Around the middle of the 5th century BC, conditions arose in Greece for a cultural revolution that, over the course of several decades, affected all spheres of public and political life and produced a radical change in the way of thinking of a significant part of the civilian population, as well as in the direction of philosophical studies. The main reason for the cataclysm that occurred was the development of Greek political life. In the period that began after the Persian Wars, the center of gravity of the political and cultural life of Hellas shifted from the territory of Asia Minor and the islands of the Aegean Sea to continental Greece, the importance of Athens, the largest city in Attica, a region in the southeast of the Balkan Peninsula, increased, which is why this period of the history of the Ancient World is often called “Attic”. The hundreds of Greek poleis (city-states) that existed by this time had had different structures for a long time, occupied different positions in the hierarchy of military and economic alliances, and constantly competed with each other in many different spheres of activity. Numerous economic and political contradictions were compounded by ethnic contradictions – between the Dorian, Achaean and Ionian cities. With the establishment of the political hegemony of Athens, the interests of numerous Greek city-states for the first time in the history of Greece acquired a common direction – due to the growth of civil self-awareness and the relevance of substantiating their own political identity. The development of all these contradictions resulted in a sharp complication of the internal situation in Greek cities, the activation of all political and human life in general.
First of all, this affected Athens itself: here, for the first time, politics became the business of every citizen, the most important moment of his daily existence. “Man is a political animal,” Aristotle asserted.
At this time, when man, his specifically human experience involuntarily becomes the “measure of things”, the first theorists of the new worldview appear – the sophists, literally “experts in wisdom” – paid teachers of eloquence, political virtue and all kinds of knowledge considered necessary for active participation in civil life. The “senior sophists” (2nd half of the 5th century BC) traditionally include Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, Antiphon, Critias. The “younger sophists” (1st half of the 4th century BC) usually include Lycophron, Alcidamas and Thrasymachus. “Half philosophers, half politicians” (Prodicus of Ceos), the sophists set the goal of their studies not to unravel the mysteries of nature, but to understand man in all his uniqueness. The main principle of sophistry was formulated by the oldest of them, Protagoras of Abdera (c. 480-410 BC), a student of Democritus: “Man is the measure of all things: of existing things – insofar as they exist, of non-existent things – insofar as they do not exist” (Protagoras, fr. 1). Accepting the teaching of Heraclitus and Parmenides on the relativity and contradictoriness of “human” knowledge, Protagoras at the same time rejected the traditional opposition of this knowledge, based on sensory experience, to “divine” knowledge, as if penetrating into the hidden essence of things. Things do not have any “hidden essence”, there are only individual things themselves, given in sensations; however, the world of human sensations is contradictory, therefore, according to Protagoras, “with respect to each thing one can put forward two opposite judgments” (Diogenes Laërtius, IX, 51). “To be” for the sophist means “to appear”, therefore, says Protagoras, “whatever appears to me, that is true for me, and whatever appears to you, that is true for you” (Plato. Theaetetus, 15le). Another famous sophist, Gorgias of Leontini (c. 480 – 380 BC), a student of Empedocles, in a work with the paradoxical title “On That Which Is Not, or On Nature” (a kind of parody of Eleatic metaphysics), argued three positions: 1) nothing exists; 2) if there is something existing, then it is unknowable; 3) even if it is knowable, then its knowledge is inexpressible and inexplicable.
The teachings of the sophists inevitably came into conflict with traditional religious ideas. Protagoras’s work “On the Gods” began with the words: “I cannot know about the gods either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what they look like, for many things prevent this: both the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life” (fr. 4). The citizens of Athens accused Protagoras of atheism, he was forced to flee secretly, and, according to legend, caught at sea by a storm, he drowned in a shipwreck. Diagoras of Melos and Theodore of Cyrene, nicknamed “the Atheist”, who were close to the sophists, directly denied the existence of gods. Prodicus of Ceos saw the origins of religion in the veneration of bread and wine, the sun, the moon and rivers, i.e. everything “that benefits people” (Prodicus of Ceos, fr. 4). Critias declared religion to be a fiction designed to force people to obey the laws (Critias, fr. 25).
