible to say that, in the first instance, what a ‘restoration’ of sophistry does mean, what it involves, is necessarily but somewhat paradoxically, a matter of working against whilst working with what testimonies there are that survive. Taking this into account, the ambition in this chapter is necessarily limited. Not only would it be naïve to assume that it is possible to say in a positive sense what sophistry is, to discover its true sense that has hitherto been hidden by the prejudices of tradition, but the very attempt to do so would perhaps miss the value of engaging with sophistry and what it has come to represent. Instead, what I seek to do in this chapter is to make clear what a ‘restoration’ of sophistry involves; or more exactly, what I seek to do is first to make clear what the fundamental problems are of such a restoration, and secondly, on the basis of this, establish, in outline at least, the value of engaging with sophistry.

Sophos, sophistes, philosophos Modern scholarship concerning the sophists takes its orientation from the collection of both doxographical testimonies about, and citations from, or purporting to be from, the sophists given in the second volume of the two-volume Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker by Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz. In Section C of Volume II, entitled ‘Ältere Sophistik’,

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The Place of Sophistry in Philosophy

Diels and Kranz include nine individuals: Protagoras, Xeniades, Gorgias, Lycophron, Prodicus, Thrasymachus, Hippias, Antiphon and Critias. 4 But although the Diels-Kranz volume is the standard source, its selection has often been called into question. The English-language translation of the collection adds a section on Euthydemus,5 while G. Kerferd, in his book The Sophistic Movement, adds the names of Callicles and Euthydemus’ brother Dionysodorus, to that of Euthydemus.6 A complete survey of all the relevant sources would, doubtless, suggest yet more names. 7 For scholars of the movement it is not, however, just a case of adding more names to a list; it is also a matter of excluding names, of making finer discriminations, of sifting the genuine sophists from the pretenders. Kerferd, for example, argues that Critias, although he was associated with the sophists, was not a sophist in the true sense, and if Diels counted him one it was on the basis of the precedent of Philostratus – who included him in his Lives of the Sophists – and nothing more. Others have suggested that Gorgias should not be classed among the sophists. 8 Kerferd’s case for excluding Critias is instructive. Referring to the fragments attributed to Critias in Diels-Kranz, Kerferd argues that only those taken from one work, Sisyphus, are relevant to sophistry; however, the attribution of this work to Critias has, in the last thirty years, been shown to be questionable. Further to this, Kerferd also takes issue against Critias’ inclusion on the basis of the extant testimonia. He concedes that what evidence there is establishes a link between Critias and the sophists, but it does nothing more. In Plato’s Protagoras, for example, Critias is present, along with the sophists Hippias and Prodicus, at Callias’ house while Protagoras is staying there. But this, Kerferd points out, is evidence only of an association with the sophists, and in contrast to the sophists proper, there is no testimony that establishes that Callias ever taught – either for money or for free. It is this latter claim that is important, for in Kerferd’s eyes, it is ‘the professionalism of the sophists’ – not only that they taught, but that they taught for money – that distinguishes them from all their supposed predecessors.9 On this basis Kerferd suggests Callias is better regarded as a pupil of the sophists than as a sophist himself. What Kerferd’s argument shows is that any classification of an individual as a sophist ultimately rests on a decision, implicitly or explicitly made, about the essence of sophistry itself, and not simply, as it might first of all seem, upon evidential and factual grounds alone. It is certainly the case that the sophists were, by and large, teachers, and teachers who received fees from their pupils, but whether this is sufficient to distinguish them as sophists is, as the example of Critias shows, open to question. Thus the real issue is not one of particular names. The real

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sense of the question about who the sophists were, what the question ‘who were the sophists?’ genuinely asks after, is the nature of sophistry itself. Only on the basis of knowing what sophistry is, is it possible to say who truly were sophists and who were not, and by extension when sophistry began, when it flourished, when it declined. A particular decision about what sophistry is, is very obviously marked in the inclusion of the works of the ‘Ältere Sophistik’ (the older sophists) in Diels-Kranz among the fragments of the so-called Presocratics.10 In this respect it is necessary to acknowledge that, as Heidegger often claimed, the term ‘Presocratic’ is not, or at least is not simply, a chronological designation.11 This is nowhere more apparent than with the sophists: all of the sophists included in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker were contemporaries of Socrates (470–399 BC). It is not possible to give exact dates of birth and death for all of them, but estimates indicate that Protagoras (ca. 490–421 BC), who was the oldest of the sophists, was only twenty years older than Socrates, and died when Socrates was approximately fifty years old. Gorgias was born around ten years before Socrates, but outlived him by some considerable time. Estimates differ as to Gorgias’ age upon death, but most agree that he was over a hundred when he died. Prodicus is estimated to have been born between 470 and 460 BC; his date of death is not known to us, but he was alive at the time of Socrates’ execution. Hippias too is reckoned to have been a contemporary of Socrates, and Antiphon, born around the same time as Socrates, was executed in 411 BC. Heidegger’s claim that the term ‘Presocratic’ is not chronological has been influential in the estimation and appreciation of the Presocratics, inspiring a revaluation and reinterpretation of their work. According to Heidegger the term ‘Presocratic’ contains an evaluation: philosophy begins with Socrates, and those thinkers classed as Presocratic are, in effect, regarded as pre-philosophical. In one sense this discrimination between Socrates and the Presocratics need not, in itself, necessarily be regarded as problematic; indeed Heidegger would come to maintain the necessity to make such a discrimination, arguing that those Presocratics such as Anaximander, Parmenides and Heraclitus are improperly regarded from the perspective of philosophy, and that their thought contains something greater or at least other than philosophy itself. However, in contrast to Heidegger’s arguments, the distinction between the Presocratics and Socrates serves commonly to bind and subordinate the former to the latter. For those that accept such a subordination the value and worth of the Presocratics is to be found in the responses that they provoked in Socrates. The Presocratics are primitive thinkers, precursors of philosophy,

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for whom the truth of what they thought is for the first time put on a properly philosophical footing by Socrates and Plato. At bottom, what the term ‘Presocratic’ says is that what these Greek thinkers, these Presocratics, wanted to say, is known not through their own words, but primarily by way of Socrates and Plato. Without following in detail Heidegger’s argument concerning the sense of the term ‘Presocratic’, it is at least possible to grant the strength of Heidegger’s claim. Whatever specific evaluation it might contain, the term ‘Presocratic’ at the very least takes Socrates as the reference point against which these other thinkers are measured. In addition to this, it is the case that with the sophists themselves it is impossible to allow that the classification ‘Presocratic’ is made on chronological grounds alone. For these reasons, then, it seems that it is possible to claim that the inclusion of the sophists in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker is a decision, that a deliberate choice has been made concerning the nature of sophistry as such: the sophists are subordinate to Socrates, and sophistry itself is only properly understood by way of Plato. However, if there are good reasons to maintain that the Diels-Kranz classification represents a decision concerning what sophistry is, this decision is not one that originates with Diels and Kranz themselves. Nor is it, more broadly speaking, one that finds its origins in nineteenthcentury philology and historical research; it is a decision, a discrimination, which originates with Socrates and Plato, and with Plato’s recognition of the specificity of what comes to be called ‘philosophy’. It is towards the end of the Phaedrus that one finds Socrates proposing such a distinction, apparently modest in its intention, between the philosopher (philosophos) and those who are, or who are said to be, wise (sophos). The matter begins when Socrates charges his interlocutor, Phaedrus, with proclaiming not only to those that put together discourses (suntithesi logous), that is to say, to Lysias and contemporary orators and rhetoricians in general, but also to ‘Homer and all other who have written poetry (poiesin) whether to be read or sung, and to Solon and whoever has written political discourses (politikois logois) which he calls laws, that if any of them has done his work with a knowledge of the truth (ei men eidos he to alethes echei sunetheke tauta), can defend his statements when challenged, and can demonstrate the inferiority of his writings out of his own mouth, he ought not to be designated by a name drawn from those writings, but by one that indicates his serious pursuit (espoudaken)’ (Phaedrus, 278c). If they have formed their work with an eye to the truth, to true things, the rhetorician, the poet and the lawmaker, ought not to be called by the title given to what they write, but by a name appropriate to what

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motivates what they do. Phaedrus then asks Socrates what name he would bestow upon them, and in response Socrates says ‘on the one hand, Phaedrus, sophon is too much, and is proper only to a god, but philosophon, or something similar, is, on the other hand, more fitting and in harmony with such a man’ (Phaedrus, 278d). Without doubt it is important to recognise in this passage from the Phaedrus the articulation of the grounds upon which philosophy as a specific practice is identified and named. In the first instance this identification requires a separation of philosophy from mere oratory or rhetoric (rhetorike) in a broad sense. Having begun the Phaedrus with an imitation and pastiche of rhetorical speeches (logoi) upon love, themselves played off one against the other in accordance with the contemporary style of debate, in the latter part of the dialogue Plato sets these speeches off against philosophical discourse itself. Socrates then turns to an explicit consideration of what constitutes writing and speaking well or badly, and differentiates explicitly between mere rhetoric and genuine discourse. He declares the true art (tekhne) of speaking to be one in which it is necessary to know the truth about what you speak, to advance its definition, and from this definition divide it into kinds until further division is impossible (Phaedrus, 277b). On the basis of this characterisation of true or genuine speaking, Socrates proceeds to the famous condemnation of writing, and more generally to the condemnation of empty eloquence, or mere rhetoric, that does not know what it proclaims. Having defined a certain method of speaking, which also describes the practice that Socrates himself is engaged in, Socrates is able to give the proper name to the one who practices it – philosophos, and thus, implicitly, he names himself and the discipline he practices – philosophia. Reading this passage from the Phaedrus in terms of a series of equivalents that are held to be common to the Platonic dialogues as a whole, it is certainly tempting to see in this discrimination of the philosophos as someone who is concerned with truth, from the mere rhetorician as someone who speaks with another end in view than that of truth, a setting apart of the philosopher, Socrates, from the sophists. By force of habit, and not without some justification – because they were concerned with making speeches, and derived their own prestige from the power of such speeches – we are inevitably led to equate the sophists with rhetoricians in general. However, as important as this distinction between the sophist (sophistes) and the philosophos, at least in this passage from the Phaedrus, is that between the sophos and the philosophos, between the philosopher and those that accept the name of the ‘wise’.

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The Place of Sophistry in Philosophy

According to Socrates the one who is named a philosopher is not wise; the philosopher does not possess wisdom, but nonetheless loves (philein) what he does not possess, and this love for wisdom is what distinguishes him. This distinction serves to set Socrates apart not only from his contemporaries, the sophists (sophistai), but also, by virtue of the originality of the method that he practises, from his predecessors, who, if they were not always counted as sophists, would have nevertheless been regarded in the past, and also at the time, as being sophos, wise and who either laid claim to the possession of wisdom or were held to do so. In order to get a fuller appreciation of the distinction that is laid claim to at the end of the Phaedrus, it is useful to compare it with a passage from the Protagoras in which Plato puts into the mouth of the sophist a declaration of the filiation between sophist and sophos. Protagoras tells Socrates that the art of sophistry (sophistiken tekhnen) is ancient (palaian). But its antiquity is not necessarily apparent to all, for those who practised it in ancient times feared its grievous burden (phoboumenous to epakhthes autes) – the ill will, the envy (phthonos) and the hostility (dusmeneia) that attach to it. Thus the truly ancient sophists made themselves disguises or were made to disguise themselves and cover themselves up ( proskhema poieisthai kai prokaluptesthai). Some, like Homer and Hesiod, clothed themselves as poets; others, like Orpheus and Musaeus, used religious rites as a screen; others, such as the athletes Iccus of Tarentum and Herodicus of Selymbrias, disguised themselves with physical training; yet others, such as the musicians Agathocles of Athens and Pythoclides of Ceos, used music as a cover for themselves (Protagoras, 316d–e). What is important about this speech, at least as far as we are concerned with it here, is not so much whether it is properly attributed to Protagoras, but the contrast between it and what Socrates says in the Phaedrus. What is put into play in the Protagoras is a straightforward appropriation on behalf of the profession of sophistry of a heritage, a past, a filiation. Among those invoked by Protagoras are the great Greek poets Homer and Hesiod, both of whom were traditionally known as sophoi, and the latter – Hesiod – providing the first recorded use of the term sophisdesthai.12 It is important to observe that there is, of course, a paradox in the play being made by Protagoras in order to establish a tradition of sophistry, and to lend to his own practice the weight and status of a heritage. For what allows Protagoras to lay hold of such a tradition is an admission of the envy and ill will that the sophist excites among the powerful of a city, and which had compelled his forebears to disguise themselves. This point – that the sophist is subject to hostility because he ‘persuades

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the best young men to abandon being with others, relatives or acquaintances, older or younger, and to be with him, and better themselves by being with him’ (Protagoras, 316c) – invokes a number of powerful anxieties, concerns about appropriate social conduct, education and the formation of political character. However, what Protagoras sets against these anxieties is the value of heritage to a society affected by traditionality, to a society that set great store by the authority of precedent, age and custom in all of its practices and teachings. What Plato plays out between these two passages is an opposition that, in general terms at least, serves to confirm the inclusion in Diels-Kranz of the sophists among the Presocratics. On the one hand, Protagoras lays claim to a heritage, assimilating the sophoi to the sophistai; on the other hand, in the Phaedrus, where the philosopher is named as philosopher, what we find is a setting apart of the Socratic practice of philosophy from the ‘Presocratic’ practices of the so-called sophoi (wise) and, by extension, the sophistai (sophists). Setting both passages together, then, reconfirms the suggestion already exposed in the names themselves of the link between the sophistai and the sophoi, and at the same time shows how Socratic philosophy establishes itself in contraposition to those two other terms, which if they are two, are nonetheless as one in being pre-Socratic. It is worth remarking that it is not just Protagoras, through the words of Plato, who claims a link between the sophists and the sophoi. In addition to the Platonic dialogue, other texts by different authors similarly stress the continuity of sophia and sophistike. For example, Aristides (AD 117–189), looking back to the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, observes that Herodotus called Solon – one of the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece – a ‘sophist’ (sophisten), and likewise Pythagoras, and that Androtion called the Seven Wise Men sophists (sophistai) (DK 79, 1). For Aristides there is evidenced in these testimonies a certain common being between the sophistai and the sophoi, which, as we have seen, Protagoras seizes upon. In this at least it seems as if the distinction made by Diels-Kranz between sophia and sophistry on the one hand, and philosophia on the other, finds a precedent in Greek thought, and legitimates itself on the basis of this precedent. However, there is a contrast to be made between what we now think of as the Presocratics (and indeed as they are found in Diels-Kranz), and the heritage that Protagoras appeals to, and that Socrates echoes. For all that there is clearly invoked by both Protagoras and Socrates something that amounts to a ‘Presocratic’ tradition, there is a striking absence of any of those thinkers that we now include under

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The Place of Sophistry in Philosophy

the term ‘Presocratic’. In neither passage, and despite any number of possible reasons for their inclusion, no mention is made of either the Ionian or Eleatic thinkers such as Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus or Parmenides. Their absence is striking, as certain other Platonic dialogues display an awareness not only of what sophistry owed to such thought, but also of what Socrates and his own thought owed to it. Whilst it is not possible to address the specific reasons why such names do not appear in either Protagoras’ or Socrates’ invocations, what can be remarked here is that for the Greeks of the time, the sense of wisdom, and for that matter knowledge (episteme), was much broader than perhaps is now the case. Not only the poets and lawmakers and rhetoricians, but also athletes and musicians were considered as being concerned with knowledge and wisdom. Both Heraclitus and Xenophanes, for example, regarded their predecessors to have been Homer and Hesiod, while athletes were held to exemplify the particular Greek virtue of mastery over oneself, which not only demanded knowledge, but itself was an essential element of wisdom. In the Laws, for example, the Athenian speaks in this regard of the same Iccus of Tarentum that Protagoras has included among the sophists. Iccus is someone who ‘possessed in his soul such art, and such courage mixed with moderation’ that he was able to win a battle over his own desire and show moral mastery of himself (Laws, 840a). Thus both Protagoras and Socrates define their own activities in relation to and against figures and practices that embody a profoundly shared tradition of reflection, knowledge and wisdom. For Protagoras it is simply a matter of appropriation – those poets, lawmakers, musicians and athletes who by convention became known as sophoi, were properly in their practices not merely poets, lawmakers, musicians or athletes but sophistai – sophists. For Socrates, in contrast, there is a separation, but one that is without doubt complex. Having already condemned mere rhetoric, poetry and legal discourse, Socrates further signals the necessity to recognise a certain modesty or limitation to the human capacity to know, thus reigning in an improper hubris. If it is improper to call those rhetoricians, politicians, poets who are concerned with truth by the name given to their writings (rhetoric, politics and poetry), it is as improper to call them wise. Certainly they must be known by a name appropriate to what fundamentally motivates them, their actions and enquiries, but that is not wisdom as such, but rather the love of wisdom. It is the due recognition of this essential limitation that effectively inaugurates philosophy. Certainly it is necessary to exercise prudence in understanding this inauguration, this inception, of philosophy. One should neither overinterpret the claim nor underestimate it. On the one hand, and as

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many scholars have pointed out, there are continuities and transformations as much as breaches and distinctions in the Platonic dialogues between philosophia as it is established by Socrates and what the Greeks thought of as sophia.13 On the other hand, while Plato himself distinguishes philosophia from both sophia and sophistike, philosophy relates to both in a very different manner, a difference that derives from the concern of philosophy with truth. Consequently something of a paradox emerges: if, in the Platonic scheme, sophistry has the more immediate relation to the heritage of the sophoi while philosophy refuses itself this immediacy, it is still the case that Platonic philosophy can be understood to be closer than sophistry to the sophoi, in that it relates to them more genuinely because it is explicitly and fundamentally concerned with truth. Nevertheless, if prior to Plato speaking of philosophia, the Greeks – and not just the Greeks – had certainly thought, they had not, for all that, philosophised. 14 If it is not the case that thinking as such finds its origin here, and if, on this basis, one can be drawn to emphasise the continuities between philosophy and the Presocratic background, it is necessary to recognise that the particular mode of thinking and speaking that is philosophy emerges with Socrates and Plato. In short, and as we have seen, what one finds in the Platonic texts is a decision that institutes philosophy, and does so by distinguishing the philosopher from both the sophos and the sophistes. Recognising the fact that what one finds in the Platonic dialogues is nothing less than the birth of philosophy allows us to see a little more clearly what is at stake in the return to and the restoration of sophistry. Or to be a little more precise, it allows us to recognise that this very task itself involves a choice. For some, effecting a restoration of sophistry means working against the exclusion put in place by Plato and returning sophistry to the institution from which it was separated in order that that institution could be instituted, thus both correcting and perfecting our understanding of the philosophical tradition itself whilst rehabilitating sophistry. Without doubt this has been, and perhaps continues to be, a common gesture among historians, philologists and historians of philosophy who have turned their attentions to sophistry.15 There is something unquestionably right in recognising that there is an intrication of sophistry and the affiliated tradition of the sophoi in the birth of philosophy. But it is worth remarking that such a response is itself at one and the same time both more and less philosophical than it knows itself to be. It is more philosophical in the sense that, in effecting such a rehabilitation of sophistry, it does nothing more than submit

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The Place of Sophistry in Philosophy

sophistry, albeit with a more positive valuation than it conventionally receives, to the very concepts and values inaugurated by Plato and the Platonic tradition. It is less philosophical though in the sense that what philosophy aspires to is a thought that puts itself into question, which seeks to discover what might be changed in itself through a thinking that is foreign to it. The alternative to this way of dealing with sophistry cannot dissociate itself entirely from philosophy either, or at least, it cannot dissociate itself from a certain form of the philosophical aspiration. For here a ‘restoration’ of sophistry means recognising that if philosophy institutes and constitutes itself around the separation it effects in relation to sophistry, then sophistry itself is productive of philosophy. By exposing philosophy once again to sophistry one not only recognises their mutual intrication, but also allows oneself the possibility of a critical purchase upon the decision that inaugurates philosophy, its values, concepts and practices.

The philosophical criticism of sophistry In the preceding section I noted that in the Platonic dialogue Protagoras, the eponymous sophist is made to give voice to a number of concerns about the effect of sophistry, its negative impact upon social conduct, education and the formation of political character. In the Meno, Plato has Anytus, an Athenian politician, forcibly articulate a hostility to the sophists that is informed by these concerns. Anytus declares his hope that no relative or friend, Athenian or foreign, ‘would be so mad as to let himself be diseased by these people [the sophists]’ (Meno, 91c). ‘They are’, he continues, ‘the manifest ruin and corruption of anyone who comes into contact with them [ . . . ] The young men who pay them money [are demented] and still more so are the relations who let the young men have their way; and most of all are the cities that allow them to enter and do not expel them’ (Meno, 91c–92b). Anytus subsequently admits to Socrates that such a judgement is not based on experience, for he has had no contact with the sophists himself. The immediate, albeit implicit, significance of Anytus’ admission lies in the fact that it was Anytus, along with Lycon and Meletus, who brought the public action against Socrates that, informed by just such concerns, resulted in Socrates being sentenced to death. But as significant here is the inference that it allows us to draw about the widespread currency of such concerns in relation to the sophists on which – in lieu of first hand experience – Anytus’ judgement can be supposed to have rested.

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Such an inference is confirmed by Socrates’ defence speech as it is presented in the Apology. The two charges brought against Socrates by Anytus, Lycon and Meletus were those of corrupting the young of Athens and making new gods (Euthyphro, 2c–3b), the latter amounting to a count of impiety (asebeia). In opening his defence Socrates suggests that in making these charges, his accusers have been encouraged by a popular and long-standing prejudice against him. This prejudice, he says, holds that there is ‘a certain Socrates, a wise man (sophos aner), a ponderer of things in the air (ta meteora phrontistes) and one who has investigated the things beneath the earth and who makes the weaker argument the stronger (ton hetto logon kreitto poion)’ (Apology, 18b). A little later Socrates adds that not only is he supposed to have made the weaker argument the stronger, but he is also supposed to have taught others the same things (Apology, 19c); he finally adds that he is supposed ‘not to acknowledge or give respect to the gods’ (theous me nomisdein) (Apology, 23d). Both these long-standing prejudices that Socrates identifies as implicitly informing the formal charges against him, and the charges themselves, were accusations frequently made against the sophists. In the Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle attributes making the weaker argument stronger to two sophists, Corax and Protagoras (Rhetoric, 1402a, 23); Philostratus, Heyschius, Plato and Eusebius all accuse Protagoras of teaching disbelief in the gods (DK 80, A2, A3, A23, B4); while Prodicus was similarly accused by Philodemus, Minucius Felix and Sextus Empiricus (DK 84, B5). Protagoras’ books were supposedly burned by Athens, and Protagoras was forced to flee to escape the charge of impiety (DK 80, A1). The conclusion that could possibly be drawn is that such prejudices as attached themselves to Socrates were more generally concerns that were widespread at the time about sophistry. In his defence speech Socrates initially states that he is unable to identify the source of such prejudices against him, observing that his task of defending himself is made all the harder for the fact that the very commonality of such prejudices mean that they always seem to have originated from no-one in particular, for they are just what everyone thinks or believes. He does, however, allow that there is a possible exception to this, and he mentions quite unspecifically ‘a certain comicpoet’ (Apology, 18d). When Socrates begins his defence proper, he repeats the prejudices that are commonly held about him, and this time he is more specific in the exception he had made to the general anonymity of his original accusers. This time he refers by name to Aristophanes. According to Socrates what the audience saw in Aristophanes’ play the Clouds, first performed in 423 BC, nearly quarter of a century before the

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trial, was a Socrates ‘being carried about . . . proclaiming that he was treading on air and uttering a vast deal of nonsense’ (19c). From this, Socrates says, arose the prejudices that he was ‘a criminal (adikei) and a busybody ( periergasdetai), investigating the things below the earth and in the heavens and making the weaker argument stronger and teaching others these same things’ (Apology, 19c). As John Sallis has pointed out, although Socrates’ account of Aristophanes’ play directly points out only one of the prejudices against him, namely that he ponders things in the air, the play portrays Socrates in a manner consonant with all of the long-standing accusations Socrates has mentioned.16 In the Clouds, Socrates claims to be able to teach the ‘unjust logos’ (adikos logos), to teach how to make the weaker argument prevail upon the stronger (Clouds, 112), and is portrayed as promulgating impiety, which is related by Aristophanes to his subterranean and meteorological investigations. Moreover, in the Clouds, Aristophanes had explicitly portrayed Socrates as a sophist. In the drama, speaking of the eponymous clouds that he venerates as the true deities, Socrates declares that it is they who protect the sophists (Clouds, 331), and who therefore preside over his school and all of its activities. Although the Clouds conflates Socrates with the sophists, it provides a non-Platonic and pre-philosophical criticism of sophistry. Following the suggestion of J. Sallis that Socrates’ long defence speech in the Apology can be read as presenting Socrates’ response to Aristophanes,17 I want to try to show how the concerns about sophistry that Aristophanes articulates are at once shared by Plato, but are also radically transformed by being placed within a problematic that gives fundamental emphasis to the idea of truth. Identifying these concerns and exposing the transformation that Plato effects in relation to them will allow a more thorough identification of the specific way in which philosophy understands itself to relate to sophistry. The Clouds opens with a speech by Strepsiades, an old man, who is unable to sleep because of the debts his household has incurred through the excessive expenditure of his son, Pheidippides, on horse racing. It is in order to free his household from these debts that Strepsiades first wishes to send his son to Socrates. By means of the skills in sophistical argumentation that he will acquire from Socrates, Pheidippides will be able to prevail in the courts against any litigation taken against the household by Strepsiades’ creditors. When his son refuses, Strepsiades himself attends Socrates’ phrontisterion. The excesses of the son have introduced disorder into the regulative and lawful (nomos) management of the household (oikos) and its economy

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(oikonomos). The need for Strepsiades to become involved with the sophistical Socrates is, then, already motivated by what for the Greeks of the time would have been an ethical failure. Aristophanes introduces this failure in relation to a number of interrelated issues, all of which revolve around the father–son relationship, which was itself both ethically and politically important to the Greeks. a. Economic management. The activity of economic management was considered to be of an essentially ethical nature. Good management encouraged piety by making possible sacrifices to the gods; it favoured friendship by allowing generosity; it added to the wealth of the polis; and principally it reinforced the ability to command, and take command over one’s possessions and one’s self by exercising this ability. 18 Such command extends beyond the household, then, to matters of the polis: mastery and moderation are as essential to good political comportment as they are to the management of the household. The ethical failures of Strepsiades’ household are doubtless all the more serious as Pheidippides, in his love of horses and chariot racing, and through the lineage of his mother, aspires to the status of a man of political influence. 19 Thus the disorders introduced into the household affairs by Pheidippides’ dissipation are nothing less than a threat to the political and ethical stability of the Athenian polis. b. Education of a wife. The responsibility for economic management of the household lies with Strepsiades. It could perhaps be objected that, traditionally at least, it was not the husband but the wife to whom the regulation of household expenditure was ascribed. But if the woman has this responsibility, it is the responsibility of the husband to ensure that she has received the right training that is necessary to exercise her responsibility. Xenophon, in his Oeconomicus, the most detailed extant treatise on marriage and the household that survives from that period, argues that when the wife’s conduct, instead of bringing profit to the husband, caused him only detriment, the husband should get the blame, for: When sheep fair badly, we usually fault the shepherd, and when a horse behaves badly, we usually speak badly of the horseman; as for the woman, if she has been taught the good things by the man and still acts badly, the woman could perhaps justly be held at fault; on the other hand, if he doesn’t teach the fine and good things but makes

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use of her as though she is ignorant of them, wouldn’t the man justly be held at fault (Oeconomicus, III, 11). Even though Xenophon seems to excuse the husband of ultimate responsibility after having trained his wife, he gives expression to a telling hesitation. It is only ‘perhaps’ possible to put the blame at her doorstep. It is a concession, and the analogy with the horseman is instructive. For like a horseman, the responsibility of a husband does not merely include training and guiding. His responsibility also lies in selecting a woman who would be a good wife, a woman who, in the first instance, is tractable. For these reasons Strepsiades unwittingly condemns himself when he curses his marriage to his extravagant wife (Clouds, 40–55). c. The recourse to sophistry. That Strepsiades is driven to Socrates in order not to resolve these debts but escape from them expresses an ethical and political condemnation of sophistry. Sophistry discourages the very moderation and disciplined training, the care for oneself, one’s possessions and one’s household deemed so necessary by the Greeks for good ethical and political order. This is most directly expressed in the opposing arguments – the antilogoi – put forward in mock sophistical dispute in the drama, in which the unjust or wrong argument (adikos logos) triumphs over its contrary, the just or right argument (dikaios logos). More dramatically, however, it is exemplified in the final moments of the play by Pheidippides, who had finally acceded to his father’s request that he attend the Phrontisterion. d. The father and son relationship. These final events draw together all the ethical and political failings that Aristophanes has identified. After his schooling, Pheidippides argues with Strepsiades and beats him. The immediate occasion of Pheidippides’ act of filial impiety was an argument over a recitation Pheidippides had made in front of guests after dinner, a speech from Euripides concerning an incestuous relationship between a full brother and sister. Strepsiades protests the impropriety of such a recitation and Pheidippides responds by hitting him. There follows an antilogical disputation between Pheidippides and his father, in which Pheidippides, in sophistical fashion, uses what is referred to as the weaker or worse argument (ton hetto logon) (Clouds, 1445) to justify his actions. As Strepsiades points out there is no law anywhere that legitimates such behaviour, and as Aristotle makes clear in the Nichomachean Ethics it was indeed a serious offence to strike

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one’s father (8, ix, 3). But the argument that Pheidippides employs to justify his deed, takes up some of the fundamental suppositions of traditional Greek thought about child–parent relations so as, in true sophistical fashion, to turn them against the customs they supported. Pheidippides establishes that, as is natural, he shares the same political status as his father. Both were free-born and are free-men (eleutheros). If both have the same status then both should be treated in the same way; if his father were right to have beaten him when he was young for the purposes of correction, then he now is right to employ such methods to correct his father, for Strepsiades is old, and old age is a second childhood (Clouds, 1407–1419). Pheidippides even observes that his argument is perhaps stronger than his father’s for beating him when he was a child. For the elderly are venerated for their good behaviour – whereas children are not – and thus there is all the more reason to punish them when they fall short of such standards. It is the reference to both his own and his father’s status as free-men that is central, for by virtue of his status the free-man was able to take up and exercise political functions within the city. Pheidippides’ conduct towards his father is, then, indicative of his potential political conduct now that he has come under the sway of the sophists. In the Politics, Aristotle considers the nature and basis of the authority that a father exercises over his son. Appealing to common practice and to traditional authorities as much as to reason and argument, Aristotle points out that it is not by superiority of birth that a father has authority – for, as Pheidippides has also observed, both are of the same status at birth; rather the father rules by way of affection and age alone (Politics, 1259a–b). Pheidippides beating his father is not just a defiance of his father’s authority, but the overthrow of common practice and the authority of tradition itself. This can be further clarified by pursuing Aristotle’s argument in the Politics. Primarily, for Aristotle, paternal superiority is based on the child’s temporary lack of a deliberative faculty, the faculty that guides conduct. It is for this reason that the father does not just have authority over the child, but also has a responsibility for its education and the formation of its deliberative capacities. In the Economics, a work attributed to Aristotle, a reciprocal if deferred obligation is said to be entailed by the parent–child relationship, such that ‘the care which parents bestow on their helpless children when they are themselves vigorous is repaid to them in old age when they are helpless, by their children, who are then full of vigour’ (Economics, 1343b). However, if the duty or obligation is reciprocal, it is not perfectly symmetrical, for even if old age confers

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a second childhood, this does not mean that the deliberative faculty is once more undeveloped and in need of shaping. Nor does it mean that it is inoperative, as it is in women according to Aristotle. Rather it is lost. Its loss does not entail that the father should be treated as a slave, who according to the Stagirite never possessed the capacity for deliberation. The father should be cared for and venerated for what they have provided the children with, in particular the gift of existence itself. Were it the case that old age conferred slavery upon parents rather than the care and concern of their offspring, then one would see that the natural impulse to secure the furtherance of the genos (lineage or race) would itself suffer. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the act of father beating is dramatically set against the allusion to the act of incest, and is correctly regarded by Leo Strauss as equivalent in its destruction of the family household and the political state. It would be difficult to attribute responsibility for the dereliction of these essentially political relations solely to Strepsiades, who has shown himself to fail in his concern for his child, to Pheidippides, who fails in his concern for his father, or to Socrates, who arms the latter with arguments that effect this failure. The point is rather that all three are bound together and mutually reinforce the others. All three, in one way or another, act hubristically, and all three fail to show proper care or concern for themselves, for others and for the city. The Platonic texts share the same concerns about education and political well-being that can be seen to structure the Clouds. The two great discourses on love, the Phaedrus and the Symposium, for example, discuss the question of the relationship between men and boys, and the discussions are directed to the question of how to provide, and indeed what provides for, a virtuous formation of character. The dialogue in Alcibiades 1 similarly centres on such concerns. Alcibiades is about to embark on a political career, and in the dialogue between him and Socrates the latter is concerned with the proper pedagogical preconditions for such a career. Such concerns inform Plato’s engagement with sophistry. The aporetic dialogue of the Hippias Major is brought to a close by the eponymous sophist proclaiming the superior value and beauty of rhetorical speeches to Socratic argument because of their ability to secure in the law courts and in any other official body ‘the greatest of all prizes, you own salvation and that of your friends and property’ (Hippias Major, 304b). There is scarcely any need for Socrates to comment upon this proclamation given Hippias’ earlier manifest ignorance about what constitutes beauty and its relation to the good, and his obvious inability to discover this. In the Apology, however, Socrates is explicit: his own

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life and possessions are of little moment, but they are that not through any disregard or neglect of the self, but, on the contrary, precisely because of a proper concern for his self, for others and for the city. It has been observed that in this way Socrates turns his trial around: it is no longer himself that Socrates defends, but the city and its citizens.20 The Athenians that he addresses are in need of care because they neglect themselves and the city by mistaking what is the proper object of concern: they ‘preoccupy themselves without shame in acquiring wealth and reputation and honours’, but they do not concern themselves with themselves, with ‘truth and the perfection of the soul’ (Apology, 29e). It is even the case that in the Apology Socrates does not dispute the characterisation of the sophists that, he says, has attached to himself by way of his portrayal in the Clouds, he simply disputes that it applies to him. Calling as his witnesses the five hundred and one Athenian citizens who are to judge him, Socrates asks them to inform one another whether they have ever heard him talking of such matters as is alleged, or in the manner alleged. Invoking the names of three sophists – Gorgias, Prodicus and Hippias – Socrates declares that these are men who lay claim to a great wisdom. They are able to ask a fee for teaching this wisdom and, because of the marvellous claims made for it, they are able to persuade young men of any city they are visiting to associate with them and give up their association with their fellow citizens (Apology, 19e–20b). As we have already seen, it is just this ability to persuade the young men of a city to associate with them – paying a fee for doing so – that has excited hostility against the sophists and is one of the elements behind the charge that Socrates has corrupted the youth of Athens. Unlike these three men, Socrates says, he never behaved in such a manner, and cannot aspire to such wisdom as they lay claim to. It is not so much the concerns that lie behind the condemnation of sophistry that differentiate the Platonic treatment from that given by Aristophanes and which were current in Greek society of the time, but the way in which those concerns are posed. Plato transforms the way in which such questions were posed and it is this transformation that distinguishes the philosophical approach to sophistry. Thus, if at this initial stage of his defence Socrates does no more than dispute the attribution of sophistry to himself, the manner in which he does this is itself significant. Ostensibly Socrates appeals to his jurors as witnesses in default of any direct accusers for the initial, more deeply entrenched, more dangerous prejudices that lie behind the charges explicitly brought against him in his trial. This manner of proceeding is, however, a first indication of the way in which the very nature of truth is posed

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by Socrates and Plato. Through the identification of the role of witness and juror, the trial is transformed in its nature. It is no longer a question of two litigating parties making their testimonies and conducting rhetorical disputes before a third party who has the task of evaluating what they say, for, as Socrates often argues, such a mode of proceeding is utterly worthless in the search for truth: in such three-way disputes, truth matters little, if at all, for what is at stake is establishing a victory over one’s opponent, and thus of merely winning over the judge or judges, of accommodating oneself to their preconceptions which remain unexamined. In contrast, by appealing to his jurors as his witnesses the stakes of the debate are changed: it is no longer a matter of the antagonistic declarations of competing litigants who expose themselves to the jury, but the possibility of an agreement of two parties on the nature of the evidence that is directly presented to them. Lyotard has drawn attention to the frequency with which Socrates explicitly proposes an elimination of the appeal to third party in the dialogues.21 In the Republic, Socrates describes what he calls antilogike – the setting up of one argument against another – and the decision of the judge between them. But, where what is at stake is the identification of the truth of some matter there is no need to appeal to a third party, for ‘if we examine things together with a view toward bringing us to an agreement, then we shall be both judges and pleaders’ (Republic, 348a–b). It is not that the appeal to a third party is unnecessary when it is a matter of identifying the truth about something, but, as the persistence of Socrates’ explicit rejection of the third party shows, it is in fact necessary to eliminate them – either by excluding them from the outset or by absorbing them into the discussion itself. In order to identify the truth, all those whose judgement carries upon the matter under discussion must be subject to examination and explicitly pass through interrogation. In the Gorgias, Socrates proposes to eliminate another kind of third party: the external witness. Again where it is a matter of wanting to establish the truth, it is necessary to acknowledge that the number of witnesses one can call may enhance one’s credibility, but it has no positive bearing on the truth itself. The only testimony that matters is that of the other party, who in disputing over the issue in question, submit all testimonies, all discourses, to the trial of refutation. Oriented towards the truth in this way, and eliminating all that positively blocks an enquiry that aims at the truth, the enquiry may not itself establish the truth, but it can at least expose falsity by way of refutation. At first, then, it seems that Socrates is only showing that the accusations made against him apply to the sophists, and that they are not applicable

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to him, because he is not a sophist. However, as we have seen, Socrates’ manner of calling into question this accusation is significant. By seeking to remove those who are to act as judges from their externality to the process of establishing the matters at issue, Socrates conducts his own trial on a philosophical basis, directly implicating his judges in a method that is directed towards truth. But Socrates’ approach to the concerns over sophistry also differs in another quite significant respect from the way such concerns were commonly presented. Aristophanes’ dramatic portrayal of the sophistic Socrates presents the impact of the purported wisdom of the sophists in a critical light. Although Socrates does not disregard this question, he does subordinate it to another question. It is not, for Socrates, primarily a question of knowing whether such wisdom is good or bad, but first of all of knowing what wisdom is. Having invited his judges to consider themselves whether there is any evidence among them that would serve to show that he was a sophist, it is this question that he goes on to pursue, by asking what that wisdom is that the human being can lay claim to, and thus what wisdom it is that he might be said to possess. In order to illustrate the nature of this transformation it will be helpful to consider the way Socrates prefaces his defence. Socrates begins by raising the matter of how the Athenians who were present in the court and have heard the accusations against him have been affected by the speeches that have been made: ‘On the one hand, how you, Athenian men, have been affected by my accusers, I don’t know’ (Apology, 17a). On the other hand, for his own part, Socrates declares that he was almost induced to forget himself (ego d’oun kai autos hup’ auton oligou emautou epelathomen), so persuasive were the speeches of his accusers (Apology, 17a). Set back against the common Socratic condemnation of the persuasive power (pithanos) of rhetorical speeches that harbour hardly any truth, the problem that Socrates sets himself to address in order to rebut the accusations that have been made against him is who he, Socrates, actually is. But having sought to establish that he is not a sophist, Socrates turns the question of who he is, into a question of what the wisdom is that he can be said to possess in contradistinction to the sophists. The true nature of his identity can only be answered in relation to this question. This exposition is initiated by Socrates anticipating a possible objection to his distinction of himself from the sophists. He poses the question of from where, if not from being a sophist, the prejudices against him have arisen. It is true, he says, that the reputation he has acquired comes from nothing other than his having a certain sort of sophia, and

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thus it is indeed on account of possessing sophia that he is brought before the court. But the sophia he possesses does not for all that make him a sophist. Rather it is precisely Socrates’ particular sophia that distinguishes him from the sophists. The wisdom that he possesses is, he says, ‘perhaps human wisdom’ [anthropine sophia] (Apology, 20d), unlike the wisdom the sophists profess to enjoy and to teach, which is ‘wisdom greater than human’ (Apology, 20e). Here, without explicitly invoking the term philosophos, Socrates elaborates upon the distinction also made in the Phaedrus, between a claim to sophia that, because such a claim is ‘proper only to a god’ (Phaedrus, 278d), is inherently hubristic, and one that, premised on a love of wisdom (philosophia), does not overreach itself and is properly human. If the particular delimitation of these two types of wisdom, which serves to distinguish Socrates from the sophists, is Platonic, the accusation of arrogating a certain divine status for oneself by way of sophia is already there in Aristophanes. In the Clouds, Socrates is presented as swinging aloft in a basket, and from this heavenly height condescends to address Strepsiades – the old man who wishes to be initiated into Socrates’ ‘thinkery’ (phrontisterion) – as a divinity would address a mortal, exclaiming ‘short-lived one, creature of a day! Why do you call me? [time kaleis, ophemere]’ (Clouds, 223). The subsequent interchange between Strepsiades and Socrates further emphasises the latter’s sophistical hubris and impiety. Asked by Strepsiades what he is doing aloft, Socrates says, ‘I walk on air [aerobato] and think about [periphrono] the sun’ (Clouds, 225). That Aristophanes portrayed Socrates as an ‘aerobat’ would have signified his hubris for the Greeks. According to Greek thought a being was always related to a particular place according to its kind. The place of the divine was the heaven [ouranos], while the human being was closer by kind to the earth [ge]. Socrates seeks to elevate himself, and thus overcome the limitations of his nature, in order to obtain knowledge of the heavens and heavenly bodies. Socrates’ violent overstepping of the proper place of the human being implies a two-fold impiety; he both attempts to go beyond the situation and place that is proper to him by virtue of the nature allotted to him by the divine, and he also arrogates to himself the place of the divine. Thus it is possible to grasp the meaning of what Socrates says by way of his situation, and to comprehend periphrono not as meaning ‘to think about’, in the sense of ‘to delimit something in thought’ and thus comprehend it, but according to its related but derogatory sense – of ‘having an overview’, and thus looking down contemptuously on something. Strepsiades’ reaction is also ambiguous, but serves to make the impiety

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of Socrates’ situation yet more apparent. In response to Socrates he says, ‘apo tarrou tous theous huperphroneis’ (Clouds, 226): the term huperphroneo can mean ‘to have high, lofty thoughts’, and it is perhaps in this way that Socrates himself understands what Strepsiades says, ‘from a basket you have, you think, high-thoughts about the gods’; but huperphroneo can also mean ‘to look down on, and thus despise’. The very elevation that Socrates bodily assumes, and which for him ensures that his thoughts are akin to the ‘meteorological matters’ [ta meteora pragmata] (Clouds, 228) he studies, also signifies a divorce from his properly human situation, from what has been divinely dispensed to humans as their lot. In the Apology, the Platonic Socrates claims, on the contrary, a distinct and properly human wisdom that distinguishes him from the sophists whose pretensions to wisdom do signify a dangerous hubris. In order to show what this properly human wisdom that he possesses is, Socrates is compelled to address the allegation that not only is he wise, but that there is no-one wiser than him. This claim originates from the Delphic Oracle, which had affirmed to Socrates’ friend Chaerophon that Socrates was the wisest of all humans. The meaning of this claim is revealed to Socrates through his conversations. Talking to others – politicians, poets and artisans – who, in one way or another, aspire to wisdom, Socrates discovers that the wisdom that is his lot, and that distinguishes him from his contemporaries, amounts to an awareness of his own limitations. Whereas they appear wise both to many other people and especially to themselves, they are not; but while both they and Socrates share a certain ignorance, knowing neither anything beautiful nor good, Socrates is aware that he is ‘neither wise much or little’ (Apology, 21b). Socrates here draws the question of what human wisdom is back into a positive relation to ignorance. Those that proclaim themselves to be wise, and in particular the sophists who do so emphatically, can only see themselves as such because they are ignorant of their ignorance; Socrates, on the contrary, knowing that he knows very little, indeed almost nothing, is wise in this: that he ‘recognises that he is in truth of no worth in respect to wisdom’ (Apology, 23b). However, if Socrates is able to recognise the inherent limitation of a properly human wisdom, if he is able to acknowledge the extent of his own ignorance, it is because philosophical enquiry, unlike sophistry, is intrinsically directed towards the truth. In other words, it is because sophistic enquiry is not essentially concerned with the truth, because it is fundamentally unconcerned with truth, that it can deceive itself about its ignorance. For Socrates and Plato, it is only thus that the sophists can think themselves wise.

