MY HIGH SCHOOL WAS THE COLEGIO NACIONAL de Buenos Aires. Among the several professors who taught me Spanish literature, I was fortunate to have, for two of the six school years, Isaias Lerner, a brilliant specialist in the Spanish Golden Age. With him we studied in painstaking detail some of the major classics: the Lazarillo, the poems of Garcilaso, Don Quixote, La Celestina. Lerner loved those texts and enjoyed reading them, and his love and enjoyment were contagious. Many of us followed the adventures of young Lazarillo with the enthusiasm we reserved for cliffhangers, the love lyrics of Garcilaso with our own saccharine daydreams, the brave endeavors of Don Quixote with a budding sense of the meaning of justice, and the dark, erotic world of La Celestina with the physical thrill of what the old bawd calls, cursing the devil, “the flooding of your sad, dark dungeons with light.” Lerner taught us to find in literature clues to our identity.
As adolescents we are unique; as we grow older, we realize that the singular being of which we proudly speak in the first-person singular is in reality a patchwork made up of other beings that in a smaller or greater measure define us. To recognize these mirrored or learned identities is one of the consolations of old age: to know that certain persons long turned to dust still keep on living in us, just as we will live now in someone whose existence perhaps we don’t even suspect. I realize that now, in my sixty-sixth year, Lerner is one of those immortals.
When in my last year of high school, in 1966, the military authorities took charge of the university, Lerner and fifteen other professors protested the arbitrary measure and were promptly fired from their posts. His replacement, a barely literate nonentity, accused him of having taught us “Marxist theory.” To be able to carry on his professional life, Lerner went into exile in the United States.
Lerner understood something essential in the art of teaching. A teacher can help students discover unknown territories, provide them with specialized information, help create for themselves an intellectual discipline, but, above all, he or she must establish for them a space of mental freedom in which they can exercise their imagination and their curiosity, a place in which they can learn to think. Simone Weil says that culture is “the formation of attention.” Lerner helped us acquire that necessary attentive training.
Lerner’s method was to have us read out aloud an entire book, line after line, adding his comments as he saw fit. These comments were erudite because he believed in our adolescent intelligence and our persistent curiosity; they were also funny or deeply tragic because for him reading was above all an emotional experience; they were investigations of things of a time long past because he knew that what had once been imagined seeped into whatever we imagine today; they were relevant to our world because he knew that literature always addresses its present readers.
But he would not think for us. Coming across yet another speech in which Celestina, without telling a single lie, twists and distorts the story so that whoever is following her seemingly faultless logic falls into the trap of taking her words for facts, Lerner would stop us and smile. “Gentlemen,” he would ask, “do you believe what she’s saying?” We were supposed to have read the book beforehand at home, and also some of the relevant criticism. We were usually scrupulous; we dared not disobey him. So one of us, with the urge adolescents have for showing off, would answer, “Well, Sir, Malkiel says . . . ,” and begin to quote the opinion of one of La Celestina’s most prestigious critics. “No, Sir,” Lerner would interrupt. “I wasn’t asking Dr. Malkiel, whose opinion I’ve read in her admirable book, as, I’m sure, as a good and faithful student, you have too. I’m asking you, Sir.” And so he would force us, step by step, to tease out Celestina’s reasoning, to follow the labyrinth of her arguments made up of vulgar wisdom, ancient sayings, commonplace bits of the classics, and other popular lore, woven into a web from which it was difficult to extricate oneself. The star-crossed lovers Calisto and Melibea had fallen for her tale, and so did we, savvy as we thought we were in bluffing and fibbing. That was how we learned about “lying with the truth.” Later on, the concept, discovered through the wiles of a sixteenth-century bawd, would help us understand the political speeches delivered with much waving of hands by a succession of uniformed authorities from the balcony of the presidential palace. To our common stock of “Why?” and “Who?” and “When?” Lerner taught us to ask “How?”
To formulate a question is to resolve it.