The Sophists considered themselves experts in many things: Hippias taught astronomy, meteorology, geometry and music; Gorgias was knowledgeable in physics; Critias shared Empedocles’s teaching on the soul; Antiphon studied the problem of squaring the circle and tried to explain meteorological phenomena. The Sophists took an important step towards creating a science of language: Protagoras studied the categories of inflection and the syntax of a sentence; Prodicus laid the foundations of the doctrine of synonyms. Hippias was proud of the fact that he knew not only all the sciences, but also all the crafts: he wove his own cloak, dyed it purple, embroidered it with gold, sewed sandals, carved a staff and forged a ring. The “queen of sciences” for the Sophists was rhetoric – “the art of persuasion.” Gorgias, Hippias and Thrasymachus were famous, above all, for their inimitable eloquence. The ability to construct a speech, to make it clear and attractive, to decorate it with antitheses, alliterations, metaphors, to give it sonority and musicality, the ability to convince people at public meetings and to control the mood of the crowd, was so necessary in the changed political situation that sophists were paid huge amounts of money for teaching this craft.
An example of sophistic dialectic can be sophisms – literally “tricks”, tasks to find a paradoxical train of thought and apply it as a means of public polemics. For example, “The Horned One”: “What you did not lose, you have; you did not lose your horns; therefore, you have horns.” Or – “The Covered One”: “Do you know who stands before you under the veil? No? But it is your father; therefore, you do not know your own father.” The most famous sophism was the paradox called “The Liar”: “A Cretan said: “All Cretans are liars”; did he tell the truth or a lie? If the truth – then he is also a liar – therefore, he lied – therefore, in fact, the Cretans are truthful, etc.
Since, the sophists asserted, several contradictory judgments can be made about each thing, each proof can be countered by another, opposite, equally well-founded and convincing proof. The stronger proof will be the one that is more practical and urgent. It cannot be said that such and such a statement is “truer” than another, it can only be said that it is “more useful”. Laws, customs, and the state itself were not created by the will of the gods, but appeared at some point as a result of an agreement between people. Hence the central distinction for sophistry between, on the one hand, that which exists “by nature” (Greek φύσις — “nature”), and, on the other, that which exists “by law” (Greek νόμος — “law”).
For example, Hippias, according to Plato, proclaimed that all people are “relatives, in-laws, and fellow citizens by nature, and not by law: for like is related to like by nature, but the law, a tyrant over people, forces them to do many things that are contrary to nature” (Plato. Protagoras, 337d).
Alcidamas declared that “God has made all men free, nature has made no one a slave” (Scholia on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 1373b); Antiphon and Lycophron rejected the advantage of noble birth; Thrasymachus defined justice as “that which is fit for the strongest” (Plato, Republic, I, 338c), and maintained that each power establishes its own laws that are useful to itself: democracy – democratic, tyranny – tyrannical, etc. From the point of view of the sophists, all human customs are conventional, and even the most familiar of them arose not “by nature” but “by agreement”. Good and evil, the beautiful and the shameful, truth and falsehood are obviously relative things, and what is good for one is evil for another, what is beautiful for one is ugly for another, and the truth in the mouth of one is a lie in the speech of another.