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For Socrates, then, such wisdom as human beings can possess is not defined by the absence of ignorance, but in relation to it, and is not attained by overcoming ignorance, but taking up a properly human relation to it. It is because of this understanding of what human wisdom is that Socrates is able to give an ontological ground to his protestation that, unlike the sophists and in contrast to his portrayal in the Clouds, he has never undertaken to teach anyone anything. Socrates does not pretend to give wisdom, and so receive in exchange money, because he realises that human wisdom is itself not properly constituted by any positive acquisition. Indeed rather than give, Socrates says he takes away the illusion of knowledge, and it is this that is the genuine reason for the hostility he has excited among the Athenians he has spoken with (Apology, 23d–24b). It is with the declaration of what is proper to human wisdom that Socrates broaches the great thematic that, in the eyes of the philosopher, marks the separation of sophistry from philosophy, ignorance from knowledge. Socrates knows he knows nothing, and so is wise in as much as he knows the limits and the worth – or more properly the worthlessness – of human wisdom. 22 In contrast the sophists thinking themselves possessed of wisdom and able to teach it, are in fact only doubly ignorant, ignorant of their ignorance, and thus contribute themselves to their own lack of insight, or blindness. It is in relation to this difference between an ignorance aware of itself, and ignorance ignorant of itself that one must situate the whole problem of what I have called above, the hubris, the immodesty, that for Plato characterises the sophists. It is as well to remark that at the point in the Phaedrus where Socrates names and distinguishes the philosopher from both the sophistes and the sophos the term hubris is not used, but it is perhaps not inappropriate to employ it. In Athenian litigation the term hubris carried the meaning of ‘aggravated personal assault’, or of violence against someone. Earlier in the Phaedrus, however, Socrates does speak of hubris, and it appears, at first glance at least, not to carry this connotation at all. There Socrates counterposes hubris to sophrusune, moderation: ‘when opinion guides us by reason (logos) towards what is best and stronger, that strength is called sophrusune, but when desire drags us without reason (alogos) towards pleasure and has come to rule within us, the name given to that rule is hubris’ (Phaedrus, 237d–238a). Sophrusune for Plato carries the sense of ‘moderation’ of ‘being temperate’ and thus a certain mastery over oneself, a sense apparent in the Gorgias, for example, where in response to Callicles, Socrates says that ‘ruling oneself’ (auton heauton archein) consists in ‘being moderate, master of himself, ruling the pleasures and

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appetites within him (sophrona onta kai enkrate auton heautou archein ton hedonon kai epithumion)’ (Gorgias, 491d). Because sophrusune is related to the sense of self-mastery, later in the Gorgias Socrates links it to ‘doing what is fitting with regard to both gods and men’ (Gorgias, 507a). Hubris, as it is counterposed to sophrusune, is, then, as an excessive immoderation, a violence against mastery and self-possession, a violence that injures the exercise of propriety over oneself. In laying claim to sophia the sophists exceed what is proper and fitting to humans, injuring themselves but also the gods, by laying claim to what properly befits only gods. In a certain sense, the same concern with sophistical hubris, injurious to the self, and indeed injurious to the well-being of the city, the polis, is evident in Aristophanes. Thus, in the Apology there are similar anxieties, similar concerns about appropriate social conduct, education and the formation of political character as those that shape the drama of the Clouds. In contrast, however, the pedagogical, ethical and political concerns that Socrates gives voice to are decisively and radically transformed by being explicitly subordinated to ontology, or, in other words they are subordinated to truth: prior to any ethical or political concern as such is the concern with truth, without which a proper ethical and political concern is not possible. In the Apology, Socrates links this concern with truth to a concern for the perfection of the soul. He does so because the two are properly speaking indissociable. For Socrates it is necessary to be fundamentally disposed towards the truth of oneself, to be oriented in oneself towards a genuine concern with the ontological question of what the human being is, in order to be able to conduct oneself properly as a citizen. The soul (psuche), the active, intelligent, part of the individual must turn its gaze upon itself, provide for itself the possibility of disclosing itself in its ontological constitution, and attempt to recall to itself the truths that are always already inherent in it. On this basis, one can well see why Socrates declares in the Apology that, in contradistinction to the sophists, he teaches nothing. The relationship that Socrates has with the citizens of Athens is one that effaces itself: concerned with the care of others, he does not act as a teacher who tells to his pupils the truth of things, but as a mediator, who seeks to incite self-inspection and self-knowledge in those he talks to.

Philosophy and sophistry Both Plato and Aristophanes share similar concerns about sophistry. However, by virtue of an explicit concern with truth Plato is able to effect a discrimination that Aristophanes does not: the philosophos can

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be distinguished from sophistes in terms of their relation to truth. The Platonic Apology sets out this relation to truth in a threefold way: in terms of a method that in its possibility is directed towards truth in contrast to sophistic argumentation; in terms of disclosing the relation of the human being to truth; and in terms of clarifying the nature of the human being as such in its concern with itself. According to Plato the aim of the sophist is to speak well (eu legein), but she does not speak well in the sense of a speaking intrinsically directed towards the truth of something, that is, in the sense of wanting to possess a genuine understanding of the matter about which she speaks, rather she merely gives the impression of doing so. The sophist has a purely extrinsic concern – to effectively persuade her audience – but without any possibility of having a true knowledge of what she speaks about. Thus Plato characterises sophistry not as a tekhne, that is, a particular mode of engaging knowingly with something, but as a ‘knack’, something that can be carried out atekhnos, without any education, or predisposition towards an understanding of something.23 But not only can the philosophos and the sophistes be distinguished, it is also possible, as we observed above, to separate the sophistes and the sophos by virtue of the same criterion: the sophoi such as Parmenides and Heraclitus – in other words, those thinkers we now consider as being the Presocratics proper – like the philosophoi were concerned with truth and being, with beings in their being, without however seeing or saying it as such. Consequently the relation that they held towards truth and which conferred on them the name of sophoi – the wise – both properly indicates this relation and the deficiency it suffered from. Not explicitly seeing or speaking of their basic, guiding concern with truth and being, they misunderstood how they were wise, and by arrogating to themselves a more intimate relationship to the truth than they had, in actuality remained more distant to it than the philosopher who knows the proper measure of human wisdom. But, inasmuch as the sophoi strove for truth the philosopher can disclose what they meant to say; on the other hand, all that can be said of the sophist is the negative truth that what they say is in no way motivated by truth. Undoubtedly it is this distinction that lies behind and conditions the view that for all that philosophy distinguishes itself from both sophistike and sophia it has a closer, more genuine relation to the latter than the former. However, despite its apparent simplicity and decisiveness, this philosophical reflection on sophistry introduces a further paradox and confusion into the relation it seeks to regulate. On the one hand, Plato produces a devaluation of sophistry by placing it in extreme antagonism to

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philosophy: in so far as sophistry is not concerned with truth it is at the furthest remove from that science which is by its nature highest, or first in order – prote philosophia to use the later, Aristotelian term. On the other hand, as Pierre Aubenque has observed, it is this determination of sophistry which, whilst it appears to place it outside of philosophy, effectively renders it all the more formidable for the philosopher. 24 The very regularity and persistence of Plato’s engagements with the sophists, and his repeated attempts to determine the essence of sophistry, are the strongest possible indication of the importance and weight that he attributed to sophistry. The sophists’ lack of concern with truth set them most directly and essentially against the philosopher. Because the sophist is only concerned with the efficacy of her discourse, sophistry is able to make the weaker argument stronger, the less just argument triumph over the more just, and turn the false into the true, or at least into the apparently true. Thus, one might say, that it is by virtue of being as little philosophical as possible that sophistry demands that the philosopher take it seriously, and that as soon as the philosopher discriminates between philosophy and sophistry according to the criterion of truth she condemns herself forever to the menace of a sophistry that will always appear philosophical. Consequently it is not only that the philosopher must treat seriously an adversary that she knows in truth to lack all seriousness, but must always seek to distinguish herself from the sophist for, as Aristotle says, the sophist will always appear wise, and has ‘the same manner [skhema] as the philosopher’ (Metaphysics, IV, 1004b, 15–17). Thus, for all that Plato has at his disposal a principle of discrimination not available to Aristophanes – a principle that declares the sophist to be the polar opposite of the philosopher, concerned with nothing, with not-being and the accidental, and caring only about opinion, persuasion and rhetorical victory – the actual act of discrimination is made no easier. As the product of the Socratic dialogue, and the decision that inaugurates philosophy, the place of sophistry and the sophist appears neatly circumscribed and assured according to a well-regulated and strictly principled opposition between a discourse that is concerned with truth and true things, and a discourse that is not. But by virtue of the Platonic gesture that expels it, sophistry is essentially implicated in philosophy. Thus, in contrast to the conventional view that the more significant and original relation to philosophy is to be found in the Presocratics proper, whether they are understood simply as primitive precursors or as the more fundamental thinkers, it is sophistry that can claim the most important and most original relation with philosophy. Very much

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less than philosophy according to Plato, it is also very much more: and just as it comes to be constituted for us by the decision with which philosophy distinguishes itself from it, so for that very reason it is constitutive of philosophy. From its Platonic beginnings, philosophy ceaselessly seeks to assure itself of itself by assuring itself of its difference from its absolute other, sophistry, which nonetheless must always accompany it, and menace it from without and from within, and which thereby both constitutes philosophy as much as it unsettles it.

The restoration of sophistry to itself On the basis of the texts and the evidence adduced in this chapter, one might think that the Greeks as a whole were unclear about the distinctions between the sophoi, the sophistai and the philosophoi. Pindar had used the term sophistes to refer to the poets, whilst Herodotus applied the term to describe Solon and Pythagoras, both of whom antedate the sophistic movement, the sophists, as we now know them. Aristophanes had portrayed Socrates as a sophist, and perhaps did no more than make use of a common perception among the Athenians in doing so; Plato for his part, if only once, spoke of philosophy as sophistry of a noble lineage (he genei gennaia sophistike, Sophist, 231b). However, far from testifying to any indeterminate understanding of sophistry, the many different applications of the terms sophistes and sophistike show them instead to have been central to the very historical life and being of the Greeks of the time. Around them and against them a complex experience was constituted, through which the Greeks would come to construct and contest their historical identity – their ethos, their education, their political and philosophical being. Certainly, before Socrates, and independently of him, sophistry provoked hostility among the citizens of Athens, the city in which all of those who are now known to us as sophists, at one time or another practised their profession. But, as the contrast with Aristophanes has shown, with Socrates – or at least with the Socrates of Plato – these hostilities and the anxieties they express are profoundly transformed by being subject to the obligation of truth, that is to say, by being made subject to an explicitly ontological, philosophical, concern. In relation to this, and in particular in relation to the image of the sophist that has been disengaged from the Platonic dialogues, to speak of effecting a rehabilitation of sophistry, of restoring sophistry to itself, is to express the desire to make sophistry vital once again, to refuse to condemn it to what Kerferd has called ‘a kind of half life between the

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Presocratics on the one hand and Plato and Aristotle on the other’, a half life where the sophists ‘seem to wander forever like lost souls’.25 However, in so far as the Platonic determination of sophistry is not a matter simply of taking a position against the views or opinions of the sophists, but of a decision that delimits an essential disposition or attitude of the sophist towards being as such, effecting a restoration of sophistry cannot ever be simply a matter of recovering its reputation, restoring to it a more positive value. Such a gesture could only possibly remain secondary to the philosophical determination of sophistry, as it is not that sophistry has ever simply been ill-served by a bias to Plato’s judgement, a disfavourable or even one-sided and hence untruthful portrayal. One might say that it is one of the greatest of ironies that sophistry suffers less from any Platonic distortion than from the decision of Plato to tell the truth: sophistry is emptied of truth, and thus in the eyes of a sedimented tradition of thought is emptied of meaning, by being subject to the very decision that constitutes truth. However, it is necessary to be cautious, for even when this is understood it is still necessary to see the paradox that any attempt to restore sophistry to itself must recognise that it must always be a restoration of sophistry to philosophy. But by restoring sophistry to philosophy, that is to say, to the philosophical decision that constitutes sophistry, and thus restoring sophistry to itself, it will also be possible to restore philosophy to sophistry. Doing this, reconstructing the complex role that sophistry plays in the institution, constitution, life and destiny of philosophy, can afford us a critical perspective on that institution, on its origins, its genealogy, and help us put its truth into question, a truth that is constitutive of the West itself.

2 Hegel and the Sophists

Sophistry is certainly a word of ill-repute, and indeed it is particularly through the opposition to Socrates and Plato that the Sophists have come into such disrepute that the word usually now signifies that, by false reasoning, some truth is either refuted and made dubious, or something false is proved and made plausible. We have to put this evil significance on one side and to forget it. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1

Introduction According to G. Kerferd it is Hegel who for the first time establishes a positive philosophical appreciation of sophistry. It is impossible to overestimate Hegel’s importance in terms of the determination of sophistry’s relation to philosophy, for in essence Hegel is the first philosopher who systematically absorbs sophistry into philosophy by according to it a positive relation to truth. As Kerferd points out, in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy,1 Hegel ‘restore[d] the sophists to an integral position in the history of Greek philosophy’.2 However this restoration is, Kerferd notes, ambiguous in its consequences. Hegel’s view of sophistry was influential throughout the nineteenth century, and even in the twentieth century it continued to shape interpretations and understandings of the sophists. But because those who took it up did not penetrate to the philosophical core of Hegel’s history of philosophy, they merely and externally repeated Hegel’s views, thus degrading and assimilating Hegel’s account to the prevalent and long-established view of the sophists. In short, what Kerferd suggests is that whilst Hegel saw the sophists as ‘subjectivists’, and recognised in this their decisive philosophical 42

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importance, those who followed him accepted his characterisation of sophistry but denied his attribution of philosophical significance to it. For post-Hegelian positivism it was held to be the case that ‘those who are genuinely concerned with truth are [ . . . ] concerned with objective reality rather than its subjective appearance’, and so it was only possible to find in the ‘subjectivism’ of the sophists ‘an anti-philosophical’ standpoint. 3 Consequently, says Kerferd, there arose the paradox that the sophists were – once more – excluded from the history of philosophy, but this time by way of the very terms that had brought about their rehabilitation. Only wanting to provide an overview and contribution towards a history of interpretations of the sophistic movement, Kerferd is not concerned with interpreting the detail of Hegel’s account of sophistry. It is sufficient for Kerferd’s purposes that he presents Hegel’s argument in historical terms – outlining it broadly, and from there establishing its consequences for subsequent interpretations of sophistry. Whilst Kerferd is right to draw attention to the influence – negative or positive – of Hegel’s historical approach to the sophists, and is also right to speak of Hegel’s inclusion of sophistry within the philosophical tradition, he nevertheless misses the internal complexity of Hegel’s account. Certainly Hegel treats sophistry seriously – recognising in it something more than mere rhetorical vanity and false reasoning, but for all that Kerferd sees this, he overlooks those other elements of Hegel’s account that provide a justification for those who stressed, on the basis of what Hegel said, the traditional view of sophistry as non-philosophical. Neither view on its own is a proper reflection of Hegel’s position, for despite the textual justification for both views of Hegel’s account of sophistry, they remain in themselves one-sided and partial versions of what Hegel says. In what follows I attempt to draw out the complexity of Hegel’s account; for it is only by recognising this that it will be possible to reach an assessment of the significance of the manner in which Hegel rehabilitates sophistry.

The sophistry of common opinion The complexity of Hegel’s account of sophistry is apparent right from the very outset. At the beginning of the section of the History of Philosophy devoted to the sophists, Hegel distinguishes the wisdom of the sophists from what he calls contemporary ‘learning’. What is currently esteemed as knowledge is, in truth, mere ‘information’, and, for the most part, scientific advances amount to nothing more than the discovery of ‘empirical matter [ . . . ] of a new form, a new worm, or other vermin’

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(HP I, 352). For Hegel, such positive facts, such empirical matter, are mere results; they are, in other words, outcomes that have been abstracted from the spiritual motivation that underlies and shapes them. In this respect they are, Hegel says, abstract and lifeless, and the culture that heralds them as being ‘of great importance’ testifies not to the magnitude of its scientific achievement, but to the loss on its part of any comprehension of an effective relation to the world. In contrast to this, the learning of the sophists – their sophia – is a genuine culture, of much greater responsibility and thus also of a greater philosophical dignity than the supposed science that is cherished by the modern world. Yet if Hegel recognises the incomparably greater achievement of sophistry and the Greek culture that it bespeaks in contrast to the reputedly more advanced and more rigorous positivism of modern science, and if he seeks thereby to establish the philosophical dignity of sophistry, he will nevertheless at the same time avail himself of the derogatory sense of the term ‘sophist’. It is in this way that he goes on to argue that if by common consent sophistry is more disdained than esteemed and subject to a contempt even greater than philosophy, it is because of ‘the sophistry of common opinion’ itself (HP I, 353, my emphasis). In short, Hegel appears to invoke a bad sense of sophistry attributable to what he calls ‘common opinion’ in order to save sophistry proper from its condemnation by that opinion. As simple as the sense of what Hegel says might appear, it is nevertheless necessary to make two points in order to get the measure of this one remark. First, although Hegel does have in mind certain failings in the ability of common opinion to think when he invokes its ‘sophistry’, it is neither its propensity to reason incorrectly that he is thinking of, nor any deliberate failings on its part – errors of reasoning wittingly made in the pursuit of some other end than the discovery of truth.4 Rather it is the inherent limitation of common opinion that Hegel wants to point to, its holding abstractly to one-sided, limited, maxims and principles as if they were in themselves absolute, fixed truths. It is because it is unaware of its own limitations as limitations, because it sees them as the only possible ground of truth, that the common understanding must view the sophist’s subversion of such fixed principles, and more generally the ability of sophistry to always find a way to speak against any single ‘truth’, as a failure and falsity of thought. Secondly, if Hegel were to say that the sophistry of common opinion is found in its one-sidedness or limitation, he does not mean that this being-limited alone constitutes its sophistry.5 What actually constitutes the sophistry of common opinion is that its limitations force it into systemic

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inconsistencies and contradictions of attitude. On the one hand, there is the inconsistency of its attitude towards sophistry in so far as the condemnations that it makes of sophistry’s failures are the projection of its own limitations. On the other hand, however, according to Hegel, its own myopia drives common opinion into contradiction with itself, or at least in its practical activities it comes to ‘speak’ against itself. Echoing the explication of sense-certainty in The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel says that it is often proclaimed by common sense that the things we see most certainly are; that is to say, we say we believe in their reality. But our practice betrays this claim, and shows that we actually assume the contrary. For we consume these things, we ‘eat and drink them’, thus practically contradicting what we say is true. These things are not in themselves, their being has no security or substance and is negated and transformed by human activity (HP I, 353–354). Thus, beyond a simple opposition between sophistry proper and common opinion, Hegel understands the latter itself to be doubly sophistical – sophistical in a both good and bad sense. On the one hand, it is sophistical thanks to the abstractions of its understanding, abstractions which it erroneously raises to absolutes, and proclaims to be the height of truth simply because of their formal consistency, but which, paradoxically extort from it inconsistencies and false judgements. On the other hand, however, it is also sophistical where it is more truthful, albeit unwittingly, namely, in its practice. There, by its actions, it dissolves and refutes the one-sided ‘truths’ that it had proclaimed in theory to be absolute and enduring, much in the way that the sophists were held to have called into question the truths of traditional Greek culture. Deliberately equivocal, Hegel’s opening account puts aside ‘the evil significance’ that sophistry has come to assume by turning the common condemnation of sophistry against the understanding that makes it, showing that it is the limitations of the understanding that make that condemnation possible, while at the same time exposing the genuine, if to itself unseen, truth of that understanding in its practical and sophistic-like excess of itself.

Formal culture Hegel does not, however, let drop the play of equivocation that had allowed him at once to condemn the common understanding for its sophistry and to rehabilitate it for its sophistry. Instead he goes on to draw the very possibility of such an equivocation back to the nature of the sophistic movement as such. In his account of Greek sophistry, and not to put to fine a point on it, Hegel tells us that the sophists both have

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and do not have a place in philosophy. That there is a tension here, a contradiction even, is certainly not a defect of Hegel’s philosophy. As has often been noted, there is scarcely a less profitable, and scarcely a more meaningless, use of one’s time than to accuse Hegel of contradiction. The apparently equivocal sense that Hegel draws from the concept of sophistry is simply a sign that Hegel has not himself lapsed into abstractive and one-sided thinking. In effect, the equivocality of Hegel’s account reproduces at a higher and thematic level the equivocality implicit in the position that the tradition has, since Plato, accorded to sophistry vis-à-vis philosophy. As I have argued in the previous chapter, it is typical of the Platonic regard to see sophistry as the absolute antithesis of philosophy. Utterly opposed in intent, unconcerned with truth, and wanting only to win an argument by any means, sophistry is rendered all the more formidable for philosophy. Lacking any genuine concern for truth sophistry will make any argument whatsoever appear true, and thus assumes the appearance of philosophy. Excluded in principle from philosophy, sophistry cannot be put aside by the Platonic philosopher, and in actuality sophistry lodges itself at the very heart of philosophy precisely because it is not philosophical. By grasping explicitly the ambiguities that haunt the Platonic account of sophistry, Hegel is, then, able to declare explicitly that sophistry both is and is not philosophical. What produces this paradoxical relation between sophistry and philosophy is, to follow Hegel’s terms, found in a distinction between the ‘formal culture’ of the sophists that is philosophical, and ‘their reflection’ that is not (HP I, 371). What Hegel calls ‘formal culture’ translates the Greek word paideia – a term that is sometimes also translated as education. The cultured or educated individual is not, however, what we might now call learned. Being cultured is not the same thing as being knowledgeable, or, to put this another way, and to recall the point with which Hegel began, the learning of the sophists is not akin to the learning of scientists. Unlike the enquiries of the scientist, sophistic culture does not bear upon a particular type of being; it is not a science of things (epistemen tou pragmatos), rather it is a culture precisely because it is not tied to any specific content. More often than not, the tradition has viewed this generality of sophistic culture negatively. It is argued that this generality has as its correlative only an emptiness, for the culture that possesses no particular knowledge or expertise, possesses no knowledge at all. From this consequence there follows a typically Platonic critique of sophistic paideia: the rhetorical and dialectical means that sophistry develops, which it employs and

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teaches, are necessitated by its epistemic and ontological impotence. As it cannot establish the truth by genuine reasons it must seek to persuade by illegitimate means, and illusorily substitute its emptiness for real knowledge. Hegel, however, reverses this judgement: for him the generality of sophistic culture is not so much its weakness, but its strength. For although the sophist cannot, and does not, lay claim to any specific domain of knowledge, her concern is more universal, being ‘all mankind and man’s essential aspects’ (HP I, 357). In this respect, the very generality of its culture can be contrasted to the specialism of the scientist, to the advantage of the former and the detriment of the latter. By necessity science specialises and thus it also isolates; it is not only inherently narrow and one-sided, but in her scientific enquiry the scientist is separated from herself, and from humanity. In contrast, sophistic culture, general and formal as it is, deals with any and all matters not because it aspires to be polymathic, but in so far as they are all the products and activities of humanity. When the sophist speaks of matters that would otherwise and later be the concern of the specialist, she does so from a cultured perspective, that is to say, from out of a concern with humanity and with what moves humanity. Because of this general concern with humanity, sophistry aims to discover the ‘absolute ends which move [men]’ (HP I, 357), and it is for this reason, Hegel says, that it is pre-eminently a political and philosophical art; an art admired by Pericles and other statesmen, for its ability to direct others and to put them in their proper place; and an art that is philosophical in its bearings, looking towards the universal that is the mainspring of the world. For Hegel the universal scope and bearing of sophistic culture is only one aspect of its philosophical nature. It is philosophical also in the freedom that it supposes and that it actualises. This aspect of sophistry is implicit in the idea of culture itself, for whilst, according to Hegel, the term ‘culture’ is an indefinite expression, it has, he says, ‘this meaning: that what free thought is to attain must come out of itself and be personal conviction’ (HP I, 356). Thus culture is, in other words, that process in which thought, determined by no other authority than itself, freely cultivates itself. In this respect, sophistry is, according to Hegel, like the ‘so-called enlightenment of modern times’ (HP I, 356), which is also that movement in which thought, or reason, undertakes its self-cultivation. And, like the Enlightenment, the free development of thought that constitutes sophistic culture actualises itself in a critical capacity. It is critical precisely in so far as it is a purely formal culture. In other words it is a culture that, as we

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have observed above, presupposes no specific knowledge content of its own, but which simply discovers through reflection general principles that alone are binding for thought, and thus rejecting any externally given authority such as religion and law that had previously imposed themselves as necessities. In this sense, as a formal culture, it has only the power to examine, to interrogate, and to condemn according to certain principles that are common to all thought. Thus, it simply undertakes to compare what Hegel calls – thereby stressing the negative, critical function of sophistic culture – ‘the positive content’ that is given to it, the matter of religion and morality for example, ‘with itself’ and thus ‘dissolves the former concrete of belief’ (HP I, 356). It is just this critical culture, according to Hegel, that excited the original hostility towards the sophists. For the concrete security of definite customs and laws, and even the security of natural being itself, become fleeting and lose their stability when they are exposed to its scrutiny, and when this happens, when common consciousness is dispossessed of its verities, it is drawn into ‘hatred and disdain’ (HP I, 354) of those that provoke its downfall. But, if it is this critical function that, at the time of the sophists, and ever thereafter for the common understanding, provoked such condemnation, it is nevertheless the case that ‘Greece has to thank the sophists for this culture’ (HP I, 357), for this culture is – in its critical function, in its freedom and in its universality – philosophical.

The sophistic dialectic The Sophists thus knew that on this basis nothing was secure because the power of thought treated everything dialectically. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1 In effect, the universality and critical freedom that Hegel ascribes to sophistic culture, and which, according to him, form its properly philosophical elements, belong to its dialectical nature. Hegel articulates this claim at the conclusion of the sub-section devoted to Gorgias in the section on sophistry in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, saying: ‘The Sophists thus also made dialectic, universal philosophy, their object, and they were profound thinkers’ (HP I, 384). However unequivocal this judgment sounds, it nevertheless poses a considerable interpretative problem. In the section devoted to sophistry in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel only once, in passing, associates sophistry with dialectic.6 It is only in the sub-section on Gorgias that Hegel refers to the dialectic with any frequency, but this cannot in itself be taken to

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establish an unequivocal link between sophistry and dialectic for Hegel, because he also distinguishes Gorgias from the other sophists by way of his use of the dialectic.7 Thus, in short, despite the importance of the dialectic to Hegel, one cannot but remark its near absence from his account of sophistry. Aside from the association of sophistry and dialectic with which Hegel concludes his account of Gorgias, one could attempt to attribute the infrequency with which Hegel refers to the dialectic in his account of the sophistic movement to the traditional discrimination that is made with regard to the practice of the sophists between antilogike, eristic and dialectic. Although ‘eristic’ – a term derived from the noun eris, meaning ‘strife’, ‘quarrel’ or ‘contention’ – and antilogic share many common features with the dialectic, the former two terms have, or at least were thought to have, derogatory connotations for Plato, whereas the latter did not. 8 To a certain extent the philosophical tradition has stayed with these connotations, emphasising the difference between a dialectic that aims at truth, and an eristic that simply quibbles and contends. Hegel, on the other hand, as I have argued above, is critical of such traditional derogations, and for this reason he does not simply take over and repeat the traditional distinctions between eristic, antilogic and dialectic that have determined them. Thus, it would be misleading to straightforwardly invoke such distinctions in order to explain the infrequency of Hegel’s use of the term dialectic. However, if one must resist the temptation simply to ascribe the traditional separation of the sophist and the dialectician, sophistry and the dialectic to Hegel, one must nevertheless recognise, as I will go on to argue, that what Hegel does say about the sophistic dialectic, and what he intends is, for all that, far from simple. Indeed, it can be seen to inherit, reproduce, and lift to a self-consciously higher level a complicated tangle of attitudes and discriminations deriving from the philosophical tradition around this issue of the dialectic, and in particular from the displacement of the Platonic understanding of the dialectic made by Aristotle. It is for this latter reason, contrary to the views of many commentators, that the positive features of sophistry that Hegel emphasises in his account of the sophistic movement are those that can be thought of as belonging to dialectics. The explanation of dialectic given in the Encyclopaedia Logic counterposes dialectic to what Hegel calls ‘abstract understanding’. The latter is akin to that which, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he has called both ‘human understanding’ and ‘common opinion’ (HP I, 352–353), which is one-sided and abstract in its thinking. Thus, in the Encyclopaedia

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Logic he says, ‘Thought, as Understanding, sticks to the fixity of characters and their distinctness from one another: every such limited abstract it treats as having subsistence of its own’ (EL, §80). Hegel is, in a certain respect, following Kant here in the definition that he gives of the understanding. Like Kant, he maintains that the understanding is distinct from, and even the contrary or reverse of immediate perception, for whereas perception gives only the concrete particular – this thing, here, now, as I immediately perceive it – the understanding ‘invests its subject matter with the form of universality’ (EL, §80). It thinks, and does so by way of concepts, which, in contrast to the immediate particularity of concrete perception, are abstract and universal. The understanding initially acts in an analytic capacity; it abstracts and thus distinguishes various attributes of things, and regarding each attribute in relation to itself, constitutes them as universals. Thus, the understanding thinks every concept as defined by its simple self-identity. Because they are defined in this way, such concepts appear to exclude one another from their own definition: they appear to be fixed and self-sufficient, and to subsist on their own. In a certain respect the culture, or paideia, of the sophists can, according to the terms in which Hegel describes it, be seen to be a culture of the understanding. For, as we have already noted, this culture compares the positive content of belief with principles of autonomous thought, and, by doing so, ‘dissolves the former concrete of belief’ (HP I, 356). Splitting this content up, and isolating particular attributes, it relates them to themselves, and thus discovers in them their self-identity, their universal form. However, for all that it appears to partake of the nature of the understanding, the culture of the sophists is still regarded by Hegel as dialectical. Thus, even in terms of what he regards as the properly philosophical element of sophistry, namely its formal culture, and thus prior to the distinction he wants to make between the philosophical and nonphilosophical elements in sophistry, one finds an ambiguity in Hegel’s account, for sophistic culture is both dialectical and not dialectical. If it is possible for Hegel to see things both ways, if it is possible for him to effectively maintain that sophistic culture is and is not dialectical, then it is because, in the first instance, what the tradition has thought of as constituting the dialectic is itself ambiguous, and thus sometimes confused with and sometimes distinct from those procedures identified above with the understanding. The two chief sources that the philosophical tradition has used to define the dialectic are Plato and Aristotle. But these sources are themselves problematic: on the one hand, what each philosopher says about the dialectic is not unambiguous, on the other hand, the characterisations that both offer of the dialectic are difficult, perhaps impossible,

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to reconcile. It has, for example, often been remarked that it is difficult to determine what the term ‘dialectic’ means for Plato, sometimes because, as in the earlier dialogues, it is ‘difficult to perceive any relation between the name and the thing’, and sometimes because it seems to mean ‘the ideal method, whatever it may be’.9 Beyond the specific difficulties posed by the Platonic dialogues themselves, it is nevertheless clear that Plato, even if he refrains from explicitly commenting on it, appropriates the term dialectic, and derives its sense, from an already existing, pre-philosophical, signification and practice. The term itself comes from the verb dialegesthai, which has a two-fold sense, namely that of dialoguing, but also that of choosing, selecting or distinguishing. Something of both of these senses remains apparent in the Platonic texts, but most frequently Plato himself will stress, through the mouth of Socrates, the association between dialectic and the method of division (diairesis), of dividing things up, of isolating the particular elements or aspects of the matter under discussion. However, although there is an obvious etymological priority that links dialectic to diairesis in Plato, for Plato himself another moment claims structural priority in terms of the dialectic itself, what he terms the synagogic moment. In the Phaedrus Socrates makes plain the co-existence of these two moments in the dialectic. Two principles, he says, are involved in the art of speaking, ‘that of perceiving and bringing together in one idea the scattered particulars’ (265d) and that ‘of dividing things again by classes, where the natural joints are’ (Phaedrus, 265e). A little later he explicitly refers to these processes as diairesis and synagoge, dividing and bringing together (Phaedrus, 266b). It is the identification of, and the priority accorded to, the synagogic moment in the Platonic account of the dialectic that forms the basis of Plato’s particular inflection of this practice, that distinguishes it from its pre-philosophical precedents, and in particular contrasts it to sophistic practises. For the making apparent of synagoge and the structural priority accorded to it derive from the specifically philosophical nature of the enquiry, its thematic concern with truth and being. What, then, is the connection between being and truth for Plato such that it is necessary for him to introduce or make explicit the prior place of the synagogic moment within the dialectic? For Plato, truth and being are articulated in what he terms the idea – or better – the co-belonging of truth and being, their co-implication, is made manifest in the idea. The term idea derives from the word eidos, which prior to Plato had the meaning of the outward and visible aspect of something; in other words, in its pre-philosophical sense the eidos is that which is visible to the eye.

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Plato effects a reversal of this original sense. The Platonic idea is precisely what is not visible to the eye. If Plato used the term to speak of what was not physically apparent, what was not in any sense anything ontic, but rather of what appertained to the ontological, to the being of beings, it was because, according to Plato, it is the idea that makes beings manifest as the beings they are. In effect, what Plato sees is that in perceiving a being as a being – the desk as a desk, the book as a book – the perception of the thing itself exceeds anything that is presented by way of the senses, indeed exceeds any and all ontic attributes of the thing, and instead makes it manifest as what it is. The being a book of the book is, for Plato, irreducible to its physical and ontic attributes: its being a book is not found in it, nor is it attributable to it, in the same way as the attributes of being heavy and worn are, but it is just this ‘something other’ that nonetheless allows us to see, to perceive, the book as such. Because this ‘something other’ is what allows us to see the book as such, Plato gives it the name idea – for it is this, despite its non-appearance and non-appurtenance to the senses, that provides the look of the thing. There is, then, in perception – or in human perception at least – for Plato, always a doubling up, a perceiving something as something, which does not add anything to the thing, but allows it appear and be understood as the being that it is. It is thanks to this eidetic doubling that the thing here before me, this particular book for example, appears as an entity, as a distinct thing and is given as what it is. What truth is for Plato must be grasped from out of the Platonic experience of being as idea. The Greek term for truth, aletheia, is a negative term, which literally means un-concealed, un-hidden, no longer escaping notice.10 For Plato the idea is truthful, is aletheiac, if it is possible to put it in this way, because it is what lets a being be seen as what it is. Although all human perception takes in a certain apprehension of the idea in order that it see any-thing in the emphatic sense, the more clear-sighted the regard of the idea is, the more that the unobtrusive as such of the perception of something is brought into view, then the more truthful will that perception be. It is just this explicit bringing into view of the idea that is at stake in the priority that Plato accords to the synagogic moment in the dialectic. Its priority, which becomes fully manifest for the first time with Plato as an element of the dialectic, is connected to the specific concern of philosophy, its concern with the being of beings. The prior, synagogic, moment is, for Plato, an initial gathering together into one view of the matter under discussion. In other words, it is an initial manifestation of the idea, a making visible in an initial way of the thing itself so that

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subsequently its articulations can be discerned and themselves made explicit. On the basis of this initial synagogic regard that looks towards the idea, diairesis, division, is effected so as to disclose the structural moments and components of the idea itself. For Plato there is scarcely any equivalence between this particular account of the dialectic and the practice of the sophists, who rather than genuinely taking into view the eide – the ideas – and the articulation of being that appertain to them, seek to conceal all differences, so as to be able to make one thing seem like another, and thus unlike what it really is. 11 However, beyond the distinction that Plato himself wants to make, there are obvious parallels between this particular Platonic determination of the dialectic and its structural moments, and the description Hegel gives of sophistic culture. Sophistic culture, Hegel says, looks towards a particular thing or content, ‘splits the content up’, ‘isolates’ the resultant ‘individualities’ or ‘particular points of view and aspects’ and secures them for themselves. Secured for themselves, these particular aspects are determined in themselves as what they are: they are constituted as universal determinations. At the same time, however, they remain aspects that determine the nature of the phenomena that was initially apprehended. Confirmation of the parallel between sophistic culture and the Platonic dialectic is to be found later in The Lectures on the History of Philosophy. In the section devoted to the dialectic of Plato, Hegel emphasises just such a parallel. He argues that ‘dialectic has in the first place the effect of confounding the particular’, that is to say, it has the effect of negating the finite, sensuous given, showing that it has no truth in it because it is always determined by its relation to something else and not in itself. If the sense of what Hegel says here is easy enough to read back into the Platonic devaluation of phenomena that have their truth by virtue of their relation to the eide, it is also what makes it possible for the sophists always to shed an opposing light on any particular phenomenon, confounding the particular by seeing it first in one way and then in another different way. Hegel then identifies a ‘second part of dialectic’ that ‘makes its first aim the bringing of the universal in men to consciousness’ (HP II, 51). Finally, beyond stressing that just such processes constitute the dialectic, Hegel emphasises the link between the practice of Plato and that of the sophists, for ‘it is’, he says, ‘a dialectic which Plato has in common with the sophists, who understood very well how to disintegrate the particular’ (HP II, 52). However, if these characteristics are common to sophistic and Platonic dialectics they do not constitute what for Hegel is the true dialectic. Rather,

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a dialectic that consists of only these characteristics is an external form of dialectics that proceeds from mere ‘reasoning’ (raisonnieren) (HP II, 52). Mere ‘reasoning’, raisonnieren, as Hans-Georg Gadamer has emphasised, is related by Hegel to the Understanding, which in both its negative and positive aspects, remains one-sided or limited and approaches its subject matter in an essentially external way. 12 As I have suggested above, it is usual to trace back the particular association that Hegel makes between these features and the Understanding to Kant, and Hegel’s speculative critique of Kant. However, beyond this stands a more complex filiation: if these features can be linked to the Understanding as much as to the dialectic, it is because the account that Plato gives of the dialectic in terms of the structural moments of synagoge and diairesis is taken up again by Aristotle, but not in his account of the dialectic. Rather, Aristotle reworks the idea of the dialectic, and where these two essential moments of the Platonic dialectic reappear is in Aristotle’s clarification of the structure of the proposition, or the logos apophantikos.13 According to Aristotle, the proposition – which is a saying something about something – consists in a holding together (sunthesis) and a separating (diairesis) of subject and predicate.14 It is because of this two-fold structure of relating and separating that the proposition is apophantic – capable of showing or exhibiting something as something. Thus, for example, the proposition ‘the stone is warm’ both holds together and distinguishes its two terms and makes explicitly manifest in its determinate character something that was already indeterminately manifest to apprehension. The logos apophantikos makes the initial phenomenon explicitly apparent as what it is, namely, the stone as being warm. For the subsequent tradition this account of the logos apophantikos forms the basis of logic, an account that Hegel inherits, via Kant, as a logic of the understanding. Although Aristotle makes use of Plato’s account of the dialectic in his account of the logos apophantikos, he rejects it as an account of the dialectic. In the Sophistical Refutations, the Stagirite points out that with regard to his account of the dialectic he has no predecessors.15 This claim has a significant bearing in terms of Aristotle’s relation to Plato. For although Aristotle allows that the dialectic was practised prior to him, he claims that the practice was not theoretically and methodically apprehended and taught, as those that instructed in disputation did so only by the rapid method of rote learning of speeches and argument rather than by instruction in the principles of the art itself. Given that Plato did reflect on his own practice, it is reasonable to infer that, implicitly at least, and as Pierre Aubenque has argued,16 Aristotle did

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not regard Plato as a precursor. Indeed, given that Plato spoke, or had Socrates or another interlocutor speak of and reflect upon the practice of ‘dialectic’, there are good grounds for assuming that for Aristotle this Platonic practice did not amount to dialectics as such. However, in view of other comments by Aristotle that appear to suggest that he did regard Plato as a dialectician,17 it is necessary not to place too much stress on this one remark; nevertheless, it is as important to avoid under-interpreting it as it is to avoid over-interpreting it. At the centre of the differences between the Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of the dialectic lies the devaluation of this tekhne from its status as the highest science to that of a logic of probability.18 Viewed in the light of this difference, it thus becomes apparent that Aristotle’s rejection of Plato as a theorist of the dialectic in the Sophistical Refutations, and even his denial of Plato as a practitioner of the dialectic, amounts to a recognition that rather than simply reflecting on the dialectic as it is practised, Plato philosophises it, pushing directly towards a positive apprehension of truth and being. As a consequence, according to the Stagirite, Plato essentially separates the dialectic from its original horizons and thus severs it from the very limitations that make it possible. In other words, the Platonic dialectic exceeds the scope of dialogue. In contrast to Plato, for whom the dialectic was an ‘art of discourse’ (tekhne logon) (Diogenes Laertius, Plato 48) that by means of diairesis could not only refute arguments but could establish definitions, Aristotle insists that dialectic can only achieve the former. It is beyond the scope of the dialectic to establish definitions because it is essentially dialogical and interrogative. To take the example Aristotle himself uses, were one to ask another party if it is true that the human being is defined as a two-legged animal, then no matter whether her response affirmed or denied the definition, nothing about the essence of the human being would thereby be positively established. For, on the one hand, a denial of the definition is only a denial and does not offer anything positive in place of what it denies; on the other hand, to affirm the definition is only to confer upon it the agreement of the interlocutor and not to provide any demonstration of its truth. Thus, and to put Aristotle’s difference with Plato at its most basic, dialogue is essential to dialectic, but is otiose to definition: as Aristotle sees it, one does not need to speak with anyone to establish a definition. Given its intrinsic relation to dialogue, for Aristotle dialectic must restrict itself to refutation. Following from this essential restriction, Aristotle will identify as two of the essential moments of dialectic just those two features that Hegel, as we have seen, attributes to sophistic

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culture, namely its formal universality and its critical capacity. Thus first, although the dialectician does not posit any knowledge of anything, she can question on all subjects, for no particular knowledge is required to mount an interrogation – all that is required is the ability, in some measure or other, to reason. Secondly, correlative to its restriction to an interrogative function the dialectic has a universal scope: unconcerned to posit any knowledge of anything, and therefore presupposing no specific expertise or competence, the dialectician can judge of – or at least impugn – everything, by exposing the purported expert to the contradictions and aporias that their own position entails. 19 If, according to Aristotle, these are two of the central features of dialectic, the same cannot be said to be the case for Hegel, for they are formally analogous to just those elements of the Platonic dialectic that Hegel will compare to the logic of the understanding. Beyond these two moments, the dialectic for Hegel primarily consists in the movement in which the finite, limited, concepts and categories of the understanding ‘supersede themselves, and pass into their opposites’ (EL, §81). The dialectic is the manifestation of the inherent instability of the concepts that the understanding had presumed to be fixed, stable and delimited, such that in themselves they turn against themselves and into their other. Such a dialectic informs the paradoxes of Zeno, with whom, according to Hegel, the dialectic properly speaking begins. 20 Hegel cites as an example of this what he calls ‘Zeno’s dialectic of matter’ (HP I, 265) in which Zeno, arguing in defence of the Parmenidean determination of being as unitary and identical, takes up the thesis of those who protest against Parmenides that being is multiple, in order to show that this thesis admits of opposing, and thus contradictory determinations. ‘If the many is’ (ei polla estin) (DK 29, B2), Zeno says, then it must consist of elementary unities, but each unity that comes to constitute the many must itself, in order to be a unity, be one and indivisible, and hence it would be without size. On the other hand, however, each element must have size, otherwise nothing would come from out of their repetition. But, then, because each element would admit of magnitude and size, and so ‘for the one part of it to be away from the other’ and because the ‘same argument holds for the part out in front’ and so on for each succeeding part and part of the parts, then, the many would also necessarily be of infinite size. Thus, according to Zeno’s dialectic, being, determined as multiplicity, admits of contradictory determinations – of being both infinitely small and infinitely large. Whilst the first determination itself appears to be necessary, it contains an insufficiency that demands the latter, and yet this latter, equally necessary, contradicts the former. 21

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Now the dialectic as Aristotle characterises it, and in particular as the sophists practice it, also involves just such a movement of concepts. It is, says Aristotle, an art, like rhetoric, that is concerned to prove contraries.22 Indeed, because dialectic ‘always involves a relation with another party’ (Topics, 153b, 10f), and depends upon the very ability to interrogate their theses and to refute their arguments by means of forcing them to admit a contradiction, it demands that the dialectician practises identifying both positions for and against upon any given thesis. It is precisely this consideration that leads Aristotle to counsel training and practice in converting arguments: ‘in dealing with any thesis it is necessary to seek the argument both for and against, and having found them, seek immediately to refute them; for the result will be that one is trained both to question and to answer’ (Topics, 163a, 36ff.). In turn, Hegel, drawing on Aristotle, emphasises that the formal ability to argue pro and contra, to find arguments ‘for and against [ . . . ] for everything’ (HP I, 368), and to discover reasons that ‘are as available for attack as for defence’ (EL, §121) is what constitutes the ability of the sophists to treat everything dialectically. It is almost certainly this aspect of sophistic culture that Hegel has in mind, then, when he speaks of it as dialectical; it is possible, however, to explain the infrequency with which Hegel uses this term to characterise sophistic culture – despite its obvious applicability – by acknowledging the double or ambiguous nature of that culture. For in so far as the dialectical method of the sophists is indissociably linked to the formal aspects of sophistic culture – its universality and its critical capacity – it is also, as we have seen, a culture of the understanding. Hegel’s recognition of the two-fold filiation of sophistic culture can be traced back to his assimilation of elements from both the Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of the nature and the origins of the dialectic. However, tracing what Hegel says back to Plato and Aristotle opens up a further problem. As sensitive as Hegel’s double account is to the Janus-faced nature of sophistry, he is curiously unequivocal on one point: whether it is seen as a culture of the understanding or whether it is seen as a dialectical culture, it is undoubtedly the case that sophistic culture is philosophical. Hegel is emphatic in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy about this point, and yet on the basis of both the Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of sophistry and the dialectic that are his primary sources in this matter, there are no grounds for making this particular attribution. For Plato the sophists cannot be said to practice dialectic because the dialectic is philosophical, and the sophists are not philosophers. Thus were Hegel to have followed Plato to the letter, he

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could not have made either of the claims that he does make. Instead, going against Plato, Hegel finds grounds for attributing the dialectic to the sophists in Aristotle’s characterisation of the dialectic. But Aristotle, in contrast to Plato, detaches the dialectic precisely from what makes it philosophical for his teacher; for the Stagirite the dialectic precisely cannot thematically and positively disclose any ontological truths. Certainly by restricting the dialectic as he does, Aristotle, in contrast to Plato, is able to appreciate the value of its lack of content, and the dialectician’s lack of specific knowledge. It is its lack of content, its nonscientificity, which gives the dialectic the positive basis for its universal applicability as critique. But for all that, the dialectic for Aristotle is not philosophical. Thus, neither what Plato says nor what Aristotle says in itself legitimates Hegel’s claim that sophistic culture is philosophical. In order to see why Hegel does make this claim, and on what basis, it will be necessary to consider why, that is with what reason, Hegel himself says that sophistry is not philosophical.