—KARL MARX, Zur Judenfrage
Words are the means by which Dante accomplishes his voyage from the dark wood to the Empyrean along the cartography of the Otherworld (outlined in Chapters 9 and 14, below). Through his own inquisitiveness he advances along the path set out by Virgil, and through the inquisitiveness of others he is allowed the final redeeming vision. Following his itinerant inquiries we, his readers, might also learn how to ask the right questions.
After crossing the first seven heavens, Dante, led by Beatrice, enters the abode of the Fixed Stars. Here Beatrice appeals to the saints to allow Dante to drink from their table since divine grace has already granted him a foretaste of what awaits a soul that is blessed. The saints respond joyfully to her request, and out of the brightest group of stars Saint Peter appears and sings so wonderful a song that Dante can neither recall it nor transcribe it.
But my pen leaps and I won’t write it down:
Because the images we paint, and our words,
Are far too garish for such folds.1
Then Beatrice addresses Peter and says that even though he truly knows (because nothing is hidden from him) that Dante “loves well, and well hopes and believes,” it would be best if Dante now spoke for himself since all citizens of the realm of Heaven must prove that they profess the true faith. And at Beatrice’s insistence, Dante must submit to what is, for all effects and purposes, a school examination.
Just as the student readies himself but doesn’t speak
Until the teacher lays out the question for him,
To sanction it, not to conclude it,
Just so I readied myself with every argument,
While she was speaking, to be prepared
For such an examiner and such a profession.2
Peter proceeds to question Dante, beginning with “What is faith?” and concluding with delighted praise for Dante’s answers. In fact, so satisfied is Peter with Dante’s discourse that he exclaims:
If everything drawn
From doctrine down there were thus understood,
There’d be no room for the Sophist’s wit.3
Saint Peter’s examination of Dante strictly follows the recognized medieval Scholastic method that guided intellectual curiosity through clearly set-out paths for several hundreds of years. From about the twelfth century until the Renaissance, when humanism changed the traditional teaching methods in Europe, education in the Christian universities was largely Scholastic. Scholasticism (from the Latin schola, which originally meant a learned conversation or debate, and only later a school or place of learning) arose from an attempt to achieve knowledge concordant both with secular reason and with Christian faith. The Scholastics, such as Saint Bonaventure, considered themselves to be not innovators or original thinkers but “compilers or weavers of approved opinions.”4
The Scholastic teaching method consisted of several steps: the lectio, or reading of an authoritative text in class; the meditatio, or exposition and explication; and the disputationes, or discussion of issues, rather than a critical analysis of the texts themselves. Students were expected to know the classic sources and also the approved commentaries; questions were then set for them on particular topics. From all these procedures, the “Sophist’s wit” was supposed to be sternly excluded.5
The “Sophist’s wit” was the ability to propose a false reasoning in such a way that it appeared true (the method favored by Celestina) either because it distorted the rules of logic and had only the semblance of truth or because it reached an unacceptable conclusion. The term and its pejorative meaning derived from Aristotle, who associated Sophists with slanderers and thieves. The Sophists, Aristotle had taught, were noxious because they labored by means of seemingly logical arguments, using subtle falsities and reaching fallacious conclusions, thus leading others into error. For example, a Sophist might try to convince a listener to concede a premise (even one totally irrelevant to the thesis) that the Sophist knew beforehand how to refute.6
Thanks mainly to Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, the Sophists have rarely enjoyed a happy place in the history of philosophy. Disregarding the Platonic restrictions to the metaphysical and the Aristotelian to the empirical, the Sophists embraced both, proposing an empirical inquiry into metaphysical questions. This, according to the historian G. B. Kerford, condemned them to “a kind of half-life between Presocratics on the one hand and Plato and Aristotle on the other, [where] they seem to wander for ever like lost souls.”7
