Counter-Currents
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In Greece in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, the sophists were highly-prized teachers of the art or craft (techne) of rhetoric. (The Greek word techne is the root of our words technique and technology.)
Socrates was widely seen as a sophist, for instance in Aristophanes’ Clouds. To a naïve bystander, Socrates certainly looked like a sophist. Like the sophists, Socrates spent a great deal of time arguing about ideas. Moreover, Socrates was seen arguing with known sophists, including the greatest sophists of them all, Gorgias and Protagoras, as depicted in the Platonic dialogues which bear their names. But if one looks at Socrates’ actual arguments with sophists, it becomes clear that he was fundamentally opposed to sophistry.
But why would a philosopher be especially bothered by those who practice and teach the art of rhetoric — as opposed, for instance, to medicine or shipbuilding or shoemaking? Philosophy, for Socrates and Plato, was the loftiest of all pursuits, far more important than any of the arts (technai).
Indeed, in the Platonic dialogues Socrates takes great pains to differentiate philosophy from all the arts. Philosophy, like all the sciences and arts, has a particular aim. The very name “philosophy” means the love (philia) of wisdom (sophia). For Socrates, wisdom is like the arts insofar as they are all primarily practical. They aim at changing things. But wisdom differs from the arts in two essential ways.
First, the arts as well as theoretical sciences are specialized. They deal with delimited realms of things: shoemakers make shoes; shipbuilders make ships; biologists study living things; geometricians deal with points, lines, and figures. Philosophy pursues wisdom, but wisdom is comprehensive. It deals in some way with all things.
Second, the arts, like the theoretical sciences, are morally neutral, meaning that they can be used for good or evil purposes, but these purposes are extrinsic to the arts and sciences themselves. They are added on by whomever makes use of them. Wisdom, however, is not morally neutral. It is inherently moral. Wisdom by its very nature aims at the good, specifically the good life for man.
If you put together wisdom’s comprehensiveness and its inherent directedness to the good, one arrives at the Socratic idea of wisdom: Wisdom is the ability to make right use of all things. “All things” means: all arts, all sciences, all the goods and circumstances life deals us.
Ask yourself what are the components of a good life. What are the things you need to live well? There are material goods such as food and drink, physical qualities such as health and good looks, relationships such as family and friends, and resources such as money, social capital, knowledge, and skills.
But Socrates would say that even the best package of goods is not enough for a good life if they are not used rightly to attain well-being, which is why we also need wisdom to have a good life.
Socrates would add that once you realize the importance of wisdom, even if fortune gives you very few components of the good life, if you use what you have wisely, you will be better off than more fortunate people who use their gifts badly.
We’ve all heard the phrase “too much of a good thing.” Too much food and drink — even just water — can kill you. As Paracelsus said, “The poison is in the dose.” The same substances can cure or kill depending on how they are used. Can there be too much pleasure? Of course there can be. We can enslave and bestialize ourselves in the pursuit of pleasure. Is it really possible to be too rich for one’s own good? Yes, if you don’t use your money rightly. If you spend your money on cocaine and heroin, you’d be better off poor. Is it possible to be too talented or too good-looking? Yes, if you surround yourself with sycophants who encourage your worst behaviors. Is it possible to be too smart for your own good? Of course it is, if you use your intelligence to delude yourself and others. Can you be too industrious? Absolutely. The most destructive people in the world are industrious cranks and kooks.
Can one lead a good life without wisdom? Yes, but only if one is extremely lucky. There is such thing as a fool’s paradise. But one would be foolish to count on luck, since wisdom allows us to make our own luck; indeed, wisdom can allow us to counteract misfortune and salvage a happy life from even the worst circumstances.
But is it possible to be too wise for your own good? No, it is not possible. Wisdom is always good. Wisdom not only regulates all other things to bring about well-being, it needs no external regulation because it is by its very nature directed to the good. So if you are counting on something to lead to well-being, and it fails, it is not wisdom but merely a counterfeit.
Because wisdom is the path to well-being, and — as Socrates maintains — well-being is what all men are seeking, wisdom is the most important thing we can pursue.
This means that nothing is more dangerous to human well-being than counterfeit wisdom. This is why Socrates deigned to cross swords with the sophists. Socrates believed the sophists were promoting a counterfeit wisdom as the path to well-being.
You can pre-order Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.
Let’s look at Socrates’ conversation with the elderly and renowned sophist Gorgias of Leontini in Plato’s Gorgias. Socrates asks Gorgias what art (techne) he teaches. Gorgias says rhetoric (rhetorike).