Reflection If it is impossible to reduce Hegel’s account of sophistic culture simply to a culture of the understanding, if, in other words, it is necessary to recognise that contra the tradition Hegel does recognise a philosophical dialectic in sophistic culture, it is nonetheless necessary to allow that despite this admission, for Hegel the dialectic that is practised by the sophists is not an objective and proper dialectic. In contrast to the dialectic of Zeno, in which objective determinations of the phenomenon under consideration turn against themselves, and push themselves into contradiction, the dialectic of the sophists is, in part at least, external to the matter under consideration. The sophist, Hegel says, is provoked to a ‘see-saw of arguments pro and con’ (EL, §81) by what are subjective grounds, and which for Hegel form the ultimate, if somewhat concealed, content of sophistry. According to Hegel the culture of the sophists broke with the satisfactions that consciousness had taken in obeying laws and customs as external authorities in mytho-poetic Greek culture. Having thus shaken what consciousness had previously regarded as stable, the problem for thought was that of discovering a fixed authority, a firm basis, from which it could proceed. What sophistry discovers, however, is merely what abstractly remains, what is left over, from the mytho-poetic culture that it brings down – the arbitrary will of the individual. In other words, sophistic culture is one in which man:

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Desires to satisfy himself in himself, to convince himself, through his reflection, of what is binding upon him, what is his end and what he has to do for this end. Thus the impulses and desires that man has, become his power, and only inasmuch as he affords them satisfaction does he become satisfied (HP I, 357–358). Thus, whilst at a formal level the sophists did not remain at the level of the concrete and immediate, but proceeded, in part at least, towards the ultimate determinations by which things are known, and thus knew something of the wealth of ways in which anything can be addressed or accused, they utilised these determinations dialectically to satisfy themselves. That is to say, if the sophists were able to see things from various points of view, they were led to place some of these aspects in the shade and others in the light in order to satisfy their own personal affections and private interests. The sophists actively sought arguments for and against on every topic in order to facilitate the satisfaction of their own desires; they learned to arrange things first this way and then that, they learned how to show that what appears evil to many men is in fact good for those men, precisely in the respect of and for the reasons that it was thought to be evil, in order to attain their own advantage. In short, it was necessary that the sophists discover dialectical oppositions between things, that they apprehend how one thing did not exclude an opposed determination but implied it, because the ultimate principle, the true and final content of all thought was the desire of the individual. Taking this as its ultimate content, its ultimate concern, all fixed determinations of things were made mutable, and ultimately dependent upon the pleasure of the subject. By referring to this inadequacy of content as an inadequacy of reflection, Hegel points to a contrast between sophistic culture and modern philosophy. For Hegel the latter, in all of its forms, is the pre-eminently reflective philosophy, for it principally consists in consciousness turning its attention back on itself, taking notice of its own operations, and thus rising to self-awareness. In this way reflection brings to light the constitutive role of consciousness in the determination of being: being is being thought. Through reflection thought gives itself over to itself and thereby discovers that all beings present themselves by way of an act of consciousness. To express this in the Cartesian terms around which, Hegel says, ‘the whole interest of modern philosophy’ hinges (EL, §64), consciousness, the cogito – in short, thought – irreducibly present to itself and thus always already assured of itself, is the first truth and the ground of all truth, the measure against which being, what is, is determined.

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Consciousness is the true subiectum, it is that which underlies and thus supports the manner of being and the truth of all that is. According to Hegel, with Descartes’ discovery of the cogito, modern philosophy derives from thought not only its form but also its content. A first anticipation of this ‘principle of modern times’ (HP I, 350) sets in, however, with the sophists. It is they who inaugurate an age of subjective reflection in which the thinking and reflective subject makes itself and its interests the content of all thought. For the sophists, the content of thought is, to put it in the terms with which Hegel pithily expresses his own thesis, mine (HP I, 351). With the sophists, this first anticipation of the fundamental principle of modern philosophy, and thus of all philosophy, is but a beginning. It does not know itself in its true and final form, for the subjectivity of the sophists is not a true, universal, subjectivity, or to put this in more Hegelian terms, it is not thought, raised to pure universality, thinking itself, but only ‘an individual particularity [ . . . ] this contingent man’ (HP I, 373), and the content that it prescribes to thought is thus simply the manifestation of self-will. The contrast between the reflection of the sophists and the reflection of modern, post-Cartesian philosophy, is already anticipated for Hegel in the antagonism between the sophists and Plato; for the latter attempts to determine the content of thought, that which animates thought, as the pure idea – the universal taken into view purely by itself – rather than the thought of the particular individual. It is on the basis of this contrast between Plato and the sophists that Hegel will, at times, stress that it is Plato who is the true originator of the dialectic whilst the sophists are in fact practitioners of eristic. But despite that, here however it is necessary to note that Hegel does attribute a dialectic to the sophists. For Hegel, moreover, this sophistic dialectic is true, true in its negative capacity, true, that is, in what it denies and what it refutes; if it is false, it is false in what it affirms, namely the particular will of the empirical individual. Thus for all that Hegel admits sophistry into philosophy he nevertheless diagnoses its historical limitations, limitations that prevent it from being the full realisation of philosophy as such. It is thus possible to see why, according to Hegel, sophistry both is and is not philosophical. It is not philosophical in the sense that Hegel sees philosophy in so far as it secures itself as philosophy as the self-realisation of thought thinking itself, its realisation as absolute knowledge. Yet it is philosophical in the sense that it is a stage in the process of this realisation. In short, sophistry both is and is not philosophical in the sense that it is a necessary moment in the movement, the becoming actual of philosophy as absolute knowing.

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Thus, over 150 years after Hegel lectured on the history of philosophy, the continued interest of his ‘rehabilitation’ of sophistry derives its necessity not simply from the influence his work had on subsequent scholars, nor from the need to discover the ‘truth’ and ‘errors’ of Hegel’s account, but from the very radicality of speculative thought itself. As the philosophy that unfolds the history of philosophy as the history of thought finding itself, Hegelian speculation understands itself as the fulfilment of the philosophical tradition. More precisely, given Hegel’s remark that it is with Descartes that ‘we really enter upon a philosophy which is, properly speaking, independent, which knows [ . . . ] that self-consciousness is an essential moment in the truth’ and that consequently ‘here, we may say, are at home’ (HP III, 217), Hegel’s work is properly, and according to its own author, a fulfilment of modern philosophy’s relation to Greek thought. The forcefulness of Hegel’s account of sophistry, his restoration – contra Plato – of sophistry to philosophy, depends on a determination of truth and of being that is specifically modern. Beyond the recognition that it is subjectivity that in modern philosophy that becomes the standard, the ground, against which being and truth are measured, any attempt to engage with and move beyond Hegel’s account of sophistry must, therefore, delimit modern thought according to its fundamental metaphysical commitments.

3 Heidegger and Sophistry

Introduction Hegel experienced the essence of history in terms of the essence of being in the sense of absolute subjectivity. M. Heidegger, ‘Hegel and the Greeks’ In an essay entitled ‘Hegel and the Greeks’, Heidegger articulates the following claim: ‘It is Hegel’, he says, ‘who, for the first time, thinks the philosophy of the Greeks as a whole and thinks this whole philosophically’ (HG, 324). Hegel is able to do this, Heidegger argues, because he thought history in such a way that it is determined as philosophical in its very essence. Not only is it that Hegel recognises in the philosophical tradition a unity, a cumulative effort of enquiry directed towards one goal, the determination of truth, as had Aristotle before him, but also that history, for Hegel, is the history of thought finding itself, of its coming to realise itself in its full and absolute truth. Heidegger’s aim is this essay is to make apparent how Hegel experienced Greek philosophy. He provides a simple, succinct answer: Hegel experiences Greek philosophy as ‘unsatisfying’; it is ‘unsatisfying’ in that it is determined by Hegel as merely a ‘beginning’. In other words, philosophy, begun by the Greeks, is, being a beginning, limited. This limitation becomes apparent when it is grasped from the perspective of the richer, fuller, truth it has made possible. Viewed on that basis Greek philosophy is a ‘not yet’, a ‘not yet’ what it will finally become. That this is the basis on which Hegel understands the Greeks is not disputed. Even where it is allowed that for Hegel modern philosophy is caught up in the fundamental oppositions of the understanding, and lacks the flexibility of thought that the Greeks discovered in the dialectic, 62

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it is still acknowledged that modern philosophy marks a decisive advance towards the fulfilment of the philosophical project for Hegel. As Hegel himself says in a citation that Heidegger recalls, ‘the first emergence [ . .. ] is the simplest, the poorest’ and ‘thus the most ancient philosophers are the poorest of all’.1 For Hegel the later always comprehends the earlier, and thus there is no question for him that the key terms of modern philosophy say what the ancient philosophers wanted to say but were not yet able to: there is nothing in ancient philosophy that has not been taken up and comprehended by modern thought. It is just such an act of retrospective comprehension that informs Hegel’s recognition of the unphilosophical element in sophistry, the philosophical inadequacy that determines the specific place of sophistry within philosophy as such. When Hegel declares that sophistry is animated by a merely subjective content, by the particular desires of the empirical individual, it is an identification of the same aspect of sophistry that informs Plato’s condemnation. The Platonic account of sophistry established an absolute opposition between sophistry and philosophy: according to Plato philosophy is fundamentally concerned with truth, sophistry is not. For Plato the sophist is concerned with speaking well, speaking effectively, but this concern implies at the same time a lack of concern with the substantive content of speech, the matters spoken about. The sophist wants to speak beautifully and powerfully, but it does not matter to her whether what she says holds true of what she says it is about. It is this intrinsic unconcern with the matters spoken about, an indifference towards the substantive content, that Plato condemns in sophistry. Thus Plato’s hostility is not directed towards the individual corruption of the sophists – some sophists were corrupt, but, as Plato recognises, others were not; some did intentionally lie and deceive, others did not. But even the most admirable sophists – Gorgias and Protagoras, for example – are admirable despite their sophistry and not because of it. As Plato shows in the Gorgias, the individual sophist may well act with rectitude, and to a certain extent this may shape their own practice, but this virtue is not grounded in sophistry itself. It emerges instead from the disposition of the particular individual which sophistry does nothing to discipline, merely giving itself over to it. That sophistry has recourse to the mere self-will of the individual is but the other face of this lack of concern with substantive content. It is possible, even necessary, to acknowledge a commonality between Hegel’s and Plato’s criticisms of sophistry. However, that there is this commonality is one thing – a direct consequence of the traditionality of philosophy itself. To claim that Hegel and Plato say the same thing is

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another. For Hegel’s agreement is no mere repetition of Plato’s criticism. Rather it is its translation, its assimilation, to the terms of modern philosophy. For Hegel the lack of substantive content within sophistry that Plato attacks becomes thoroughly identified with the failure of sophistry to grasp that which is the true and ultimate substance, the determining content of all knowledge, pure universal subjectivity. Given that not only is this pure subjectivity passed over in the sophists but also never recognised as such by the Greeks, indeed given that it only explicitly emerges in philosophy with Descartes, then there is without doubt a certain forcefulness in Hegel’s interpretation of Plato’s arguments. This forcefulness has often been remarked,2 but it is important to recognise that for Hegel this forcefulness constitutes its legitimacy. Hegel understands the development of philosophy as the unfolding of the unitary and necessary historical progress of spirit towards itself. Spirit – defined by Hegel in the Philosophy of Right as ‘thought in general’3 – progresses towards itself, thus overcoming its self-alienation, by experiencing itself as that which determines all objectivity, all beings in their being. In other words, the progress of spirit towards itself is the movement that thought exercises upon itself, a movement through which thought finally comes (in the first instance with Descartes) to think itself as the fundamental subject, the absolute that determines all that is. The forcefulness of Hegel’s reading of Plato’s criticisms of sophistry, indeed his reading of Greek philosophy per se, is nothing other than the forcefulness of spirit itself, recognising and appropriating its past, owning its history. If the original meaning of Plato’s criticism is not preserved in its original form, this loss is the very possibility of its truth, of its having opened up or participated in a process that overtakes it, but which confers upon it its genuine meaning. Despite this Heidegger will still attribute a certain violence to Hegel’s interpretation. That he does so is because Hegel’s philosophy, in which the tradition of Western metaphysical culminates, expresses a narrowing down of the original significance of the fundamental concepts and experiences of Greek philosophy. For Heidegger, Hegel’s ‘not yet’ does not bespeak an immaturity of Greek philosophy as Hegel himself thought, but betrays the inability of the philosophical tradition both to measure up to its origins and to see how far in advance of it these origins are. Thus, succinctly, almost brutally, Heidegger counterposes to the ‘not yet’ under which Hegel subsumes all Greek philosophy and thought, another ‘not yet’. This ‘not yet’ is that of our thinking, a thinking which is ‘not yet’ adequate to, and which is exceeded by, the basic experience

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that stands at the origin of Greek thought. This latter ‘not yet’, which holds sway more or less explicitly over all of Heidegger’s thinking, expresses another relation to Greek thought than that which obtains in the philosophical tradition itself. In order to grasp its significance for the understanding of sophistry it will be necessary to give a closer account of its method and motivation.

The destruction of the history of ontology In the introduction to the 1927 lecture course published under the title Basic Problems of Phenomenology, a course delivered just after the publication of his magnum opus, Being and Time, Heidegger lays out the character of his phenomenological method of philosophy and its relation to what he calls the single and proper theme of philosophy – being. In advance of any fundamental substantiation, such a characterisation of philosophy is, Heidegger notes, only an assertion. Yet it is an assertion that can be lent a certain weight by the evidence of the philosophical tradition, which from the beginning of philosophy in antiquity has always addressed itself to being. Heidegger’s immediate intention is to show that the ontological nature of its enquiry distinguishes philosophy from all other sciences, all of which deal with beings and do not and can never deal thematically with being as such. Negatively speaking, then, philosophy cannot derive its method from those of the sciences. However, and here taking up a distinction already made by Aristotle in relation to both philosophy and the dialectic,4 the ontological concern of philosophy, its concern with being rather than beings, necessitates that philosophy also and at the same time concern itself with a particular being – the human being or Dasein. Access to beings as beings presupposes an understanding of being: beings are disclosed only to that particular being which has such an understanding of being. That being is the being that we ourselves are. Thus the science – philosophy – that seeks to clarify and bring to conceptuality this understanding of being must necessarily take into consideration the being – the essential constitution and characteristics – of Dasein. Given that what is proper to Dasein is always to have an understanding of being, no matter how vague and approximate it might be, Heidegger will claim that philosophy does not indifferently study Dasein, but is itself most radically bound to the possibilities and destinies of Dasein’s existence. As the ontological analysis of Dasein’s existence undertaken by Heidegger in Being and Time shows, the original constitution of Dasein’s being is temporality. Dasein does not exist as a being ‘in time’; rather its

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very being is essentially temporal. Consequently the possibilities and destinies of Dasein’s existence are not determined by an eternal and unchanging essence. Rather, because Dasein itself is fundamentally temporal in its character they are themselves temporally and historically given. As Heidegger says in Being and Time, Dasein is its past. It does not simply have its past as something which is behind it, and that trails after it, it ‘is its past in the way of its own being’ and this past ‘already goes ahead of it’ disclosing and regulating its own possibilities (BT, 41). Given the very temporality and historicality of Dasein’s being, one cannot fail to see that the traditionality of philosophy is for Heidegger no accident. The very fact of philosophy’s traditionality is grounded in the essential historicality of Dasein’s being. Thinking itself inherits a history, and cannot – for all that it might think otherwise – except itself from this. Certainly the fact that Dasein has once been seized by the possibility of clarifying for itself the meaning of being, does not mean that all subsequent philosophical enquiry will see itself as bound to the tradition, but even where it does not this is not evidence against the essential traditionality of philosophy as such. Rather it merely points to a deficient mode of being traditional. The irreducible historicality of philosophical thinking means that Dasein can fall prey to the tradition that hands down to it the possibilities of ontological enquiry. Tradition ‘becomes master’ (BT, 43) in such a way that what comes down to us is deprived of its capacity to provoke. The traditional concepts, horizons and angles of approach appear unworthy of being questioned. In other words, no matter whether they are accepted or rejected, the meaning of such concepts, horizons, indeed the very meaning of ontological enquiry itself, is assumed to be self-evident. Consequently it is traditionality itself which uproots Dasein’s historicality, making it suppose that there is no necessity to go back to and question the primordial sources from which the concepts and categories handed down to it have been drawn. As a result the succeeding tradition far from advancing beyond its origin remains in thrall to it. To use the language of the later Heidegger, in being merely taken over the tradition itself becomes derivative, unequal or inadequate to its origins. The tendency of ontological enquiry to dissipate into self-evidence and sterility demands that philosophy must recover the original meaningfulness of its basic concepts and modes of interrogation. For Heidegger the only possibility of advancing beyond the tradition is by going back: Greek ontology and its history – that through various filiations and distortions determine the basic character of philosophy – must be returned to, and positively appropriated. This return to the origins of the tradition is

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named by Heidegger destruction – ‘a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn’ (BPP, 23). Hence what is destroyed by the destruction is not traditionality per se, but its doctrinal content, that in it which is passed down unthinkingly. However, if the traditional concepts must be deconstructed so that the concealments that the tradition has itself brought about are dissolved through a step-back to Greek ontology, and the genuine validity of its concepts recovered, then this return is itself not an indifferent repetition of that ontology. The return to Greek ontology is a creative repetition: beyond simply disinterring the original ontological concepts fashioned by the Greeks, it is necessary to understand them better than the Greeks did themselves. This does not imply assimilating Greek ontology to the terms of a modern thought supposed to be richer simply because it is later. Rather, and contra Hegel and modern philosophy in general, it necessitates ex-posing oneself to the Greek, and in doing so exposing the horizons of experience that inform the basic ontological concepts of the Greeks. The reclamation of the experiential origins of Greek conceptuality, an origin covered over by the very concepts themselves, and hence forgotten, is a task that is itself grounded in the very nature of ontological enquiry, and what it enquires into – being. Given that being is always the being of beings, and that it is always made accessible at first only by starting with some being, the way in which being is understood is determined by the factual experience of beings, itself limited by the possibilities of experience peculiar at a particular time to Dasein. Thus the repetition discovers the proper meaning of such concepts by determining their original and legitimate sphere of application. In the Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger advances the claim that the interpretation of being offered by Greek philosophy, and in particular by Plato and Aristotle, is itself derived from a particular mode of experience, a particular type of access to beings, and from a particular type of being. Thus Heidegger will say ‘as early as antiquity a common or average concept of being came to light, which was employed for the interpretation of all the beings of the various domains of being and their modes of being’ (BPP, 22). That Greek philosophy already puts forward an average concept of being means that in a certain sense the Greeks themselves and not just the subsequent tradition were oblivious to the basic experiences that inform their fundamental ontological concepts. In this way dismantling the basic concepts, deconstructing them back to their sources, amounts to a positive appropriation of the tradition, and not its mere negation and condemnation as worthless. The aim of the destruction

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is an appreciation of the positive possibilities of the traditional concepts by an understanding of their limits. The destructive step-back to Greek ontology aims at a recovery of the possibilities that are inherent in the tradition, and the reclamation it effects is a taking hold of the tradition that has always already taken hold of Dasein itself; in the words of Being and Time it is a going back to the past in a positive manner on the part of Dasein in order to make it productively its own. The motivation behind the destruction that Heidegger works is thus to be found in its negative aspect which looks towards ‘“today” and at the prevalent way of treating the history of ontology’, its tendency to bury the past in nullity, and the obstructions that it consequently places in the way of properly understanding the philosophical concepts and conceptuality that determine our understanding of ourselves and our world.

Subjectivity, time and tradition The Basic Problems of Phenomenology presents the necessity of a destruction of the traditional ontological concepts in terms of correcting the tendency, exacerbated by the tradition, of employing an average concept of being for the interpretation of all beings and thus concealing if not their being at least their particular modes of being. The destruction is, however, directed with a certain necessary force towards the traditional way in which the being of the human being has itself been comprehended. As Heidegger articulates it, although ‘Plato saw quite well that the soul, with its logos, is a being different from a sensible being [ . . . ] he was not in a position to demarcate the specific mode of being of this being from the mode of being of any other being or non-being’ (BPP, 22). Heidegger continues that this is a tendency that is omnipresent in the tradition; Aristotle and all subsequent thinkers down to Hegel, and even after Hegel, have continued to employ this average concept of being that fails to properly demarcate the being of the soul, the subject, and thus the human being. In fact, and although the tradition has always held to the difference between the human being and sensible beings or things, it has been unable to ontologically distinguish them with any rigour. The very difficulty lies in the tendency to proclaim that the soul or the subject is not a thing, but then address its ontological characteristics in terms that although they appear to have an unrestricted application to all beings are, as a demonstration of their ontological provenance shows, proper to things, or even and more specifically, proper to a very particular type

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of thing. Thus what Heidegger is concerned to expose is that despite a variety of inflections that are made within the philosophical tradition, that tradition remains committed to a remarkable indifference to the question of the being of the human being. The ontologically indifferent conception of the human being found in the philosophical tradition, but in particular the emphatic commitment to this indifferent conception that presses to the fore with the centrality accorded to subjectivity in modern philosophy, exacerbates the tendency towards the nullification of the temporality and historicality of Dasein. Even those concepts which are synonyms or radicalisations of ‘subjectivity’ proposed by modern philosophy with a view to observing the particularity of the human being, concepts such as ‘consciousness’, ‘spirit’, ‘person’, or even ‘man’ (BT, §10) still co-posit the concept of ‘subjectum (hupokeimenon)’ (BT, 72) and so distort Dasein’s being by interpreting it as something that endures in a substantial identity. It is only possible to conceive that such a substantial identity would be affected by time accidentally, so to speak, and after the fact of its being what it is. Thus, to follow the implications of Heidegger’s argument, the more pronounced a role the subjectivity of the subject in whatever guise it is presented comes to play in the determination of truth, the less will the historicality of thinking and truth be able to show itself in its proper light. Such a conception of the being of the human being is what effectively denies to Dasein any possibility of a genuine insight into the fundamental philosophical concepts that have been passed down to it by the tradition. Consequently, even when philosophy believes itself to be putting into question its own heritage it is, as Jacques Derrida has felicitously put it, dictated to it a tergo.5 According to Heidegger, the Hegelian determination of the relation between time and spirit, and thus the Hegelian determination of history, remains of a piece with the tradition. Hegel conceives the relation between spirit and time as one in which spirit ‘fall[s] into time’ (BT, 484), one in which it becomes temporal. Such a conception bespeaks an all too traditional externality between spirit and time. Nevertheless, and as Heidegger points out, the possibility of spirit’s falling into time must be assured by a fundamental kinship between both: ‘time must be able, as it were, to take in spirit. And spirit in turn must be akin to time and its essence’ (BT, 480). The interpretation of both spirit and time that allows Hegel to bring out their kinship only further underlines the derivations of these two Hegelian concepts. On the one hand, spirit – thought thinking itself – manifests itself dialectically as the negation of negation; in thinking its other, its negation, spirit essentially thinks itself, it actualises itself

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through the activity of negation. For Heidegger this interpretation of spirit is a formalisation of the Cartesian cogito, of consciousness as cogito me cogitare rem, grasping of self as grasping of non-self (BT, 433). Similarly, Hegel conceives time dialectically as the negation of negation. Thus it accords with spirit as it actualises itself to ‘fall into time’. However, that Hegel is able to conceive time as the negation of negation is because of the pre-eminence he accords to the ‘now’. In other words, it is because he supposes what Heidegger denominates a derivative, vulgar determination of time. To follow the argument of the Jena Logic, which Heidegger says lays out the essentials of Hegel’s thinking on time, the absolute this of time, the now, is, according to Hegel, the ‘absolutely negatively simple’, for the individual now is the now point that simply divides the past from the future; thus it excludes from itself all multiplicity. But, as this negation it negates itself, for the now itself passes over into non-being: ‘it has its non-being in itself and becomes immediately something other than itself . . . the future’. 6 If, on the basis of a determination of time thought according to the now, only the present is, negating the before and after which are not, nevertheless when this determination is grasped dialectically the present reveals itself to be the result of the past, and it is itself pregnant with the future. Accordingly, on the basis of this dialectical conception of the relation between spirit and time, it is only possible to comprehend the relation of spirit to the past of the history of philosophy as one in which the past (a no longer present, a past present) is negated by the present. The past is negated, but in so far as the present is in fact the result of the past it negates, the past is preserved in the present rather than simply being nullified or abolished by it. It is preserved, but preserved only according to the moment that supersedes it, and thus which yields its truth. In so far as the Hegelian account of time is founded upon a derivative, vulgar conception of time it is shown by Heidegger to suppose a more fundamental temporality of Dasein; but if the Hegelian account supposes this, its ignorance of it denies it an original access to the philosophical tradition that constitutes its past; it is the tradition that consequently dictates to it its understanding of its relation to history and so it remains derivative of the traditional determinations and manners of thinking where it thinks to exceed them. Heidegger’s demonstration of the correlation between Hegel’s determination of the relation between the historicality of spirit and the vulgar conception of time does not seek to correct Hegel. In the Basic Problems of Phenomenology Heidegger comes back to the contrast between his

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destructuring of the tradition and Hegel’s speculative dialectical appropriation in order to make this point. Hegel, he says is not to be corrected, for he was ‘completely in the right’ (BPP, 282) when he himself expressed that his philosophy had thought through Ancient Greek philosophy to its end. Hegel’s philosophy brings to fulfilment a certain dynamic within the philosophical tradition. Consequently in attempting to recognise the limitations of Hegel it is not necessary to go beyond Hegel; indeed it is necessary not to go beyond Hegel. In relation to the tradition ‘Hegel saw everything that is possible’ (BPP, 282). But if he saw everything that is possible he did not grasp those possibilities in their radicality. In order to philosophise, Heidegger says, it is necessary to return to the original and simplest problems of philosophy that were first of all posed by the ancients. Only by doing so will it be possible to grasp the limitation of the philosophical tradition, and in particular of modern philosophy for what they are. Philosophising demands not that it simply progresses, and puts the past behind it, but that it ‘come[s] to itself’ (BPP, 282). In other words, it is necessary to pose again the questions that animated the research of the Ancient Greek philosophers, unsettling the self-evidence that they have lapsed into. In doing so philosophy does not alienate itself from itself, but appropriates more radically its own origins in order to become what it is.

The critique of the traditional interpretation of sophistry Heidegger never subjected either sophistry or any particular sophist to a sustained interpretation. Unlike the texts and lecture courses on the canonical figures – Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, the Scholastics, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schelling and Nietzsche – the sophists are not much read by Heidegger. A lecture course from 1925–26, Logik. Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, provided a brief interpretation of Gorgias’ treatise On Not-Being. Later, once in an essay entitled ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (1938), and once in a lecture course on Nietzsche delivered in 1940, Heidegger gave an interpretation of Protagoras’ saying ‘man is the measure of all things’. But beyond these explicit readings a host of other texts refer to sophistry, from the early lecture course published as Plato’s Sophist (1924–25), through to the 1955 lecture What is Philosophy? Thus, if the sophists never get read with same degree of attention as Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides, then they are not consigned to the same obscurity as the other Presocratics. More broadly speaking, the sophists are not passed over in the same way as are Boethius, Dionysius the Aeropagite, or the Neo-platonists, for example. If, as R. Bernasconi

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has argued, these last are ‘names one rarely hears about from Heidegger [ . . . ] indicating in some measure the process of selection by which [he] sought to establish the lineage that identified which thinkers and which ideas constituted the tradition’, 7 then it is possible to say that despite the infrequency with which Heidegger refers to the sophists, they nevertheless play some part in the lineage and ideas that constitute the tradition for him. In general terms, our task in what remains of this chapter, which has as its aim to characterise Heidegger’s understanding of sophistry, is to delimit and interpret the logic that underlies this understanding and which determines the place that sophistry occupies within what for Heidegger constitutes the philosophical tradition. In the first instance however, and given that in some way the sophists are central to the philosophical tradition for Heidegger, it is necessary to consider how the destruction of the tradition affects the traditional determination of sophistry. In the lecture course on Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger subjects what he calls the ‘traditional interpretation of sophistry’ to a ‘critique’ (PS, 150). This ‘critique’ takes aim at the interpretation of sophistry that, developing through the tradition, has become sedimented and self-evident. If we recall that the destruction of the tradition, itself ultimately nothing negative, aims precisely to free up the tradition itself from the traditional interpretations by taking what has become obvious and unquestioned and make it transparent to its foundations, then it is legitimate to regard this ‘critique’ as an attempt to destructure the traditional account of sophistry. The traditional interpretation, Heidegger says, typically regards the sophists as ‘sceptics, relativists and subjectivists’ (PS, 150). Heidegger does not point to any particular representative of this traditional interpretation. That he does not, does not itself undermine the validity of his interpretation, for it is in the character of traditionality itself in so far as it is declines into obviousness to issue in an average and hence fundamentally anonymous interpretation. For this reason, one should exercise caution in interpretatively attributing Heidegger’s characterisation to a particular philosopher. Nevertheless, in as much as it is a traditional interpretation, it is one that is characteristic of Hegel’s understanding of sophistry. That Hegel’s understanding moves within the parameters of such an interpretation of sophistry, is most obviously seen in the contrast that he makes between the subjective dialectic of the sophists and the objective response it provokes in Socrates and Plato. To interpret sophistry in this way is, according to Heidegger, untenable. This is not because, contra such interpretations, the researches of the

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sophists were positive in intent or outcome and aimed at something more than the merely negative that scepticism or relativism appear to imply. For Heidegger it is not a matter of establishing the sophists on a more positive philosophical footing, of discovering in them something more than the negative goad for Socrates, but of showing or recalling that the sophists were not philosophers at all. In this respect the traditional interpretation, whether it be an average anonymous interpretation or one that bears the proper name of a major philosopher, is unsupportable in so far as it assumes that the sophists were ‘exponents of definite philosophical positions’ (PS, 151), or more succinctly, in so far as it assumes that they were philosophers. The intention behind the critique of the traditional interpretation of sophistry is not to make it possible to return to sophistry and disclose in it a wealth of possibilities partly undiscovered and partly covered over by the tradition itself. There is no generous repetition, no productive re-reading, of the sophists; nor could there be, for, according to Heidegger, the sophists from the outset and all along had absolutely no interest in saying anything substantive about philosophical questions at all. In fact they had no interest in saying anything substantive about anything. As Heidegger writes, three years after the lectures on Plato’s Sophist, in the lecture course published under the title The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic the sophist is not moved by the serious concern that motivates the philosopher, and does not strive for genuine understanding as the philosopher does. Unlike the philosopher, who seeks the being of beings in its primitive and direct truth, the sophist at best is a mere ‘rationaliser’ (MFL, 12) who is concerned merely to argue without insight into what it is that she argues about. Thus the fondness of the sophist for paradoxes and empty reasoning. It is because of this lack of concern, sophistry itself cannot give anything to see; it cannot, in a positive sense, provide the basis from which an appropriation of the proper matter or things of philosophy is possible. On what basis and with what reason, then, does the traditional interpretation make its claims? For Heidegger, whilst it is not entirely without foundation, the traditional interpretation establishes itself through an inversion of the spiritual development of the Greeks and of philosophy itself. For, Heidegger argues, it is only by passing through Plato that one could think of making the sophists ‘exponents of definite philosophical systems’ (PS, 151). It was Plato who, by first of all understanding sophistry from out of a philosophical regard, a regard that primarily looks towards being as such, and strives to attain a conceptual understanding and determination of it, made it apparent that

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sophistry was itself fundamentally involved with ‘semblance, the false, the not and negation’ (PS, 150). Because they only sought to debate and speak well or beautifully, because they only sought a purely aesthetic existence (PS, 149), the sophists could say nothing substantive about their own profession, about what they professed or how they professed it. Only on the basis of Plato’s research into being could it have become possible to attribute to the sophists a scientific concern with ‘semblance, the false, the not and negation’ and thus read into sophistry a theoretical position that could be construed as scepticism or relativism. If on the one hand the critique disturbs the complacency with which sophistry has been understood, and yet if on the other hand in doing so it does not offer the grounds for a positive re-reading of sophistry, it nevertheless is undertaken with a positive intent. In its positive aspect the critique aims to free up the researches of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle from the distortion imposed upon them by the traditional interpretation of sophistry. For whilst the attribution to the sophists of a definite philosophical position is only possible on the basis of what Plato had said about the sophists and not on the basis of what the sophists themselves understood or could have understood, it is occasioned by the loss of a sense for the original motivation of philosophy itself. It results from construing the content of philosophical research as arising in opposition to sophistry. It thereby places that against which Socrates, Plato and Aristotle worked their way forward ‘on the same level as Plato and Aristotle themselves’ (PS, 151), and so understands philosophy itself ‘as a counter-movement against certain doctrinal contents, schools, and the like’ (PS, 151). Such an interpretation thus impacts more essentially on philosophy than it does on sophistry; placing sophistry on the same level as philosophy does not mean raising it above its essential capabilities, but separating philosophy from its essence. It is an interpretation that turns philosophy – which in this context means the investigations of Plato and Aristotle – away from its proper origin, and turns it into mere arguments, arguments opposed to the sophists. One might even say that, in the eyes of Heidegger, far from philosophising sophistry the traditional interpretation of sophistry, sophisticates philosophy.

The being of the sophist Ancient sophistry was nothing but [idle-talk] in its essential structure, although it was perhaps shrewder in certain ways. M. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time

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Heidegger does not legitimate his critique of the traditional interpretation of sophistry by an interpretation of any of the fragments attributed to the sophists, but rather by referring to Aristotle. In particular his critique find its resources in the well-known passage from Book Gamma of the Metaphysics in which Aristotle distinguishes the dialectician and the sophist from each other and from the philosopher. Aristotle makes the distinction by way of a consideration of the apparent similarities between all three: Dialecticians and sophists have the same manner as the philosopher; for sophistry is sophia in appearance only, and dialecticians discuss all things, and both the sophists and the dialecticians have beings as a whole as their theme; but clearly they discuss these concepts because they appertain to philosophy. For sophistry and dialectic move within the same field of beings as philosophy, but philosophy differs from the former in the nature of its capability and from the latter in its outlook on life. Dialectic treats as an exercise what philosophy tries to understand, and sophistry seems to be philosophy but is not (Metaphysics, IV, 1004b, 17ff.). Heidegger emphasises that according to Aristotle the sophist and the dialectician appear to move in the same field of beings as the philosopher – beings as a whole – for ‘they do not claim to move within a definite region [of beings] but claim to be able to speak and give answers about everything’ (PS, 148). All three, the sophist, the dialectician and the philosopher claim to deal with the whole. In terms of their ontic concerns all three are, then, indistinguishable. It is by their ontological concern and by the determinate existence that their enquiries presuppose that they differ. Dialectics shares the same ontological concern as philosophy. It makes an attempt to exhibit beings in their being, but it is inadequate to the task. It is thus distinguished by the possibility that belongs to it by its very nature; it has only limited possibilities of disclosing the being of beings in comparison to philosophy. As to the distinction between philosophy and sophistry made by Aristotle, and rendered in the above citation as a distinction in ‘outlook on life’, Heidegger translates it thus: ‘from the other [i.e. from sophistry] philosophy distinguishes itself by way of choosing in advance the mode of existence’ (PS, 148). Here, Heidegger renders Aristotle’s saying – tes de tou biou te proairesei – literally. The Greek term bios does not mean mere life, mere animal life, but signifies a manner of life, a manner of being. Accordingly, what is at issue in the contrast made by Aristotle is,

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for Heidegger, eminently a matter of human existence. As the existential analytic of Being and Time makes clear, the human being, Dasein, does not exist in the same sense as other entities do. Dasein is never simply present as, for example, a mere thing is. A mere thing is indifferent to its own existence; its being what-it-is is unaffected by the mere fact of its existence, that-it-is. By contrast, the term ‘existence’ when it is applied to Dasein does not denominate the simple fact that-it-is, for according to Heidegger, and in contrast to other entities, the ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence. As such the characteristics that appertain to Dasein do not do so as properties pertain to things, but are rather ‘possible ways for it to be’ (BT, 67). These possible ways to be, these possibilities of being, determine the very existence of Dasein; for Dasein existence is always a being-underway towards achieving a possibility of its being. Thus, in interpreting Aristotle’s distinction between the philosopher and the sophist, Heidegger emphatically draws attention to its existentialontological sense; it is according to determinate possibilities of Dasein that the philosopher and the sophist are differentiated. To be sure Tredennick’s translation of Aristotle retains something of this sense in as much as an ‘outlook on life’ denotes a particular and determining mode of disposing oneself towards life as a whole, towards beings, but Heidegger strives to bring out much more forcefully that this is not merely a way of looking at things, but is a fundamental determination of Dasein itself. How, according to Heidegger’s interpretation does the being, the existence, of the philosopher differ from that of the sophist? The ‘bios of the philosopher is devoted purely to substance [Sachlichkeit]’ (PS, 148), the philosopher has chosen in favour of substance rather than semblance. In contrast the sophist, who is concerned only with the ability to speak and converse ‘reasonably and beautifully about all things regardless of whether what is said holds good or not’ (PS, 149), has decided in favour of semblance rather than substance. The manner of being, the bios, of the sophist is merely aesthetic. This contrast between a type of speech that aims to bring about an understanding of its content, to measure up to the matter spoken about, and thus disclose it, and one that is merely aesthetic, concerned with its own beauty, is presented by Heidegger as a difference of attitude, of disposition: for in contrast to the sophist the philosopher ‘takes that about which [she speaks] seriously’ (PS, 150). The interpretation of the same passage that Heidegger gives in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic makes it clear that the ‘seriousness’ of the philosopher constitutes what in Being and Time Heidegger calls the befindlichkeit of Dasein. Philosophy differs from sophistry ‘through existence already having been deeply moved in advance, i.e., through

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“seriousness”’ [durch das Im-vorhinein-ergriffenhaben der Existenz] (MFL, 12). Ergriffensein, as the English translation notes, ‘means to be seized by a compelling affection’ (MFL, 12). According to the analysis of the existential constitution of Dasein set out in Section V of Division 1 of Being and Time, what is indicated ontologically by the term befindlichkeit is ontically familiar as our mood or moods (stimmung), our being affected in one way or another; it is the state or mood in which Dasein finds itself. Ontologically Dasein finds itself, is brought before its being, by its mood or moods, which constitute ‘how it is’. But Dasein does not just disclose its own being to itself in accordance with its moods or affections; always already affected by one mood or another, and disposed according to it, Dasein also discovers those beings that it is not in a way that it is irreducible to and prior to any theoretical cognition and volition. Dasein does not choose to be bored, but is affected by boredom; Dasein does not choose to love and is not able to love someone simply because of what it knows about them and because it thinks it should. It is in accordance with this or that mood that has seized it, that its world comes to matter to Dasein. It is for this reason that Heidegger is able to understand Aristotle to lay claim to such a fundamental stimmung or mood on the part of philosophy: seized by a compelling seriousness, existence is proairetically affected; it is moved in advance to disclose itself in accordance with this seriousness. According to her fundamental seriousness, existence matters to the philosopher in such a way that it is uncovered in its questionableness. Philosophy is, then, ‘a striving for the possibility of genuine understanding’ (MFL, 13). For Heidegger, to understand is to survey a matter, to survey its possibilities and to make it transparent in its being. Thus in the seriousness constitutive of philosophy, the philosopher seeks to grasp existence according to its decisive possibilities of being. In as much as it is constitutive of Dasein to be disposed in one way or another towards that with which and for which it exists, through the seriousness of philosophy Dasein acquires ‘an outstanding free disposition’ (MFL, 11) over beings as a whole, over both the being that it is and those beings that it is not. Given this interpretation of Aristotle’s account of philosophy it is possible now to understand more clearly why, for Heidegger, to see philosophy as defining itself in opposition to the supposed doctrinal content of sophistry is to degrade philosophy itself. Philosophy is essentially ontological enquiry, disposed according to its seriousness to a questioning of being, of both beings as a whole and beings in their being. In its enquiry, its questioning with regard to being, it does not take up a position in relation to sophistry or, for that matter, in relation to

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anything. It is neither for nor against anything because in disclosing being it is the essentially prior attempt to open a space in which it is possible to take up a position towards something as such. In its fundamental seriousness philosophy is the counter-movement to ‘everything routine, everyday, average’ (MFL, 13). In its ‘everyday being’ Dasein has a basic kind of being, falling (verfallen). For the most part, Dasein has fallen away from the possibilities of a genuine understanding of existence, and thus from a genuine realisation of its ownmost possibilities. In the light of the more explicit interpretation given in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, the sophist’s concern with semblance, counterposed to the philosopher’s concern with substance, is to be understood in terms of fallenness. Following Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger as we have seen, has shown that the sophist is concerned primarily with speaking well in the sense of speaking beautifully and convincingly. This determination of sophistry, now placed within the existential determination of Dasein’s fallenness, becomes interpreted in terms of the specific way of speaking that is characteristic of fallenness – idle-talk. If speaking or talking has the possibility of bringing the hearer and speaker to genuinely see and understand what is talked about, it also has the possibility of not doing so. In falling away from the potential of disclosing that about which it speaks, it ‘closes off and covers up’ (BT, 213). This closing off and covering up which characterises idle-talk is a saying something, but a saying that gives only a semblance rather than substance. This substitution of semblance for substance is not attributable to an intention to deceive, to pass something off as something else. Rather it arises because speaking takes place without understanding the matter spoken about. The very possibility of this failure of understanding derives from the nature of language, which does not require that one be brought before what is spoken about – in either imagination or perception – for it to have meaning. It is for this reason that, despite the fact that what is talked about is ‘meant only in an indeterminate emptiness’,8 that idle-talk can pass for genuine discourse. For the sophists this is of central importance, for by making use of the average intelligibility of idle-talk, and indeed doing so with skill and shrewdness, they are able to pass themselves of as sophoi. In view of this interpretation, it is perhaps only possible to assent to the remarks of Barbara Cassin, who in her magisterial account of sophistry, L’effet sophistique, suggests that ‘all in all, the initial judgement of Heidegger on sophistry only translates the most traditional perception into new concepts centred around the notion of [fallenness] verfallen’. 9

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In order to understand what is at issue in pointing this out, it is important first of all to acknowledge that the return to the traditional perception of sophistry as it is found in Aristotle and Plato is intentional, and in its own terms, radical. By its means Heidegger seeks to rescue the existential and ontological sense of philosophy from the levelling down it suffers when sophistry itself is interpreted as an epistemological doctrine of scepticism and relativism that Socrates and Plato reacted against. In other words, Heidegger does not set out to displace the traditional understanding of sophistry by discovering new facts about the sophists, but rather, by way of a repetition of Plato and Aristotle’s determination of sophistry he seeks to open up the traditional determinations that have been carried down through the philosophical tradition, revealing the limitations those determinations suffer when they are interpreted in an insufficiently radical or original way, and in particular when they are subjected to the terms of modern philosophy. However, and as Cassin realises, by interpreting sophistry as an instantiation of Dasein’s fallenness or inauthenticity, Heidegger himself risks loosing the historial specificity of sophistry, making of it the paradigmatic semblance that eternally accompanies all genuine philosophising.