Before Plato, the Greek term sophistes was a positive denomination, related to the words sophos and sophia, meaning “wise” and “wisdom,” and designating a skilled craftsman or artist, such as a diviner, a poet or a musician. The legendary Seven Wise Men of Greece were called sophistai (in Homer’s day, a sophie was a skill of any kind) and so were the pre-Socratic philosophers. After Plato, the term sophistry came to mean “a reasoning that is plausible, fallacious and dishonest,” and a sophist discourse, a medley of false arguments, misleading comparisons, distorted quotations, and absurdly mixed metaphors. Paradoxically, this definition of the sophist method presupposed an understanding of a much greater question. “Plato knew he could interpret the sophist as the antipode of the philosopher,” wrote Heidegger, “only if he was already acquainted with the philosopher and knew how matters stand with him.” For Plato and his followers, it was easier to identify the faulty system of their perceived opponents than to define the features of their own undertaking. In the second century C.E., Lucian of Samosata described the Christians as “worshipping the crucified sophist himself and living under his laws.”8
Medieval and early Renaissance Europe inherited the scorn and the underlying questions. When in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it became necessary to label the practitioners of syllogistic reasoning, pedantic rhetoric, and empty erudition in the universities and cloisters, Erasmus and his followers used Sophists to deride them. In Spain, the leading scholar Fray Luis de Carvajal, who first defended and then criticized Erasmus’s reading of Scripture, strongly supported the position against what he called the sophistry of many Scholastics. “I, for my part, would wish to teach a theology that is neither quarrelsome nor sophist and impure but free from all contamination.”9
Though the texts of the ancient Sophists themselves were long lost and only the caricature of their authors survived, many humanists accused the European universities of harboring inefficient teachers and mediocre scholars who were guilty of those same sophist sins that Plato and Aristotle had denounced. By the sixteenth century, François Rabelais, following the now established idea of the Sophist as a dullard, mocked the Scholastic theologians of the Sorbonne by depicting them as “sophist philosophers”: drunk, dirty, and money-grabbing. His hilarious creation Master Janotus de Bragomardo delivers in macaronic French, full of Latin distortions and misquotations, a Scholastic oration for the recovery of the bells of Notre Dame, which the giant Gargantua has stolen to hang on his mare. Master Janotus belts out with sophist panache: “A Town without bells is like a blinde man without a staffe, an Asse without a crupper, and a Cow without Cymbals; therefore be assured, until you have restored them unto us, we will never leave crying after you, like a blinde man that hath lost his staffe, braying like an Asse without a crupper, and making noise like a Cow without Cymbals.”10
It has been noted that Rabelais’s refusal to submit to orthodox literary forms (his Gargantua is a subversive riot of mock-chronicles, pastiches, fantastic catalogues, and vicious parodies) stems from a profound sympathy for popular lore and belief—or rather increasing unbelief in a time of spiritual crisis—and a knowledge of the undergrowth above which rose the official Christian culture of universities and cloisters.11 The social order, which in Dante’s time was already crumbling, found its image in the sixteenth century as the world of topsy-turvy, where the place of everything is in its antipodes: the donkey is the teacher, the dog, the master.12 According to the Oracle of the Bottle, which Gargantua’s son Pantagruel and his companions consult in the last chapter of the fifth book, “When you come into your World, do not fail to affirm and witness, that the greatest Treasures and most admirable Things are hidden under Ground, and not without reason.” “All Things Tend Towards Their End,” reads an inscription on the wall of the Oracle’s temple: both divine and human curiosity, Rabelais seems to be saying, are meant to be pursued to their uttermost reach. Our curiosity is to be rewarded not by looking upwards to the heavens but down to earth. “For all the Ancient Philosophers and Sages have held two things necessary, safely and pleasantly to arrive at the Knowledge of God and true Wisdom: first, God’s gracious Guidance, then Man’s Assistance.”13 For Rabelais, as for Dante before him, the hapless Sophists were not included among those honest seekers.
François Rabelais, “La Dive Bouteille” (The Oracle of the Bottle), from Illustrations du Cinquiesme et dernier livre des faicts et dicts héroïques du bon Pantagruel, 1565. (Bibliothèque nationale de France.)