A different point of view was held by Socrates (c. 470–399 BC), “the most just of men” (Plato), who decided, in word and deed, to teach “virtue as such,” without regard to sophistic particulars and conventions. Socrates, the son of the sculptor Sophroniscus and the midwife Phenarete, was born in Athens c. 470 BC. In his youth, Socrates was a student of Anaxagoras and the philosopher Archelaus (nicknamed “the Physicist”) (mid-5th century BC), who taught, among other things, that in nature there are “two causes of origin—heat and cold”; that “all animals arose from mud”; and that “the just and the ugly exist not by nature, but only in accordance with human institution.” “Here,” says Diogenes Laërtius about Archelaus, “physical philosophy ended, and Socrates, after this, gave rise to moral philosophy” (Diogenes Laërtius, II, 16). During the Peloponnesian War, Socrates took part in a number of battles – at Potidaea (430), at Delium (424) and Amphipolis (422), where he showed himself to be a brave and very hardy warrior. Thus, for example, once in the camp near Potidaea, Socrates stood motionless all day and all night until dawn. When Socrates was later asked about the reason for such an act, he answered: “I listened to my inner voice.” Socrates called his inner voice “demonium” (Greek δαιμόνιον – “deity”); He could not explain what it was and only said that this “demon” was constantly telling him how he should not act. His favorite saying was: “Know thyself.” According to legend, the Delphic oracle itself called Socrates a sage. The question was asked: “Who is the wisest of the Greeks?” The oracle answered: “Sophocles is wise, Euripides is wiser, and Socrates is wiser than all.” However, Socrates refused to acknowledge himself as a sage, claiming: “All I know is that I know nothing!” “He lived in Athens all the time,” writes Diogenes Laërtius, “and enthusiastically argued with anyone, not in order to convince them, but in order to get to the truth” (I, 22). He was bald, squat, with a bump on his forehead, and with bulging eyes. He lived in poverty, wore a rough cloak, ate whatever he could find, explaining: “I eat to live, and the rest live to eat.” Walking through the market, Socrates liked to repeat: “How nice it is that there are so many things that one can do without!” Socrates had many students, among whom the most famous were Plato, Xenophon, Antisthenes, Alcibiades and some others. “He was the first to discuss the way of life and the first of the philosophers to be executed by court order” (II, 20). In 399, Socrates was accused “of not honoring the gods that the city honors, but introducing new deities, and is guilty of corrupting the youth; and the punishment for this is death” (II, 40). He was sentenced to death by 361 votes out of 500.
Socrates never wrote anything, and therefore his philosophical views can be judged only by secondary sources, the so-called “Socratic works” of Plato and Xenophon, who were his younger contemporaries and at the same time his students. Virtue (Greek αρετή – “virtue”, “valor”, “goodness”), from the point of view of Socrates, is the highest and absolute good, constituting the goal of human life, for only virtue gives happiness. Virtue consists in the knowledge of good and action in accordance with this knowledge. Truly brave is he who knows how to behave in danger, and does exactly that; truly just is he who knows what is proper to do in public affairs, and does exactly that; truly pious will be he who knows what should be done in religious rites and sacraments, and acts exactly that, etc.
“Socrates did not find a difference between wisdom and morality: he recognized a person as both intelligent and moral if a person, understanding what is beautiful and good, is guided by this in his actions and, conversely, knowing what is morally ugly, avoids it” (Xenophon. Memories of Socrates, III, 9. Translated by S. I. Sobolevsky). Virtue is inseparable from knowledge. People act immorally, are mistaken and suffer precisely because they do not know what is good and what is evil.
Virtue can and should be learned. However, Socrates did not teach virtue the way the sophists did, preferring direct conversation (in Greek διάλογος, “dialogue”) with the interlocutor to speeches and instructions. Hence the name of his philosophical method – dialectic. Dialectic consists of irony and maieutics. Irony (literally “pretense”) is somewhat reminiscent of the sophistic method of argumentation, designed to reveal internal contradictions in the speech of the opponent or in the view under study. Pretending to be a simpleton and claiming that he himself knows nothing and cannot teach anything, Socrates asked his interlocutor to answer a series of questions: what is good? evil? justice? courage? etc. By means of leading questions and answers, the interlocutor’s thoughts were consistently reduced to absurdity, as a result of which contradictions were revealed between this person’s words and his actions. On this basis, maieutics (literally, “childbirth assistance”) was carried out: Socrates, who liked to compare himself to a midwife, helped his interlocutor “give birth” to the truth. In his philosophical practice, Socrates proceeded from the fact that each person already contains knowledge of the truth, but does not realize it until the questions asked of him lead him to a contradiction with himself, and, as a result, to the recognition of his ignorance. Doubt in the truth of previous judgments leads to self-knowledge. “To know oneself” for Socrates means to act in life so that words do not diverge from deeds, and for this it is necessary to study the content of general concepts: to find out what actions of people can be called virtuous, to establish what is common in certain actions, and finally to give a definition of the corresponding moral concept: courage, justice, piety, etc. “Socrates held this opinion: if someone knows what a given object is, then he can explain it to others; and if he does not know, then it is not at all surprising that he himself makes mistakes and leads others into mistakes. In view of this, he never ceased to study with his friends the questions of what each object is” (Xenophon. Memories of Socrates, IV, 6. Translated by S. I. Sobolevsky).