Sophistry: between the Presocratics and the philosophers Such an account of sophistry is far from being Heidegger’s final word on the subject. When Heidegger returns to the sophists – and in particular to Protagoras – in 1938, he has put into question the radicality of the approach to Greek philosophy that marked both Being and Time and the lectures from the 1920s. In the lectures on Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger’s destructive return to Greek philosophy was basically limited to a return to Plato and Aristotle. That there is a certain limitation to this early account, a certain myopia, or restriction to its access to Greek thought, shows up clearly in the remarks that Heidegger makes concerning Parmenides. Plato and Parmenides, he says, share the same basic – and that is to say Greek – consideration of being. But in comparison to Plato, Parmenides ‘speaks of being only in a general and undetermined way’ (PS, 141). To be sure, Plato only says what Parmenides – or Greek thought as such – placed at his disposal, but he says it in a much more radical and developed way. Plato’s ‘innovation with respect to the research’, Heidegger claims, ‘lies in this, that the ground upon which rests the question of being now becomes concrete’ (PS, 141). If, correlatively, ‘the task of the appropriation of the ground becomes more difficult’ (PS, 141) the result is ‘richer’ (PS, 141). Clearly then, for Heidegger,

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Parmenides’ approach to the question of being is deficient in comparison to Plato’s, and one might say of Heidegger here, what Heidegger himself later says of the entire philosophical tradition: that basically Parmenides is hardly known except by way of Plato. Throughout the 1930s Heidegger puts into question the scope of the destructuring of the tradition that had been effected in the 1920s. If Being and Time had subjected the interpretation of the meaning of being found in the philosophical to a destruction, this took place without a genuine knowledge of the history of being, of the nature of the succession and transformations of being that constitute the history of philosophy.10 In particular Heidegger’s interest is increasingly directed towards those among the Presocratics who he terms the ‘first Greeks’ – Parmenides, Heraclitus and Anaximander. No longer is it merely the case that the research of these first Greeks can be subordinated to Plato and Aristotle in as much as what they say of being is ‘indeterminate’ and more richly articulated by the later philosophers. The early Greek thinkers, the so-called Presocratics, can no longer be considered ‘merely a preparation for Plato’ (AWP, 143) and what they say cannot be understood on the basis of Plato and Aristotle. Rather they are understood to have brought to language an experience of being that is different – ‘greater’ even – than that which is found in the subsequent philosophical tradition. Thus, informed by a thinking of the philosophical tradition that is alert to the irreducibility of the various epochs of being, Heidegger’s interpretation of Protagoras evidences a more historically nuanced understanding of sophistry. Citing Protagoras’ saying panton chrematon metron estin anthropos, ton men onton hos estin, ton de me onton hos ouk estin (DK 80, B1), Heidegger begins by opposing to the common translation ‘man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not’11 one that is ‘more in keeping with Greek thought’ (N IV, 91): Of all ‘things’ [of those ‘things’, namely, which man has about him for use, customarily and even continually – chremata, chresthai] the [respective] man is the measure, of things that are present, that they are thus present as they come to presence, but of those things to which coming to presence is denied, that they do not come to presence (N IV, 91). In the first instance, and despite the fact that thus translated the fragment still states ‘unequivocally that “all” being is related to man as ego (I)’ (N IV, 93), this interpretation is intended to free the sophist from the

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habitual representation of the moderns according to which man – conceived as subject – opens up and makes accessible beings in their being. But beyond pointing up the epochal differences implicit in the distinction between modern philosophy’s outlook on things and that of Greek philosophy, here the interpretation invokes a further, and perhaps more decisive, difference. For the positive condition of the interpretation is the recognition by Heidegger of another experience of truth, an experience of the ‘unconcealment of beings’, as Heidegger translates the Greek aletheia, that was originally taken up into knowledge by those thinkers who are prior not only to the advent of modern philosophy, but who stand at the beginning, and thus in a certain sense before the advent, of Western philosophy: Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides. 12 For Heidegger, such an experience of aletheia as the unconcealing of beings is apparent in what the early Greeks called phusis – a word that comes to be translated into English as nature. So fundamental is the experience of phusis to the early Greeks that it pervades the work of the Presocratics, many of whom composed work peri phuseos – On Nature. But this was not because the Greeks were a natural people, for phusis did not name a particular being, type of being or region of beings. For the early Greek thinkers phusis means being; it is the event of presence that allows each and every being to show itself. It is because in this coming forth into presence beings show themselves, dis-cover themselves as the beings they are, that the early Greeks experienced truth as a-letheia, as a privation or a stealing away from lethe, understood, not psychologically as mere forgetfulness, but ontologically as concealment or hiddenness. 13 Thought in this way truth is not a function of subjectivity, but rather is a more originary openness in which the belonging together of ‘subject and object’ arises, and from which both have their respective ‘natures’ imparted to them. Protagoras’ statement moves within such a way of experiencing phusis and aletheia for, according to Heidegger what Protagoras says is that ‘by lingering in the realm of the unconcealed, man belongs in a fixed radius of things present to him’ (N IV, 93). It is because man, so defined, belongs to the unconcealed that Protagoras speaks of him as the metron or measure of all things. The human being is not the measure in the sense that he alone sets the standard by which beings are known; rather the human being is the measure in the sense that, confined to the fixed radius of the unconcealed, he lets this ‘become the basic trait of his existence’ (N IV, 94), and experiences beings according to this restriction which grants their specific presence as the beings that they are.

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Heidegger corroborates this understanding by offering an interpretation of another fragment from Protagoras, fragment B4: Peri men theon ouk echo eidenai, outh’ hos eisin, outh’ hos ouk eisin outh’ hopoioi tines idean. Polla gar ta kolounta eidenai he t’adelotes kai brachos on ho bios tou anthropou (DK 80, B4). Heidegger translates: ‘To know [in a Greek sense this means to “face” what is unconcealed] something about the gods I am of course unable, neither that they are, nor that they are not, nor how they are in their outward aspect. For many are the things which prevent beings as such from being perceived; both the not-openness [that is, the unconcealment] of beings and also the brevity of the history of man’ (N IV, 94). According to the restriction that is its lot, the human being is unable to decide about the being or not-being of the gods; but this is no mere agnosticism or scepticism, for in accord with its essence, which is determined by the manner of its respective restriction to the unconcealed, the relationship of human being to the deities is fixed. Protagoras’ saying that ‘man is the measure’ is founded upon an experience of being as presencing and truth as unconcealment that is found in Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides. Sophistry presupposes sophia. However if sophistry preserves the experience that determines sophia it also narrows it down. For all that it presupposes such an experience of the unconcealment of beings, it enacts an ‘emphatic restriction’ of it ‘to the respective radius of man’s experience of the world’ (N IV, 94). This recognition in turn entails a shift in Heidegger’s understanding of the relation of sophistry and philosophy. For now, according to the reading proposed in ‘The Age of the World Picture’ and repeated in What is Philosophy? it is the case that the thinking of Plato and Aristotle is seen ‘as a struggle against sophism’ (AWP, 143). In this struggle against sophistry, and thus in its dependency on it, the advent of philosophy brings about a decisive change in the interpretation of being that proves to be the end of Greek thought. It is from out of the restriction of aletheia to the respective radius of the human being’s experience of the world, that the Platonic determination of being as idea arises. This determination, Heidegger argues, itself constitutes a fundamental change in the experience of presence. 14 With the emphasis on the idea as the basis of the thing’s presence there is a shift towards grasping the horizon within which something shows itself as predominantly a characteristic of human comportment towards beings, and a corresponding movement away from the part that the entity seen actually plays in opening up the visual field in which it is circumscribed. The actual being is abstracted from its own being-present. Instead its being is granted as the idea or eidos that is revealed in the soul. Presence,

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the being-present of a being that constituted it as what it is, becomes yoked and subordinated in relation to looking, apprehending, thinking and asserting. Consequently truth is no longer experienced as the unconcealment of beings, and thus as a fundamental trait of beings themselves, but in terms of the correspondence or homoiosis between the act of knowing and the thing itself. The interpretation of sophistry that Heidegger gives in the 1930s marks a decisive advance over that which is found in the earlier works. No longer are the actual sophists merely understood as a particular example of the sophistry that always doubles philosophy as its fallen, inauthentic other. It is a measure of how far Heidegger has progressed from this earlier understanding that saw in the sophistry a particular form of idle-talk that he is able to remark, in the reading of Protagoras he makes in the 1930s, that we need not wonder that Socrates says that we can suppose Protagoras ‘a thoughtful man [in his words involving man as metron panton chrematon]’ and ‘not simply talking foolishly’ (N IV, 94). The sophists are now recognised as historically singular thinkers who provoked the fall of thought into philosophy, and who thus precipitated the end of the brief, originary experience of being found at the dawn of Western thought. However this appreciation of the historical specificity of sophistry in a certain sense repeats the earlier analysis. If, for the Heidegger of the 1920s, sophistry itself offered nothing for thought, if sophistry was in itself unworthy of questioning because it necessarily lacked any phenomenological grasp of what it presumed to talk about, the revised reading does not itself change much. Sophistry now appears as a secondary discourse, dependent on the originary thought of the early Greek thinkers. There is no antagonism between the sophists and Anaximander, Parmenides and Heraclitus, but merely a restriction, a narrowing down of what the earlier thinkers had said, and thus there is nothing original to be found in the sophists. In short, once again the sophists offer nothing for thought, and simply constitute the passage between the authentic early Greeks, and Plato and Aristotle with whom thought passes into philosophy and thus with whom the manner of experiencing being takes its decisive and fateful turn. Throughout its history philosophy has more or less continuously, and in sundry forms and ways, counterposed itself to sophistry. From Plato through Hegel and up until Heidegger, it is around sophistry and against it that philosophy constructs and contests its identity. Because of this sophistry offers the possibility of a critical perspective on the institution of philosophy: constituted by philosophy as its absolute other,

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against which philosophy establishes itself, sophistry promises to provide a way of putting into question the philosophical disposition towards truth and being, of opening up and dislocating that discourse which determining ‘the innermost basic features of our Western-European history’,15 constitutes our identity. If, despite the radicality of his own questioning of philosophy, Heidegger is unable to see in sophistry such a possibility, it is because, in a certain sense, his account of sophistry itself remains implicated in the traditional view. By reducing sophistry to a secondary, derivative discourse dependent on the account of truth established by the Presocratics proper, Heidegger paradoxically perhaps, but once more, and according to the most classical of gestures, denies to sophistry any truth of its own. Far more than mere sceptics or relativists, and certainly far more than mere ‘babblers’ utterly unconcerned with truth, for Heidegger the sophists are still far less than the philosophers, being merely the conduit from the first Greek thinkers – Anaximander, Heraclitus and Protagoras – to the philosophers proper. Thus once more the sophists are condemned, this time from out of a history of the epochality of being, to a kind of half-life. It is this condemnation that remains to be put in question. In order to allow that sophistry can delimit and dislocate philosophy not only will it be necessary to follow Heidegger by declining to treat the sophists philosophically, refusing philosophy’s two paradigmatic gestures – that of subsuming sophistry under itself as an abstract moment of its own truth, and that of expelling sophistry outside and against itself – but, beyond Heidegger, it will also be necessary to discover in sophistry what it offers to thought.

Part II Lyotard and the Sophistication of Philosophy

4 Lyotard and Sophistry

Introduction You try for two kinds of understanding: first, that which permits you to situate the antistrephon of Protagoras within the writing of temporal logic [ . . . ]. A strong understanding and ultimately useless. The other is totally different: to learn obscurely, after months and years of study, why this bizarre verbal argument interested you [ . . . ]. Who’s going to follow you if you no longer even say where you want to go? But you take a certain pleasure in this silence. You feel its opacity as an interesting resource against Hegelianism or absolutism in general. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Endurance and the Profession’ In the introductory chapter of his first major publication, Discours, figure, Lyotard brings up the example of sophistry. Is it not the case, he asks, that the very possibility of truth is destroyed by the claim that the ‘figural’ is irreducibly present in all ‘discourse’, all language? Given that the figural comprises ‘libidinal intensities, affects and “passions”’, 1 to maintain its irreducible presence within discourse appears to threaten the end, the cessation, of philosophy. For if discourse is ‘not only signification and rationality, but also expression and affect’ (DF, 15), then it seems as if ‘the door [is] opened to a sophistry by way of which one could always assert that the manifest signification of a discourse does not exhaust its sense’ (DF, 15). However, having invoked the opposition between the rationality of philosophy and the irrationality of a sophistry that operates ‘seductively’ and ‘violently’ by way of the affective power of its speech, Lyotard refuses it. It is not a matter of siding with sophistry against philosophy, even if philosophy – in what it takes to be its own good sense – opposes itself to the ‘figural’. Rather it is a matter of displacing 87

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the opposition itself. This is the case because what is at stake for Lyotard in the disclosure of the constitutive presence of the figural within the discursive is a more radical determination of truth than that which structures the opposition of philosophy and sophistry. What the philosophical tradition knows as the figure, and which in the forms of painting, poetry and rhetoric it has opposed to articulated signification, is a historically, perhaps epochally, specific determination. The opposition of the figural and the discursive – of the sensible and the intelligible – belongs ‘to a world of speech that is in rupture with another world, that of aletheia’ (DF, 16). Accordingly, sophistry and philosophy must also be thought as ‘fragmentary discourses born of [this] breaking of the speech of aletheia’ (DF, 288, note 6). With the invocation of this evidently Presocratic aletheia it would appear unnecessary for Lyotard to enter into a thinking of sophistry as such, for sophistry is a mere product, a determination of a secondary, derivative conception of truth which, in itself, offers nothing to thought. As Pierre Billouet has pointed out, the framework of Lyotard’s account, the comparison and delimitation between two ‘worlds of speech’, is clearly indebted to Heidegger’s reading of the early Greeks.2 Billouet adds that, despite the debt, Lyotard does not elaborate upon Heidegger’s account of aletheia. Rather, it is to Freud that Lyotard turns in order to characterise the sense of truth, of aletheia, that he has invoked. It is certainly true that in Discours, figure – in particular the latter part of Discours, figure – as well as in other essays from the same period, Lyotard calls upon Freud to explicate his conception of this other, more radical truth. In ‘Jewish Oedipus’, an essay on Freud published in 1970, Lyotard writes that ‘truth does not speak, stricto sensu, but works’.3 This definition is reprised in Discours, figure in order to characterise Freud’s account of desire. In the chapter entitled ‘The Dream-Work Does Not Think’, Lyotard affirms both that ‘desire does not speak’ and ‘the dream is not the language of desire, but its work’ (DF, 239). If desire is not to be thought of as a language, if it does not offer symbols to thought, it is because it is not to be understood as a ‘second discourse within discourse’ (DF, 282), and thus it does not constitute a second world behind the scenes, so to speak, that forms the prior condition and ‘truth’ of the manifest discourse. If truth too ‘does not speak’, then it is because it also cannot be thought of as a transcendental or intelligible order grounding that of which it is the truth. The Freud that Lyotard turns to is a Freud subject to a non-metaphysical reading. Consequently, whilst there is not an explicit reading or engagement with Heidegger on Lyotard’s part in Discours, figure, there are

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nonetheless a number of points of contact between the overtly Freudian account of aletheia found in that text and Heidegger’s retrieval of a more originary and non-metaphysical account of truth by way of the Presocratics. Such a point of contact is apparent in the positive conception of truth that Lyotard advances. In putting itself to work, ‘truth’, Lyotard tells us, like ‘desire’, ‘figures itself’. 4 It is undoubtedly the case that this formulation can be thought, and is thought by Lyotard, in Freudian terms as the occurrence of the dis-figuration that desire forces upon the constituted order of discourse. But it also points to Heidegger. For Heidegger, truth thought as aletheia is the event of unhiddenness, the making manifest of beings. What is at stake in thinking truth in this way is the discovery of an active principle to beings which, rather than being determined and grounded according to a prior ideational order or transcendental conditions, actually play a part in the disclosure of their being. Lyotard’s declaration that ‘truth works’ implies an analogous conception in which truth is thought verbally, actively, as the occurrence in which the figural figures itself. Moreover, if the figural actively gives itself, opens up and discloses its being, it is at the same time a withdrawing. In giving itself, the figure always holds itself back, and resists any and all cognitive appropriation. This resistance to explanation does not destroy the truth of the figure; it is precisely what constitutes its being, its truth. Again, one cannot fail to be struck by the proximity – if not the debt – to Heidegger’s thinking of aletheia as including within itself an essential hiddenness – a resistance and non-disclosure – constitutive of being. If there is, then, on Lyotard’s part a particular inflection to his reading of Freud that is implicitly Heideggerian, the recourse to Freud is imposed upon Lyotard by a certain necessity. The recognition that truth is historically constituted entails that thought itself acknowledges its historical situation, its historial grounds and its intrinsic finitude. Accordingly, as Lyotard argues, it ‘does not belong to anyone to restore the presence of [aletheia]’ (DF, 17). There can be no restitution of a Presocratic aletheia to the world, and any attempt to effect such a restoration could only appear to be a lie.5 However, there can be an attempt to disclose the truth as it gives itself according to the exigencies of the times. It is thus a matter of establishing the truth as it occurs in ‘what the world seeks blindly today through practices and experiences of all kinds’ (TPM, 12), a matter of thinking both with and against the way in which the world offers itself to us today. This world, a world that is characterised in terms of its rupture with the aletheiac world of the Presocratics, is thus one that is determined

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by philosophy.6 Such a world implicates desire at the level of truth, for the break with the aletheiac world of the Presocratics is one in which truth comes to be that which is to be accomplished by the will to know, the object striven after and desired by the discipline that takes its name from that striving desire – philosophia. At the same time, however, this desire that speaks in and motivates philosophy is subject to a ‘rationalistic’ determination that masks it as it reveals it.7 It is this ambiguous implication of desire within a world shaped by philosophy that leads Lyotard to Freud in order to think the regions of turbulence that disorder and disfigure – that deconstruct – the order of a discourse, of a language, of a world constituted by the fall into philosophy.

Kairos Mnesiphilus, a man of praxis in whom the Greeks saw the very model of ancient sophistry, first appears in Greek history on the eve of the battle of Salamis, disguised as the ‘wise counsellor’ in a particularly difficult moment. At a crucial point – truly a moment of kairos – Mnesiphilus helped Themistocles [ . . . ] to control a shifting situation. Thanks to Mnesiphilus, the most resourceful of the Greeks was able to turn a manifestly unpromising situation to his advantage. M. Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Ancient Greece In 1975 Lyotard delivered a series of lectures on the subject of Nietzsche and the sophists. Introducing these lectures, Lyotard avowed his intention to be that of restoring ‘a type of reasoning, a type of life, and also probably a type of politics [ . . . ] that are sophistical’.8 One cannot but be struck by the apparent contradiction with the view of sophistry that Lyotard had articulated only four years earlier in Discours, figure. Whereas in the earlier text it was a matter of refusing to side with sophistry, it is now a matter of taking up and recovering the practices of the sophists. Despite the manifest contrast, there is nonetheless a profound consonance between the intention that informs the attempt to rehabilitate sophistry and the deconstruction of the ‘vast rationalism’ of the ‘Platonico-Christian tradition’ (DF, 22) worked out in Discours, figure by way of the Freudian problematic of desire. It is again a case of seeking among the interstices of the philosophical order the possibility of displacing the claims of philosophical reason, not according to another truth, but by way of its own limits and through what it seeks to exclude. This is perhaps most clearly stated in a formulation that derives from an essay published in 1975. 9 According to this formulation, what

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is at stake in the restoration of sophistry is the possibility of seizing upon the ‘disordered, useless, dangerous and singular concrete enterprises’ (TPM, 99) of the sophists in order to deconstruct the philo-sophical order. The singularity and concreteness of sophistic enterprises have long been recognised, and Lyotard’s acknowledgement of them does not in itself constitute anything original. According to many of the sophists, their pupils and their followers, the art of sophistry is an art of expediency, an art that aims to seize the opportunities afforded by circumstance. Isocrates, a pupil of Gorgias, declared that in oratory ‘it is not sufficient merely to say the right thing; it is necessary to say it at the right time’,10 as the right thing said at the wrong time is, at best, inefficacious, and at worst harmful. Alcidamas, also a pupil of Gorgias, argued against Isocrates who had maintained the virtue of written speeches, that such an emphasis on the opportune moment entailed the superior virtue of improvised discourses: for it is the latter, being by their very nature open to the singularity of events, that will truly afford the orator or the sophist the possibility of seizing the occasion, the opportune moment, in which his or her intervention will have a decisive effect. It is important to note that both Isocrates and Alcidamas were speaking under the authority of Gorgias, who according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus was the first to attempt to write on ‘the art of the “timely”’ [peri tou kairou] (DK 82, B13). An alternative view, offered by Diogenes Laertius, assigns the origin of a concern with kairos to Protagoras: ‘he was [ . . . ] the first to distinguish the tenses of the verb, to expound the importance of the right moment [ protos mere chronou diorise kai kairou dunamin exetheto]’ (DK 80, A1). As Monique Trédé has suggested, given that Protagoras knew both when to use long and short discourses and how to take up both sides of an argument, there are good grounds for supposing, as Diogenes Laertius claims, that he was aware of the importance of kairos,11 which is doubly implicated in Protagoras’ practice of antilogike. An appeal to kairos can legitimate the application of contradictory predicates to the same subject because nothing is absolute; at one time or on one occasion it is thus, and on another thus. To follow the example adduced by Trédé, ‘nothing is absolutely honourable, nor shameful, but from the same things kairos sometimes creates shame, sometimes, conversely, honour’.12 But, as Alcidamas had observed, exploiting the circumstantial determination of the identity of something must be supplemented by another consideration: kairos must also be taken into account in relation to the moment at which the argument is actually spoken if it is itself to be expedient.

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If there is a dispute as to who amongst the sophists was the originator of such reflections on the role and importance of the ‘opportune moment’, and if this dispute is difficult to settle, it is because the question of the ‘timely’, the right occasion – in short the question of kairos – was an issue of long-standing importance to the Greeks. From the time of Homer and Hesiod the issue of kairos had been linked to the question of the effectiveness of any act. The notion of kairos was fundamental to all analyses of human action. As Trédé observes, it was central to the exercise of the skills of medicine, navigation, cookery, military strategy and politics as well as that of oratory. Mastery of the critical instant in all of these fields was the key to success: it was not sufficient to have acquired knowledge of general principles in order to practise these arts, for beyond such knowledge, and in order that it should be efficacious, it was necessary to possess the capacity to determine the apposite moment of application, the point at which to act. The idea of rhetoric and oratory was, by its very nature, always already bound to the question of kairos, and it is for this reason that the sophists were among those who were considered to be skilled in contriving with the moment. It is this ingenuity, this ability to contrive or ruse so as to seize hold of the moment and ‘[turn] the situation around’ (OSW, 72), that informs Lyotard’s analysis of sophistry in both the lecture course on Nietzsche and the Sophists and the essay ‘On the Strength of the Weak’ that emerges from it. The manner of the sophists, Lyotard argues, is typified by the ability, exemplified in the Dissoi Logoi, to exploit circumstantial determinations in order to declare that if there is good reason to view an action as culpable, then again there is also good reason to see it as laudable. Given this, it is always possible to transform the sense or value of the facts of a matter according to what is required by the occasion.

Protagoras The manner – or more accurately the habitus – of the sophist is linked to a type of intelligence bearing upon the contingent. There is, however, a certain paradox here, a paradox that is linked to any technique that bears upon kairos: if kairos names the contingent – or perhaps more strongly, the fugitive and the unforeseeable – how is it possible, if not to master it, at least to ruse with it? Lyotard takes up this problem – or paradox – in relation to a story that he relates at least twice, once in the essay ‘On the Strength of the Weak’, and once in The Differend. Preserved in the doxography concerning Protagoras, the story – itself retold in many guises – has a certain exemplarity. It illustrates what

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Diogenes Laertius tells us about Protagoras, which in itself encompasses many of the features that the tradition has come to regard as characteristic of sophistry. Protagoras, Diogenes says, ‘was the first to exact a fee of a hundred minae [ . . . ], to institute contests in debating, and to reach rival pleaders the tricks of their trade’; furthermore, ‘in his dialectic he neglected the meaning in favour of verbal quibbling’. He was also, according to Diogenes’ testimony, ‘the first to distinguish the tenses of verbs’. 13 According to the story that Lyotard recounts, Protagoras and a student of his, Euathlos, have entered into a contract: Protagoras will be paid a fee by Euathlos if, thanks to his tuition, Euathlos wins at least one of the cases he must plead before the tribunal whilst under Protagoras’ supervision. The principle appears straightforward, and the judgement easy: if Euathlos has won at least once he pays Protagoras, if he has not won, he does not pay. As Lyotard relates the story in The Differend, it happened that ‘one day Protagoras demanded his fee (misthos) from his student Euathlos, and as Euathlos protested that he had not won a single victory (oudepo niken nenikeka), Protagoras replied: if it is me who wins (ego men an nikeso) [this dispute], you must pay me because I have won (hoti ego enikesa); and if it is you, because you have’ (D, 6, my translation). For Protagoras to obtain his fee even when Euathlos has lost every argument he has pled, it is sufficient for Protagoras to include his claim for payment among the series of cases that Euathlos argues under his tuition. If Euathlos successfully contests Protagoras’ claim that he has won at least one argument, then he wins an argument and he must pay Protagoras. If he does not contest the claim successfully, then he must still pay Protagoras who claims that Euathlos has won at least one argument. In ‘On the Strength of the Weak’, Lyotard characterises what he sees as ‘the source of the power of the paradox [le ressort du paradoxe]’ (OSW, 65; SFF, 7) around which the story revolves. Its power derives from its inclusion of the current conflict between the student and tutor ‘in the class of exterior and inferior conflicts for which the teacher prepares the student’ (OSW, 65). As a consequence it is possible for Protagoras to juxtapose the attributes of student and adversary under the name of Euathlos without essentially preferring either: if Euathlos loses ‘he will pay like any adversary; but if he wins, he will have to pay in his capacity as a student’ (OSW, 65). From this Lyotard emphasises some of those characteristics that Diogenes Laertius has already linked to Protagoras, which serve to distinguish the manner of the sophist from that of the philosopher. In the first instance, for the sophist, the master–student relationship is subject to ‘commercial contract relations’ (OSW, 65).

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Protagoras is not concerned to protect the minds of those in his charge from adversity, he is not concerned to nurture or school them. There is no progressive process of education, such as Plato outlines in the Republic, where care is taken over those who are being educated in order to protect and nurture their capacities. Rather, the student who has concluded a commercial contract in order to study for a fixed period of time is bound to suffer the same sharp practices that are the lot of any commercial relation. The relation is not governed by the intention of introducing the student to the truth, but rather by the desire to realise a profit. And Euathlos will have to pay for losing, just as he will have to pay for winning. However, Lyotard also observes that Protagoras’ ruse points to something else: ‘Euathlos the student and Euathlos the adversary are distinct objects of discourse’ (OSW, 65–66). Protagoras’ paradox implies that the identity of Euathlos, the attributes that attach to him and define him are profoundly linked to circumstance and point of view. Contrary to the discourse of the philosopher, for whom it is a matter of identifying an identity independent of circumstances, a stable and fixed subject underlying all attribution, Protagoras seizes upon a contingency that affects all definitions, all determinations and all being. From inside sophistic discourse, Lyotard says, ‘it is in no way contradictory to make both the former [Euathlos the student] and the latter [Euathlos the adversary] pay’ (OSW, 66). The contradiction only appears in relation to a discourse that seeks to introduce a stability of identity, or at least to determine and separate essential attributes – such as being a student; and accidental attributes – such as being an adversary. Thus Lyotard continues: Protagoras’ paradox simply states that there is no enduring subject under the attributes that we can observe, that no attribute is more important than any other, and that there are as many qualified subjects as situations (OSW, 66). Protagoras’ argument appeals to the circumstantial determination of the identity of Euathlos. But if the identity of the pupil is determined by the moment, then the ability to exploit these determinations demands a certain reckoning or rusing with the domain of kairos on the part of the sophist. The aspect of Protagoras’ argument that achieves this is more clearly spelled out in Lyotard’s analysis of the argument in The Differend. In this later account Lyotard articulates more carefully the mainspring of the paradox, the procedure that allows Protagoras to transform the alternative that seemed to be offered to Euathlos by the

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initial contract into a dilemma. From the two alternatives that seemed to be possible (either Euathlos wins or loses) is derived a consequence that permits only one of the two opposites to be affirmed. Thus even when Euathlos complains that he has not won, everything nonetheless takes place as if he has. As we have seen, in order to enclose Euathlos in the dilemma, Protagoras simply includes the current dispute between himself and his pupil in the series of disputes that Euathlos is considered to have pled under his tuition. To facilitate this confusion Protagoras – first to distinguish the tenses of the verb, as Diogenes says – takes advantage of a resource offered to him by the aorist tense (enikesa) of the verb nikao (I win). Phrasing his judgement in the aorist tense, which Lyotard observes, is the ‘tense for the indeterminate’ (D, 7) and that does not express whether the action it refers to is continuous or complete, Protagoras is able to conflate the current litigation between himself and his pupil with all those that have preceded it: ‘if you win, then I’m the winner’ (D, 7). Protagoras’ response to Euathlos’ protestation that he does not owe Protagoras any fee because he has not won a case as his tutor alleges is a quite singular piece of anticipation that enables Protagoras to turn an unpromising situation – Euathlos’ manifest lack of success in front of the tribunal – to his own advantage. By way of this anticipation, Protagoras is able to master the moment of disputation between them in advance: Euathlos might just as well pay Protagoras up front, because in both cases he wins. It is a ruse, a piece of cunning, by way of which Protagoras exerts a certain control over what is yet to happen: beyond the technique usually ascribed to the sophist or the rhetorician of adapting their words or argument to the occasion, Protagoras adapts the occasion to his argument, and is thereby able to seize hold of the opportunity ahead of the moment itself.

Retorsion The ability of the sophists to transform unpromising situations by way of their words is informed by a practice that for Lyotard comprises the core of the sophistic enterprise – a manner of speaking and acting that, at the beginning of the lecture course on Nietzsche and the sophists, he terms ‘retorsion’. 14 A little later in the same course Lyotard specifies what he means by the term. Following an account of sophistical speech given by Jacqueline de Romilly in her work Histoire et raison chez Thucydide, in a chapter entitled ‘Les discours antithétiques’, Lyotard says that ‘Gorgias, Protagoras, Prodicos were amongst those people who taught

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publicly how to support a thesis upon any subject whatsoever, and also how to support the contrary thesis’ (NS, 07/02/75). In effect the sophists teach the principle of double argument – dissoi logoi – in order that, no matter what the particular argument, the one possessed of this skill is always able to retort. If, by principle the sophist considers both arguments for and arguments against in relation to the same thing, he or she is always able in practice to issue a reply to his or her adversary. It is for this reason that the retort lies at the basis of the sophistical speech. In identifying this manner of speech, and in calling it retorsion, Lyotard is following Aristotle. Sharing a close relation to dialectic, the sophists most often spontaneously and unreflectively seek to render equally plausible both the arguments for and the arguments against something, both thesis and antithesis. A practice based on dialogue, it has as its spur the potential objection of an interlocutor: the sophist searches both for arguments pro and contra, and also the means to refute them. Because the motivation of such a practice is the response of one’s interlocutor, the practice does not aim at the truth of things themselves. It does not need to: it is only concerned with the acquiescence of the one with whom one speaks. In the practice of arguing, according to Aristotle, the sophist seeks only plausibility, only conviction, only the means by which to prevail over the adversary. In the process of arguing, and in order to ensure that one obtains a victory – irrespective of whether one establishes the truth or not – the procedure can effectively be put through another turn. Not only can one always issue a retort to one’s adversary, one can turn her argument back against her, showing that what she thinks is favourable to her thesis is not, but is instead unfavourable. Not only do her arguments, contrary to her intentions, count against her but also count for oneself. It is this further turn in the process of the argument that Lyotard, following Aristotle, calls retorsion.15 The sophistical act is not merely a matter of making a retort, but in retorting, of also producing an act of retorsion – turning the adversary’s argument back against herself. In ‘On the Strength of the Weak’ Lyotard elaborates upon Aristotle’s characterisation of the dispositif or apparatus that characterises this act of retorsion. This dispositif is exemplified for Aristotle by the arguments of Corax of Sicily, who was the tutor of Gorgias. Corax takes the case of a man of weak constitution who has been accused of assault and battery. In such a case his defence would be that, given his client’s weak constitution, it is not probable that he has committed the crime he has been accused of. But were his client strong, the case against him would have no more probability – at least it would not according to Corax. For Corax

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would plead that because of its very probability it is improbable that the strong man committed the crime he is accused of. How is it possible for Corax to admit the probability of the accusation and still declare it improbable, indeed declare it improbable for the very reason that it is probable? Corax argues in the following way: ‘You can see how robust he is. Isn’t that already enough to accuse him in advance? And can you believe that my client would have fallen into the trap? He has avoided a very probable indictment by abstaining from all brutality, and that is why he is innocent’ (SFF, 4). In effect, Corax has turned the very argument that would be employed by the plaintiff back on itself, for it demonstrates that, far from it being probable that his client is guilty, they show that it is in fact perfectly probable that he is innocent. What Aristotle discerns in this singular act of retorsion is, according to Lyotard, a quite particular employment of a more general ‘discursive apparatus’ that is ‘one of the commonplaces of all genres of discourse (political, legal and ceremonial)’ (OSW, 62). It is a rhetorical trope, a form of inversion, that by exaggeration or diminution makes the least probable argument appear the more probable, and vice versa, the most probable the least probable. Thus, for example, on the basis of Corax’s defence of the strong man, it not only appears improbable that his client committed the crime that he stands accused of, but it also appears more probable that it was committed by some weak man. In the practice of oratory or rhetoric, Aristotle is able to regard this as a legitimate procedure: the exaggeration of what is small and the diminution of what is large constitutes ‘fair oratorical war’ (OSW, 62). As Lyotard points out, in accepting the general application of this rhetorical ploy as legitimate, Aristotle diverges from Plato. For his part, Plato has Socrates invoke the great orators ‘Gorgias and Tisias [ . . . ] who saw that probabilities are more to be esteemed than truths, who make small things seem great and great things small by the strength of their words (dia rhomen logou)’ (Phaedrus, 277a–b). This ability to make the great small and small great by way of words incites Plato’s indignation. It is characterised by Plato as the production of an unnatural inversion. It makes the false appear true, and the true appear false. This is an unnatural inversion – a perversion – because an argument essentially derives its strength, its cogency, from its truth. In making, or in seeking to make, the lesser argument prevail over the stronger sophistry goes against the natural order of things, for it is against nature for the stronger force to be ruled by the weaker. If this inversion, which is contrary to nature, is possible, it is because the sophist and the rhetorician do not attend to the truth of what they say, that is, its relation to that of which

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they speak. Rather they are solely concerned with the effect of what they say upon their audience. The immediate concern of the sophist is, according to Plato, less to speak of than to speak to; the referential capacity of language only plays a part in his considerations in so far as he seeks to convince his audience that what he says is true. Plato did not recognise a true tekhne in sophistry. In the Platonic dialogue that carries his name, Gorgias maintains the superiority of the tekhne he professes to teach. The art of rhetoric is the supreme art. Although it has no proper object of its own it is all-powerful, embracing and controlling all other spheres of human activity. The examples that Gorgias uses to illustrate his argument recall the importance that for the Greeks not only attached to the possession of a skill but more essentially to the ability to use it effectively. Gorgias claims that the art of medicine is impotent without the skill of the orator, the great sophist himself having been able to persuade a sick man to take his medicine when the doctors themselves were unable. 16 For Plato such claims underlined the spuriousness of sophistry and rhetoric, which aimed to substitute its own vacuity for genuine competence, by virtue of a mere knack and a certain shrewdness in dealing with others.17 Unlike Plato, Aristotle did recognise in rhetoric at least, a true tekhne. The Stagirite finds in rhetoric a positive ground. Whilst rhetoric does not aim at the true, it nevertheless has for Aristotle a certain domain within which its employment is justified. If it cannot be a science it is legitimately applicable in the context of everyday life. It aims at persuasion, or as Aristotle himself says, it ‘can be defined as the faculty [dunamis] of discovering the possible means of persuasion in relation to any subject whatsoever’ (Rhetoric, 1355b). Rhetoric is, as Plato had recognised, empirical, relying on insights into character and passions in order to achieve its end. It is derived from insight into everyday locution, and has the task of mediating between man and man. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle recognises that what is essential in relation to any human activity, and in particular to any intra-human activity such as medicine, is the ability to apply the skill that one possesses effectively. Such a tekhne cannot be anything other than empirical, for the relation between humans is not itself constant and invariant and does not allow of an absolute or transparent cognition. For these reasons, as Lyotard suggests, and at least in regard to rhetoric itself, Aristotle is able to regard the exaggeration of what is small and the diminution of what is large as legitimate. However, in certain cases – and such cases are marked by the example of Corax – this device is still to be regarded as illegitimate. Corax’s argument is, according to Aristotle,

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‘a [logical] fraud’, it is not ‘not genuine but spurious, and has no place in any art except [mere] rhetoric and quibbling’ (Rhetoric, 1402a ff.). What is it then, Lyotard asks, that in this one instance incites in Aristotle ‘the long-standing indignation of the “friends of wisdom” against the artists of the word’ (OSW, 62)? What is it, in other words, that in this case, incites the hostility of the philosopher towards the sophists? Aristotle characterises the ruse that Corax employs in the following way. Corax, Aristotle says, with some intent confuses two types of probability – absolute (haplos) probability and relative or particular probability. ‘The probable being not what occurs invariably but only for the most part’ (Rhetoric, 1402b), it will perhaps seem strange to speak of an ‘absolute probability’. However, by the term ‘absolute probability’ Aristotle means that which is a probability in its own right – in the sense that when I say ‘it is probable that the sun will rise again tomorrow’ I do not make any additional reference to any other thing, characteristic of a thing, or circumstance in order to qualify this probability. By contrast, the ‘relatively probable’ is what is only probable when it is qualified in some way, when it is brought into a relation with something else. What is absolutely probable is, then, probable without any qualification, whilst what is relatively probable is probable only in relation to particular circumstances; it is a qualified or singular probability. In a certain sense, the two alternatives that are at play in the case of the strong man accused of assault – that he is guilty of the crime or that he is innocent – appear equally probable. Nevertheless, for Aristotle, only ‘the one is really so’, the other is not probable absolutely, ‘but only in the conditions mentioned’ (Rhetoric, 1402a). Confusion of the two types of probability, however, is sufficient to turn the weaker argument into the stronger, making the improbable appear probable. Agathon represents Corax’s argument in the following way: ‘one might perhaps say that this very thing is probable, that many things happen to men that are not probable’ (Rhetoric, 1402a), to which the Stagirite adds the gloss ‘for that which is contrary to probability nevertheless does happen, so that that which is contrary to probability is probable’ (Rhetoric, 1402a). But, so as to regulate the impropriety that threatens here, Aristotle continues by arguing that although it is probable, the improbable is not probable absolutely; rather the less probable, or the improbable, has only a relative or even singular probability. The fallacy or reasoning occurs, as in the case of ‘sophistical disputations [epi ton eristikon]’ (Rhetoric, 1402a), when the relative circumstances that qualify the possibility are themselves omitted. It is the same mistake that is found, ‘for instance, in dialectic’, when ‘it is argued that that which is

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not is, for that which is not is that which is not [hoti esti to me on on, esti gar to me on me on]’ (Rhetoric, 1402a). The first ‘is’, signifying being expressed not relative to anything else, and so posited of itself, posited absolutely, and thus denoting existence, is fallaciously derived from the merely relative, or copulative, employment of the term: that which is not being that which is not, that which is not is. What Aristotle protests against is the sophist’s employment of retorsion, which, in terms of Lyotard’s analysis of Aristotle can now be lent a third sense. If, in general, the sophistical retort retorts, that is, if it turns the arguments of one’s adversary back on herself, here it has a quite specific meaning: this act of retorsion ‘consists [ . . . ] in placing what is given as absolute, as the final word, in relation to itself, and thus placing it in the register of relative and particular things’ (OSW, 63). In other words, it turns the absolute in upon itself. According to Lyotard, what troubles Aristotle in all of this is that the sophist can always manage a retort against the final word. If, Lyotard argues, probability can serve as the criterion for the judge’s judgement, why then cannot the probability of this use of probability serve as a guide to the conduct of the accused? In such a case, or in such cases, ‘there is no last word, no single criterion, no judge and no master. The relative, the particular, can be stronger than the absolute or what claims to be absolute’ (OSW, 63).