The Gorgias distinguishes between masters of a techne and people who possess it merely though a “knack” (empeiria), from which we get the word “empirical,” meaning what is related to experience. In eighteenth-century English, an “empiric” referred to a charlatan or quack who practiced medicine based solely on experience. Masters of an art don’t merely have a knack. They have also taken a step back from their skills, reflected upon them, and articulated general principles. This allows them to make intelligent speeches (logoi) about their arts, which allows them to teach their art to others rather than just bidding them to learn by imitation and practice.
When Socrates asks Gorgias what rhetoric deals with, he says “speeches” (logoi). Socrates then asks Gorgias to distinguish the speeches rhetoric deals with from the logoi of other arts like medicine and physical training. At this point, Gorgias could introduce a distinction between the form and content of speeches. Rhetoric could deal with all kinds of speeches, but it could focus on their common formal qualities rather than their particular contents. Aristotle, for instance, takes this route, focusing on the formal properties of all persuasive logoi: logic, dialectic, and rhetoric. For Aristotle, rhetoric can be defined as the study of the techniques of persuasion about human affairs.
Gorgias, however, does not take this route. Instead, he claims that rhetoric differs from other technai in that it consists entirely of speeches, without any grubby hands-on work. Socrates points out that this does not distinguish rhetoric from mathematics. Besides, it still doesn’t say what rhetoric is about.
Gorgias then says that rhetoric is about the greatest of human concerns. But Socrates points out that other arts make the same claims about health, money, etc. Besides, Gorgias doesn’t actually say what this greatest good is, so Socrates asks, “What is this thing that you claim is the greatest good for humankind, a thing that you claim to be a producer of?” (452d).[1]
Gorgias replies: “The thing that is in actual fact the greatest good . . . It is the source of freedom for humankind itself and at the same time the source of rule over others in one’s own city” (452d). Rhetoric produces the greatest good by teaching
. . . the ability to persuade by speeches judges in a law court, councilors in a council meeting, and assemblymen in an assembly or in any other political gathering that might take place. In point of fact, with this ability, you’ll have the doctor as your slave, and the physical trainer, too. As for this financial expert of yours, he’ll turn out to be making more money for somebody else instead of himself; for you, in fact, if you’ve got the ability to speak and to persuade the crowds. (452e)
The art of rhetoric literally gives one the power to enslave the practitioners of all the other arts, because rhetoric allows one to grasp the levers of political power, which allows one to regulate the whole of society.
Later in the dialogue, Gorgias argues that rhetoric actually gives one the power to persuade people about every other art better than those who know and practice those arts themselves. An orator who knows nothing about medicine is capable of persuading a patient to take his medicine better than the doctor who knows why the medicine is necessary. Socrates finds this power spooky, to which Gorgias says, “Oh yes, Socrates, if only you knew all of it, that it encompasses and subordinates to itself just about everything that can be accomplished” (456a).
At this point, it becomes clear how sophistry is a counterfeit of philosophy.
The sophists teach the art of rhetoric, understood as the pursuit of the best life for mankind: freedom for oneself and power over others. Gorgias actually defined “virtue” as “the capacity to rule over people” (Plato, Meno, 73c–d). One attains freedom for oneself and power over others through politics.
Philosophers also pursue the best life for mankind. They, too, understand the good life in terms of virtues like justice, courage, and temperance. But for Socrates and Plato, the best life for man is apolitical rather than political. Genuine freedom for oneself is inconsistent with power over others.
Once the art of rhetoric lets you grasp political power, you can “encompass and subordinate” all other arts, as well as all sciences, and indeed all the goods produced in society. Beyond that, rhetoric has the power to make lesser arts effective by making them more persuasive than genuine truth and skill.
Philosophy has a similarly lofty position vis-à-vis the arts, sciences, and all the goods of the world. Wisdom encompasses and subordinates all things, making them effective producers of well-being by using them rightly.
Gorgias, however, hastens to make clear the crucial distinction between sophistry and philosophy. Rhetoric, he says, is morally neutral. It can be used for good or ill. Thus, teachers of rhetoric such as Gorgias cannot be held responsible for the uses to which their students put it.
Sophistry was more than the art of rhetoric. It was the art of rhetoric joined with a political ideology that can be called technocracy, which means the rule of techne, which basically means the rule of experts who promise to scientifically understand and technically manage human existence.
Technocracy is dangerous, however, because it accumulates power but not wisdom. Because it is morally neutral, it can’t answer the question, “Can there be too much power, too much control?” It can’t set limits to itself. It lacks wisdom’s exclusive orientation to the good, without which the all-encompassing and all-subordinating power it commands cannot reliably produce well-being for ruler or ruled alike. The problem with technocracy is that it can rule everything but itself.