“Once the sophist Antiphon, wishing to distract Socrates’ interlocutors from his, approached him and said this in their presence: Socrates! I thought that people who study philosophy should become happier from it; but you, it seems to me, are enjoying the opposite fruits. For example, you live in such a way that not even a single slave would remain with his master under such a lifestyle: your food and drink are the worst… you do not take money, but it brings joy when you acquire it, and when you own it, it gives you the opportunity to live both more decently and more pleasantly. In other areas of knowledge, teachers inspire their students with the desire to imitate them: if you want to instill such an idea in your interlocutors, then consider yourself a teacher of misfortune. To this Socrates replied: It seems to me, Antiphon, that you imagine my life to be so sad that I am sure you would rather die than live as I do… It seems, Antiphon, that you see happiness in a luxurious, expensive life; but in my opinion, having no needs is a property of a deity, and having minimal needs is to be very close to a deity; but a deity is perfect, and to be very close to a deity is to be very close to perfection… When I heard such conversations, – writes a witness to this conversation, Xenophon (c. 444 – c. 356 BC), – it seemed to me that he himself was a happy man and that he led his listeners to moral perfection ”(Xenophon. Memories of Socrates, I, 6. Trans. S. I. Sobolevsky). In the unique unity of practice and theory, life and philosophy, in the desire to express the essence of an act through a concept and to transform a concept into reality lies the main meaning of the philosophical doctrine of Socrates; this is the key to his unique philosophical experience.
At the beginning of the 4th century BC, some of Socrates’ students founded new philosophical schools, which were called “Socratic”. These include: 1) Megarian; 2) Elido-Eretrian; 3) Cyrenaic; and 4) Cynic. The Megarian school was founded by Euclid of Megara (d. after 369 BC), one of Socrates’ closest students. Opponents of this school gave it the nickname “eristic”, and its representatives were called “eristicians” (i.e. “debaters”). Based on the teaching of Parmenides that there is only one “being” and on the teaching of Socrates on the good, identical to virtue, Euclid asserted that “there is only one good, called by various names: sometimes understanding, sometimes God, and sometimes mind and other names, and he denied the opposite of the good, declaring that it does not exist” (Diogenes Laërtius, II, 106). The Megarian school played a significant role in the development of logic, studying the nature of logical paradoxes (sophisms) and the analysis of the forms of logical implication (consequence).
Stilpo of Megara denied the existence of general concepts and maintained that whoever says “man” does not name a single individual and, therefore, says “nobody” (II, 119). Another representative of the school, Diodorus Cronus, demonstrated the identity of being in possibility with being in reality (Epictetus. Conversations, II, 119, 1) and denied the very phenomenon of movement: he believed that “nothing moves, but is always advanced” (Sextus Empiricus, Against the Learned, X, 85). The Elido-Eretrian school was founded by
Phaedo of Elis, a skilled debater and teacher of eloquence. This school was very similar to the Megarian and did not add any original ideas of its own.
The Cyrene school was founded by Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435 – after 366 BC). He argued that everything exists for some good or evil and that the only thing that matters is either “good” or “bad”. Aristippus therefore rejected mathematics, for which the distinction between “good” and “bad” does not exist. Nature, he claimed, is unknowable and its study is an impossible and useless undertaking. Aristippus likened man to a besieged city: he seems to be a prisoner of his sensations, receiving no news from the outside. Sensations are perceptions of our own states, not of the things of the natural world themselves. The soul can have only two states: smooth and calm movement (pleasure) and abrupt and impetuous movement (pain). The teaching of the Cyrenaics is hedonistic (Greek ηδονή— “pleasure”, “enjoyment”): they declare pleasure to be the goal of human life, and happiness—the sum of pleasures. Wealth in itself is not a good, but only a means to obtain pleasures. Property can be a burden for the one who is attached to it, therefore, Aristippus said, “one must have as many things as can be saved in a shipwreck.”