‘I lie’: the retorsion of philosophy In contrast to philosophy, sophistry is a discourse, or better, a collection of ruses that in their bearing on the contingent, the unstable, the fleeting and the singular seek not to know it, to reduce it to its stable, unchanging truth, but to exploit it. The originality of Lyotard’s analysis is to have identified at the heart of the habitus of the sophist the technique – if one can call it that – of retorsion. It comprises of three interconnected aspects: the making of a retort in an argument; the turning of an adversary’s argument back against themselves, or retorting it, by effectively showing that what she thinks is favourable to her argument counts against herself; the turning back of the absolute, or the supposedly absolute, against itself, placing it in a register of relative and particular things. It is by way of the ruse of retorsion that the sophists are able to open up the contingent, and exercise their own ‘empirical’ artistry against the friends of wisdom. Protagoras’ argument exemplifies two of the three aspects of retorsion that Lyotard identifies. Protagoras’ response turns Euathlos’ argument back against him – Euathlos says ‘I did not win’, to which Protagoras

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responds: ‘very well, have it your own way, you did not win, but in saying so you win and you must pay me’. In order to make Euathlos’ testimony speak against itself, Protagoras makes use of ‘the faculty a phrase has to take itself as its referent’ (D, 6): the very words that Euathlos says refer to themselves. In this way the great sophist avails himself of the retorsion of the absolute that Aristotle denounces in the Rhetoric. By choosing to confuse ‘the modus (the declarative prefix: Euathlos says that) with the dictum, the negative universal that denotes a reality (Euathlos did not win once)’ (D, 6), Euathlos’ statement, referring to the totality of claims he has made and lost under Protagoras’ tuition, which has an absolute or universal value is included within the totality it refers to and hence becomes relative. Having drawn attention to this aspect of Protagoras’ argument, Lyotard goes on, in The Differend, to invoke the theory of types espoused by Bertrand Russell in the Principia Mathematica with the aim of prohibiting just such a retorsion of the absolute. Lyotard’s intention in engaging Russell is not directed towards Russell himself. Rather, and as Jean-Michel Salanskis has observed, Lyotard orients his engagement in order to call into question the Platonism that, for him at least, lies behind Russell’s argument. According to Lyotard, in its Platonic determination the truth of a statement or discourse amounts to its conformity to its referent – for Plato the ideas. By utilising the facility that a phrase has to take itself as its own referent, the sophistical act of retorsion undermines the essential distinction between the discourse of knowledge and the thing that it refers to. Russell’s theory of types is geared towards prohibiting this subversion. In the terms of Lyotard’s presentation in The Differend, Russell’s argument is that a proposition that refers to a totality of propositions cannot itself be a part of that totality. If it is included in the totality to which it refers then it immediately ceases to be consistent or meaningful. This is the case with Protagoras’ argument as it also is with the Paradox of the Liar. Like so many of the exemplary paradoxes of the sophists, the Paradox of the Liar, attributed first to Epimenides the Cretan and then Eubulides of Megara, is given in many different forms. In its strongest form the paradox simply states ‘I lie’. The statement admits neither of being true nor of being false, and each time one attempts to attribute either truth or falsity to it, it perverts the attribution. If it is supposed true, then it is immediately falsified; if it is supposed false then it is, after all, true. It is because of this confusion that Russell argues the principle of retorsion must be proscribed if the statement is to be properly decidable in terms of its truth-value.

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According to Russell, ‘the Liar says: “everything that I affirm is false”. This in fact is an assertion that he makes but which refers to the totality of his assertions, and it is only if one includes it in the totality that the paradox appears’.18 Lyotard is thus driven to remark of Russell that ‘the logician has nothing but scorn for the sophist’ (D, 6–7) who ignores the principle of distinguishing the two orders of statement. But ‘the sophist’ Lyotard retorts ‘doesn’t ignore it, he unveils it’ (D, 7). The sophist – or even sophistry as such, in so far as it is identified with the practice of retorsion – discloses Russell’s axiom of types for what it is, namely ‘a rule for forming logical phrases (propositions)’ (D, 7). This rule, according to Lyotard, is one that delimits the discipline of logic in terms of its ends, deciding the truth-value of a phrase. But, if this is so, how does sophistry constitute an ‘unveiling’, a critical disclosure, of what is at stake in this principle? An answer to this question is provided in the fourth section of the essay ‘On the Strength of the Weak’, entitled ‘Eubulides’, in which Lyotard adverts both to the Liar’s Paradox and to Russell’s attempt to refute, or police, the practice of retorsion. Although the terms in which Lyotard renders Russell’s argument are slightly different here to that found in The Differend,19 his fundamental point appears to be more explicitly articulated than it is in the later text, for he states that the virtue of Russell’s refutation of the ‘diabolical little apparatus’ (OSW, 66) employed by the sophists is that it ‘is given so crudely that it cannot fail to be anything more than it actually is, namely, a decision’ (OSW, 66). In this earlier formulation of Russell’s argument Lyotard characterises the distinction between the two types of statement in terms of the level of their reference. What Lyotard calls type 1 statements are those that deal with any objects whatsoever. Type 2 statements are meta-linguistic; they refer to type 1 statements. Distinguishing between the two and ensuring that they themselves remain distinguished, means that the truth-value of a type 1 statement cannot affect or modify that of the second, meta-linguistic type of statement. The statement of Eubulides – ‘I say truly that I lie’, as Lyotard gives it, following Cicero – can, then, be broken up: it consists of a type 1 statement, ‘I lie’, and a type 2 statement, ‘I say truly that’. As long as the two are distinguished, and the second order statement not folded back into the first, then the truth-value of the latter cannot be modified by the former, ‘and one can rescue [ . . . ] the possibility of non-contradiction’ (OSW, 67), of a consistent discourse, and thus truth. However, Lyotard, speaking in the name of Eubulides, asks: ‘of which type is Russell’s statement’ (OSW, 67)? The axiom is, Lyotard argues,

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a type 2 statement, since it affirms a truth-value for the group of propositional variables for a statement. Being itself a member of the class of its referential statements – precisely what it seeks to proscribe – it transgresses the law that it postulates. To avoid its inconsistency, it would be necessary, Lyotard says, to introduce a principle of a higher rank, differentiating the axiom from the statements to which it refers by positing a type 3 statement. Such a solution would, however, lead to an infinite regress. As Lyotard recognises, in a certain sense, ‘this is not very serious’ (OSW, 66), as in order to avoid the regression one only need recognise the axiomatic nature of the rule, acknowledging that it is only on this condition that truth-values can, in fact, be fixed. However, if the axiom is exposed in its foundational pretension, this, in another sense, is quite serious, for the authority of the axiom is undermined if it is not fashioned according to an order that is prior to it, but simply decrees itself. Laying claim to a foundational status – that of determining the condition under which the truth-values of statements or propositions can be fixed, whilst also being the place where the oppositions that it seeks to preserve themselves collapse – Russell’s axiom is without the reason that it institutes. ‘What is it then’, Lyotard – still speaking in the name of Eubulides – rhetorically asks, ‘that makes this decision more valid than that of some liar?’ (OSW, 67).

The sophistical ruse (metis) In ‘On the Strength of the Weak’ Lyotard suggests that the retortive ruse used by Protagoras allows him to exact payment in advance from his student; used by Corax to defend his client – the strong, vigorous, man from the probable indictment of assault; and used by Eubulides when he proclaims ‘I lie’ are particular instances of a practice that allows the weak and the oppressed to obtain peculiar results. They are particular instances not only of the practice of retorsion, but of a more general, varied, practice. For, as Lyotard argues, sophistry is not restricted to a type of reasoning alone. It wages its battles on ‘living bodies, political societies, economic communities, and age and gender classifications’ (OSW, 63), and it is properly ‘a type of life’ (NS, 07/02/75), or what I have called a habitus. The sophist calls on whatever means she can in order to play her ruses. For example the body, Lyotard says, ‘can infiltrate the master discourse, laugh, and make one laugh’ (OSW, 68). Here Lyotard cites the authority of Diogenes Laertius – an authority that is not always to be relied on – who preserves those ‘other’ sophistic ruses for the tradition. Diogenes tells of Crates the Cynic who teaches a pupil of Aristotle to fart

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at will; he relates the story of Diogenes who eats in the agora and who masturbates in public, justifying the former by arguing that ‘if there is nothing bad about eating, then there is nothing bad about eating in public’, and the latter by remarking ‘Ah, if only one could calm one’s hunger like that by rubbing one’s stomach!’20 All of these practices of the sophists are particular instances of what the Ancient Greeks called metis. As Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant have shown, for the Greeks metis ‘combined flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years’. 21 It is a type of intelligence that is exemplified in all those activities in which success is linked to the ability to seize hold of the opportune moment, kairos. The Greeks used it not only to speak of the cunning of the hunter and angler, the skill of the weaver, the navigator, doctor and politician, but also ‘the tricks of a crafty character such as Odysseus, the back-tracking of a fox and the polymorphism of an octopus’,22 and the rhetorical guile of the sophists themselves. Because there are as many different instances of metis as there are various practices that concern the contingent and unforeseeable, there can be no common definition of the term. Detienne and Vernant point to Homer for whom metis was something multiple and diverse. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, metis is associated with a range of words that emphasise its multiplicitous nature. In particular Detienne and Vernant underscore its association with the term poikilos, which means that which is many-coloured, mottled or dappled. Poikilos was a term that could be used of the sheen of a material, the glittering of a weapon, or the dappled hide of a fawn. In this sense it referred to that which in appearing gives itself in every changing aspect.23 For this reason Plato associated poikilos with that which is never the same as itself, but always other and other (Republic, 568d). Similarly metis itself always showed itself as everdiffering. However, if there was no single or common definition of metis, there was a certain unity of analogy. Among all the diverse practices that embody metis what is at issue is an intelligence that, mindful of kairos, applies itself to objects and situations that must be dominated by cunning, or what Lyotard, following Detienne and Vernant, calls ruse, if success is to be attained.24 It is by way of metis that Antilochus, the son of Nestor Neleiades, is able to carry a victory in a chariot race against a rival who is older, more experienced and who has better equipment and a faster team of horses. Nestor, himself once a great athlete and fighter, tells his son ‘metis makes a woodcutter, not strength. By metis a helmsman guides the speeding

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vessel over the wine-dark sea despite the wind. It is through metis that the charioteer triumphs over his rival’ (Iliad, XXIII, 359f.). Following his father’s advice Antilochus cuts in front of his opponent, Menelaus, who is forced to rein in his own team and in doing so effectively cedes the race. Antilochus tricks his opponent into thinking he has lost control of his chariot on a narrow bend and is thereby able to overtake – and so overturn the advantages that his rival has. According to Detienne and Vernant the episode of Antilochus shows how metis incorporated cunning, tricks, and the ability to seize an opportunity in order to bring about a reversal in an initially and naturally unfavourable situation, such that the inherently weaker is able to triumph over the stronger, the lesser force dominate the greater. Metis is, then, engaged in a world of becoming, enveloped by the flux of temporality, and it does not seek to master either by looking towards an extra-worldly, extra-temporal realm of ideas, but by exploiting its immersion, its immanence, in the world, by making use of its own ruses, disguises, tricks and traps. For this reason metis is said to be the possession of hunters of all kinds. The angler, for example, makes use of metis when he employs dissimulation in order to catch a fish: the line he uses must be as fine as hair, a bait must be weighted so that it moves as if it were living, the angler must be silent and still. Given that the fish is at home in water, and is more fleet than the angler, in order to catch it he must use traps and adopt disguises. Only in this way, by way of metis, will it be possible for him to undo the balance of forces, and triumph over an adversary that is naturally better endowed than he is, and is unlikely to be caught. But it is not just the angler or the hunter that employs metis: all animals do. According to Oppian, the fishing frog, sluggish and soft in body, is nevertheless able to catch small, nimble fish through metis. By way of a fleshy appendage that grows beneath its lower jaw it tricks these fish; they respond to it, and are baited; the frog draws its bait back towards its jaw, and the fish follow until they are swallowed by the frog.25 Metis is not enjoyed by humans alone but by all life, and the intellect itself has no particular privilege within its domain. The intellect is merely one means among others by which an unfavourable situation, a disfavourable distribution of forces, of strength and weakness can be overcome. Having turned the sophistic practice of retorsion against the philosophical idea of truth, exposing this idea or ideal as a decision, a decision without ground or reason, and thus without privilege, Lyotard is able to recover sophistry itself as an instance or element of a way of life that secures its victories by way of the body as much as by way of reason.

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Indeed, the sophists, fabled for their quick tongues and minds, and who to be sure primarily employ argumentative ruses, ‘go so far as to make their bodies “speak” – for example, by farting’ (OSW, 64), and reveal that the body too has its intelligence. Lyotard thus discovers in sophistry one means by which it is possible to dislodge the primacy of consciousness, of the intellect, that Platonic philosophy supposes. For the sophists, who excel in ruses, tricks and machinations, the intellect cannot be regarded as an end-itself. It is just one more ‘means of setting traps where by definition the balance of disfavourable forces can be reversed’ (OSW, 71).

5 Lyotard and Kant: A Sophistical Critique

Introduction They talked in order to produce certain effects, not in order to profess the truth. J.-F. Lyotard, Lessons in Paganism The course on Nietzsche and the sophists from 1975 had promised the resuscitation of sophistry, a restoration of both a sophistical reason and a sophistical way of life. This restoration required a delimitation and displacement of Platonism. In order to effect such a displacement Lyotard appealed to the sophistical practice of retorsion. The retortive ruses of Protagoras and Eubulides were shown to threaten the well-regulated and ordered relation between a statement and its referent. By undoing the distinction between the discourse of truth and that of which it is the truth, the practice of retorsion exposed the rules or restrictions that order the representational operation of language – the metaphysical fixity of the relation between the logos and that of which it speaks – and which allow it to function as a discourse of truth. Consequently this ordering of language is exposed as only one possible ordering of language, the rules and restrictions it implies only determining one particular way of playing or ploying with the logos. Truth, determined Platonically as the accord between the statement and its referent, is one particular effect of language. More essential and more original than the representational relation between word and thing that, for philosophy, constitutes the criterion of truth, is the capacity to ruse, to lie and lay traps, to dissimulate and produce effects. It is in this way that Lyotard’s engagement opens up the restoration of sophistical reason. Despite this, after the essay ‘On the Strength of the 107

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Weak’, which was a direct outcome of the lecture course on Nietzsche and the sophists, Lyotard did not ever again approach the matter of sophistry directly. For a brief period, Lyotard attempted to draw out the restoration of sophistry by way of his writings on paganism, and the brief tract, Lessons in Paganism, outlined a pagan politics that could at least be supposed to answer in spirit, if not name, to the restoration of a sophistical politics announced in the lecture course. Beyond this, however, the concern with sophistry appears to wane, and between 1977 and 1978 there emerges in Lyotard’s work a different concern, a turn towards the question of judgement, that brings with it a concentration upon the work of Kant. More than one commentator has argued that this shift in concern is all the more emphatic for the deliberate distancing that Lyotard takes from the style, the temper, of Libidinal Economy.1 In the opening pages of Just Gaming, Lyotard links the style of Libidinal Economy to sophistry: the scandal of the book, Lyotard says, ‘is that it is all rhetoric; it works entirely at the level of persuasion, the old peitho’ ( JG, 4). What Lyotard calls the lexis of the book – its mode of presentation – is deliberately rhetorical, and Lyotard declares that ‘without knowing it, I was experimenting with a pragmatics that, for some of the sophists, is a decisive aspect of the poetic’ (JG, 5). Looking back on Libidinal Economy in Just Gaming, Lyotard states that he came to recognise in the book, in its style, a sophistical challenge to Platonism. In an analysis that is profoundly indebted to his engagement with sophistry, Lyotard retorts the accusation of deceit, of manipulation made by Plato against the rhetoricians and sophists. Turning the accusation back upon Plato, Lyotard argues that the discourse of truth – philosophy – is, in a certain sense, itself as sophistical as sophistry, as rhetorical as rhetoric, seeking a certain mastery over those that it addresses: This kind of writing [that seeks mastery over its addressee] is generally taken to be that of the rhetorician and the persuader, that is, of the maker of simulacra, of the sly one, the one who deceives. To me, it is the opposite. That is, in ancient thought, since Platonism let us say, the rhetorician, the orator, the poet, etc., is precisely the one who seeks to produce effects upon the other, effects that the other does not control. But if you take dialogic discourse, as Plato presents it, it is a discourse in which each of the participants is, in principle, trying to produce statements such that the effect of these statements can be sent back to their author so that he may say: This is true, this is not true, and so on. In other words, so that he can control, or contribute to the control of, these effects ( JG, 4).

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Despite this analysis, and despite what it clearly owes to Lyotard’s engagement with sophistry, in its lexis, Just Gaming itself appears to be a step back from such a manner of writing. A series of dialogues with Jean-Luc Thébaud, if it does not exactly replicate the mode of the Platonic dialogue, it opens itself to the responsibility of the question, and the necessity for a response, and, as Lyotard’s comments cited above indicate, it can be understood to represent a coming to terms with, and evaluation of, the experimental coup of Libidinal Economy.2 The works that follow Just Gaming for the most part continue to eschew the violence, the passionate zeal, of Libidinal Economy. With the publication of The Differend in 1983, the third of his major works, Lyotard has moved so far from the style of Libidinal Economy that he is able to declare in the introduction that his ‘naïve ideal’ has been ‘to attain a zero degree style and for the reader to have the thought in hand, as it were’ (D, xiv). Some commentators have argued that the abandonment of the intensity of Libidinal Economy for the cooler, dispassionate analyses of the subsequent works, does not so much mark a rupture with the earlier text, but a modulation of tone, a modulation of pathos and affect.3 I am not concerned to make or repeat such arguments here. What I do want to suggest, however, is that Lyotard’s engagement with Kant also represents a modulation of Lyotard’s rehabilitation of sophistry rather than its abandonment. My aim, in making this suggestion, is to show that Lyotard’s reading of Kant is an attempt to further the recovery of the particular intelligence that had been drawn out of the sophistical habitus.

Kant and the transcendental dialectic In Chapter 2, I noted that Hegel wavered in his ascription of the discovery of the dialectic. Following Diogenes Laertius, and also, to a certain extent, Aristotle, Hegel attributes its discovery to Zeno on the one hand, to Plato on the other.4 In contrast to this traditionally founded double-attribution, there is no such openly stated ambiguity for Hegel when it comes to attributing responsibility for the re-emergence of the question of the dialectic in modern philosophy. There is only one philosopher to whom Hegel specifically and by name accredits responsibility for rediscovering the importance of the dialectic: ‘In modern times’, he says, ‘it was, more than any other, Kant who resuscitated the name of Dialectic and restored it its post of honour’ (EL, §81). In speaking of Kant’s revitalisation of the dialectic, Hegel has in mind the transcendental dialectic of pure reason, expounded by Kant in one of the major divisions of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant divided the

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Critique of Pure Reason into two main parts – the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements and the Transcendental Doctrine of Method. The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, concerned with what Kant calls the elements that belong to pure knowledge a priori, that is those elements that form the condition of possibility of all knowledge of objects, is itself divided by Kant into two further parts – ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ and ‘Transcendental Logic’. The ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ forms one part of the ‘Transcendental Logic’, preceded by what Kant calls the ‘Transcendental Analytic’. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines the idea of logic as such as the science of the ‘rules of the understanding in general’ (CPR: A52, B76). The understanding – and more generally thinking – judges.5 Judgement, the act of uniting representations in consciousness, of expressing x as y, for example, is determined according to certain principles and rules. Logic as such is, then, the exposition of the rules according to which the understanding, or more generally thinking, thinks. Having defined logic in this way, Kant goes on to discriminate between what he calls ‘general logic’ and ‘transcendental logic’. The former – general logic – is equivalent to the traditional idea of logic: its object is the rules of thought as such. As Kant explains, general logic ‘abstracts from all content of knowledge, that is from all relation of knowledge to the object’ (CPR: A55, B80), and it is thus concerned only with the formal agreement of thought with itself: From this concern it is able to procure the rules that in general determine thinking, independently of its concrete occurrence. The principle of non-contradiction is, perhaps, the most evident and the most fundamental of such rules: it states only the formal condition that what is said of something cannot speak against it. By contrast, transcendental logic treats of the rules that condition in advance thought’s relation to objects in general. Behind the division of logic into general logic and transcendental logic is the recognition that thinking is both a unification of representations (the concern of general logic) and a relatedness to objects. Transcendental logic is concerned with the object relatedness that belongs a priori to thought, a relation that, in advance of any empirical intuition, determines objects. On the basis of the discrimination that he introduces into the idea of logic Kant goes on to distinguish between what can be accomplished by these respective divisions with regard to truth itself. In so far as general logic is concerned with the mere form of thought it provides only the general and necessary rules of the understanding. The identification of these rules forms what Kant calls an analytic. Negatively speaking these rules furnish criteria of truth in as much as whatever

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contradicts them is necessarily false, for thought would thereby contradict itself. But positively speaking they provide only the conditio sine qua non of truth. As Kant explains, truth, thought according to its traditional determination, comprises an adequatio intellectus et rei, an adequation of thing and thought; thus, as general logic is not concerned with the relation between thing and thought, but only of thought to itself, it is possible that although thought may be in accord with itself it may nevertheless be in contradiction with its object. General logic can thus do no more than provide for thought the precondition of truth, namely its own internal correctness, but cannot go any further. In contrast to general logic, transcendental logic is a ‘logic of truth’ (CPR: A62, B87). It is concerned with the rules that are prescribed by the understanding for the intellection of any object. In other words, it determines a priori the relation of thought to thing, and thus it identifies the transcendental truths that render possible, by preceding them, all empirical truths. However, although general logic provides only the formal rules for thinking and thus does not have any bearing on the content of knowledge, there is still the temptation, Kant claims, to treat it as if it did. Where general logic is treated as if it can enable us to judge positively regarding objects and make assertions about them, it oversteps its limits. It ceases to be what it is – ‘merely a canon of judgment’ (CPR: A61, B85) – and becomes instead an organon, that is to say, it is treated as if it were an instrument for the production of objectively valid assertions. In the face of such a temptation Kant is moved to remind us that ‘no one can venture with the help of logic alone to judge regarding objects, or to make any assertion. We must first, independently of logic, obtain reliable information; only then are we in a position to enquire, in accordance with logical laws, into the use of this information and its connection into a coherent whole’ (CPR: A60, B85). When logic is treated as an organon, Kant says ‘it is called dialectic’ (CPR: A61, B85). Kant attempts to legitimate this use of the term ‘dialectic’ by noting that despite the various meanings and senses that the Greeks themselves attributed to the word, the dialectic itself never amounted to ‘anything else than the logic of illusion’ (CPR: A61, B86). For Kant, in essence dialectic was a spurious art, which consisted in the procurement of the appearance of truth through the imitation of the rigour of logic, which served to conceal the emptiness of its pretensions. Employing logic as an organon is, then, dialectical, for although its rigour is genuine enough in itself, it is misapplied in order to procure the appearance of truth. Any attempt to employ logic in this way can, Kant says in a telling

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phrase, only ‘end in mere talk’ (CPR: A61, B86), for whilst it has the form of rigorous knowledge, it argues without any regard for content that can alone provide cognition with the real possibility of truthfulness. Thus, when it is overextended, when it over-exercises its influence, general logic, like the Greek dialectic, is nothing more than a logic of illusion. Just as Kant identifies an illegitimate use of general logic, he also identifies an illegitimate application of transcendental logic. Transcendental logic, as I noted above, is concerned with the pure a priori relation of thinking to objects, a relation in which truth is constituted. In other words, it is concerned not with the empirical relation of thought to objects, not with what experience provides for thought, but with the possibility of what thought or the understanding prescribes in advance to the experience of objects. Corresponding to the analytic of general logic, the identification of these elements forms the transcendental analytic. But although the elements of transcendental logic are what determine in advance the appearance of objects, they are still only legitimately applied to what is given – or can be given – in actual empirical experience. Where the temptation of applying these pure modes of knowledge that belong to the understanding beyond the limits of experience, as if they applied to things of which no experience is possible, is surrendered to, then transcendental logic also becomes a logic of illusion. It too becomes dialectical. Given that for Kant the dialectic is a ‘logic of illusion’, he has no hesitation whatsoever in aligning it with sophistry. Dialectic is, he says, ‘a sophistical art of giving to ignorance, and indeed to intentional sophistries, the appearance of truth, by the device of imitating the methodical thoroughness which logic prescribes’ (CPR: A61, B86). Such sophistries, he remarks with a quite traditional disdain, are quite ‘unbecoming the dignity of philosophy’ (CPR: A62, B86). Indeed, so unbecoming the dignity of philosophy are they that Kant is moved to observe that within philosophy the title ‘dialectic’ has come to be employed not in order to designate instruction in such sophistical arts, but instead ‘has been assigned to logic, as a critique of dialectical illusion’ (CPR: A62, B86). In speaking of the critical sense in which the term ‘dialectic’ has ‘otherwise come to be used’, Kant is alluding to the precedent of the Stagirite whose own investigations disclose the deceptions involved in the sophistical use of the dialectic. Aristotle’s explication of the logic of illusion does not itself aim at instructing how to produce apparent knowledge, but to recognise it and guard oneself against it. This is also how dialectic is to be understood in the Critique of Pure Reason. The transcendental

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dialectic has as its task to ‘expose the false, illusory character of [such] groundless pretensions, and [ .. . their] high claims to discover and extend knowledge merely by means of transcendental principles’ (CPR: A63/4, B88), which it does by describing the boundaries which all claims to knowledge must observe. And since to discover the deception as a deception is to at the same time prevent if from deceiving, ‘it will substitute what is no more than a critical treatment of the pure understanding, for the guarding of it against sophistical illusions’ (CPR: A64, B88).

Corax If Hegel was right in attributing to Kant the honour, in modern times, of resuscitating the dialectic and restoring it to its place of honour within philosophy, then, for Kant if not for Hegel, this was only in the critical and philosophical sense of the discipline. Certainly Kant’s rehabilitation of the dialectic entails no rehabilitation of sophistry, for the Transcendental Dialectic sets out to expose the sophistical illusions, the illegitimate extension of thought beyond the boundaries of the legitimate application of concepts within experience. That Lyotard should declare in Just Gaming not only that he is hesitating ‘between two positions, while still hoping that my hesitation is in vain and that these two positions are not two positions [ . . . ] a pagan position, in the sense of the sophists, and a position that is, let us say, Kantian’ (JG, 73), and a little later remark that ‘if Aristotle is to believed’ then ‘Kant [ . . . ] is a sophist’ (JG, 78), must serve to at least alert us to the full force and radicality of his reading of Kant. The hesitation between the Kant and the sophists is played out in an analysis of one particular sophistical ruse, the ruse by which Corax defends a strong man accused of assault. The ruse turns around the very excess that Kant had denounced in the Transcendental Dialectic as a dialectical overstepping of the bounds of experience. It is to the reading of this ruse, and the appropriation of Kant that it entails, that I now wish to turn. Lyotard begins by recalling that for the sophists, and for Aristotle ‘who in matters of ethics and politics, follows the sophists’ problematic completely’ (JG, 73), there is no knowledge in matters of ethics and none in politics. In short, there is no, and can be no, knowledge of practice, in the sense that there are no absolute rules that can suffice to determine how to act. According to Lyotard, ‘one cannot put oneself in

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a position of holding a discourse on society; there are contingencies; the social web is made up of a multitude of encounters between interlocutors caught up in different pragmatics. One must judge case by case’ (JG, 73). The contrast, at least in so far as it bears upon the Greeks, and in particular Aristotle, is between wisdom, sophia, which is concerned with the eternal, the unchanging, and that which has as its concern all those beings that are submitted to change, and that are themselves unstable.6 If it is possible to provide a rational determination of the former, the same cannot be said of the latter, of which no general and methodical presentation is possible, for they vary each time, according to circumstances. For Aristotle, where the contingent prevails, and where sophia encounters its limits, it is necessary to exercise judgement; not in the sense of discharging a transcendental knowledge that enables one to comprehend a given matter by subsuming it as a particular case under a concept, but to intervene and act in a world that is imprecise and fluctuating, and that allows action its own intelligence. 7 In Just Gaming Lyotard links such a form of deliberation, bearing on what can be otherwise and in which the contingent prevails, to what Aristotle called phronesis. In the sixth book of the Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle classes phronesis along with tekhne, for both are concerned with things that can change. Tekhne is concerned with the production of beings, whereas phronesis is concerned with action. It is a matter of deliberating well about what is good and advantageous for an individual and for a community. Phronesis is, Lyotard will claim, the paradigm of political judgement. Phronesis, the intelligence of judgement, relies on experience: what cannot be known by demonstration can at least be guided by probability and customary opinion. Today such terms are often regarded as pejorative, but for the Greeks – or at least certain of them, Aristotle and the sophists – they did not carry such an association. When Aristotle identifies the dialectician as someone who deals with probabilities he means something more than the merely arbitrary or hypothetical. ‘Probable theses are those which correspond to the opinion of all, or to the majority amongst them, or to the wise, and amongst the latter, either all of them, or the majority, or finally the most notable and the most distinguished of them’ (Topica, I, 1, 100b, 21f.). There is then, a certain force or weight behind that which is accorded the status of the probable; it is, Lyotard remarks, what has ‘always’ been said, or at least what one has ‘always’ heard told, and if not that, then there are at least people who defend such a judgement.

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As we have seen in the previous chapter, Aristotle relates the defence offered by Corax of Sicily in the case of a strong man accused of having assaulted a weak person. The case against Corax’s client rests on a probability: he is strong, and therefore it is exceptionally likely that it is he who has beaten the plaintiff, because according to opinion the strong always beat the weak. The opinion has a certain force of law and, as Aristotle remarks, Corax would himself use such an argument – or at least utilise its implication – were he to defend a weak person accused of such a crime, for he would argue that it is improbable that the weak person should have committed such an act (Rhetoric, II, xxiv, 11). In such cases, and as it threatens to do in the accusation brought against the strong man, probability intervenes and conditions the verdict of the judge. As Lyotard puts it: ‘one feels the weight of opinion as the past, as a near truth acquired in the reckoning of a very frequent repetition of the judgement’ ( JG, 78). In such cases the use of opinion is, then, adjudged to be legitimate, for although it is an opinion and not a truth its application is justified by experience, by what is probable or deemed to be probable. Corax’s defence of the strong man opposes itself to the weight of such opinion by using it, arguing that his client, reckoning on the probability that he would be accused of such a crime because of his great strength, has for this reason refrained from such an act. In ‘On the Strength of the Weak’ Lyotard had characterised this ruse as an act of retorsion, showing how Corax turned the probability that serves as a guide to the judge’s judgement back against itself by arguing the probability of this usage of probability can be adduced in defence of the strong man, serving to guide him in his conduct. In Just Gaming Lyotard recasts his account of this ruse: by way of stressing the positive role accorded by the Greeks to opinion in the making of judgements, Lyotard draws explicit attention to the fact that Corax’s defence offers an overstepping of the boundary that is constituted by what has been justified by experience, and which thought as probability, forms the basis for the judgement of the judge. Instead of the judge making her judgement on the basis of a law that is grounded in experience, she is invited, by Corax’s plea, to go beyond this conditioning opinion. Lyotard thus presents the ruse in terms that emphasise its relation to Kant’s account of dialectical reasoning in the Transcendental Dialectic. However, Lyotard goes further than simply aligning Corax’s transgression of what experience has authorised with Kant’s analysis of dialectical illusion, for he continues by saying that what Corax’s defence implies is a type of anticipation and a maximisation of an idea in which ‘there is

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already all of Kant, at least all of Kant of the Idea’ (JG, 78). In order to follow Lyotard’s argument it will be necessary to turn once again to Kant.

The Ideas of Reason In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between what he calls ‘pure concepts of reason’ and ‘pure concepts of the understanding’. The pure concepts of reason are what Kant otherwise calls, looking back to Plato and Aristotle, ‘Ideas’; the pure concepts of the understanding Kant calls ‘categories’, having once again looked back to the precedent of Aristotle. The distinction can be somewhat confusing however, for Kant is not distinguishing between two different types of concept but only the use that is made of them, for according to Kant reason does not really generate any concepts of its own, but takes up in its own fashion those of the understanding. The understanding, Kant tells us, makes use of concepts in order to represent something. A concept, as Kant defines it, is a ‘general representation’; it contains something common to several individual things. In this sense, a concept is the condition for the unification of individual representations. It provides a rule determining the individual cases that are included under it. The concept of furniture, for example, gives a rule by which it is possible to include under it such things as tables, chairs and cupboards. Such a concept is empirical, derived from experience, and is thus not a pure concept of the understanding. The concepts that Kant attributes specifically to the understanding in its purity are concepts that constitute a unified stock of essential determinations that provide the general rules that condition the thinking of all objects. Kant calls these pure concepts of the understanding categories. The categories apply necessarily and in advance to all objects. If those objects that we apply the concepts of heaviness and hardness to could conceivably be otherwise, there are no objects that are not determined by the categories. In order to identify the use that reason makes of the categories, Kant looks first to the merely logical employment of reason – reason in its syllogistic use – by means of which inferences are drawn. In syllogistic reasoning, reason ‘seeks to discover the universal condition of its judgement (the conclusion)’ (CPR: A307, B364): it looks for a concept, which, in its full extension, acts as a middle term in a syllogism and so conditions the attribution of the concept of the understanding given in the major premise to the subject of the conclusion. Thus, in the syllogism

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concerning Socrates, it is the concept ‘man’ which conditions the attribution of mortality to the philosopher. The particular role of reason is, one might say, to find the reason for its judgements, and it ‘arrives at knowledge by means of acts of the understanding which constitute a series of conditions’ (CPR: A330, B387). But, Kant observes, the condition of the judgement expressed in the syllogism is itself subject to the same ‘requirement of reason’, namely that ‘the condition of the condition must [ . . . ] be sought’ (CPR: A307, B364). It is this observation that allows Kant to draw out the principle peculiar to reason in general, and to show what distinguishes from the understanding. The principle is that reason ‘find for the conditioned knowledge obtained through the understanding the unconditioned whereby its unity is brought to completion’ (CPR: A307, B364). Thus whilst both the understanding and reason seek to secure a certain kind of unity of representations, the ‘unity of reason is quite different in kind from any unity that can be accomplished by the understanding’ (CPR: A302, B359). Through the categories, the understanding secures the internal coherence of the conditions of all possible experience of objects, but beyond this series of conditions and its internal coherence, reason seeks an ultimate reason: in accord with its own demand it looks beyond the series of conditions to the unconditioned. Reason, aiming at completeness, seeks to make representations of the total or collective unity of experience, which thereby transcend every possible experience. It forms its Ideas by freeing a pure concept of the understanding from the unavoidable limitations of possible experience, and extending it beyond the limits of the empirical. According to Kant, the Ideas are, then, concepts whose objects cannot be met with anywhere in experience. It is when they are treated as if they were directly applicable to objects, as if they permitted some cognition of reality, that the dialectical illusions are committed. In Kant’s terms, they are applied constitutively, as if the concept played a constitutive role in relation to appearances. Kant does, however, allow that the Ideas can have a ‘regulative’ function in which they serve, as maxims, for the orientation of the understanding with respect to the totality of knowledge, as when we are guided in our enquires by a desire for completion and unity that transcends anything that can be achieved merely by the categorial employment of the understanding. In their regulative and legitimate employment, the Ideas guide the understanding without claiming to constitute an object or contribute directly to cognition. In their regulative use the Ideas, the concepts of pure reason are, in Kant’s eyes, rehabilitated; that is to say, they are rescued from sophistical abuse.

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Corax’s idea Having suggested an identification of Kant and Corax, or at least the Kant of the Idea and Corax, Lyotard proceeds by recalling us to an important difference: for Kant the Ideas are produced by the maximisation of a pure concept of the understanding; in Corax’s case, however, it is not a concept that is at issue but rather an opinion, and the argument that Corax offers is regarded as a paradox precisely because it carries against common opinion (doxa). Nevertheless, Lyotard’s point is that the probability that it is at issue in the opinion does bear a certain relation to the categories in Kant’s sense, for it provides a condition or a rule so to speak, that forms a law under which particular judgements are made. In his argument Corax imputes to his client a maximisation of this opinion. As Lyotard voices it, Corax’s client has thought ‘I am likely to be found guilty if opinion remains what it is, but if I maximise and if I use my imagination, if I anticipate what the judge will decide on the basis of common opinion, then I may be able to reverse the likelihood’ ( JG, 78). The customary judgement, based on the rule of probability is given its maximum extension, being brought to cover all possible cases of this sort. Thus Lyotard observes that with this maximisation a ‘sort of idea arises’: ‘Corax conducts his argument in relation to the sort of idea of the use to which opinions will be put, especially by the judge’ ( JG, 80). By means of this ‘sort of idea’ Corax anticipates a decision, a decision that is not yet taken, and does so in order that it not be taken. Thus the idea, as Lyotard sees it, introduces ‘into the use of opinions, the future, and notably here the future of the decision of the judge who will rely on past opinions’ ( JG, 79). The judge makes her judgement on the basis of the already judged, the probability, or ‘near truth’ that is determined by the opinion of either all or most people, or if not all or most, at least all or most of those who are deemed to be wise. Corax on the other hand, in order to impugn the case against his client, does so by an idea, a counter-argument that relies not on something for which an empirical validation is possible, but ‘on the not yet judged to establish precisely that an act did not take place’ ( JG, 79). The intelligence of judgement, or, to return to the Aristotelian term by which Lyotard sometimes refers to this intelligence, phronesis, is always already ahead of itself. Into any deliberation that bears upon the contingency of actions, and thus in the political per se, it is necessary that the given situation be reckoned not only in accord with the past but also the future, what has been and what is not yet.

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Lyotard observes that by way of such a reckoning, by way of this ruse denounced by Aristotle, the law, the rule under which such cases are judged, is turned. By allowing that the opinion that states ‘the strong always beat the weak’ will act as the rule by which the judge will proceed in her judgement, Corax is able to claim it as the cause of the innocence of his client. The opinion provides not the rule by which his actions should be judged, but the motive, the reason, for his action: it is because of the opinion that the strong always beat the weak that Corax’s client abstained from beating the weaker man. It is because the judge will have been guided by a custom or habit of judgement that acts as a sort of constitutive rule, that such a rule should not be employed. Corax’s argument shows that ‘in matters of opinion, precisely because one is in opinion, the reverse of what is believed and holds sway as law is nonetheless not refutable and can therefore be defended’ (JG, 80). It is an argument that plays upon the dialectical fact that from one opinion it is possible to produce an antithetical opinion, both of which are equally arguable. By doing so it undermines the capacity of the opinion held against Corax’s client to function in a constitutive fashion, determining all particular judgements. One might say, following Kant, that Corax’s argument serves to impugn the dogmatism of the judge, or at least it serves to introduce to the judge a hesitation concerning the dogmatic application of the principle. Thus, according to Lyotard, against such dogmatism, Corax recovers a capacity for ‘what is called judgement in Kant, that is, the capability of thinking outside of the concept and outside of habit’ (JG, 82). Lyotard’s claim that in Corax’s ruse there is all of the Kant of the Idea suggests that sophistry itself can be rescued from the judgement that Kant makes against it when he aligns it with the illegitimate, constitutive, employment of Ideas. Lyotard’s final claim in the fifth dialogue of Just Gaming, a claim that recapitulates the arguments we have considered, answers to this suggestion. Lyotard states that what passes for a sophism in matters of opinion is more often than not an ideal usage of opinion in the sense that it opens up the possibility of judging outside of the field constituted by a determinant employment of probability. It establishes, or re-establishes ‘the capability to decide (the recourse to the capability of decision) in the diversity of opinions and not merely by means of what has been attained’ (JG, 82). Lyotard continues: This is where the whole matter lies: one must not merely take into consideration all of society as a sensible nature, as an ensemble that already has its laws, its customs and its regularities; but the capability

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to decide by means of what is adjudged as to be done, by taking society as a suprasensible nature, as something that is not there, that is not given. Then the direction of opinion will be reversed: it is not taken any more as a sediment of facts of judgement and behaviour; it is weighed from a capability that exceeds it and that can be in a wholly paradoxical position with respect to the data of custom ( JG, 82). There is in this argument a reclamation, contra Kant, of the particular intelligence that is sophistic, that not only recognises the necessity to judge case by case, but which realises that necessity by way of its capacity to dissolve established, sedimented culture. Such a reclamation rescues sophistry from the darkness into which Kant’s judgement casts it, and which obscures access to it. This attempted reclamation discovers in the ruse of the sophist the critical function that Aristotle had already recognised as the true role and positive function of the dialectic. As I have argued in Chapter 2, for Aristotle the dialectic is acceptable when it is employed in a critical capacity. When its use is restricted to the role of refuting an argument, when it shows what pretends to knowledge is not knowledge, it is legitimate. For Aristotle it is when the dialectic is used positively, when it oversteps its own limits in order to bring forth proofs, and to establish knowledge that it becomes illegitimate, eristic and sophistical. Kant’s own account of the dialectic, whilst not observing Aristotle’s appreciation of the dialectic in its negative role, maintains something of Aristotle’s insight in the distinction made in the Transcendental Dialectic between the legitimate and illegitimate uses of the Ideas of reason: the Ideas are legitimate when they do not lay claim to providing positive knowledge, and assume only a regulative function. However, if Lyotard is able to recover sophistry from the judgement that following the tradition Kant made against it, and if the attention that he pays to the Transcendental Dialectic indicates a Kant read under the guiding thread of the sophists, there nevertheless remains what Lyotard called a certain ‘hesitation’ to his reading, a certain distance between the sophistical ‘sort of idea’ and the Kantian Idea. As we have seen Kant stresses the fact that the pure concepts of reason, the Ideas, do not arise from reason itself. Rather they are concepts of the understanding that have been freed ‘from the unavoidable limitations of possible experience’ and extended ‘beyond the limits of the empirical’ (CPR: A409, B435). This means that the concepts of reason do not themselves relate to beings that are given in experience, but to the concepts of the understanding, and where this is recognised, that is where they are employed legitimately, the function ‘solely in order to prescribe to

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the understanding its direction towards a certain unity’ (CPR: A326, B383). In this way the Ideas are recognised as providing not constitutive principles that enable determinant judgements, but regulative principles that provide a rule that orients the understanding towards a horizon of unity or totality. Having retrieved a sophistical intelligence by way of his analysis of Corax, and having sought to do so by way of a reading of Kant that maintains a constant inner connection to sophistry, the question that Lyotard’s reading presses towards is that of the principle according to which this intelligence is regulated. The answer that Lyotard provides in Just Gaming points not towards a horizon of unity or totality, but to a ‘horizon of multiplicity of diversity’ (JG, 87), a horizon that seeks divergence and dissensus rather than convergence and consensus. In Just Gaming Lyotard finds an example of such a regulative principle in the example of the sophists and in Aristotle who in describing the differend constitutions around the Mediterranean accepted that phronesis, the capacity for deliberation and judgement, is differently disposed in each constitution. This response finds itself deepened, and the recovery of sophistry that is linked to it further radicalised, in The Differend. It is the task of the next two chapters to examine this response.