* * *
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Note
[1] Plato, Gorgias, trans. Donald J. Zeyl, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).
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9 comments
I really enjoyed the simple and clear style of this article, even though I do not agree with the conclusion. I think the author succinctly and elegantly describes Sophistry and its history, but stretches the meaning of Technocracy (using its original Greek meaning) to link it to Sophistry, as the title suggests. We should bear in mind that what we mean by Technocracy nowadays has a much narrower definition. It simply describes a government in which the elite are comprised of technical or scientific experts.
This was very well-written, Greg.
I appreciate your thorough explanation, especially since I don’t read much Greek philosophy.
You’re a wise man.
Looking forward for Greg’s article on the French situation…
Meanwhile, is this article worth being excited about?
https://www.timesofisrael.com/mass-walkout-as-major-french-paper-taps-far-right-editor-with-record-of-antisemitism/
“Mass walkout as major French paper taps far-right editor with record of antisemitism
Geoffroy Lejeune, 34, former editor of far-right publication, appointed to lead Journal du Dimanche following takeover by conservative billionaire”
I forget, which ethnic group suooosedly has the highest verbal IQ?
Jews?
I read the dialogue a while back. My impression is that Gorgias comes across as a solipsistic BS artist who disbelieves in objective reality and plays elaborate word games – in other words, a postmodernist.
Europeans in France need help to design a simple, factual and attractive black and white flyer that can be printed A4 or A5 and mass delivered. Educating the population on what is happening and how it can be resolved – mass deportations. Make it normie friendly and refer to French culture etc. The ideal flyer can be memed online as well.
Probably best if there is no website listed on the flyer, then various activist groups can either add their own website or leave blank.
Let’s make the most of this amazing opportunity.
This was the most edifying article I have read in a long time. The system we are living in now is worse, than not having wisdom despite a good faith, but failed effort. This system is predicated on a constant barrage of willful deceit, lies and manipulations. They even use a matryoschka doll of sophistry calling it: PR; nudging; news.
Very thoughtful article. Thank you.
Greg Johnson wrote:
I am going to have to disagree in that I don’t think our problem is one of amoral technology or technocracy at all.
Engineers have long complained that their craft has been subverted by political hacks who understand technology about as well as a pig understands Sunday.
Compare Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover.
The latter was a mining engineer who made a personal fortune in the craft, and having good Quaker ancestry, he was as honest as Jimmy Carter and had served as a laudable famine-relief Tsar who might have actually saved millions of lives rather than captaining the deaths of millions like the man who won the U.S. Presidential election in 1932.
Hoover was a competent Secretary of Commerce, and was nearly as Progressive as the Hyde Park plutocrat and demagogue who was able to convince the hungry and unemployed in his Fireside Chats on the radio that he was a man-of-the-people who cared, and who was working tirelessly to help them.
FDR was like his neighbor, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. an unironic Jeffersonian Democrat and no doubt the better rhetorician of the two Presidents. Hoover, however, was arguably the more technically competent.
President Herbert Hoover had cut his teeth in the “Horatio Alger” system of the early 20th century and simply could not believe after the Stock Market Crash of 1929 that the ship would not eventually right itself.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s plan for the Depression was hardly any better ─ little more than expanding the scope of the Federal government, particularly the Executive branch bureaucracy. When FDR’s court-packing scheme failed in 1937 and many experimental New Deal planks were on the verge of being considered unconstitutional or even Fascist, the President as Commander-in-Chief started plotting for Interventionist War as the solution to the unemployment problem and a new World War to prime the economic pump.
In the end Pearl Harbor ended the Depression more than any Fireside Chat or impotent Alphabet Soup agency. President Franklin Roosevelt was elected to four unprecedented terms of office and attained nearly Godlike status, while President Hoover’s largely-undeserved negative reputation remains to this day.
Many relatives and elders whom I grew up with and who intimately remembered the Great Depression might or might not have been die-hard Republicans, but they resented Hoover and reluctantly or otherwise revered Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
This is unfortunate in many ways because Herbert Hoover, while being a better technocrat than a rhetorician, was not an Interventionist ─ and he actually addressed the nation’s Mexican migrant problem during the Depression with deportations now called outright Ethnic Cleansing.
Fortunately the Supreme Court did not gut all “Fascist” ideas in the New Deal. The National Labor Relations Act is one such law. But to keep my commentary limited to pamphlet size instead of book length, I would like now to move on to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project ─ dubbed “the Modern Prometheus.”