Wisdom, from the Cyrenaics’ point of view, consists in not being a slave to pleasures, but in subordinating them to one’s rational will. Aristippus’ follower Hegesias, nicknamed “the one who persuades to die”, considered perfect happiness unattainable, since “our body is filled with many sufferings, and the soul shares the sufferings of the body and therefore worries”, therefore death is preferable for a rational person, and life is indifferent (Diogenes Laërtius, I, 94). The founder of the Cynic school was Antisthenes of Athens (c. 455 – c. 360 BC), a student of the sophist Gorgias, and then Socrates. The name of the school goes back to the word “dog” (Greek κύων, genitive fall. κυνός), since the Cynics, according to their enemies, saw happiness in living “like a dog”, i.e. being “closer to nature”. Philosophy, from their point of view, is the wisdom of life, which does not need any abstract knowledge. Antisthenes claimed that the essence of a thing cannot be determined, one can only say that a given thing has certain qualities. Hence the thesis on the impossibility of contradiction: “Only one thing can be said about one thing, namely, only its proper name” (Aristotle. Metaphysics, V, 29, 1024b). A thing must be designated only by its proper name, denoting only it alone.
From this position, the Cynics criticized Plato’s doctrine of “ideas.” According to Plato, each thing (the individual) is something specific due to its involvement in one or another “idea,” a universal essence (the general), but, according to the Cynics, it is impossible to express the general about the individual, that is, for example, to say: “Socrates is a man.” One can only say that Socrates is “Socrates,” and a man is “a man,” etc.
If the true understanding of a thing is reduced to its “proper name”, then the true good is the “own good” of each person. This “good” is not things, not power, not property, not health, and not even life as such. What is truly “own” for a person is his inner freedom. It is true virtue, which consists in abstinence from pleasures and insensitivity to suffering. Following the sophists, the Cynics distinguished between nature (“physis”) and human institutions (“nomos”). Nature, in their understanding, determines the minimum that a person needs and serves as a sufficient criterion for moral behavior. Everything that is considered the norm in human society is artificial and conventional, opinions are false and lead away from true happiness, virtue and vice in the generally accepted sense of the word are empty words. “There are many popular gods, but one natural one,” asserted Antisthenes (Cicero. On the Nature of the Gods, I, 32). The Cynics condemned wealth, luxury and pleasure, preferring to these things an unpretentious life, moderate work that gives peace of mind and strengthens the body, honest poverty. Antisthenes’ student was Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404 – c. 323 BC). Diogenes put into practice everything that Antisthenes spoke about. He wandered around Greece barefoot, in a rough cloak over his naked body, with a beggar’s bag and a thick stick. When asked where he was from, Diogenes answered: “I am a citizen of the world.” All his property was contained in one clay cup, and he smashed it on a stone, having once seen a boy drinking from his palms at the river: “The boy turned out to be wiser than me,” said Diogenes. In Corinth, where he visited most often, Diogenes settled in a round clay barrel – a pithos. He fed on alms in the square, demanding it as his due. Someone remarked to him that alms are given to the lame and the blind, but not to philosophers; Diogenes replied: “Because people know that they can become lame and blind, but never philosophers.” He walked the streets in broad daylight with a lantern and shouted: “I am looking for a man!” Plato once gave a famous definition: “A man is a two-legged animal without feathers.” In response, Diogenes plucked a rooster, brought it to school and said: “Here is Plato’s man!” They said to him: “You know nothing, and yet you philosophize!” He answered: “If I only pretended to be a sage, then this too would be philosophy!” He lived to see the days of Alexander the Great. When Alexander was in Corinth, he came to see Diogenes. He was lying and basking in the sun. “I am Alexander, King of Macedonia, and soon of the whole world,” said Alexander. “What can I do for you?” “Step aside and do not block my view of the sun,” Diogenes replied. Alexander stepped aside and said to his friends: “If I were not Alexander, I would like to be Diogenes” (Diogenes Laërtius, VI, 20-81).
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