6 Lyotard and the Sophistication of Ontology

Introduction The previous chapter traced Lyotard’s attempt at a restoration of sophistry, or more particularly of a sophistical intelligence, in Just Gaming. I concluded by suggesting that Lyotard’s attempt to clarify what regulates that intelligence finds itself both deepened and radicalised in The Differend. The possibility of reading The Differend in such a way is suggested not only by the inclusion of a number of analyses of sophistical arguments in The Differend, but also by one of the prefatory remarks made by Lyotard in that text. Under the heading ‘Author’ Lyotard declares that ‘the present reflections’ were announced ‘in the Prière de désinsérer’ of Rudiments païens (1977) and in the Introduction to The Postmodern Condition (1979). Were he not afraid of being tedious, he would confess that he had begun this work right after the publication of Économie libidinale (1974). Or for that matter . . .’ (D, xiv–xv). Not only do such remarks confirm the importance of The Differend, reflecting Lyotard’s claim, cited in the introduction to this book, that it formed one of his three real books, but they also serve to situate it in relation to the period in which Lyotard’s publications engaged with the sophists. In following Lyotard’s radicalisation of his engagement with sophistry in The Differend my reading is concentrated on the second of the ‘Reading Notices’ that interrupt the main text. This notice discusses the argument attributed to the sophist Gorgias concerning being. It is through this notice, then, that Lyotard is able to clarify the nature of sophistry, of a sophistical intelligence, in terms of its ontological significance. In other words, what I shall argue here is that Lyotard’s attempt to determine what regulates the sophistic intelligence is made in terms of the sophistic relation to being. This will allow me to suggest that the idea of the 122

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differend itself supposes such an intelligence. It will also allow me to show how Lyotard retrieves sophistry from philosophy, and effects its restoration.

The sophistry of reason: from the antinomies of pure reason to the differend What is a differend? In the preface to The Differend Lyotard gives a first definition. He writes: ‘as distinguished from a litigation a differend would be a case of conflict between two parties (at least) that cannot be decided equitably for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both arguments’ (D, xi). In presenting the idea of a differend in such terms Lyotard once more draws on Kant. As we have seen in the previous chapter, when Lyotard speaks of a ‘rule of judgement’ he is thinking – indeed thinking thinking – in broadly Kantian terms. In Section 22 of the Prolegomena Kant says that thinking is to be understood as ‘the same as judging’, for thinking is the uniting of representations. When, for example, I think of my worn-out shoes, such a thought is, for Kant, ultimately reducible to the judgement that my shoes are worn-out. In such a case in representing to myself my shoes I represent them as worn-out, a representation that is reducible to a judgement. A ‘rule of judgement’ is what provides the condition for the unification of representations. It is the rule by which a certain judgement is articulated and thus legitimately made. Let us follow the distinction that Lyotard makes between a litigation and a differend: a litigation occurs when there is a disagreement over the validity of a judgement that can be settled by appeal to a particular ‘rule of judgement’ – or, to put this otherwise, where there are two judgements expressed which contradict each other, their conflict can be litigated when both accept the same ‘rule’. In such cases, because both judgements are subject to the same rule, the rule that provides the basis for the legitimacy of one party’s claim also implies the illegitimacy of the other party’s claim. This can be expressed in an inverse sense: where both parties think the same object in the same regard, where both take it into view with regard to its being coloured for example, then both are, in principle, and despite their dispute, subject to the same rule of judgement. In the case of a differend, however, the legitimacy of one party’s argument does not imply the illegitimacy of the other: both parties have grounds that are equally valid and necessary. In such cases, where neither party has a legitimate basis for superiority over the other, an antithetic arises: there is a conflict between the contending parties that

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is something more than a simple, and corrigible dis-agreement. A single rule of judgement by which to discriminate between the parties is lacking, and a single principle cannot regulate their dispute. As a consequence of this lack, to apply ‘a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both if neither side admits this rule)’ (D, xi). Again, with regard to the idea of an antithetic, a precedent can be found in Kant, in the form of what Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason calls the ‘antinomies of pure reason’. The identification and treatment of the antinomies of pure reason forms one of the three main divisions of the Transcendental Dialectic in which Kant addresses the traditional concern of metaphysics with those beings that are suprasensible, that is, which because of their nature cannot form the objects of any possible experience. Kant defines such beings under the headings of ‘soul’, ‘world’ and ‘God’. Traditionally the soul (psuche) is addressed by that branch of metaphysics that is known as psychology; the world (kosmos) is addressed by cosmology; and God (theos) is addressed by theology. Kant’s intention is to show how in their treatment of their respective objects these three traditional disciplines lapse into dialectical inferences. Thus, in casting his account of the differend in terms that recall Kant’s identification of the antinomy of pure reason, Lyotard is already pointing beyond Kant and towards sophistry. Considered historically, Kant’s identification of the antinomies of pure reason is a criticism of the doctrines of both empiricism and rationalism concerning the object of one of these three definite branches of metaphysics – cosmology. For Kant cosmology, dealing with what the Greeks called the kosmos, was concerned with the totality of all beings, of all nature, that is, the world as such. According to Kant, it is characteristic of this cosmology that it attempts to achieve knowledge of the totality of all beings – that is, the world – by means of concepts of reason, and it is in doing so that the antinomies arise. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the concepts of pure reason, or the Ideas, are formed by an extension of the pure concepts of the understanding, or the categories, such that reason, aiming at completeness, seeks to make representations of the total or collective unity of experience. Corresponding to the three disciplines of metaphysics, the three Ideas that Kant treats, deriving from the categorial form of relation, represent the unconditioned totality and unity of the subject in the Idea of the soul, the unity and totality of appearances in the Idea of the world, and the third the absolute unity of the condition of all objects of thought in the Idea of God.

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By virtue of their very formation the pure concepts of reason do not immediately relate to beings that are accessible in experience, but only to the understanding. They prescribe to the latter faculty its orientation towards a certain unity. In making its representation of the Idea of the world, and in unfolding this representation in propositions, cosmology falls into antinomies, it lapses into a conflict in relation to its ideal object, developing two opposing propositions about the same object – or rather non-object – but in such a way that each of them is, or can be, maintained with equal necessity. Now, because in each of the antinomies reason is brought to exceed the bounds of experience, it comes to a position where if none of its propositions can ‘hope for confirmation in experience’, neither can they ‘fear refutation by it’ (CPR: A421, B449). And, in so far as for each of the particular forms of the antinomies it is possible to show ‘clear, evident and irresistible proofs’ (P, §52) – that is to say, strictly logical proofs, proofs that Kant calls ‘dogmatic’ – it is impossible to effect a resolution of the impasse that they occasion by denying the validity of either the thesis or the antithesis on logical grounds alone. Each antinomy, Kant says, ‘is not only in itself free from contradiction, but finds the conditions of its necessity in the very nature of reason – only that, unfortunately, the assertion of the opposite has, on its side, grounds that are just as valid and necessary’ (CPR: A421, B449). Thus the antinomies, despite being denounced by Kant as illusions of reason, are not arbitrary: reason is naturally led to them by its desire to exceed all conditions, and apprehend the world itself in its unconditioned totality. Experience never satisfies reason completely: every question posed to it, it answers only by referring us further and further back along an infinite chain of conditions and reasons, and thus brings forth no final and ultimate conclusion. The dissatisfaction that experience occasions shows not the vanity of metaphysics in striving beyond the empirical, but the insufficiency of all physical modes of explanation to answer to the higher faculty of reason. Thus, in each of the antinomies reason has an interest in both the thesis and antithesis that renders their conflict unavoidable. On the side of the theses the interest is threefold. First, there is a certain practical interest – the arguments themselves forming the foundation of morality and religion; secondly, a speculative interest – the postulation and employment of the Ideas concerning the world is such as to allow a definitive completeness; and thirdly, a popular interest – they satisfy commonsense in so far as ‘the common understanding finds not the least difficulty in the idea of an unconditioned beginning’ (CPR: A467, B496). On the side of the antithesis there is to be found no

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practical interest, or at least no immediate or obvious practical interest, on the part of reason. On the contrary, Kant suggests, the ideas themselves appear deprived of all power and influence by the antithetical arguments: If there is no primordial being distinct from the world, if the world is without beginning and therefore without an Author, if our will is not free, if the soul is divisible and perishable like matter, moral ideas and principles lose all validity (CPR: A468, B496). However, the antitheses offer a superior speculative interest – or at least they do whilst the scope of their own arguments are limited to restricting the pretensions of the theses to extend their cognitive claims beyond what they can properly know. Then they have in themselves a critical validity. But they too are susceptible of overstepping the mark and becoming dogmatic, confidently denying ‘whatever lies beyond the sphere of [their] intuitive knowledge’ (CPR: A471, B499). Considered in their formal aspects one finds in the antinomies an anticipation of the differend. As we have seen, each of the antinomies are grounded in a certain interest of reason itself. In its pre-critical state reason is deeply tortured by these interests: it is by reason of reason’s interests that the antinomies arise, but it is neither possible for this pre-critical reason to negate both sides of the antithetical conflict and so realise the impasse that it brings itself to, nor affirm both sides of the antithesis so that its impasse would not appear. Now, where a conflict between the antinomies is enacted, it is, Kant says, the side who contrives ‘to make the last attack, and [is] not required to withstand a new onslaught from their opponents, [that] may always count on carrying off the laurels’ (CPR: A423, B450). Victory is secured in this antithetical field simply by ensuring that one has the last word. Lyotard takes up this point, and indeed extends it, in order to further define a differend. If the precondition of the differend is the lack of a rule of judgement equitably disposed to two conflicting arguments, a differend itself arises when, in the case of an antithetical conflict, one of the parties is divested of the means to argue and allow their argument to become known.1 But – and here Lyotard differs from Kant – it is not merely because they speak last that one party ensures that they have the final word, but because theirs is, effectively, the only word heard. One speaks the final word all the more successfully not by speaking last, nor for that matter by preventing one’s opponent from speaking, but by establishing the absolute priority of one’s speech as such. Everything is said in one’s

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own idiom and in a manner that confirms one’s own position, and one’s own arguments, or it is not said at all. As Lyotard argues, ‘the “perfect” crime does not consist in killing the victim or the witnesses (that adds new crimes to the first one and aggravates the difficulty of effacing everything), but rather in obtaining the silence of the witnesses, the deafness of the judges, and the inconsistency (insanity) of the testimony’ (D, §9). By neutralising the addressor, the addressee and the sense of the testimony it is as if there were no argument, no real dispute, in the first place. In short, there is a differend when the regulation of the conflict that opposes two parties takes place ‘in the idiom of one of the parties’ (D, §12), whilst the counter-argument is itself not signified. Here, then, we find one of the reasons that informs the need to distinguish so carefully between a litigation and a differend, for it is by being treated as if it were a litigation that the differend is occasioned, and with it the denial of the legitimacy of the other’s experience as such, the denial of its truth by the occlusion of its reason or ground. However, a more substantive point can be seen to be at issue beyond the formal similarity between the Kantian diagnosis of the antinomies of reason and Lyotard’s idea of a differend, a point that puts at stake the very nature of reason, and philosophy itself. For, as Kant recognised, the conflict of reasons in the antinomies are anything but adventitious: where hitherto it had been held to be the case that all contradiction on the part of thought arose simply from external and accidental factors, Kant shows that the antinomies are contradictions that arise necessarily and that are internal to reason. In this respect they are, Kant says, ‘sophistications not of men but of pure reason itself’, and as such ‘even the wisest of men cannot free himself from them’ (CPR: A339, B397). However, if for Kant, and in contrast to Plato and Aristotle for whom sophistry was decisively opposed to philosophy, there is a natural and unavoidable inclination towards sophistry in reason, there is also an equally decisive agreement between Kant, and Plato and Aristotle in their respective characterisations of sophistry. As I have argued, both Plato and Aristotle define sophistry by its lack of interest in saying anything substantive about anything. In the Gorgias, Socrates compares the sophist to the rhetorician: they are, he says ‘the same’, or if not the same, then ‘akin and nearly resembling one another’ (Gorgias, 520a, 6ff.). The aim of the sophist, like that of the rhetorician, is to ‘speak well’, but to speak well is not meant in the sense of speaking truthfully about something, that is, in the sense of possessing a genuine understanding of the matter about which he speaks, rather it is merely to give the impression of doing so. Aristotle gives a similar characterisation in the Metaphysics,

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showing his fundamental agreement with Plato when it is a matter of distinguishing the sophist from the philosopher: ‘the sophists take on the same manner as the philosopher . . . [but] sophistry is only wisdom in appearance’ (Metaphysics, IV, 1004b, 17–20). In short, and as we have seen, for Plato and Aristotle the sophists were concerned with speeches and argumentation alone, and not with considering anything in its true being. Similarly, for Kant, it is possible to speak of a sophistication of reason not simply because of its dialectical conflicts, but because in its transcendent employment of concepts and categories, in extending their employment beyond experience as such, reason, whilst professing to enlarge our knowledge, ends in ‘nothing but mere talk’ (CPR: A62, B86). That is to say, because no content can answer to its assertions, reason simply bandies about concepts, and it thus gives to ignorance ‘the appearance of truth, by the device of imitating the methodical thoroughness that logic prescribes’, and uses this ‘to conceal the emptiness of its pretensions’ (CPR: A61, B86). Thus, whilst Kant admits of an inherent sophistication of reason, the very essence of his critical enterprise is to protect philosophy from it. No less than Plato and Aristotle, and despite admitting sophistry within reason, Kant seeks to establish a strict division between philosophy and sophistry. Such sophistry is, as we have already noted, for Kant ‘quite unbecoming the dignity of philosophy’ (CPR: A62, B86). To put this in Lyotard’s terms, the problem for Kant is that philosophy is itself wronged by the unhindered sophistries of reason, that is to say, it is wronged by the uncritical application of reason to the realm of the properly metaphysical – to what are, in effect, supersensuous objects, of which the world considered as a whole is one. The sign of this wrong is to be found in the prevailing mood of ‘weariness and complete indifferentism’ (CPR: A, x) that for Kant characterises the general attitude towards metaphysics in his time. This mood is occasioned, on the one side, by the dogmatism of naïve rationalism, and, on the other, by a sceptical despair in metaphysics, itself the result of the speculative excesses of the dogmatists, both of which are the ‘death of sound philosophy’ (CPR: A407, B434). The sophistical excesses of reason wrong philosophy precisely because, in what is most proper to it – the exercise of its influence over the domain of the supersensible – philosophy is held to be able to provide a theoretical knowledge. In the way in which philosophy is supposed to aspire to knowledge of the supersensible it is misjudged, and when it is shown to fail in this, as it must, it is wronged. But, if the problem for Kant is that the unhindered sophistications of reason wrong philosophy, it remains to be asked if Kant’s judgement

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and discrimination, repeating the judgement and discrimination of the philosophical tradition against sophistry, do not themselves constitute a wrong against sophistry. To put this in other terms, and in order to open up the very ground of the idea of the differend, what remains to be determined is whether Kant’s philosophical discrimination against sophistry does not in the end turn against what he had first admitted – the possibility that reason itself is inherently sophistical, and whether in this respect Kant turns against his own insights and the very possibility of the critical enterprise as such. More simply then, what is at issue here, for us, is to show that, as Lyotard himself can be understood to argue, the very possibility of philosophy is itself engaged from out of sophistry and in itself implies – even if it does not acknowledge it – the idea of the differend.

Lyotard, Gorgias and Parmenides The task that this book has addressed itself to, the task that it has taken from Lyotard’s work, is that of establishing another relation between sophistry and philosophy than that determined by Plato, a relation that does not expel the sophist outside of truth. It is necessary not to underestimate what is involved in such a task, for as Part I of this book has made clear, the Platonic gesture is one which prepares the way for the traditional characterisations of sophistry since that time. There have been two dominant ways of presenting sophistry within the philosophical tradition. The first of these characterisations simply excludes sophistry altogether from philosophy, and places it instead in rhetoric; the second, and prima facie more accommodating characterisation, adjudges the sophists to have been integral to philosophy, but in the sense that they were primitive precursors of modern philosophy. Either they are viewed as empiricists who concern themselves with the reality of the sensible and living world, its plurality and movement, or as sceptics who arrest the naivety of a Greek philosophy simply directed towards the apprehension of the external world. But if this latter appears a more generous accommodation of sophistry, it perhaps only the more effectively wrongs sophistry by allowing it a limited place within philosophy as an abstract moment of its proper truth. As we have seen, Hegel’s account of sophistry, for all of its dialectical and speculative sophistication finally presents the sophists in such a light. If Lyotard can be said to set out to correct this understanding of sophistry it is not because he will suggest that sophistry is, in fact, part of philosophy, but rather, and in sophistical

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fashion, it is by turning things around and showing that sophistry comprehends philosophy, that sophistry is the very condition of philosophy itself. In the second notice of the Differend Lyotard appeals to what he calls ‘the nihilist reasoning of Gorgias in On Not-Being’ (D, 14). According to Lyotard this ‘reasoning’ refers back to the Poem of Parmenides. In this respect, the title given to Gorgias’ argument, preserved in the account of Sextus Empiricus, is significant. Sextus tells us that Gorgias’ treatise was known as On Nature or On Not-Being. It is the alternative that is important, for it indicates the significance of the argument itself. The first part of the title establishes the treatise within an already extant series of writings, an incipient tradition so to speak. The fragments of Anaximander, of Heraclitus and indeed of Parmenides are all concerned in some way with phusis. However, if the first part of the title of the treatise situates Gorgias’ arguments within a certain line of thought – and indicates a certain relation to Parmenides, the qualification that follows announces a quite decisive inflection within and for this line of thought. By nature – or phusis – the Greeks originally designated what in itself grows and comes to presence. As Heidegger has argued throughout his work, being for the Greeks had the meaning of presence. That both phusis and being could designate what comes to appear in its presence indicates that the presence of what is, that is, its being was essentially a bringing itself forth, an opening of that ‘space’ within which it appears as what it is. Phusis in this sense did not designate a particular domain of beings, as in our contemporary understanding of the physical and nature, but the being of beings themselves. However, if phusis was supposed to designate what comes to presence, what emerges and comes to stand, what establishes itself, or what, simply put, is, then what Gorgias would seem to maintain is the opposite: to speak of nature is not to speak of what is, but of what is not, it is to speak not on Being, but on Not-Being. What is at issue for Lyotard in The Differend is to determine the significance for philosophy of the inversion of the meaning attributed to phusis. Lyotard maintains that in referring to the Poem of Parmenides, Gorgias’ argument engages the ‘thesis’ (D, 15) expressed in the Poem that there are two paths alone open to investigation: ‘one, that it is and cannot not be’ and the other ‘that it is not and must not be’. 2 But this engagement itself is ambiguous. Doubtless it appears to take the form of a direct contradiction of the Poem, for the thesis argued by Gorgias that ‘nothing is’ [ouk einai .. . ouden],3 seems to contravene the words of the Poem: ‘never

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will this prevail, that what is not is’, words followed by the injunction to ‘restrain your thought from this road of enquiry’. However, contrary to the immediate impression his singular affirmation gives, Gorgias is, Lyotard says, ‘ “defending” the thesis of Parmenides’ (D, 15). In effect Gorgias does nothing more than attempt to distinguish between the way of being (or of truth) and that of not-being, in order to demonstrate the difference between them, to show that being is, and not-being is not. As soon as it becomes the object of Gorgias’ demonstration, however, the ‘thesis’ of Parmenides is, according to Lyotard, ‘ruined’ (D, 15). Gorgias’ argument falls into two parts, two sets of implications, which Lyotard lends emphasis to by punctuating it with a ‘he adds’. The argument begins: ‘if not-being is not-being [si le ne pas être est ne pas être]. . ., just as much as the existent [l’étant], then the non-existent [le nonétant] would be: in fact, the non-existent is non-existent as the existent is existent, such that actual things [le choses effectives] (ta pragmata) are no more than they are not’ (LD, 32). Gorgias then ‘adds’: ‘but then if not-being is, its opposite, being, is not. In fact, if not-being is, it makes sense that being is not’ (D, 15). In the first instance, Gorgias does nothing more than re-affirm what the goddess has already revealed to Parmenides – he re-marks the distinction between being and not-being. In other words, he simply identifies not-being as not-being in order to distinguish it from being. In this Gorgias attempts to remain faithful to the necessity to truly know being, and thus to preclude the possibility of being lead astray by the confusion of being and not-being. The minimal requirement for such fidelity is the simple identity of not-being: ‘not-being is not-being’. But this act of identification has the contrary effect to that desired. ‘Is’ is said in the same way and with the same reason of being and not-being: not-being is just as being is. Being and not-being are consequently indiscernible: both are in the same way. If ‘is’ can be said of both being and not-being, then it is impossible when saying ‘is’ to know whether what one says ‘is’ of is or is not, or as Gorgias affirms it is impossible to know whether ‘actual things are any more than they are not’ (D, 15). A second, and consequent inference follows. If not-being is, then it is necessary to say that being, which is its opposite, by virtue of its opposition, is not. As Lyotard explains: if what is, is not-being, then being must not be, because it is distinguished from what is – that is, not-being – by way of negation. In other words, being ‘is only affirmed through a double negation’ (D, 15). It is not that ‘is’ is, but that it is not not-being. It is this second inference that specifically engages the path of thinking prohibited by the goddess in Parmenides’ Poem, that is, the path that

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states that what is not is. Gorgias, however, only entertains this way of thinking as a consequence of attempting to argue for the thesis expressed in the Poem; he is driven onto the prohibited path by the logic he follows in attempting to establish the distinction between being and not-being. But nothing is gained by making trial of this second path: it is no more possible to support a distinct identity for being and not-being here than it was before. Thus the conclusion is reached which establishes the first affirmation of Gorgias’ argument – namely that ‘nothing is’. Indeed, nothing would be, Lyotard argues, according to Gorgias: either because being and not-being are the same thing, or because they are not. If they are it is because being is not-being; if they are not, it is because being is not not-being, and is only affirmed through a double negation (D, 15). Now what Lyotard marks very clearly in his commentary is that it is not only as a consequence of what is argued that Gorgias ruins the Poem, but that it is by virtue of the very decision to engage the thesis, to make it the object of a demonstration and to subject it to argumentation, that it is ruined. In other words, what is ruined is not merely the ‘thesis’ expressed in the Poem, but the Poem itself. The very modality of its saying, and not just what is said, is, in accordance with the etymological meaning of the word ‘ruin’, brought down. The saying itself is made to fall outside of its own essence by the decision of Gorgias to turn it into an argument. Lyotard characterises the saying of the Poem, its mode of enunciation, as ‘demonic’. It is the ‘demonic phrase . . . upon which Parmenides’ poem opens’ (D, 15) that is ruined by Gorgias’ intervention. What does Lyotard mean in speaking of the ‘demonic phrase’ which opens the Poem, and how is this ‘phrase’ ruined by Gorgias’ apology for the Poem? The Poem begins with a descriptive narrative of Parmenides’ journey to the goddess. The word daimon appears in the third line of this first fragment of the Poem: ‘The mares that carry me as far as my heart may aspire/ were my escorts: they had guided me and set me on the celebrated road/ of the god [daimonos] which carries the man of knowledge . . . ’ (EGP, 130). The daimonic is what appertains to the gods, and thus the word daimon serves to introduce what, as the translation indicates, is the specific dimension of the divine. Accordingly the ‘demonic phrase’ would be the divine phrase, but if the Poem begins descriptively, in what sense can Lyotard speak of it opening upon a divine phrase? The second fragment of the Poem, which relates the revelation made to Parmenides by the goddess of ‘the two roads of enquiry there are to

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be thought of’ (DK 28, B2.2), in turn opens with the injunction of the goddess – ‘come now, I will tell you’ (DK 28, B 2.1) and the instruction to ‘preserve the account [the Greek word here is muthos, myth] when you hear it’ (EGP, 132; DK 28, B2.1). What follows, then, is not as J. Barnes claims ‘Parmenides’ own views about the true nature of reality’ (EGP, 129), but what has been revealed to him by the goddess, or, more strictly speaking, it is the muthos of the goddess that is set down in the Poem. The word muthos means, literally, ‘anything delivered by word of mouth’, and so it comes to carry the sense of ‘spoken word’. This muthos is, then, the ‘demonic phrase’ of which Lyotard speaks. Lyotard isolates two pertinent, ‘pragmatic’ aspects of this phrase. First, the phrase itself (or most immediately the injunction which introduces the ‘demonic phrase’) has the effect of displacing Parmenides from the position of narrator or addressor of the Poem. It is not Parmenides who originally speaks the phrase, but the goddess. Thus, as Lyotard remarks, the ‘demonic phrase’ is ‘a received phrase’ (D, 20): ‘the phrase that comes down to us from Parmenides is the one that he heard from a divine mouth’ (D, 20). The Poem is not said under the authority of Parmenides, but rather under the authority of the goddess. As such, the demonic phrase does not invite interlocution. The phrase spoken by the goddess to Parmenides, and relayed by Parmenides to us, situates us (Parmenides and Parmenides’ audience) as auditors, those who receive the divine word. But at the same time that we are situated as auditors we do not become potential interlocutors of the goddess. In effect, the positions of the speaker and the auditor in relation to the ‘demonic phrase’ are not commensurable. The phrase of the goddess does not ask for the auditor to give or withhold their assent to what it says, and so it does not presuppose the ability in the auditor to become the speaker of another, equivalent phrase, declaring things to be either as the divinity says or otherwise than she says. It is in this sense, Lyotard observes, that the gods are ‘traditionally called “the strongest ones” (kreittonès)’ (D, 21): we humans cannot exchange positions with them by attempting to dispute what they declare to be the case, or by attempting to confirm it by offering proofs in their stead. In short, one does not argue with a divinity. What the gods say does not require our consent in order to be admitted as true, and if we do address the gods it is only to offer prayers to them or plead with them. Thus, secondly, the ‘demonic phrase’ is in essence revelatory, its truth a revealed truth. It is this revelatory mode of enunciation then that is ‘ruined’ by Gorgias. ‘It suffices that Parmenides indicate two paths are open to thought, that of is and that of is not’, Lyotard writes, ‘in order for Gorgias to turn them into a thesis and antithesis

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argued by partners in a dialectic from which the goddess is absent and to have them refute each other’ (LD, 33, my emphasis). Thus Gorgias’ argument does not so much refute the ‘demonic phrase’ as de-demonise it. Or, at least, Gorgias’ decision to make an argument for the revelation effects the de-demonisation of the ‘demonic phrase’, so that the divine withdraws itself from language, from the logos. In order to make this consideration clearer it is necessary to come back to Parmenides’ Poem and to consider more closely the divine revelation or the demonic phrase on which it opens. What has come down to us as the second fragment of the Poem recounts the goddess’ revelation of two paths of enquiry, ‘one, that it is and cannot not be . . . another, that it is not and must not be’ (EGP, 130; DK 28, B2.3–2.5). It is upon this revelation that the Poem can be said properly to open, the first fragment, relating Parmenides’ journey to the goddess and her words of greeting, forming its prologue. 4 Barbara Cassin, from whose work Lyotard derives his own reading of Gorgias, has proposed a precise reading of the designation of the first path in Fragment Two. 5 In its attention to the syntactic development of the line and its grammatical import, this reading follows the example set by Heidegger in his close attention to the saying of the Poem, and in particular the saying of its fundamental words – ‘is’, ‘being’ and ‘to be’.6 However, Cassin’s reading differs from Heidegger’s in as much as its comprehension of the Poem draws on Gorgias’ own understanding as it is implied in his ‘antilogue’ to the Poem. The line in question runs: ‘he men hopos estin te kai hos ouk esti me einai’ (DK 28, B2.3). Cassin underlines the repetition of the verb ‘to be’ which, in two forms, the third person singular of the present indicative esti(n) and the present infinitive, einai, occurs three times in the line. These three instances are deployed according to a rigorous syntactical development. According to Cassin, the first occurrence of the verb – estin – should be understood syntactically to mean simply ‘is’. There is no substantivisation, no nominalisation of the verb at all in its first instantiation; the Greek does not say ‘Being’ as some translation suggest, and even to render estin with the impersonal ‘it is’ still hints too strongly at a potential subject,7 which is to anticipate a place opened up only subsequently in and through the syntactical development of the line. Thus the first path opens on a simple and straightforward affirmation: ‘is’. The second part of the line, the clause beginning with the conjunction ‘and’ [te kai] – te kai hos ouk esti me einai – contains two forms of the verb ‘to be’, esti and einai, which in their relation are grammatically ambiguous. The infinitive form einai can be read either as completing ouk esti or as its subject, the alternatives modifying the sense of the phrase ouk esti.

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On the one hand, Cassin states that ‘it is the case, and even the rule, that placed . . . at the beginning of a proposition and followed by an infinitive, esti signifies: “it is possible”’ (SP, 49). Thus preceded by the negative adverb ouk, it means ‘it is not possible’. On the other hand, where einai is understood as the subject of ouk esti, the phrase ouk esti simply means ‘is not’. The ambiguity may appear slight, but the point here is that this ambiguity is inseparable from the essential meaning of the clause, and it must be grasped in its developmental movement. The initial affirmation of the ‘is’ in the first clause of the line supports a double negation, or the impossibility of the contrary – ouk esti me einai – ‘is not not to be’. Now in redoubling itself the verb acquires a modal force, that is, it expresses, negatively, a possibility, that is, that it ‘is not possible (for it) not to be’, and consequently under the infinitive form, einai, ‘is’ becomes its own subject, or opens for itself its own subject position. Thus Cassin renders the line as follows: ‘L’une: que est et que (il) n’est pas (possible de) n’être pas’ (SP, 50). To elaborate upon this translation: ‘the one’ – that is, the first way open to thought – is to say ‘is8 and that (it) is not (possible) not to be’. The parentheses serve to express the ambiguity of the Greek, the interpolated ‘(it)’ indicating the recursive opening – via the modalisation of the verb – of the subject position within the line. What the word of the goddess says then, what the demonic phrase reveals is, according to Cassin, the ‘originary epiphany of presence’ (SP, 64). In other words, the sheer affirmation (of the) ‘is’ simply says the presence of being and its opening out of itself. By way of its self-saying affirmation – ‘is’ – ‘is’ presents itself. And from this initial affirmation that says only ‘is’ unfolds the necessity of its nominalisation. The verb ‘is’ unfolds and develops from itself, and in accordance with itself, its own substantivisation. But even if this is, as Cassin says, a literal translation of the line that announces the first path open to thought, does it make any sense? The evidence of most other translations, which ‘add’ to the initial ‘is’ a subject position marked by the third person impersonal ‘it’ even if they do not substantivise the ‘is’ into ‘being’, would appear to indicate that perhaps it does not make sense – and that, on the contrary, there is, by necessity, always a subject prior to any verbal ‘predication’, that, in other words, ‘is’ must always be said of something. To argue that the Poem claims otherwise would, however, be to miss the point. What is at stake in the Poem is not whether ‘is’ must always be said of something, but how ‘is’ is said of something. Or, to put this otherwise, how something is at all. Two points should be observed here. First, and as Heidegger reminds us, the ‘is’ claims a very definite priority: without

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it, without what it says, and without saying it of everything, there would be nothing to say. Without ‘is’ there would not merely ‘be a noun and a verb less in our language [ . . . ] there would be no language at all. No being as such would disclose itself’. 9 Secondly, and granting this priority of the is, the Poem does not say the absolute separation of verb and noun, but only the relative priority of the verb within an originary and structural belonging together of verb and noun. This belonging together of verb and noun is thought grammatically in terms of what is called the participle. It is of the essence of the participle to participate in both nominal and verbal senses. To think this structural interrelation from out of the relative priority of the verb is to think what is named by the noun from out of the verb. Thus we speak of a ‘blossom’ or a ‘bloom’, as it is that which ‘blossoms’, or which ‘blooms’. In its blossoming, the blossom appears as what it is. It is for this reason that Heidegger says the Greeks originally, that is, prePlatonically, experienced being as, and not in contradistinction to, appearing. Being is experienced in the appearance in its appearing: ‘appearing is not something subsequent that sometimes happens to being. Appearing is the very essence of being’.10 In other words, appearing is not the manifestation of a prior essence, the making actual of – to use a slightly awkward locution – a possible or a possibility; rather in the appearing – to employ the participle – there is given both the appearance, that is, the being present itself (actuality) and that which appears, what is present (the essence, the delimitation of its possibility), or to say it in the Greek there is given both the simple estin and the ti estin. Thus the Poem reveals the originary manifestation, the self-showing, of presence, that is, being, in the word, the logos, of the goddess. Or to put it pointedly, if somewhat anachronistically, the Poem is the originary saying of ontology. But why is it then that this originary epiphany of being is said specifically by way of the divine word of the goddess? Neither a poetic device nor ‘a mythological remnant in the domain of philosophy’, 11 the presence of the divine in the Poem must be thought from out of the essence of what is said in the Poem. The divine saying is a showing. ‘Reality’ as Lyotard says is revealed by this phrase. Now one might say, following Lyotard and accentuating the pragmatic aspect of the phrase, that it is because the ‘demonic phrase’ reveals that it is attributed to a deity: the goddess derives her divinity from the ability of her phrase to reveal reality, rather than the phrase deriving its ability to reveal from the divinity of its speaker. ‘Ontology’, Lyotard says, considered ‘as a genre of discourse presupposes this obscure illumination: that of which it speaks [ce dont elle phrase], being, is also that which speaks by its mouth

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[ce qui phrase par sa bouche]: the referent is also the addressor. “Being and thinking are the same”’(LD, 39). 12 What Gorgias’ defence ‘ruins’, then, is this immediate apprehension of the essential – the epiphany of presence, its ‘divine’ revelation. In mirroring the Poem, Gorgias’ demonstration opens up the greatest distance from it, so that it is at one and the same time both close to and infinitely distant from the Poem. As it is reported, the first argument offered by Gorgias bears upon the claim that ‘nothing is’ [ouk einai . . . ouden] (MXG, 979a, 12). Now, when this first argument is actually presented, it is gathered under the expression ouk esti (MXG, 979a, 14). This too is translated as nothing exists, but in effect lacking any subject, this phrase says simply ‘is not’: kai hoti men ouk esti [(And) that (on the one hand) is not] (MXG, 979a, 14). Once again it is only if its grammatical inflection is observed, and in particular its proximity to, and its differential repetition of the structure of Parmenides’ Poem, that the significance of Gorgias’ argument becomes absolutely clear. On the one hand, the subsumption of the argument under the simple negative form ‘is not’ recalls the sheer affirmation of the ‘is’ of the Poem, whilst on the other hand, it also marks – or re-marks – the inversion of the process of the unfolding of the ‘is’ into its substantivisation, its self-disclosure, in the Poem. Here, rather than disclosing itself from itself, as is the case with the ‘is’ of Parmenides’ Poem, it is a matter of presenting what in effect is properly a conclusion and then, as Lyotard observes, showing ‘how it is reasoned’ (D, 15). ‘Is not’ must be understood as a conclusion for at least two reasons: once because it is a matter (initially at least) of Gorgias defending the revelation of the goddess and not simply contradicting it by positing the ‘is not’, or that ‘nothing is’ or ‘nothing exists’. But more directly, ‘is not’ is effectively concluded because it is no longer a question of something showing itself, but rather a matter of demonstrating and arguing. Now according to the report given in the treatise, what is at stake in Gorgias’ own argument is a matter of initially proving that ‘it is neither possible to be nor not to be’.13 How, then, is ‘is not’ concluded from such a proof? To show how, it is necessary to set out some of the steps of Gorgias’ argument and to pay close attention to its syntactic detail in the light of our understanding of Parmenides’ Poem. The argument runs: ei men gar to me einai esti me einai, ouden an hetton to me on tou ontos eie (MXG, 979a, 25). Lyotard employs the translation given by Cassin: ‘Car si le ne pas être est ne pas être, non moins que l’étant, le non-étant serait’ (LD, 32).14 Van Den Abbeele’s translation of this passage reads: ‘if Not-Being is Not-Being, just as much as the existent, then the

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non-existent would be’ (D, 15). Whilst the English translation brings out the application of the principle of identity, through the copula ‘is’ to ‘not-being’: ‘Not-Being is Not-Being’ it does not follow the syntactic nuances of the French and so effaces any trace of that of the Greek. ‘The judgement of identity’, Cassin says, ‘does not bear upon the participle “not-being”, but upon the verb, [not to be] which is distinguished syntactically, by the play [the presence and absence] of the definite article, once as subject (“le ne pas être”, to me einai) and once as predicate (“pas être”, me einai)’.15 Here, then, Gorgias’ argument ‘repeats’ the self-development and unfolding of ‘being’ in Parmenides’ Poem, and as we have already said, in this repetition, establishes both its distance from the Poem, and with it another way of thinking altogether. From the moment that ‘not to be’ [le ne pas être] is identified as ‘not to be’ [ne pas être] it is properly substantivised, deploying itself as subject, and taking the nominal form to me on. Thus the substantivisation of the verb produces non-being ‘with as much right and for the same reasons as being [l’étant/the existent]’: (SP, 449) non-being ‘is’ just as much as being ‘is’. ‘Is’ is said indeterminately of both being, or in the words of Gorgias: ‘if not to be [le ne pas être] is not to be [ne pas être], [then] no less than being, non-being would be’.16 Consequently when ‘is’ is said of actual things (ta pragmata) – in the sense that we say, naturally, actual things are – it is impossible to know if that ‘is’ says ‘being’ or ‘non-being’, or, as Gorgias writes, it is impossible to know whether ‘actual things are any more than they are not’ (D, 15). It thus appears, as Cassin argues, ‘that it does not suffice to be subject to the verb “to be” in order to be’ (SP, 451). From thence, as we have seen, Gorgias makes trial of the second, prohibited path announced by the goddess in the Poem, by affirming that ‘not to be is’ (le ne pas être est) (LD, 32). But, if ‘not to be’ is, then as a consequence it is necessary to conclude that ‘to be’ is not: ’to be’ is affirmed only as a negation of a negation, and is by virtue of not-being ‘not to be’. Finally, if it is affirmed that ‘not to be’ is, then, rather than being opposed, ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’ are confused, are the same, and if they are the same then, also, nothing would exist: ‘and if they are the same thing, in this case also nothing would be: in effect non-being is not, thus also being, if at least it is the same thing as non-being’ [ei de tauto, kai outos ouk an eie ouden. To te gar me on ouk esti kai to on, epeiper ye tauto to me onti] (MXG, 979a, 32–34).17 Now, from here it is possible to say both that ‘it is neither possible to be nor not to be’, and also that ‘nothing is’ or, more properly ‘is not’. It might be supposed that the two ‘affirmations’ (if it is possible to call

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them that) agree in so far as, first, Gorgias has proven that ‘to be’ is not, and, second, as ‘not to be’ is, it too is not, and thus being cannot be said of either. Consequently, the only conclusion possible would be that ‘nothing exists’ or more simply ‘is not’. However, such an account of Gorgias’ argument does not sufficiently take into account its engagement with the Poem of Parmenides. If there is no contradiction between the two claims it is not because they can be reconciled under the single affirmation that there is nothing, but because the two claims do not bear upon the same thing. On the one hand, the former carries upon the verbal and nominal senses of ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’: because it is impossible to properly distinguish between ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’, and thus between ‘being’ and ‘non-being’, the alternative: either ‘to be’ or ‘not to be’ is, strictly speaking, impossible to draw; thus, in Gorgias’ words, ‘it is neither possible to be nor not to be’. One cannot affirm either, but nor can one deny either. On the other hand, however, and as a consequence of the indeterminacy of being, in that it is opened up by the ‘neither possible to be nor not to be’, the conclusion ‘is not’ is said in contradiction to the affirmation of the ‘is’ in the Poem of Parmenides. In other words, ‘is not’ signifies the failure of the demonic phrase – the inability of being to show itself of itself, since the verb ‘is’ no more exposes being than it does non-being.