Cristopher Nolan has just completed an Imax movie on “the father of the atomic bomb,” and I am looking forward to seeing it, although I somewhat dislike the thesis of the “Modern Prometheus” book about Oppenheimer.
I am not looking forward to 70 mm film shot in Black & White or washed out color just to be technically clever. Nolan’s Dunkirk film (2017) was visually impressive while being devoid of any political or even military nuances other than that the Good Guys won. I expected A-grade material and got a B-minus historical movie.
Cillian Murphy should be very good in the title role of Dr. Oppenheimer, while Matt Damon as General Leslie R. Groves, that I am not so sure about. Mr. Damon should have at least worn a pot-belly prosthesis, because from the trailers, I don’t think that he will be able to give the Gen. Groves role the gravitas and dignity that Paul Newman did in an earlier iteration of the story. I can hardly wait to see.
General Groves was an engineer who built the Pentagon under budget and was selected to lead work on the weapon that was believed would win the war. Groves had a legendary fondness for Hershey’s chocolate bars, while Oppenheimer was an ambitious secular Jew and academic with a penchant for chain-smoking Chesterfields and collecting Communist wives and mistresses.
The tale of Doc. Oppenheimer is a classic one of the amoral scientists who pursued the technically “sweet” (his words) superbombs *because they can and not because they should.*
General Groves is just another dumb Goy who was able to harness this apocalyptical malevolence in the service of the star-spangled Satan.
Trinity Test Site, NM 1945.
I don’t entirely agree with this assessment, however. The White Nationalist expert on foreign affairs, Mr. Eric Striker goes so far as to think that NATO is motivated by nothing more than LGBTQ+ and that the world will be a much better place once the United States is forced to abandon its nuclear weapons.
I’m more inclined to see it like the late Holocaust Revisionist Friedrich Paul Berg did in that the world was saved from Communism by two things: Adolf Hitler and the atomic bomb.
Mr. Berg was a Columbia University-educated engineer who once worked in the World Trade Center. He notably described the United States as a “luxury lunatic asylum.” We had many discussions together over the years.
Likewise, my octogenarian Dad was an aerospace and nuclear engineer. His job title was “Scientist” this or that, but he was not an academic. His advanced degree was in Mathematics & Statistics and his specialty was reliability engineering.
Dad’s first job out of college was for Thiokol chemical working on the Minuteman ICBM, which was an unproven solid-rocket fuel design that had to deliver a 800 kiloton warhead onto the Cold War enemy with extreme accuracy in a minute’s notice. Earlier generation ICBMs like the Atlas or the Titan had to be tanked up or kept that way with dangerous and toxic liquid fuels, and I can remember in 1980 when a Titan II missile blew up in its silo in Arkansas. The 9 Megaton nuclear warhead did exactly what it was supposed to do, “Fail Safe,” and there was no radioactive leakage.
I started school in Las Vegas, Nevada in the 1960s with my Dad evaluating atomic bomb test data from the Nevada Test Site. They were only doing underground nuclear tests by then ─ the last one being the Davy Crockett tactical nuke test witnessed by Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. But Las Vegas, Nevada then was a far cry from a tiny Mormon watering hole on the dusty trail between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles in those days. It did not yet resemble Babylon, at least not like it does now.
Anyway, when the Space Shuttle SRBs blew up in 1986, Thiokol brought my Dad back as the expert who could fix the problem.
The Space Shuttle solid rocket boosters (SRBs) had never been designed to work in frigid weather, but the public wanted to see the Teacher in Space in time for Reagan’s State of the Union address.
The public wants “zero defects” but engineers know that we don’t live in that kind of world. They have to design for failure all the time but rarely do they get to define what is meant by success.
After using his engineering credentials working for the military-industrial-complex for most of his professional life (and lucky to find the work) my Dad was not too happy when I joined the Army forty years ago. He enjoyed working for NASA projects but not so much the military ones.
However, Dad did not regret working on weapons of mass-destruction (WMDs) because something like the Minuteman Missile made a very good deterrent to Communist mischief. As he put it, “it packs a wallop.”
Doc. Oppenheimer famously lost his security clearance in the 1950s. That and rending one’s garments over Hiroshima and Nagasaki (instead of bombing the nasty Natzees) is probably what the Christopher Nolan film is going to be about.
This, and that little stinker, Dr. Edward Teller testifying against his former boss. Teller was an agnostic Hungarian Jew who had witnessed the Red Terror as a boy and who had lost most of his right foot in a streetcar accident in Munich. Teller studied physics under German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg.
Because he owned and drove a car, Teller drove physicist Leo Szilard (who postulated the nuclear Chain Reaction while watching London traffic signals in 1933) out to Long Island, New York to meet with celebrity scientist Albert Einstein in 1940 to write a letter to President Roosevelt urging him to develop an atomic bomb. Those Jews were certain that Adolf Hitler was doing so even as they spoke.
Oppenheimer established the laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico and is called the father of the A-bomb, while Teller, working out of the radiation laboratory at UC -Livermore, has been called the father of the H-bomb.
It is not true that the people who built the bombs did not discuss the moral implications of their work.
First Szilard would not work for the U.S. military at all, and he attempted to persuade President Truman not to use the bomb against Japan in 1945.
Oppenheimer was of the opinion that the atomic bomb should be delivered to the military and be used as soon as possible. Teller decided not to sign Szilard’s petition.
Teller later wrote:
“First, Szilard was right. As scientists who worked on producing the bomb, we bore a special responsibility. Second, Oppenheimer was right. We did not know enough about the political situation to have a valid opinion. Third, what we should have done but failed to do was to work out the technical changes required for demonstrating the bomb [very high] over Tokyo and submit that information to President Truman.”
Oppenheimer wrote to a critic long after the war:
“You may well have forgotten Guernica, Dachau, Coventry, Belsen, Warsaw, Dresden and Tokyo. I have not.”
Back during the Clinton Administration, my Dad and his engineer friends from the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory were furious that the light-skinded Negress Hazel O’Leary got the Integral Fast Breeder Reactor program killed just as it was about to pay off with turnkey applications. It actually cost more to ashcan the project than to finish it properly.
Hazel O’Leary was an affirmative-action UC Berkeley and Harvard lawyer that had once married an Irish Democrat who had been a utilities bureaucrat. As Slick Bill’s Secretary of Energy, Hazel knew about as much about engineering as a pig knows about Sunday.
Recently, President Bidet’s Canadian-born Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm posthumously restored Doc. Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Great.
Dr. Teller testified in 1954 that he no longer trusted Dr. Oppenheimer’s judgement on security matters. That should have gone without saying. Oppenheimer surrounded himself with Communists and was blind to Soviet espionage on the most secret American project of World War II. General Groves estimated that the Soviets would need twenty years to duplicate the first atomic bomb tested at Trinity, New Mexico in 1945. It actually only took them until 1949 to duplicate this feat.
The Soviets were not as backwards as the Americans thought, but they also had much help from friendly travelers. I don’t think Oppenheimer was a traitor but he could be incredibly naïve when it came to Communists. And losing his AEC security clearance during the Cold War hardly affected his academic stature except as a darling of the Left.
Secretary Granholm, the first female Governor of Michigan, is at least White, a naturalized U.S. citizen with a husband and three children. But she is another f@king bureaucrat lawyer and not an actual engineer.
I did not go into Engineering because I could correctly see that you don’t get to work on cool stuff like landing men on the Moon most of the time, but instead do a lot of dubious projects that are nearly always government contracts. I don’t know if I made the right choice or not. I am proud of the things that my Dad did. But he and his friends were the first to argue that engineers are like prostitutes come Sunday morning.
The “technical experts” are not amoral at all. But they are obligated to work for their Johns, Hazels, and Jennifers ─ who are political swamp creatures, who themselves are the minions of those who actually do call the shots.
My Dad (and my Uncle who was also a post-Sputnik nuclear and rocket scientist) looked at it philosophically in that their families depended on them to have decent jobs (and many jobs are much worse). They talked thoughtfully about the morality of their work and everything else about it all the time.
None of them ever made any career moves based on something like the typical yuppies who want a better compensation package to get the latest sports car or boat. All of them had relatively big Mormon families. To do so, they both gave up plum jobs and global travel to avoid the rat race.
From the 1999 cult classic movie Office Space when the software engineers are wondering with a great measure of lamentation what it would be like to still be working for Penetrode company when they were aged fifty, the Indian software associate perks up with his Apu voice, “it would be nice to have that kind of job security.”
Mad Scientist or Mike Judge movies aside, the public’s view of the engineer is completely skewed.
They see engineers and rocket scientists like the comic book nerds from the TV show Big Bang Theory. My Dad used to watch that show which came on just before the Evening News and resents it to this day.
“We depend on engineers as a society, but they are always seen as just nerds.”
This illustrates the problem. We live in a technological world where almost nobody understands technology. We might as well be practicing black magic.
Technology is not an App on one’s Smart Phone. Dumb policy bimbos and affirmative-action lawyers are the ones who really call the shots.
It is not the Technocrats who are the ones devoid of moral introspection.
🙂
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