Sophistry and philosophy What, then, is the significance for philosophy of this failure, this ruination of the demonic phrase of the Poem? Or, in other words, how are we to understand, in the light of Lyotard’s reading of Gorgias’ treatise On Not-Being, the relation between sophistry and philosophy? It will be helpful in this respect to return to Aristotle’s account of Gorgias’ argument. For Aristotle, the judgement concerning Gorgias’ argument appears to be as straightforward as it is necessary: In the Rhetoric we find a condemnation of the sophist’s confusion of being and not-being. By virtue of this confusion the sophistical argument threatens not merely to make what is false appear true, and what is true false, but to undo the ground of the distinction between the true and the false as such. That is to say, if, in general, sophistry employs the power of words in order to substitute them for the evidence of things, then this particular sophism, with the confusion of being and not-being, threatens the very evidentiality of the evident as such. For Aristotle the contradiction that this particular act embodies – the saying of being as not-being and of not-being as being – endangers the evident itself in so far as it threatens the fundamental

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identity of being itself. It attacks the principle of non-contradiction in its very ground by undoing the identity of being with itself. This confusion of being and not-being exemplifies the illegitimacy of sophistry as such. It is an error, or more precisely a paralogism which, Aristotle says, is accomplished by falsely deriving the sense of absolute existence – that not-being is, from the relative employment of being as copula – that not-being is not-being.18 But Aristotle’s characterisation of this most fundamental of sophistical errors by way of this distinction is less decisive than it may at first appear. For all that Aristotle attempts to regulate the confusion provoked by this sophism, at bottom his criticism is itself restricted by a certain withdrawal of the evidentiality of the evident. The basis of Aristotle’s identification and criticism of this paralogism is his recognition that being is said in many ways. Amongst the manifold ways in which something can be addressed in its being, something can either be said to be something, that is, it can be said in relation to something else and so qualified as something, or it can be said absolutely.19 This distinction between an absolute and relative employment of the ‘is’ – or an ‘existential’ and ‘copulative’ employment – goes back to a distinction implicit in the term ousia and which signifies both a predicative and pre-predicative determination of truth, that is, being true as a determination of something understood as something, or being true as the simple being there of the thing itself, its presence. Aristotle distinguishes between these two senses of ousia in terms of order and rank. That is to say, he marks a difference between ousia understood in a primary sense, ousia prote, and ousia understood in a secondary sense, oudia deutera. Despite being distinguished by Aristotle, these two modalities of ousia belong together. They are given unitarily, and are in a certain sense inseparable. Nothing is given that is not in itself both given as this thing that is simply present and at the same time apprehended as something. This particular horse that I encounter before me is, Aristotle says, perceived by me as a horse, and not just as a this (Categories, V, 2a, 11ff.). Now, in accordance with his express denomination of these two modes of ousia Aristotle gives priority to the particular this, to the ‘it’ in its presence: ‘ousia in the truest and strictest, the primary sense of that term, is that which is neither asserted of nor can be found in a subject’ (Categories, V, 2a, 14). In its proper sense ousia is not an attribute of something, but the singular thing itself. Here Aristotle separates himself from Plato. For Plato the thing before us is not the thing that is seized upon by apprehension. What is in the true sense, that is, what is properly

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apprehended, is the eidos which is situated in a world apart. The things that we encounter here-below are for Plato far from being what is properly present; rather they are in a certain sense what is not, they are me on, or to put this in other words, they are but a distant and distorting reflection of the eidos, they are eidolon. Thus Aristotle says of Plato that he separates, that he disjoins (khorisdei) what in effect coheres as one in the unity of ousia. A chasm (khorismos) is created between the merely apparent down-here and true being which is elsewhere. The appearing thing is degraded to a mere appearance, whilst being is elevated to a suprasensory realm. Consequently the thing itself, this particular being, is abstracted from what makes it present – for Plato it merely participates in its own true being. What opens this true being is not this thing here, rather it is the relation between the eidos – which is precisely what is not seen, but what is invisible, aeides – and thought (nous). It is, we should note, this same criticism that Kant makes of Plato. For Kant, whilst with the Ideas Plato recognised a ‘higher need than merely [spelling out] appearances according to the understanding’ (CPR: A314, B371), he nevertheless ruined experience itself, and made possible the dogmatism of later times, by the ‘exalted nature’ of the Ideas. However, for all that he opposes Plato on this point, Aristotle’s opposition is less decisive than it appears to be. No less than Plato, Aristotle is similarly circumscribed by what Lyotard calls ‘the problematic . . . of the loss or decline of the referent’s reality’ (D, 22). On the one hand, Aristotle’s explicit distinction between ousia prote and ousia deutera, and his declaration that the primary meaning of ousia is what we have called the simple ‘it’ that is apprehended, means that essence itself is secondary, derivative. Yet, on the other hand, Aristotle declares that truth and falsity are, properly speaking, a matter not of this immediate apprehension but of attribution. What is true is a statement about something, and most true of all statements are statements of essence. Truth, understood in this sense, is a matter of the correctness of the logos. Thus there appears in Aristotle a fundamental ambiguity concerning the true locus of truth, an ambiguity about whether truth lies in the ‘is’ that says what something is, which bespeaks the essence of something, or if it is in the presencing of that thing. This ambiguity is not simply the result of an indecision on Aristotle’s part, or a lack of clarity concerning the nature of truth itself. It arises from out of a change in the nature of truth and of being. The ambiguity in Aristotle reflects the fact that Aristotle stands on the basis of an earlier understanding of truth and being, but interprets that basis from out of an understanding for which truth is already correctness and being no

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longer the epiphany of what is present. To be sure, what Aristotle names ousia prote goes back to this earlier understanding of truth and being. Yet, even where Aristotle explicitly says the priority of the presence of the thing itself, this is nevertheless interpreted from out of an understanding for which this presencing as presencing has withdrawn. It is because of this transformation in the nature of being and truth that Aristotle is able to speak of ousia prote as hupokeimenon, that is, of what is properly present as what in every case underlies all statements about it. Being present is to be set before the logos, to be thrown over against it as an ob-ject. Thus in Aristotle the logos itself is no longer rooted in the ‘originary epiphany of presence’ as it was for Parmenides. For Parmenides, as we have shown, the ‘is’ said the original inclusion of the logos in the opening of being itself. Logos is no longer fundamentally poiesis, a saying that grounds itself in an originary disclosure of being. In contrast, for Aristotle, the statement about this thing is understood in terms of its referentiality; it is guided and circumscribed by its conformity to what it refers to. Only in that sense can the logos be understood to be true: its truth is decided by its correctness, its conforming to what is spoken about. It is this transformation that lies at the basis of Plato’s claim that the ancients, that is, Parmenides and Heraclitus, were themselves ‘more close to the God’s than us’ (Philebus, 16c), and why they more naturally attained to what Aristotle characterised as a ‘being in contact with and saying’ (Metaphysics, IX, 1051b, 24) of things, that is, the direct and simple encountering of a being in its being. Thus, Aristotle’s attempt to circumscribe and comprehend the sophist’s paralogical confusion of being and not-being, is itself circumscribed and comprehended by that confusion. According to the reasoning of Gorgias the fundamental word of ontology, ‘is’, does not guarantee anything of itself; it does not secure, does not show, that what it is said of is, any more than that it would not be. Consequently, and as Lyotard remarks by way of Plato, ‘phrasing takes place in the lack of being of that about which there is a phrase. Language is the sign that one does not know the being of the existent’.20 If, however, this withdrawal of being, this ‘retreat of the referent’, signals a certain waning of the power of the logos, it also signals a certain inflation of its power. ‘If nothing is’, as Gorgias says, ‘then demonstrations say everything without exception [ei men oun ouden, tas apodeixeis legein hapanta]’ (MXG, 980a, 9, cited D, 16). The being of beings, no longer ‘bestowed by some goddess at the tip of her index finger’ (D, 16), is henceforth an instance to be established, ‘demonstrated [ . . . ] argued and presented as a case’ (D, 16). It is, in short,

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to be reasoned about. Language no longer inheres originarily in the epiphanic disclosure of being, but instead it confronts the being of beings in such a way that it becomes what establishes the reality of that which is set over against it, as its referent, its ob-ject. ‘The word logos’, as Lyotard remarks, ‘changes [its] meaning. It is no longer speak-welcome, it is speak-argue’ (D, 20). It is against the retreat of being that philosophy in the strict sense is established. As Lyotard says, one of the things at stake for Plato and Aristotle is ‘confirming the decline of the ontologos, and of defining the rules for the new logologos’ (D, 20). If Aristotle provides a theory of dialectics and of rhetoric, in the sense that he reflects upon an already established tekhne, and indeed if he prided himself on his innovation in this field,21 since before him no proper reflection on these practices existed, this is because it is only with the decline of the ontologos that the need for the regulation of discourse becomes apparent. Aristotelian orthology, that is, the necessity that there be rules instituted for correct reasoning and in order to establish the reality of what is talked about, itself follows from ‘the nihilist reasoning of Gorgias’ (D, 14), even if this reasoning is condemned in its letter by Aristotle. Indeed, one might say that Aristotle is only able to institute a Poetics in so far as by virtue of Gorgias’ de-demonisation of the Poem of Parmenides, poiesis becomes a mode or genre of the logos and no longer its essence, in so far as there is no longer an originary inherence of language, of logos in the presencing of being. Both sophistry and philosophy are, then, modalities not of ‘ontology’ but of ‘logology’, in so far as the logos itself comes to mean ‘speak-argue’ (D, 20). Such speaking takes place in the lack of being of that about which one speaks. To follow Aristotle, two possibilities emerge from this retreat of being: one can either speak – as the sophist does – for the pleasure of speaking, and for the sake of arguing, or, one can speak – as the philosopher does – in order to ‘signify something for oneself and for another’ (Metaphysics, IV, iv, 1006a, 22f.). In speaking one can argue, one can reason, or one can ruse. Aristotle’s presentation of these two modes of speak-arguing carries a certain judgement upon them. The seriousness of philosophy is counterposed to the empty vanity of sophistry: philosophy is the attempt, by way of argumentation, to make us see that of which it speaks, it is the attempt to establish truth by way of argument; sophistry, which is nothing more than mere argumentation, does not allow us to see anything, it is not directed towards truth. Is it possible, however, to allow that this parcelling out of the logos between sophistry

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and philosophy can be understood otherwise? In other words, is it possible to recover a properly sophistical intelligence? According to Lyotard’s reading, Gorgias’ treatise, by engaging the Poem of Parmenides, and by attempting to ‘defend’ it, turns it into a thesis and ‘ruins it’. The argument of the treatise sophisticates the enunciation of being, forcing being into retreat. The Poem of Parmenides states the Path of Truth that tells us that being is, and that it is not possible for it not to be. If we know this Path and follow its way then we are open to being; not knowing it and not following it, we are led astray. Gorgias, however, shows that it is impossible to know this Path, and that expressed, argued, the thesis betrays itself, for being and not-being are indistinguishable, ‘is’ is said of both in the same way. It is because of this displacement of ontology that Aristotle tells us that the sophist does not speak in order to discover or communicate the truth, but simply for the sake or pleasure of speaking. In other words this practice of speaking does not ground in an extra-linguistic truth, but in language itself. In this sense the sophists initiate a pragmatics of the logos – the meaning of what is said, of language, is not to be found anywhere other than in language itself and what it does. It is on this basis that the sophists can be said to lay claim to rhetoric. When the sophist speaks she is guided not by what she speaks about, but by speaking itself, and the ends she pursues rather than the origin of what she says. In other words, the sophist practices the tekhne of speaking in terms of its effect on their listener and interlocutor, and begins to formulate the rules for achieving these effects. Philosophy offers one way of speaking about things, but it is nothing more than one particular way of doing so and as the sophist recognises, there are many others. With this recognition, and with the transformation of the essence of language, the sophist makes possible the identification of the differend, and a differential practice of speaking. For the sophist, as Lyotard has written elsewhere and only indirectly of sophistry, ‘to speak is to fight’ (PMC, 10). Even when one does not speak against an adversary, but where one speaks for the sheer pleasure of speaking, the ‘sheer pleasure of inventing new idioms, turns of phrase, words and meanings’, as in ‘the labour of language harassment undertaken by popular speech and literature’, the ‘pleasure depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary – at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language or connotation’ (PMC, 10). One speaks against the limits of what has been said, and with an ear for what remains unsaid, in order to institute new idioms, ‘idioms

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which do not yet exist’ (D, §23). It is only with an ear that is attuned in such a way, that finds itself guided by an intelligence that seeks not truth understood as homologia, but understood as what is in excess and otherwise than such a truth that it is possible to bear witness to the differend.

7 A Sophistical Differend

Introduction The previous chapter presented the argument that The Differend could be understood to continue Lyotard’s engagement with sophistry. What are the implications of such an argument? In the first place it can be seen to challenge the assumption that The Differend can be viewed as presenting Lyotard principal philosophical idea – the idea of the differend, for my argument suggests that that idea is not solely philosophical, but also sophistical. It is necessary to state that the view that The Differend is Lyotard’s principal philosophical work has not been accepted by all of Lyotard’s commentators or critics. It has rightly been pointed out that the attention that has been paid to The Differend and to Lyotard’s appropriation of Kant have served to obscure the interest and value of Lyotard’s earlier works, and in particular Libidinal Economy and Discours, figure.1 It is perhaps the case that the recognition of the role that sophistry plays in the formulation of the idea of the differend will contribute to the important work that has been undertaken recently that re-evaluates the relation between The Differend and these two earlier books. However, more common than the assumption of the centrality of The Differend to Lyotard’s work, has been the understanding that The Differend presents a series of related positive philosophical theses concerning language (or the ‘phrase’), argumentation and ethics. For those who see The Differend as Lyotard’s principal work, these theses are understood to represent a definitive expression of his previous ideas. For example, in a recent essay G. Bennington has claimed such a view informed his presentation of Lyotard’s work in his important and influential book, Lyotard: Writing the Event. According to Bennington his account of 146

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Lyotard in that book took as its focal point what Lyotard had said about language in The Differend. In Bennington’s own words, he praised ‘Lyotard for coming to the view that the language of desire and more generally of energetics, of libidinal economy, was no more than a “façon de parler” and for then proceeding with Le Différend to a general analysis of façons de parler’ which he understood to represent for Lyotard ‘the limpid conceptual ether in which philosophy [ . . . takes] place’.2 With a different emphasis, but the same underlying assumption that what is principally at issue in The Differend is a positive theory of language, H. Ruthrof has argued that The Differend provides ‘a theory of reference as part of a “realist textualist” view of the world, a construal rooted in the conflictual structure of “phrases”’,3 whilst B. Waldenfels has suggested that in The Differend Lyotard provides ‘an extra-ordinary language philosophy’ which uses elements from a number of different theorists and philosophers such as ‘Frege, Bühler, Jakobson, Benveniste, Austin and Searle’ in order to model its own account. 4 Despite the explicit differences between such accounts, however much they emphasise this or that aspect of what Lyotard says about language, and this or that precedent for what Lyotard says, the unquestioned supposition common to them all is that in The Differend Lyotard proposes a theory of language. Just as Wittgenstein and Kripke are said to have provided a particular philosophical account or theory of language, so too Lyotard is held to provide his own account of language or phrases in The Differend, an account that can be profitably compared or criticised in relation to these others. By considering Lyotard’s reading of Gorgias, it might seem as if my argument has simply added one more precedent to the list of those already identified precedents that feed into The Differend and which influence its presentation of language, of argumentation, of politics and ethics. However, it is the implication of my argument that the recourse to sophistry that Lyotard makes in The Differend is undertaken in order to provide a delimitation of the truth of the inception of philosophy. If, and as Lyotard says in the introduction to The Differend, the context of the book is to be understood as ‘the “linguistic turn” of Western philosophy’ (D, xiii), then that turn is itself put through another turn, a sophistical turn, a retorsion, by Lyotard. The linguistic turn attributed to philosophy is returned to its origins in the sophistication of ontology by way of Gorgias’ treatise On Not-Being, and in a practice – that of sophistry – that it seeks so persistently to separate from itself and, in so doing, deny to it any truth.

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In the light of such an account, what The Differend offers is not so much, or not merely, a theory of language, or of the phrase, but a recovery and critical delimitation of the philosophical disposition towards language by way of sophistry. If the differend itself has any purchase it is in relation to this disposition and against it, and it finds its own possibility in terms of what is supposed – but disavowed – by philosophy. In this sense the differend is brought forth on the basis of a recognition of the historical constitution of thought. In what follows I seek to offer a substantiation of this view of The Differend, by way of a consideration of two of the differends that Lyotard discusses in the book.

Zoon logon ekhon In the first of the numbered paragraphs that form the main text of The Differend Lyotard provides a – perhaps even the – paradigmatic example of a differend. In the very first sentence of this first paragraph Lyotard echoes a definition of the human being that has been central to philosophy, and explicitly central since Aristotle. ‘You are told’, he says, ‘that human beings endowed with language [doués de langage] were placed in a situation such that none of them now can tell you what it was’ (D, §1). The phrase doués de langage alludes to the definition of the human being that sees it as zoon logon ekhon, ‘the animal that has language’. In the essay ‘La phrase-affect’5 Lyotard refers to the Politics in which Aristotle designates the possession of language as being what differentiates man from all other animals, ‘alone amongst the animals, only man has logos’ (Politics, 1253a, 10). Conceding to animals a voice, which is the sign of pleasure and pain, the means by which they signal pleasure and pain to one another, it is nevertheless the case that only man has logos, and by way of it, the capacity ‘to render manifest the useful and the harmful, and as a result of this the just and the unjust, and other similar things’ (Politics, 1253a, 15). This having of language, is essential to the being of the human being in as much as without language – perhaps understood in its broadest possible sense – the human being would not be the being that it is. It is for this reason that Lyotard, is able to say of the infant – who is quite literally without logos, if not without voice – that whilst it is not regarded as non-human, it is a being who is promised to the human, but is not yet itself properly a human being.6 The phrase that Lyotard employs – doués de langage – is one of the standard French translations of zoon logon ekhon,7 but it does not go without saying that it says the same thing. If we follow the conventional

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translation of the Greek into English then it is difficult to ignore what appear to be some significant differences. Lyotard speaks of ‘human beings endowed with language’ or perhaps even ‘gifted with or given language’, whereas the Greek ekhon is conventionally translated as ‘having’ or ‘possessing’. What Lyotard would seem to want to say is that this having of language, this being ‘gifted’ or ‘given’ language is not an acquisition in the sense that something that we acquire is taken into our possession, and we own it or dispose of a certain mastery over it. This is a consideration that is confirmed by Lyotard’s declaration that one of the things at stake in The Differend is to refute the idea, or the ‘prejudice’ as he puts it, that the human being ‘makes use of [language] for his own ends’ (D, xiii). The translation of the Greek ekhon as ‘having’ or ‘possessing’ would appear to suggest, on the contrary, a mastery of or disposal over language. We should perhaps first recall that the possession of language involves the being of the human being for Aristotle; without language the human being would not be the being that it is. The possession or having of language is, then, of an essentially different order to the possession of an attribute or property. It is also necessary to note that ekhon also means ‘to live in, to inhabit’ – thus zoon logon ekhon says the animal that is distinguished by its living in, dwelling in, or inhabiting of language. To be sure, what one lives in, one can possess and exercise a certain disposal over it – but one does not and could not be said to live in or inhabit language in the sense that one lives in a house. Rather one inhabits language, or lives in it, in the sense that one finds oneself or is given oneself and one’s world through this inhabitation. Zoon logon ekhon is the being, the animal, that relates to itself and to others in and through language, and which, as Aristotle has said renders manifest the useful and the harmful, the just and the unjust and other similar things. Despite the proximity suggested by this last consideration, Lyotard does not just simply want to recall the Aristotelian definition of what is proper to the human being, for he invokes it in relation to a ‘situation’ which is such that those who were there cannot, or can no longer, talk about it, ‘can no longer say what it was’ (D, §1). He thus draws the definition of the human being as zoon logon ekhon into relation with a certain silence, a certain inability to speak. In order to open up the nature of Lyotard’s concern with this silence, it is necessary to look at the opening paragraph more closely. As we have seen, Lyotard has invoked a situation in which human beings, ‘endowed with language’ are unable to speak of that situation itself. The situation is such that those who were there are unable to talk about their experience. The silence is such that it constitutes a trauma – which in Greek

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means an injury or a hurt – that is made or registered at the level of language. The experience that is undergone is such that it is precisely constituted by this injury, the experience, the situation, is what it is, because a certain silence inhabits it, because an injury is made at the level of the ability to speak. In such circumstances, to the being traumatic or the trauma there co-belongs a deprivation, or to use the Greek word, a steresis of speech. With what Lyotard calls a differend this steresis that is co-constitutive of the traumatic experience is taken up and turned against the injured party: You are told that human beings endowed with language have been placed in a situation such that none of them can now tell you what it was. Most of them disappeared then, the survivors rarely speak about it. When they speak, their testimony only bears on a minute part of this situation – How to know that this situation itself existed? Is it not the fruit of your informant’s imagination? Either the situation did not exist as such. Or it did exist, and thus the testimony of your informant is false, because either he or she should have disappeared, or else because he should say nothing about it, or, if he speaks, he can only testify to the singular experience that he had, and it remains to be established that this was a component of the situation in question (D, §1). According to Lyotard’s argument the incommensurability between the initial claim – that a situation exists that cannot be talked about – and the demand that this situation be opened up by testimony to cognition is employed to discredit the claim that such a situation even existed. Should one attempt to speak of the situation in order to testify that it did exist, then the very testimony cannot be accorded any credibility because it would thereby give the lie to its own claim – namely that the situation in question was such that it cannot be talked about. As Lyotard says, either the situation did not exist or did; but if it did then it is not what it was said to be, and therefore it did not exist. In this instance, which constitutes a differend in the sense that what is claimed or laid claim to cannot reveal itself, there is a doubling up of silence. The silence of the traumatees is not allowed to speak for itself; this silence is itself silenced. Or to put this in other words, the not being able to speak of the traumatees becomes simultaneously a not being heard. The violence that is involved in this not being heard can perhaps best be appreciated by considering that although a silence is the absence of noise,

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it is precisely for all that not inaudible: it is only because we hear it, that there is silence. For this reason the silence that constitutes the differend is not a simple silence, but a silence of the second order, doubled up, a silence that is itself silenced. This point, this doubling up of steresis in relation to the ability to speak, which for Lyotard shuts up a certain silence, can be further clarified by considering a different example, an example that, at first glance, appears to go in completely the opposite direction to the situation that Lyotard invokes in the first paragraph of The Differend. The example is drawn from the sophistical ruse employed by Protagoras in debate with his student, Euathlos, previously discussed in Chapter 4, and which is given in the first of the notices in The Differend. It goes in the opposite direction to the previous case of a differend, for the sophists are, as tradition tells us, precisely those who take pleasure in speaking and who – according to their own boasts – can not only speak about anything whatsoever, but can teach others to do the same. Protagoras, we should recall, has entered into a contract with Euathlos. He will be paid a fee for his tuition if his pupil is able to win one of the cases he must plead before a tribunal whilst under his supervision. Protagoras demands his fee, and rebuffs Euathlos’ protestations that the contract has not been met, by claiming that should he win this dispute he must be paid, and if he loses it he must be paid, for Euathlos will then have won a case. What is important about this piece of sophistry in this context is that the sophist, who in general claims to be able to shut his or her opponent up by way of their arguments, does here by allowing that opponent to speak. It is, as we have seen, an instance of retorsion, whereby the argument that an adversary employs is made to speak against them. In this case, then, there is also a steresis of speech – a steresis suffered by speech itself in and as it speaks, which is a steresis not simply of speaking, but of what is heard in and by way of speaking. Here, whatever Euathlos says, it is Protagoras’ claim and not Euathlos’ that is heard. The wrong that Euathlos suffers at the hands of his tutor cannot testify to itself precisely because the terms in which it expresses itself, the terms in which it articulates itself, are already the terms of Protagoras’ argument. According to these two examples the silence that constitutes the differend, and which is also a steresis of speech, is nothing simple. That is to say, following Lyotard’s argument, beyond a simple inability to speak, which is itself a steresis of speech, there is, on the one hand, a steresis that occurs in speaking, which is a steresis in the sense that

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what is said is nevertheless not heard, and, on the other hand, there is a doubling up of steresis, whereby a silence is itself silenced. Or, and to put this in other words, there is a making sterile of steresis. The unity of these two different types of steresis – and that which gathers them under the differend – is the inability of the about which of the silence or speech to show itself as what it is in that silence or speech. To take the example of the sophism, subject to the terms of Protagoras’ argument it is impossible for Euathlos to make it apparent that, contrary to Protagoras’ claim, he is a loser. Euathlos’ statement that says that he, Euathlos, has lost every case that he has pled under Protagoras’ tuition, immediately transforms him into a winner. In Euathlos’ judgement, so to speak, the connecting of the subject and the predicate occurs in such a way that in asserting what it asserts about Euathlos it manifests Euathlos in the opposite light. Similarly, in the first case of a differend, the silence that is proper to the traumatic situation – which co-constitutes that situation as what it is – is understood to imply the non-existence, the non-being of that situation.

Steresis In the preceding section, beginning with Lyotard’s invocation of the Aristotelian definition of man as zoon logon ekhon, I have argued that the silence that constitutes the differend can be characterised as a steresis, in which speech suffers a privation of its ability to speak about, or to speak of, something. In paragraph fourteen of The Differend Lyotard speaks of the differend in terms that invite such a consideration. In this paragraph Lyotard distinguishes between being able not to speak and not being able to speak, and according to the English translation says that ‘the latter is a deprivation, the former a negation’ (D, §14). It thus appears that Lyotard is claiming that it is the second of the two – namely, ‘not being able to speak’ – is a deprivation, and the former – ‘being able not to speak’ – is a negation. There is a justification for regarding things in this way, for it is possible to allow that the inability to speak in the sense of ‘not being able to speak’ is a deprivation of sorts – a lack or privation of the capacity for speech. To make such a consideration clearer, we should note that, in making this distinction, Lyotard refers to Aristotle’s discussions of privation and negation in both De Interpretatione (21b, 12–17) and the Metaphysics (IV, 1022b, 22ff.). In the Metaphysics, Aristotle considers the many senses in which ‘privation’ or steresis is used. The first sense he considers is that in which we say a thing is ‘deprived’ if it ‘does not possess an attribute which is a natural possession,

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even if the thing itself would not naturally possess it’ for example, we say that a vegetable is deprived of eyes (Metaphysics, V, 1022b, 22f.). Can we then say that not being able to speak, not having the ability to speak, is a privation, and that, by contrast, the ability not to speak, is a negation? Lyotard continues: Not to speak is part of the ability to speak, since ability is a possibility and a possibility implies something and its opposite. Possible that p and Possible that not-p are equally true. It is in the very definition of the possible to imply opposites at the same time. That the opposite of speaking is possible does not entail the necessity of keeping quiet. To be able not to speak is not the same as not to be able to speak (D, §14). Because it pertains to an ability, not-speaking in the sense of being able not to speak cannot rightly be regarded as a negation: the two possibilities implied by the ability can be affirmed of the same subject at the same time. In other words, it can be equally affirmed that a being that is able to speak, might or might not speak. It is, then, ‘not being able to speak’ that is properly a negation. It is a negation of the possibility of speaking as such. ‘Being able not to speak’ is a deprivation or a steresis of the ability. In order to bring the point home, in the next paragraph Lyotard states ‘it would be absurd to suppose that human beings “endowed with language” cannot speak in the strict sense, as is the case for stones’ (D, §15). The distinction that Lyotard makes, or more accurately, that he takes from Aristotle, between steresis and negation, makes it clear that here the meaning of steresis can only be properly grasped by taking into account the manner in which it belongs to the ability to speak. In order to approach this it is necessary to recall the Aristotelian distinction that Lyotard has recourse to in the essay ‘La phrase-affect’ between the voice possessed by all animals and the logos that the human being has. Aristotle concedes to the voice, the inarticulate sounds of beasts, the ability to ‘manifest something’ (Politics, 2, 16a, 27), however, none of these noises ‘constitutes a name’ (Politics, 2, 16a, 27). What underlies this discrimination becomes apparent if we understand that for Aristotle, whilst the simple voice can be said to indicate something, in the sense that it is a signal, the logos makes manifest something as something, and it is in this ability to make manifest something as something that the name first finds its possibility. Going further one might say that it is only because the logos can make manifest something as something that it is possible for it to disclose that about which its speaks in its being. The definition

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of the human being as zoon logon ekhon points not to the possession of the voice, but to the capacity to disclose – by way of language – something as something, and thus to have a relation to being as such. In what sense, then, does the ability not to speak belong to the capacity to disclose something, to make manifest something as what it is? Or perhaps, and to advance more directly to the question of the differend, how does the ability not to speak, how does this steresis, become excluded from logos, how is it excluded from truth, and deprived of sense or meaning? In order to clarify this I want to return to the two differends that I have already cited.

Not speaking The second numbered paragraph of The Differend takes up the strikingly indeterminate situation described in the first paragraph: ‘I have analysed thousands of documents. I have tirelessly pursued specialists and historians with my questions. I have tried in vain to find a single former deportee capable of proving to me that he had really seen, with his own eyes, a gas chamber’ (Faurisson [ . . .]). To have ‘really seen with his own eyes’ a gas chamber would be the condition which gives one the authority to say that it exists and to persuade the unbeliever. Yet it is still necessary to prove that the gas chamber was used to kill at the time that it was seen. The only acceptable proof that it was used to kill is that one died from it. But if one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber. – The plaintiff complains that he has been fooled about the existence of the gas chambers, fooled that is, about the so-called Final Solution. His argument is: in order for a place to be identified as a gas chamber, the only eye witness I will accept would be a victim of this gas chamber; now, according to my opponent, there is no victim that is not dead; otherwise this gas chamber would not be what he or she claims it is. There is, therefore, no gas chamber (D, §2). Is it not the case that this example of a differend – in fact much more than an example, perhaps the example of a differend – is nothing more than a particularly vile sophistry? As Lyotard observes, Faurisson’s argument is premised on a certain wilful ignorance or blindness, and he criticises the Revisionist’s absolute and dogmatic confidence8 in denying the existence of the gas chambers and the Holocaust. But beyond such criticisms, Lyotard points out that in making such arguments Faurisson

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avails himself of a disposition towards reality that is that of the West. This disposition, Lyotard claims, arises on the basis of the ontological retreat that is effected by Gorgias through the sophistication of the Poem of Parmenides. As Lyotard argues, following Gorgias ‘if nothing is therefore, then demonstrations say everything without exception’ (ei men oun ouden, tas apodeixeis legein hapanta) (MXG, 980a, 9, cited D, 16). It is necessary to demonstrate, and this takes that form of arguing and presenting a case, which ‘once established [ . . . ] is a state of the referent for cognitive phrases’ (D, 16). Lyotard gives the example of another piece of sophistry attributed to Gorgias in order to clarify the form that such argumentation takes on the basis of the ontological retreat. Someone declares that they lent an undamaged kettle to Gorgias and that the sophist returned it with a hole in it. To the accusation that he borrowed the kettle, Gorgias responds that he did not; the accuser alleges the kettle was borrowed undamaged, Gorgias that it was damaged when he borrowed it; the accuser that it was borrowed undamaged and returned with a hole in it, to which Gorgias replies that it was returned undamaged. Lyotard comments: Even if there is a reality (borrowed), it is not predicable (undamaged/ with a hole in it); and if it is, the case corresponding to the attribute cannot be shown (returned with a hole in it/returned undamaged). The logical retreat, absurd when it is isolated from the course of the prosecution’s argument, unveils the rules for the family of cognitive phrases: determination of the referent (kettle borrowed or not), attribution of a predicate to the subject of the utterance (borrowed with a hole in it or not), display of a case which proves conclusively (returned with a whole in it or not) (D, 15). In order to establish the reality of something it is necessary that the rules unveiled by Gorgias be adhered to, and that the annihilation by which he attempts to refute the case against him be undone. It is necessary to establish ‘that there is someone to signify the referent and someone to understand the phrase that signifies it; the referent can be signified; it exists’ (D, 16). Faurisson avails himself, then, of this sophistry, but it is no mere sophistry. Rather it is the sophistication of ontology that reduces reality, what is, to what can be established through argument. Faurisson seizes on the silence that encompasses the Holocaust, the silences of the survivors who, more often than not, are unable to speak of it, and whose testimony, when they do speak about it, ‘bears only upon a minute part

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of this situation’ (D, §1), and the silence that is imposed by the destruction of the evidence of the atrocities that accompanied the crime itself. For the revisionist historian the incapacity of the survivors to bear testimony to the event of the Holocaust signifies nothing, and the admission of a lack of information is employed to silence the silence surrounding the Holocaust. But in principle at least, the revisionist is not an aberration: he does nothing more than ‘you or me when we have to refute a thesis about reality’ (D, §48), for he simply demands that reality be argued and proved, that it be signified and that it be shown. One recognises here, a repetition of Kant’s claim that cognitive truth is established only on the basis of the possibility of a judgement being verified by an intuition. The implications of Lyotard’s argument are such that they lead to the identification of a certain commonality between the arguments of the revisionist historian who silences the silence surrounding the Holocaust, and what would be the inverse, the attempt to establish the truth of the Holocaust by means of establishing the facts of what happened, and the quantity of those killed, which is to reduce the meaning, or the truth of the Holocaust to positive facts alone. The argument is as difficult as it is necessary given what is at issue, and it is important to be clear about what Lyotard says. Lyotard is not claiming that there is a strict identity between those that deny the existence of the Holocaust, and those that – rightly – proclaim the nonsense and vileness of such arguments, and who discredit Faurisson’s arguments on the basis of adherence to positive facts. Nor does Lyotard suggest that it is not necessary to undertake such a refutation of Faurisson. Indeed, there is an absolute necessity to do so, given that the disposition towards cognitive truth demands such a procedure. What Lyotard is claiming is that the truth of the meaning of the Holocaust, the meaning that it holds for us, is not exhausted by positive facts, and does not at all ground in what can be established by reason and argumentation alone. One of the things at stake in this account is, then, to recall us to the differend that structures our own disposition towards reality, the disposition, namely, of the West, at least the West since Parmenides and Gorgias. It is this differend that we are brought to confront in relation to the meaning that the Holocaust holds for us. In effect, according to Lyotard, what thought comes up against in the Holocaust is at once the most expressive and least expressive of phenomena – that which affects us most deeply but which can issue in no expression, and which leaves in its wake only silence. In paragraph ninety-three of The Differend Lyotard presents the differend that is entailed by this, and does so

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by opposing what he calls the ‘scholar’ and the ‘common person’. ‘The scholar’, that is, the one who knows, who submits to the rules of scientific cognition, Lyotard suggests ‘claims to know nothing about’ the silence that envelops the Holocaust (D, §93). The silence itself has no positive reality, no positive meaning – what can be said, the positive facts that can be adduced, exhaust the sense of what happened, and if there is nothing else said it is because there is nothing else that can be said to have happened, nothing else that is meaningful, open to argumentation and proof. The steresis of speech that surrounds the Holocaust is itself rendered sterile by the very protocols of cognition. But for a concern that is other than learned, scholarly, cognitive, that is, that does not turn upon the identification and agreement concerning a referent, or to put it otherwise and as Lyotard does, for the ‘common person’ (D, §93), this silence, this steresis of speech, has a sense, it does not signify nothing – it is a ‘negative presentation’ of what is in excess of positive knowledge. The survivors of the Holocaust are silent not because there is nothing to say, but because they can say nothing, and this is because either ‘the situation in question is not the addressee’s business ( . . . he or she is not worthy of being spoken to about it, etc.)’; or because ‘it is not the survivor’s business to be talking about it (they are not worthy, etc.)’ (D, §26); or because the situation is intrinsically inexpressible, it exceeds what can sensibly be said. In effect, then, this silence is a sentiment, a sign that ‘one cannot find the words’, and which marks a differend in so far as the wrong suffered by the survivors cannot be expressed in the idiom of scientific cognition, in so far as they cannot prove the wrong they have suffered. In the Holocaust, or in the silence that surrounds the Holocaust, Lyotard finds the competence of cognition impugned, and the necessity to lend one’s ‘ear to what is not presentable under the rules of cognition’ (D, §93). It is a necessity to lend one’s ear to a silence, to allow the steresis of speech to speak. As we have seen, Lyotard situates the emergence of the rules of scientific cognition for establishing cognition in relation to the sophistication of being that Gorgias had effected in relation to the Poem of Parmenides. Yet, in a certain sense, if they arise from that act of sophistication, and the decision to argue that it entails, their precedence does not itself stem from sophistry. That precedence arises from the exclusion of sophistry from truth, for the sophists, who argue, do not, unlike the Platonic philosopher, accept the priority of reason. The logos, for the sophist, is not primarily directed by reason, it is not only or purely a logical logos, but a logos that is given and finds its meaning and sense in affect and what, by way of its affects it can effect. It is necessarily

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attuned to what, beyond reason, cognition, and logic, calls to thought, and disposes us to think. It is this sensitivity, this intelligence, that in appealing to the sense of the silence that surrounds the Holocaust, its ability to recover from that silence a making manifest, an intelligence that allows that silence to speak, without presupposing what it says, that Lyotard recalls and calls us to recognise as always already with us. The difference that Lyotard plays apart between the ‘scholar’ and the ‘common man’ is, then, nothing else, nothing other, than a differend that emerges from the sophistication of ontology and the division, effected by the philosopher, between that discourse concerned with truth and which loves wisdom and that discourse that does not. The very possibility of the differend as Lyotard thinks it arises from out of this sophistication of ontology, and confronts philosophy with its own truth – sophistry. Before one finds oneself reasoning with the sophist, one is always affectively disposed by what they say: the argument of Protagoras that subjects the pupil, Euathlos, to a differend, might well wrong him, yet, as Lyotard observes, it makes us laugh (cf. D, 7). Such a sophistry, reclaimed by Lyotard, is one that cannot be reduced, as it is by philosophy, to mere empty pretensions, for it is a sophistry inherent to – if disavowed by – philosophy, and which comprehends both reason and philosophy as such.

Conclusion

The intention behind this book was to examine the place of sophistry in Lyotard’s work. In this I was guided by the task Lyotard declared in his lectures on Nietzsche and the sophists from 1975. There, as we have seen, he stated that what was at issue for him was the restoration of a type of reasoning, a type of politics and a type of life that are sophistical. I have attempted to determine the significance of this undertaking and show how this informs The Differend. It has not been my intention to suggest that this was the only influence on The Differend, but to evaluate the role that it could be said to play and the importance of that role. A restoration of a sophistical reason, politics and type of life has first, as Lyotard says, to confront the bad reputation under which sophistry is known, or at least to confront the source that conditions it. Such a reputation, and the prevalent understanding of sophistry is traditional. Chapter 1 located the source of that understanding and reputation in Plato. The sophists were cast by Plato as the alter ego of the philosopher, concerned only with speaking for the sake of speaking, for winning over an audience by the power of their words, appealing to the baser instincts and the feelings, and advancing arguments that lack in seriousness and substance. There can be no question of seeking to show evidentially that such a reputation and understanding is wrong: not only is there no evidence by which to do so, but, as Nietzsche said, the fact itself is stupid. What evidence there is will always show itself in the light of a certain metaphysical or philosophical disposition. A restoration of sophistry must, as I argued, be brought into relation to what Plato says, and to the Platonic determination of philosophy, and any claim to effect such a restoration must be set against the approaches to sophistry that have been established within that tradition. The reading of sophistry that is provided by Lyotard in ‘On the Strength of the Weak’ confronts the 159

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Platonic determination of sophistry, and turns the sophistical ruse back against Plato. The sophists find their first accommodation or inclusion within the philosophical tradition, their first restoration, with Hegel. But they are admitted as precursors, philosophical in certain respects, to, and abstract moments of, the proper truth of philosophy that discloses itself with the advent or realisation of speculative thought. Such an accommodation ultimately cedes nothing to the sophists that is not itself philosophical: the truth of sophistry, and what sophistry can be said to offer to thought, is determined philosophically. Despite offering a decidedly untraditional approach to the philosophical tradition, and despite putting into question the Hegelian reading of the history of philosophy, Heidegger, who has otherwise challenged and retrieved the thought of the Presocratics, remained quite traditional in his reading of the sophists. In the writings prior to the 1930s sophistry is regarded in terms of its inauthenticity or fallenness, an understanding that denies to sophistry not only any originality but any genuine historical specificity. In the 1930s Heidegger re-engages the sophists, and effectively admits that sophistry itself stands between and provokes the step from the early Greek thinkers, Parmenides, Heraclitus and Anaximander, to philosophy; but sophistry itself is perhaps no more than the external occasion of this step into philosophy. Such a recognition opens the way for Lyotard’s own engagement with sophistry, which both seeks to realise the role that it plays in the formation of philosophy as such, and which at the same time seeks to reclaim for it, its own originality, its own intelligence and contribution to thought. Lyotard’s reading of the sophists becomes progressively more radical, radicalising itself in the movement of realising its own implications. This is not to suggest that Lyotard knew from the beginning where his reading of sophistry was leading. Rather, it is to suggest that his reading – always in advance of itself – only discovers itself after the event. Nevertheless, from the very first the reading of sophistry that Lyotard makes offers itself as a complication of post-Hegelian philosophy’s realisation of its own finitude and the necessity for it to discover the site and possibility of its own thought in its Greek origins. It complicates this concern by way of its engagement with the sophistry. Just Gaming pursues the restoration of a sophistical intelligence made in ‘On the Strength of the Weak’ in relation to Kant, seeking to recover sophistry from the judgement that is made against it. Lyotard explicitly regards his reading of sophistry in Just Gaming as an attempt to retrieve or restore a type of political intelligence that is sophistical, a manner of acting or judging politically

Conclusion

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without criteria, and case by case, preserving the heterogeneity of the social. In The Differend this concern is put through a further turn. The question of a sophistic manner of judging, a sophistic form of judgement, which had been addressed in Just Gaming, is re-addressed and radicalised in the form of recognising that by way of the sophistication of ontology, it is sophistry that effectively determines the philosophical disposition towards language and being. Such a recognition, such an exposition of the mutual implication of sophistry and philosophy, allows a critical purchase on the decision that inaugurates philosophy, its values, concepts and practices, a decision against which and in terms of which it is possible to locate, if not exhaustively, the meaning and critical significance of the idea of the differend. The radicality of the restoration of sophistry that is finally effected in The Differend is perhaps best gauged in terms of the truth – a sophisticated truth – that is implied by the idea of the differend. The word ‘differend’ is a straightforward transposition from the French, where its meaning is quite common: a differend is a dispute or a disagreement, what we call in English ‘a difference of opinion’. The translator of the English edition refers to the decision to retain this French term, rather than translate it, in order to alert the reader to what he calls ‘the specific technical sense’ that Lyotard gives to the term. This is a mistake, for it is precisely the ordinary sense of a ‘difference of opinion’ that is important to Lyotard, with all that it implies of a stand-off between at least two parties that is founded less upon any reasonable grounds, and more on a stubborn and intractable feeling. As Aristotle knew well, as soon as we are concerned with opinion, with doxa, and not with reason, we are in the territory of rhetoric and sophistry rather than that of philosophy. A differend, a difference of opinion, is affectively motivated, it is a disagreement fed by a deep-seated, deeply rooted, and often mute, feeling of being in the right. Thus, often, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, displaying either those affections known as blind hope or brute stubbornness, we maintain a conviction of the rightness or justice of what we feel. Traditionally dismissed as prejudice, such opinionative differences are the originary locus of truth. Such is the claim that is implicit in the two cases of the differend that we have examined in the previous chapter. In addition to those two differends, beyond those two cases that give themselves as feelings or signs that the sophisticated ear can attend to, it is perhaps necessary to recognise that friendship, philia, can also be linked to the differend. Friendship, the bond of love between human beings, is not made possible by any mere agreement of ideas or interests, but itself depends on a quite obscure,

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unarguable affection, which as often as it might prevent a fruitful understanding between individuals is its only possible ground. The differend as a pre-judicative, pre-predicative affection is the foreclosed but original ground of that which the very term philosophy itself speaks of, a love of wisdom that makes possible at once a community – a common being – and preserves at the same time the truth of the individual, the particular and the different. Somehow, and paradoxically, more truthful than anything that can be argued, logically established, and thus abstractly mediated between persons, thus more truthful than truth, the differend is a properly sophistical truth, in so far as sophistry and rhetoric are primarily concerned with affective disputation rather than rational argumentation. It is the principle, the possibility, or perhaps just the name for a sophistical logos.

Notes Introduction 1. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Sur la force des faibles’ in L’Arc 64, 4–12. This article first appeared in translation in Semiotext(e) 3(2), 1978, trans. R. McKeon, pp. 204–214. A later translation by F. J. Evans is published in TPM under the title ‘On the Strength of the Weak’, pp. 62–72. 2. See J.-M. Salanskis, ‘Paradoxes, singularités, systèmes’ Critique 33, 1977 and ‘Genèses “actuelles” et genèses “sérielles” de l’inconsistant et de l’hétérogène’ in Critique 34, 1978. 3. P. Billouet’s short study Paganisme et postmodernité: J.-Fr. Lyotard (Paris: Ellipses, 1999) does not, despite its title, devote any sustained analysis to Lyotard’s account of sophistry. Zbigniew Kotowicz’s essay ‘Lyotard’s Route to Atomism’, Parallax, 2000, Vol. 6, 114–126, is notable among recent writings on Lyotard for examining Lyotard’s debt to ancient Greek thought. 4. For abstracts of Foucault’s courses and for a selection of his essays on the Greeks, see M. Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1, Ethics, ed. P. Rabinow (London: Penguin Books, 2000). 5. F. Wolff, ‘Trios: Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault’ in Nos Grecs et leurs modernes: Les Stratégies contemporaines d’appropriation de l’antiquité, ed. B. Cassin (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), pp. 232–248. 6. R. Harvey and M. S. Roberts, ‘Editor’s Introduction’ in TPM, p. xiii. 7. A claim made, for example, by Harvey and Roberts in their introduction to Towards the Post-Modern; also made by G. Bennington in his Lyotard: Writing the Event; and by C. Bayard in the introduction to the Lyotard edition of Philosophy Today, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter 1992. However, it would not be difficult to show that The Postmodern Condition is a more representative work than these commentators allow. Lyotard’s introduction to The Postmodern Condition makes this clear. He writes: ‘The text that follows is an occasional one [ . . . ] It remains to be said that the author of the report is a philosopher, not an expert [ . . . ] The philosopher at least can console himself with the thought that the formal and pragmatic analysis of certain philosophical and ethico-political discourses of legitimation, which underlies this report, will subsequently see the light of day. The report will have served to introduce that analysis from a somewhat sociologising slant, one that truncates it but at the same time situates it’ (PMC, xxv). The later text to which Lyotard alludes is The Differend. Although The Differend was published in French in 1983, it was begun, by Lyotard’s own avowal, in 1974 (see D, pp. xiv–xv). Moreover, despite occasionally expressing reservations over the term ‘postmodern’, and stating more than once that his arguments on this subject had been misunderstood, Lyotard returned repeatedly to the term, and as late as 1993 published a collection of essays under the title Moralités postmoderne. These considerations are only external, but a close reading of The Postmodern Condition would doubtless bear them out. The issue, then, is less one of what there was in The Postmodern 163

164

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

Notes Condition to read, but how it was read. Taken up and assimilated to debates – or more properly polemics – in the social sciences and the humanities over the waning of the credibility of Marxism on the one hand, and on the other hand integrated into disputes within the philosophy of science, the reception of The Postmodern Condition did indeed prevent a full appreciation of Lyotard’s philosophical project. But such readings that The Postmodern Condition received, and by extension the manner in which Lyotard was understood, were partial or abstract not because they privileged one particular, ‘specialised’ text, but because they lacked insight into the source, the central problematic that informed all of Lyotard’s work. Such a lack could not ever be corrected by showing that Lyotard’s concerns extended to aesthetics, literature, psychoanalysis and politics. Indeed doing so could only increase misunderstanding and confusion, for it was not a lack of breadth of knowledge of Lyotard’s work that led to the distorted and partial assessments that sprung from the success of The Postmodern Condition, but a lack of depth of understanding. J. Williams’ Lyotard: Towards a Postmodern Philosophy (Oxford, Polity Press, 1998) establishes the profound relationship between The Postmodern Condition and Lyotard’s other writings. See articles by H. Ruthrof, ‘Differend and Agonistics: A Transcendental Argument’ in Philosophy Today, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter 1992, 324–335; P. Waldo Prado, Jr ‘Argumentation and Aesthetics: Reflection on Communication and the Differend’, in ibid., 351–366; E. Steuerman, ‘Habermas vs Lyotard: Modernity vs Postmodernity?’ in Judging Lyotard, pp. 99–118. Interest in the Lyotard–Habermas controversy has waned: P. Lacoue-Labarthe gave perhaps the clearest expression of this loss of interest in his ‘Oú en étions-nous?’, accusing Lyotard of trivialising the import of his arguments by entering a polemic with the more or less inconsequential arguments of Habermas. B. Waldenfels has returned to this controversy and given it a certain degree of renewed impetus in his ‘Ethics in the Differend of Discourses’ in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 32, No. 3, October 2001, 242–256. See the editor’s introduction to Judging Lyotard, ed. A. Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1992), p. ix. See J.-F. Lyotard, PMC, pp. 60–67. See, for example, R. Beardsworth, ‘On the Critical “Post”: Lyotard’s Agitated Judgement’ in Judging Lyotard, pp. 43–80. Beardsworth argues that the indeterminancy of thought ‘is not just a present historical phenomenon (or its philosophical diagnosis), it is the reflective activity of thought or production as such in its “nascent state” and this would in fact apply to all thinking and art whatever the manoeuvre then is to cover up the “initial” indeterminancy [ . . . ] such manoeuvres would be in the history of philosophy, for example, and despite their crucial differences, the positing of God, Being, the Subject, Geist, the proletariat, cognitive rationality, etc. and would constitute the “history” of philosophy’, p. 53. J.-L. Nancy, ‘Dies Illa: (From One End to the Infinite, or Of Creation)’, trans. U. Haase, in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 32, No. 3, October 2001, p. 258. Translation modified. In particular, having outlined the path of this thinking from Discours, figure onwards, Lyotard says ‘these days, while I am still presumably guided by the same claustrophobia, I find it necessary to study in the Kantian approach to

Notes 165

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

1

taste what under the name of “productive imagination” is the disclosure of such a free, open receptiveness to clouds – let me even say, to Being’ (P, 33). See J. Derrida et al., La Faculté de juger (Paris: Minuit, 1985), p. 7. Both Foucault and Derrida wrote on Kant in the late 1970s and the 1980s. See, for example, Foucault’s essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and Derrida’s ‘Parergon’ in The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987). For a brief account of this interest in Kant in the 1980s, see Billouet, op. cit., pp. 5–7. Perhaps the clearest example of this is G. Bennington’s somewhat promissory remarks in his ‘ “Ces Petits Différends”: Lyotard and Horace’ in Judging Lyotard, pp. 145–167. Having raised the question of the bridge, Bennington remarks that it would be impossible to address this question without considering Lyotard’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, and without also considering both Heidegger’s remark in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, that the bridge does not connect the banks that are already there, but that the banks emerge as banks when the bridge bridges the stream and Derrida’s reading of Kant and the question of the bridge in The Truth in Painting. In his interview with Lyotard, R. Beardsworth tries to draw Lyotard on his relation to Derrida on the grounds of the Kantian question of judgment. See ‘Nietzsche and the Inhuman’, trans. R. Beardsworth in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 7, Spring, 1994, pp. 67–130. J.-L. Nancy, ‘Dies Irae’ in La faculté de juger, p. 13. See J. Williams, Lyotard and the Political, pp. 97–101. This text, translated by C. Lindsay, is published in translation as an afterword to Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event, pp. 45–75. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Nietzsche and the Inhuman’, op. cit., p. 92. G. Bennington, Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: MUP, 1988), p. 2. See Le Différend ‘«mon livre de philosophie» dit-il’. J.-F. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 9. J.-C. Milner, ‘Jean-François Lyotard, du diagnostic à l’intervention’ in Jean-François Lyotard: L’exercice du différend, eds D. Lyotard, J.-C. Milner and G. Sfez (Paris: PUF, 2001), pp. 261–272, p. 261. R. Gasché, ‘Saving the Honour of Thinking: On Jean-François Lyotard’ in Parallax, 2000, Vol. 6, No. 4, 127–145, p. 127.

The sophists

1. So common is this view that it is impossible to give anything other than a representative indication of it. See, for example, M. Nussbaum who, in The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), speaks of the empty, subjective vanity of sophistry, p. 128. 2. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981, 1999), p. 1. This is an argument that also informs J. de Romilly’s The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens (Oxford: Clarendon Paperbacks, 1998). 3. See J.-F. Lyotard, NS 07/02/75. 4. H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. II (Berlin, 1952 and subsequent editions), Section C, ‘Altere Sophistik’. I will follow the convention of referring to this text by the abbreviation DK. In DK each sophist

166

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

Notes is given a number; following this, the texts collected for each sophist are grouped into testimonia, labelled A, and fragments, labelled B. Each separate testimonial or fragments is then numbered again. Thus a particular reference will, for example, take the form DK 80, A21. R. Kent Sprague, ed., The Older Sophists: A Complete Translation by Several Hands of the Fragments in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker Edited by Diels-Kranz With a New Edition of Antiphon and of Euthydemus (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1972, 2001). G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement, pp. 42–59. See also the article by R. Kent Sprague, ‘Eating, Growth and Sophists: Some Aristotelian Food for Thought’ in The Sophists and their Legacy, ed. G. B. Kerferd (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1981), pp. 64–80. Aristotle, for example, identifies Polyidus (Poetics, 1455a, 6–8; b, 8–11), Lycophron (Politics, 1280b, 10–12) and Bryson (Rhetoric, 1405b, 8–13) as sophists. See C. J. Classen, ‘Aristotle’s Picture of the Sophists’ in The Sophists and their Legacy, 7–24. See E. R. Dodds, Plato Gorgias (Oxford: 1959). Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement, p. 25. Perhaps the most forceful of modern expression of this view is to be found in Th. Gomperz’ Greek Thinkers: A History of Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 1, trans. L. Magnus (London: John Murray, 1901). Gomperz says: ‘We may be asked, What was the genuine common factor in the several sophists? And to that question we can but reply that it consisted merely of their teaching profession and the conditions of its practice imposed by the age in which they lived. For the rest they were united [ . . . ] by the part they took in the intellectual movement of their times. It is illegitimate, if not absurd, to speak of a sophistic mind, sophistic morality, sophistic scepticism, and so forth.’ p. 415. The designation ‘Altere Sophistik’ serves to distinguish the Greek sophistic movement from what is known as the ‘Second Sophistic’, a movement that occurred in the second century AD, and based itself upon the rhetorical teachings of the Greek sophists. See, for example, M. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 184. The first recorded use of the word sophistes occurs in Pindar (522–443 BC), and throughout the fifth century it has a wide range of application: poets and sages, craftspersons and gods are all, at some time or other, described as sophists. When Pindar uses the word he speaks of what is meletan sophistais, the concern (meletan) of the poets (sophistais). See, for example, J.-P. Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (New York: Cornell UP, 1982), in particular Chapters 5 and 6, ‘The Spiritual Universe of the Polis’ and ‘The Crisis of the City: The Earliest Sages’, pp. 49–81. See J. Beaufret, ‘La naissance de la philosophie’ in Dialogue avec Heidegger, Vol. 1, Philosophie Grecque (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973), p. 20. See, for example, J. de Romilly, who in The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens sets herself the task of ‘understanding what was going on and being thought in fifth-century Athens’, and aspiring ‘to set the record straight’, to correct the judgement against the sophists that takes ‘from them the fine title of “Sophists”, experts in wisdom, that they had won’, and thus make it possible to properly ‘understand the age of Pericles and the “Greek miracle” ’ (p. xiii),

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25.

a task that would be impossible ‘without a clear idea of the nature and scope of the Sophists’ influence’ (p. xi). See J. Sallis, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues (Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996), p. 35. Ibid. Sallis’ claim that the Apology, unusual among Plato’s work in amounting to little more than a monologue by Socrates, is in fact a response to, and thus an indirect interlocution with, Aristophanes’ accords with the view of Jacob Burckhardt. Burckhardt agues ‘it is true that twenty-four years were to pass before the trial and execution of Socrates, but without Clouds the cause and motive of those events would have been almost entirely absent’. Thus, for Burckhardt, in addressing the origin of the prejudices that have led to his trial, Socrates in effect is doing nothing other than addressing Aristophanes. J. Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, ed. O. Murray, trans. S. Stern (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), p. 75. Cf. M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Uses of Pleasure (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 143–184. For a succinct account of the status and social-symbolism of horses within Greek culture, see J.-P. Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought. A more extensive discussion of the complex mythopoetic significance of the horse among the Hellenes can be found in F. Schachermeyr, Poseidon und die Entstehung des Griechischen Götterglaubens (Bern, 1948). This argument finds it most economical and elegant expression in M. MerleauPonty, ‘In Praise of Philosophy’, In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. J. Wild, J. Edie and J. O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970), pp. 33–41. Lyotard makes this argument in the ‘Plato Notice’ of The Differend, pp. 19–26. The Oracle’s declaration, Socrates says, means this: ‘human wisdom is of little or no value’ and ‘this one of you, O human beings, is wisest, who, like Socrates, recognises that he is in truth of no account in respect to wisdom’ (Apology, 23a–b). Cf. Sophist, 225C, 1. P. Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), p. 95. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), p. 1.

2

Hegel and the sophists

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

1. The German text, Geschichte der Philosophie, which formed volumes 13–15 of Hegel’s Werke, was published in 1833–36 and edited by K. L. Michelet. However the text of the lectures were compiled posthumously from lecture notes taken by students over the 20 years preceding Hegel’s death in 1831. Haldane and Simson’s three volume English translation, which was first published in 1892, is based on Michelet’s second edition of the Lectures (Volume 1 is dedicated to Greek Philosophy to Plato, Volume 2 to Plato and the Platonists, Volume 3 to Medieval and Modern Philosophy). I have decided to refer to this translation of Michelet’s text, because although other editions of the text are available, Michelet’s has not been surpassed. 2. G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement, p. 6.

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Notes

3. G. B. Kerferd, ‘The Future Direction of Sophistic Studies’ in The Sophists and Their Legacy, p. 2. 4. Elsewhere Hegel makes this point when he argues: ‘Sophistry, as we ordinarily conceive it, is a method of investigation which aims at distorting what is just and true, and exhibiting things in a false light. Such however is not the proper or primary tendency of Sophistry.’ EL, §121, p. 178. 5. ‘Now the sophistry of common opinion, which is without the culture of thought and without scientific knowledge, is found in the fact that to it its determinations are, as such, held to be existent in and for themselves, and a number of rules of life, maxims, principles, &c., are considered as absolutely fixed truths.’ (HP I, 353). 6. The single reference in question is taken as the epigraph to this section. 7. ‘[Gorgias] was strong in the dialectic requisite for eloquence, but his preeminence lies in his pure dialectic respecting the quite universal categories of Being and non-being, which indeed is not like that of the Sophists’ (HP I, 378–379). 8. For a discussion of the Platonic distinction between eristic, antilogic and dialectic, see G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement, Ch. 6, ‘Dialectic, Antilogic and Eristic’, pp. 59–67; for an example of the carrying over of this into Aristotle see, for example, G. Ryle, ‘Dialectic in the Academy’ in New Essays on Plato and Aristotle, ed. R. Bambrough (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 39–68. 9. See E. Dupréel, Les sophistes: Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias (Paris: Ed. du Griffon, 1948), p. 260 and G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement, p. 65 respectively. 10. Heidegger has proposed such a translation of aletheia and has, in numerous works, justified and drawn out the implications of such an understanding (see, for example, The Essence of Truth, trans. T. Sadler (London & NY: Continuum, 2002); The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. T. Sadler (London & NY: Continuum, 2002). However, this interpretation is independently confirmed by the etymology of the term found in Liddell and Scott’s A Greek-English Lexicon, compiled by H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, revised and augmented throughout by Sir H. S. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948). 11. In the Phaedrus (261e) Socrates invokes Zeno, who precisely eliminates such differences, and effects a confusion between the ‘one’ and the ‘many’, ‘rest’ and ‘motion’. The example of Zeno is significant. Given that Zeno’s intent is, or can be understood to be philosophical – that is, in as much as he can be understood to attempt to defend Parmenides’ thesis about being (cf. Parmenides, 128c–d) – it exemplifies a point that Socrates makes: although sophistical speeches, may well not themselves be directly concerned with truth and being, a truly successful sophistic practice must know truth and being in order to be able to effect their distortion. 12. See H.-G. Gadamer, ‘Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient Philosophers’ in Hegel’s Dialectic. 13. For one example of this line of argument, see M. Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1997). The essence of Heidegger’s argument is best represented by the following claim: ‘The meaning of Plato’s dialectic is the genuine root for our

Notes 169

22.

understanding of Greek logic and consequently for the ways of posing questions in logic’, §55, p. 241. This account of the proposition is to be found in On Interpretation, 16a, 10–13: ‘Just as there are thoughts in our minds without truth or falsity, while there are others at times that have necessarily one or the other, so also is it in our speech, for combination and division (sunthesis kai diairesis) belong to truth and falsity.’ Sophistical Refutations, 184a. P. Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, p. 254. Cf. Metaphysics A, 6, 987b, 32. See, for example, J. D. G. Evans, Aristotle’s Concept of the Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), Ch. 1, passim; see, also, O. Hamelin, Le systeme d’Aristote (Paris, 1920). For an attempt to reconcile the two positions, see G. Ryle, ‘Dialectic in the Academy’, op. cit. See, in particular, Sophistical Refutations, 11, 172a, 22. HP I, 261. It is worth remarking that Hegel’s attribution to Zeno of the status of being the true originator of the dialectic finds an Aristotelian precedent. According to a text relayed by Diogenes Laertius, Aristotle is supposed to have regarded Zeno as ‘the inventor of the dialectic’ (Diogenes Laertius, IX, 29). It is not surprising that here, as in many other places in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel follows Aristotle, for the Stagirite was himself the first – and at least until Hegel, unequalled – ‘historian’ of philosophy. However, in EL Hegel follows a different precedent, albeit one that still derives from Aristotle, when he says ‘among the Ancients Plato is termed the inventor of the dialectic’ (EL, §81). What is interesting about this chain of precedents for our argument is that it illuminates the complex attitude Hegel displays towards sophistry. For, on the one hand, to emphasise Plato’s origination of the dialectic is, by implication, to distance sophistry from dialectics; on the other hand, as Aubenque has argued, given that the attribution to Zeno of being the inventor of the dialectic derives from a now lost work by Aristotle entitled Sophist, one can infer a much stronger connection between sophistry and dialectics, in as much as Aristotle’s invocation of Zeno would be as a precursor to the specifically sophistic tekhne of dialectic. See P. Aubenque, op. cit., p. 254, note 3. Alluding to the apparent necessity of each arm of Zeno’s dialectic, Hegel says that ‘it has not been refuted to the present day; even now we have not got beyond it, and the matter is left in uncertainty’ (HP I, 265). See Rhetoric, 1355a, 34.

3

Heidegger and sophistry

14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, Vol. XIII, p. 175, cited HG, 328. 2. A. Ferrarin makes this point most succinctly in his Hegel and Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), Pt. 1, Ch. 1, §4, ‘Hegel and Aristotle: The Constraint of the Thing Itself’, p. 47ff. The forcefulness of Hegel’s appropriation of Greek thought is most generally recognised in the systematic nature of Hegel’s misinterpretation and mistranslation of Greek texts such as the Sophist, the Metaphysics and the Enneads. Gadamer makes this point in ‘Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient Philosophers’, op. cit. The locus classicus of the

170

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

Notes demonstration of Hegel’s misreading of the Sophist is C. L. W. Heyder’s Kritische Darstellung und Vergleichung der Methoden Aristotelischen und Hegelschen Dialektik (Erlangen: 1845). G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), §4, A. For Aristotle it is because the dialectician has no specialist knowledge that she is concerned with humanity as such. Hegel takes up this point and applies it to sophistry. See Chapter 2, §2, ‘Formal Culture’. See J. Derrida, ‘Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982), p. 39. G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 7, Jenaer Systementwürfe, II, ed. R. P. Horstmann and J. H. Trede (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1971), p. 194. R. Bernasconi, ‘Repetition and Tradition: Heidegger’s Destructuring of the Distinction Between Essence and Existence in Basic Problems of Phenomenology’ in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought, eds T. Kisiel and J. Van Buren (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 129. M. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, Prolegomena, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1992), p. 269. B. Cassin, L’effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), p. 107. Heidegger makes this point in the ‘Zähringen Seminar’, arguing ‘In Being and Time there had not yet taken place a genuine knowledge of the history of being, whence arises the awkwardness and, in truth, the naïveté of the “ontological destruction”. Since then, this necessary naivety has given way to knowledge’. M. Heidegger, Vier Seminar, p. 133. I have taken this citation from M. Sinclair, Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art, PhD thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University. I am indebted to M. Sinclair for generously making his thesis available to me, and for allowing me to draw on his admirably detailed and expert interpretation of this aspect of Heidegger’s work. The translation of this statement is taken from Ch. 14 (‘The Statement of Protagoras’) of the fourth of Heidegger’s Nietzsche Lectures, N IV, 91. It is worthwhile pointing up an ‘ambiguity’ in the two versions of the interpretation of Protagoras. In the interpretation offered in the Nietzsche lectures, and which generally is the fuller of the two, Heidegger appears to locate Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides firmly within the philosophical tradition, referring to them as ‘those thinkers who stand at the beginning of Western philosophy’ (N IV, 94). In the earlier interpretation given in AWP Heidegger anticipates a distinction that will press through in his later work, arguing that ‘through Plato’s thinking and through Aristotle’s questioning a decisive change takes place in the interpretation of what is and of men’, a change so decisive ‘that it proves to be the end of Greek thought’ (AWP, 143). I return to this point later in this section. The English translators of Heidegger’s essay, ‘Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16)’ included in Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy, trans. D. Farrell Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1984), provide the following etymology that bears on the term aletheia: T. Gaisford’s Etymologicum Magnum (Oxford: 1848), pp. 62, 51 discusses it as follows: letho = lanthano: alethes to me lethe hupopipton. Letho is a collateral form of lanthano, I escape notice, am hidden, unseen or forgotten by others.

Notes 171 Gaisford describes alethes as that which does not sink into lethe, the source of oblivion. Liddell-Scott translate alethes as ‘unconcealed’, p. 103. 14. See, in particular, ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ in M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill (Cambridge: CUP, 1998), pp. 155–182. 15. M. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, trans. W. Kluback and J. T. Wilde (Estover, Plymouth: Vision Press, 1963), p. 29.

4

Lyotard and sophistry

1. See J.-F. Lyotard, ‘On a Figure of Discourse’, trans. M. S. Roberts in TPM, pp. 12–26, p. 12. In accordance with the French, I have re-inserted the quotation marks around the term ‘passions’. See ‘Sur une figure de discours’ in DP, pp. 115–132, p. 115. 2. See P. Billouet, Paganisme et Postmodernité, pp. 25–26. 3. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Jewish Oedipus’, trans. S. Hanson in TPM, pp. 27–40. The original essay, ‘Oedipe juif’ is collected in DMF, pp. 183–200. The English translation rather curiously renders the French ‘La vérité ne parle pas, stricto sensu; elle travaille’ (p. 184) simply as ‘Truth does not speak, stricto sensu’ (p. 27). I have restored the omitted phrase, in order to retain the contrast that Lyotard wants to make. 4. Cf. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘The Psychoanalytic Approach to Artistic and Literary Expression’ in TPM, pp. 2–11. In this article Lyotard writes, ‘The power of a literary or pictorial expression does not lie in its harmony [ . . . ] it is what contains and maintains open and free the field of words, lines, colours, and values, so that truth can figure itself therein. [pour que la vérité s’y «figure»]’ (My emphasis and interpolation, p. 6). 5. Lyotard presents this argument in an essay from 1984, ‘Figure foreclosed’, trans. D. Macey in LR, pp. 69–110. The essay, as its title suggests, takes up themes present in Discours, figure and was perhaps conceived much earlier than its date of publication might lead one to believe, for as Lyotard informs us, it ‘takes as its starting point a seminar given by Clemence Ramnoux in 1966–67 on structural and analytic methods of interpreting legends’, p. 107. 6. Lyotard explicitly articulates such a claim in ‘One Thing at Stake in Women’s Struggles’, trans. D. J. Clarke, W. Woodhull and J. Clarke in LR, pp. 111–121. He writes: ‘philosophy is not just any discipline. It is the search for a constituting order that gives meaning to the world, society and discourse’ and it ‘never ceases to underwrite [the West’s] quests for knowledge and politics in the name of Truth and the Good’, p. 118. 7. Lyotard makes this argument in DF in articulating the distance that he progressively takes towards phenomenology in the course of that text. See DF, p. 20ff. A similar account can be found in ‘Figure foreclosed’, in particular p. 75ff. 8. See NS 07/02/75. Jean-Michel Salanskis refers to these lectures in ‘Paradoxes, singularités, systèmes’, Critique 33, 1977, 649–656. 9. The citation is taken from ‘Futility in Revolution’, trans. K. Berri in TPM, pp. 87–114. Originally published as ‘Considérations préliminaires à une histoire païenne: Notes sur la déchristianisation’ in G. Lascault, ed. Vers une esthétique sans entrave (1975), pp. 255–287. 10. Isocrates, Panegyric, p. 9; Against the Sophists, pp. 13, 16.

172

Notes

11. See M. Trédé, Kairos: L’à-propos et l’occasion (Paris: Klincksieck, 1992), pp. 247–254. 12. Ibid., p. 248. The example is taken from the Dissoi Logoi, DK 90, §2. 13. All three citations are from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (Cambridge, Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1925), IX, 52. 14. In the first of the lectures on Nietzsche and the sophists, Lyotard says that what he is seeking to characterise is not ‘the practice, but the manner of the sophists. I call it retorsion’. See NS, 7 February, 1975. 15. Aristotle specifically speaks of the retorsion, or turning back, of a dilemma upon the one who issues it in order to show that what she thinks is good is, in fact, bad, or vice versa. The example that Aristotle gives is the following: ‘a priestess refused to allow her son to speak in public; “For if,” she said, “you say what is just, men will hate you; if you say what is unjust, the gods will.” On the other hand, “you should speak in public; for if you say what is just, the gods will love you, if you say what is unjust, men will.” ’ Thus ‘retorting a dilemma on its proposer takes place, when two things being opposite, good and evil follow on each, the good and evil being opposite like the things themselves’. The word that Aristotle uses, and which is translated as ‘retorsion’ is blaisosis. The term is thought to derive from the noun blaisos meaning ‘having the knees bent inwards’, or ‘bandy-legged’, and more generally ‘crooked’ or ‘twisted’. See Rhetoric, 1399a, 15. 16. See Gorgias, 456b–c. 17. See ibid., 462a ff. 18. B. Russell, My Philosophical Development (London: Unwin Books, 1975), p. 78. 19. For a detailed discussion of Lyotard’s presentation of Russell’s Theory of Types in OSW, see J.-M. Salanskis, ‘Paradoxes, singularités, systèmes’, op. cit. 20. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VI, 6, 98. 21. M. Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. J. Lloyd (Sussex, Harvester Press, 1978), p. 3. 22. Ibid., p. 2. 23. See ibid., p. 19ff. 24. In French, Detienne and Vernant’s Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society has the title Les ruses d’intelligence: la Metis du grecs (Paris: Flammarion et Cie, 1974). In addition to OSW, where Lyotard speaks of the hostility of Plato and Aristotle towards ‘a logical ruse that is also a moral, political, and economic ruse’, Lyotard speaks of ‘ruse’ in many of the essays included in Rudiments païens and in JG. In particular, see ‘Humour in Semiothelogy’, trans. M. Kamdar in TPM, pp. 73–86. In the opening pages of JG Lyotard explicitly mentions Detienne and Vernant’s study, and later repeatedly refers to sophistical ruses. 25. See Detienne and Vernant, op. cit., p. 28f.

5

Lyotard and Kant: a sophistical critique

1. See, for example, P. Billouet, op. cit., pp. 59–65. 2. G. Sfez, Jean-François Lyotard: la faculté d’une phrase (Paris: Galilée, 2000). For an extended analysis of JG in relation to LE, see J. Williams, Lyotard and the Political, op. cit., pp. 97–110.

Notes 173 3. See, for example, G. Banham, ‘The Anxiety of the Little Girl: Infancy, Capital and Critique’ in Inhuman Reflections: Rethinking the Limits of the Human, eds S. Brewster et al. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000); P. Billouet, op. cit. 4. See Chapter 2, in particular note 63. 5. See, for example, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Can Qualify as a Science, trans. P. Carus (Illinois: Open Court, 1902), §22, where Kant states ‘the business [ . . . ] of the understanding is to think [ . . . ] thinking is uniting representations in one consciousness { . . . } The union of representations in one consciousness is judgement. Thinking therefore is the same as judging’, p. 63. 6. See, for example, Magna Moralia, I, 34, 1197a, p. 34f.: ‘Are practical (phronesis) and philosophic (sophia) thought identical? Surely not. The latter deals with demonstrable truth and with invariable fact; while practical thought is concerned not with these but with the world of changing phenomena. For example, such facts as straightness, curvature, concavity are always the same; but with expediency it is otherwise. So far from being exempt from change, it changes; the same thing may be expedient today, but not tomorrow; expedient for me, but not for you; expedient under some circumstances, but not under others.’ 7. For detailed considerations of this topic in Aristotle, see M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, op. cit.; P. Aubenque, La prudence chez Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1963). For a suggestive comparison between Lyotard and Nussbaum, and a consideration of the problems attendant on such a comparison, see S. Melville, ‘Just Between Us’ in Philosophy Today, Vol. 36: 4, Winter 1992, 367–376.

6

Lyotard and the sophistication of ontology

1. In Section 12 of D. Lyotard writes, ‘I would like to call a différend the case where the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and for that reason becomes a victim.’ 2. I have used the translation of Parmenides’ Poem given by J. Barnes, trans. and ed. EGP. In referring to the Greek I have used the version given in The Presocratics, ed. M. R. Wright (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1995), based on that established by H. Diels in DK. 3. All Greek citations from Gorgias’ Treatise are taken from the anonymous On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias, included in Aristotle’s Minor Works, trans. W. Hett (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1936), abbreviated MXG, 979a, 12. 4. Thus, for example, J. Barnes argues ‘Parmenides produced one short work written in ungainly hexameter verse. A substantial proportion of the poem survives. It opened with a fanciful prologue, after which the main body of the work divided into two parts’, EGP, p. 129. 5. Cassin, B., Si Parménide: Le traité anonyme De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1985). 6. See in particular Heidegger, M., What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), in the final chapters of which Heidegger, reading paratactically DK 28, B6, 1, Khre to legein te noein t’ eon emmenai (conventionally translated as ‘One should both say and think that being is’), lays stress upon the role of participle, noun and verb. 7. J. Barnes translates estin thus in EGP: ‘one, that it is and cannot not be’, p. 132.

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Notes

8. The ‘que’ omitted here, refers back in the Greek to the verb ‘to say’. 9. M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim (Virginia: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 82. 10. Ibid., p. 101. 11. The phrase, used critically, is J. Beaufret’s and can be found in his Parménide: le poème (Paris: PUF, 1996), p. 16. 12. The full passage runs: ‘L’ontologie comme genre de discours présuppose cette obscure illumination: ce dont elle phrase, l’être, est aussi ce qui phrase par sa bouche; le référent est aussi le destinateur. «C’est le même, être et penser»’. At the risk of losing the continuity of translation, and with some freedom, I have rendered phrase as ‘speaks’. I have done so however to make clear the basic sense of the passage which is lost by Van Den Abbeele’s translation: ‘As a genre of discourse, ontology presupposes this obscure illumination: what it phrases, Being, is also what is phrased through its mouth: the referent is also the addressor.’ (my italics) Abbeele’s rendering of the central explanatory clause confounds the difference between referent and addressor, saying the same thing both times. 13. MXG, 979a, 25, cf. SP, 436. LD, 32. 14. Cf. Cassin, SP, 445. 15. SP, 448. This difference does not appear at all in the English translation of The Differend, English lacking the ability to render with the same immediacy the substantivisation of the verb either by way of the formal identity of the infinitive and the participle or even by means of employing the definite article as it occurs in both the French and the Greek. 16. Where the Greek says to me on, and the French ‘le non-étant’, the English translation gives ‘the non-existent’ in order to mark the difference with the ‘not-being’ which translates the verbal to me einai/’le ne pas être’ of the Greek and French. 17. Cassin translates ‘Mais si c’est la même chose, en ce cas aussi ne serait rien: en effet le non-étant n’est pas, ainsi que l’étant, si du moins il est bien la même chose que le non-étant’. SP, 445–446. 18. See Rhetoric, 1042a, 10ff. Compare also my discussion of Corax paralogism and Aristotle’s account of it in Chapter 4, ‘Corax’. 19. See, for example, Sophistical Refutations, 5, 166b, 37ff. 20. Plato, Letter VII, 342a–d (cited D, 22). 21. See, for example, Sophistical Refutations, 34, 184a, 1ff.

7

A sophistical differend

1. James Williams has argued for the importance of Lyotard’s libidinal writings in his Lyotard and the Political, op. cit.; the editors of TPM point out the importance of Lyotard’s early writings in their introduction to that collection. 2. G. Bennington, ‘The Same, Even, Itself . . . ’in Parallax, Vol.6, No. 4, 2000. 3. H. Ruthrof, ‘Differend and Agonistics: A Transcendental Argument?’ in Philosophy Today, Vol. 36, No. 4, Winter 1992, 324–335, p. 324. 4. B. Waldenfels, ‘Ethics in the Differend of Discourses’, trans. K. Crome and U. Haase in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 32, No. 3, October 2001, 242–256, p. 243.

Notes 175 5. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘La phrase-affect: d’un supplement au Différend’ in Misère de la philosophie, ed. D. Lyotard (Paris: Galilée, 2000), pp. 43–54, p. 50. 6. See, for example, the introduction to The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby, ‘About the Human’, pp. 1–7. 7. See, for example, B. Cassin’s discussion of this definition ‘L’homme, animal politique, animal doué de logos’ in Aristote et le logos: Contes de la phénoménologie ordinaire (Paris: PUF, 1997), pp. 25–57. 8. Dogmatic in the sense that Kant attributes to the word, in that such claims ‘confidently deny whatever lies beyond the sphere [ . . . ] of knowledge’ (CPR: A471, B499), or as Lyotard writes, Faurisson’s ‘conclusion should have been that since the only witnesses are victims, and since there are no victims but dead ones, no place can be identified as a gas chamber. He should not have said that there are none, but rather that his opponent cannot prove that there are any’ (D, §6).

Select Bibliography This bibliography includes only the titles of works regularly consulted or of central importance to my argument. I have endeavoured to provide references to accessible English translations of all works included.

French editions of Lyotard’s work Lyotard, J.-F. La Phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954). ——. ‘Coitus Reservatus’, Critique 30, 1974, pp. 3–13. ——. Économie libidinale (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974). ——. Instructions Païennes (Paris: Galilée, 1977). ——. ‘Notes preliminaries sur la pragmatique des oeuvres (en particulier Daniel Buren)’ in Critique, 34, 1978, 1075–1085. ——. La Condition postmoderne (Paris: Edition du Minuit, 1979). ——. Le Différend (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1983). ——. L’assassinat de l’expérience par la peinture, Monory (Talence: Le Castor Astral, 1984). ——. Tombeau de l’intellectuel et autres papiers (Paris: Galilée, 1984). ——. Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1985). ——. L’enthousiasme: La critique kantienne de l’histoire (Paris: Galilée, 1986). ——. Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Paris: Galilée, 1986). ——. L’Inhumain: causeries sur le temps (Paris, Galilée, 1988). ——. Lectures d’enfance (Paris: Galilée, 1991). ——. Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (Paris: Galilée, 1991). ——. Dérive a partir Marx et Freud (Paris: Galilée, 1994). ——. Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée, 1994). ——. Chambre sourde: L’antiesthétique de Malraux (Paris: Galilée, 1998). ——. La Confession d’Augustin (Paris, Galilée, 1998). ——. Misère de la philosophie, ed. D. Lyotard (Paris: Galilée, 2000). Lyotard, J.-F. and Thébaud, J.-L. Au Juste: conversations (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979). ——. Cinq cours de 1975 sur Nietzsche et les Sophistes, http://www.webdelueze. com/sommaire.html.

English editions of Lyotard’s work Lyotard, J.-F. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984). ——. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988). ——. Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia UP, 1988). ——. The Lyotard Reader, ed. A. Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). ——. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). 176

Select Bibliography

177

——. Libidinal Economy, trans. I. Hamilton-Grant (London: Athlone Press, 1993). ——. Political Writings, trans. and ed. B. Readings and K. P. Geiman (London: UCL, 1993). ——. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1994). ——. ‘Nietzsche and the Inhuman: Interview with Jean-François Lyotard’, trans. R. Beardsworth, in Journal of Nietzsche Studies, No. 7, Spring, 1994, 67–130. ——. Toward the Postmodern, eds R. Harvey and M. S. Roberts (New York: Humanity Books, 1999). ——. The Confession of Augustine, trans. R. Beardsworth (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2000). ——. Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-aesthetics, trans. R. Harvey (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2001). Lyotard, J.-F and Larochelle, G. ‘That Which Resists, After All’ in Philosophy Today, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter 1992), 402–417. Lyotard, J.-F and Thébaud, J.-L. Just Gaming, trans. W. Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). ——. ‘The Phrase-Affect: From a Supplement to The Differend’, trans. K. Crome in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 32, No. 3, October 2001, 234–241.

Other works consulted Aquinas, T. Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. J. P. Rowan (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1961). Aristophanes. The Clouds, trans. B. B. Rogers (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1924). Aristotle. Art of Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1926). ——. Magna Moralia, trans. G. C. Armstrong (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1926). ——. Nichomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1926). ——. Metaphysics, 2 Vols, trans. H. Tredennick (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1933). ——. Oeconomica, trans. G. C. Armstrong (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1935). ——. Minor Works, trans. W. Hett (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1936). ——. Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans. H. P. Cooke and H. Tredennick (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1938). ——. On Sophistical Refutations, trans. E. S. Forster (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1955). ——. Posterior Analytics, Topica, trans. H. Tredennick and E. S. Forster (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1960). ——. Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1989). ——. Poetics, trans. S. Halliwell (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1995). ——. On the Soul, trans. W. S. Hett (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1997). Aubenque, P. Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962).

178

Select Bibliography

——. La prudence chez Aristote (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). Bambrough, R. New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965). Banham, G. ‘The Anxiety of the Little Girl: Infancy, Capital and Critique’ in Inhuman Reflections: Rethinking the Limits of the Human, eds S. Brewster et al. (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000). Barnes, J. ed. Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987). Beaufret, J. Dialogue avec Heidegger Vol. 1, philosophie grecque (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973). ——. Dialogue avec Heidegger Vol. 2, philosophie moderne (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973). ——. Dialogue avec Heidegger Vol. 3, approche de Heidegger (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973). ——. Dialogue avec Heidegger, Vol. 4, le chemin de Heidegger (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973). ——. Parménide: Le Poème (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). Benjamin, A. ed. Judging Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1992). Bennington, G. Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988). ——. ‘The Same, Even, Itself . . . ’ in Parallax, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2000), 88–98. ——. ‘Time after Time’ in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 32, No. 3 (October 2001), 300–311. Bernasconi, R. ‘Repetition and Tradition: Heidegger’s Destructuring of the Distinction Between Essence and Existence in Basic Problems of Phenomenology’ in Reading Heidegger From the Start (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 123–136. Billouet, P. Paganisme et postmodernité: J.-Fr. Lyotard (Paris: Ellipses, 1999). Brogan, W. ‘The Place of Aristotle in the Development of Heidegger’s Phenomenology’ in Reading Heidegger From the Start (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 213–227. Burckhardt, J. The Greeks and Greek Civilisation, ed. O. Murray, trans. S. Stern (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998). Carroll, D. ‘Rephrasing the Political with Kant and Lyotard: From Aesthetic to Political Judgments’, Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Fall, 1984). Cassin, B. ed. La plaisir de parler (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986). ——. Si Parménide: Le traité anonyme De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia: Edition critique et commentaire (Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1980). ——. L’effet sophistique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). Cassin, B. and Narcy, M. La Décision du sens: Le livre gamma de la Métaphysique d’Aristote, introduction, texte, traduction et commentaire (Paris: J. Vrin, 1989). Classen, C. J. ‘Aristotle’s Picture of the Sophists’ in The Sophists and their Legacy (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1981), pp. 7–24. Crome, K. ‘The Sophistications of Philosophy: The Place of Sophistry in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Differend’ in The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 32, No. 3 (October 2001), 277–299. ——. ‘Plato and the Institution of Philosophy’ in The Richmond Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn 2002), 21–28. ——. ‘Retorsion: Jean-François Lyotard’s Reading of Sophistry’ in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XLI, No. 1 (Spring 2003), 29–44.

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Index

Alcidamas, 91 aletheia, 52, 81–3, 88–90 see also truth Anaximander, 17, 22, 82, 83, 84, 130, 160 Androtion, 21 antilogic, 28, 32, 49 antinomies, 124–7 Antiphon, 16, 17 Anytus, 24, 25 Aristides, 21 Aristophanes, 25–30, 39, 40 father–son relationship, 28–30 Aristotle, 25, 39, 75–8, 113, 114, 115, 120, 127–8, 140–5, 148, 152–4 on dialectic, 54–8 on logos apophantikos, 54 on parent–child relations, 28–30 on retorsion, 96–100 Aubenque, P., 39, 54 beautiful, 4–5 being, 8, 51–5, 59, 61, 65–8, 75, 79–80, 100, 130–43 Bennington, G., 8, 146–7 Bernasconi, R., 71 Billouet, P., 88 Callicles, 16 Cassin, B., 78–9, 134–6, 137–9 cognition, 154–8 Corax, 25, 96–100, 113, 115–16, 118–19, 121 Idea in Corax, 118–19 Critias, 16 daimonic, 132–4, 136 de Romilly, J., 95 Deleuze, G., 2 Derrida, J., 2 determinant judgement, 4, 120–1 Detienne, M., 104, 105

dialectic, 49, 50–8, 111–12 see also Transcendental dialectic Diels, H., 15–16, 17, 18, 21 differend, 7–10, 123, 126–27, 129, 146–8, 161–2 Diogenes Laertius, 55, 91, 93, 95, 103, 109 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 91 Dionysodorus, 16 eristic, 49 Eubulides of Megara, 101–3, 107 Euripides, 14 Eusebius, 25 Euthydemus, 16 Faurisson, 154, 155–6 figural, 87–90 Foucault, M., 2 Freud, S., 88–9 friendship, 161–2 Gasché, R., 8–9 Gorgias, 1, 9, 14, 17, 31, 48–9, 91, 122, 130–4, 137–9, 147, 155, 156, 157 Habermas, J., 4 Hegel, G. W. F., 14, 42–61, 62–5, 109, 129, 160 on Gorgias, 48–9 on sophistic culture (see under paideia) on sophistic dialectic 48–58 on the sophistry of common opinion, 44–5 on the sophistry of contemporary learning, 43–4, on the unphilosophical aspect of sophistry, 63–4 sophistry and enlightenment, 47 184

Index Heidegger, M., 17–18, 62–84, 88–9, 130, 160 aletheia, 81–3 befindlichkeit, 76–7 dasein, 65–6, 68–71 destruction, 66–8 fallenness, 78 idle-talk, 78 on Hegel 62–5, 69–71 on Protagoras, 80–2 on the being of the sophist, 74–9 on the ideas, 82–3 phusis, 81 Heraclitus, 17, 22, 38, 82, 83, 84, 130, 160 Herodotus, 21, 40 Hesiod, 20, 22 Heyschius, 25 Hippias, 16, 17, 30, 31 Holocaust, 154–8 Homer, 18, 20, 22 hubris 34, 36–7 hupokeimenon, 69, 142

185

Lyotard, J.-F. Cinq cours de 1975 sur Nietzsche et les Sophistes, 90, 95–6 Discours, figure, 87–90, 146 Just Gaming, 108–109, 113–16, 118–21, 161 on aletheia, 88–90 on Freud, 88–9 on Heidegger, 88–9 on retorsion, 95–100 on Russell, 101–3 ‘On the Strength of the Weak’, 92, 93–4, 96–7, 100–6, 160 Postmodern Condition, 3–5 The Differend, 7–10, 92, 93, 94–5, 101, 122–4, 126–58, 161 Lysias, 18 metaphysica specialis, 124 metis, 104–6 Milner, J.-C., 8–9 muthos, 133

Ideas of reason, 116–21 Isocrates, 91

Nancy, J.-L., 5, 6 Nietzsche, F., 1, 159 not-being, 130–43

judgement, 110, 123–4 see also determinant judgement, reflective judgement

Ontology, 65–8, 136–7, 142–3, 144, 147, 158, 161 ousia, 140–2

kairos, 91–2 Kant, I., 2, 4–6, 50, 54, 109–13, 116–17, 120–1, 124–6, 141, 160 on Ideas of Reason, 116–17 on the sophistication of reason, 127–9 Kerferd, G., 16, 40, 42–3 Kranz ,W., 15–16 Kripke, S., 147

paideia, 46–8, 50 paralogy, 4, 140 Parmenides, 17, 22, 38, 79, 82, 83, 84, 130–9, 155, 157, 160 Pericles, 14 Phaedrus, 18, 19 Philodemus, 25 Philostratus, 16, 25 phronesis, 114, 121 phusis, 81, 130 Pindar, 40 Plato, 9, 18–41, 50–3, 57–8, 73–4, 82–3, 97, 109, 127–8, 157, 159–60 criticism of sophistry, 24–6, 30–40 on diairesis and synagoge, 51–2 on dialectic, 50–3

litigation, 123–4, 127 logic (general and transcendental), 110–13 logology, 143 logos, 141–5, 153–4, 157, 162 see also zoon logon ekhon logos apophantikos, 54 Lyotard, D., 8

186 Index Plato (Continued) on education, 30–1 on ideas, 51–3 on rhetoric, 19 on the relation between philosophy and sophistry 18–24 Presocratics, 17–18, 21–2, 38, 39, 89–90 Prodicus, 16, 17, 25, 31 Protagoras, 9, 14, 16, 17, 20–2, 25, 80–2, 91, 92–5, 100–1, 102, 107, 151–2 Pythagoras, 21, 40 Ramdani, M., 7 reflection, 59–60 reflective judgement, 4–5 retorsion, 95–100, 147 rhetoric, 19, 22, 57, 92, 97–9, 108, 144 Russell, B., 101–3 Salanskis, J.-M., 2, 101 Sallis, J., 26 Sextus Empiricus, 25, 130 silence, 149–51, 154–8 Socrates, 14, 17, 18–41 defence speech, 25–6 on wisdom, 33–5 Solon, 18, 21, 40 sophrusune, 36–7 steresis, 150–4, 157 Strauss, L., 30

subjectivism of the sophists, 42–3, 72–3 see also reflection Sublime 4–5 tekhne, 19, 38, 55, 98, 114, 143, 144 Thales, 22 Thrasymachus, 16 Thucydides, 14 Transcendental dialectic, 110–13 trauma, 149–50 Trédé, M., 91, 92 truth, 18–19, 22–3, 31–3, 37–41, 44–6, 51–3, 55, 87–90, 101–3, 105–6, 110–13, 127, 141–2, 144–5, 161–2 understanding, 49–50, 54 Van Den Abbeele, G., 137 Vernant, J.-P., 104, 105 Waldenfels, B., 147 Williams, J., 7, 9–10 Wittgenstein, L., 147 Wolff, F., 2 wrong, 124, 128–9 Xeniades, 16 Xenophanes, 22 Xenophon, 27–8 Zeno, 56, 58, 109 zoon logon ekhon, 148–9, 152–4