In later centuries, there were exceptions to this accepted disparagement of the Sophists, and not all of them were minor. Hegel called the early Sophists “the masters of Greece,” who instead of merely meditating on the concept of being (like the philosophers of the Eleatic school) or discoursing on the facts of nature (like the phisiologoi of the Ionian school) chose to become professional educators. Nietzsche defined them as men who dared efface the borders between good and evil. Gilles Deleuze praised their ideas because of the interest these awaken in us. “There is no other definition of meaning,” he wrote, “but one identical to a proposition’s novelty.”14 Novelty, however, was not what the Sophists were after, but rather efficiency of a kind.
Sometime in the early decades of the fifth century B.C.E., perhaps during the fragile peace with Sparta after 421, there arrived in Athens a prominent philosopher from a city-state in the northwestern corner of the Peloponnese, Elis, known for the excellence of its horses and for having organized, three centuries earlier, the first Olympic Games. The name of the philosopher was Hippias, and he was celebrated for his prodigious memory (he could retain over fifty names after a single hearing) and for being able to teach, on demand and for a considerable fee, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, grammar, music, metrics, genealogy, mythology, history, and, of course, philosophy.15 He is also credited with the discovery of a curve and the quadratix, used in attempts to square the circle, and also for the trisection of an angle.16 Hippias was a voracious and curious reader, and compiled a sort of anthology of his favorite passages under the title Synagoge, “Collection.” He also wrote declamations on the classical poets which he offered to recite whenever the occasion arose, poetic productions that probably dealt with lofty moral questions. We must say “probably” because of all of Hippias’s extensive work, nothing has come down to us except a few quotations in the works of his critics: Plutarch, Xenophon, Philostratus, and, above all, Plato.17
Plato made Hippias the principal interlocutor of Socrates in two of his early dialogues, named, according to their length, Hippias Minor (or Lesser Hippias) and Hippias Major. In neither is the portrait of Hippias flattering. With little sympathy for the character, Plato has Socrates, somewhat tongue in cheek, seek from Hippias an answer to essential questions about justice and truth, knowing well that Hippias will be incapable of providing it. In his tentative responses, Hippias is shown as a pedant, a braggart who boasts that “I have never found any man who was my superior in anything,” someone who offers to answer any conundrum put to him (as he is said to have done at the festival of all Hellas),18 someone easily flattered and yet, at the same time, a curiously naive and trusting man. According to the classicist W. K. C. Guthrie, Hippias must have been someone “with whom it would be difficult to be angry.”19 Because he taught for money all around Greece, he was called a Sophist, a designation that referred not to a sect or a philosophical school but to a profession, that of itinerant teacher. Socrates despised the Sophists because they advertised themselves as purveyors of knowledge and virtue, two qualities that according to him were unteachable. Perhaps a few men, principally men of noble birth, could learn how to become virtuous and wise, but only on their own—and in Socrates’ opinion most of humanity was hopelessly incapable of learning how to become either.
The divide between the Sophists and the followers of Socrates was largely a matter of class. Plato was an aristocrat and scorned these wandering pedagogues who set themselves up for hire in the market among the rising middle class of the nouveau riche. This class was composed of merchants and artisans whose newly acquired wealth allowed them to buy weapons and, by enrolling in the infantry, political power. Their goal was to take the place of the old nobility, and for this they needed to learn how to speak effectively in an assembly. The Sophists offered to teach them the necessary rhetorical skills in exchange for money. “The sophists,” says I. F. Stone, “are treated with snobbish disdain in the pages of Plato for accepting fees. Generations of classical teachers have echoed this uncritically, though few of them could afford to teach without pay either.” However, not all Sophists kept the money they were given. There were those who distributed their pay among the poorer students, and there were others who refused to teach students they deemed hopeless. But because, by and large, they agreed to teach almost anyone for cash, Xenophon argued that the Sophists stripped themselves of their intellectual freedom and became slaves to their employers.20
It must be said that Socrates and his followers speak in negative terms not of all Sophists, past and present, but only of the Sophists of their day. Against these contemporaries they advanced not only social and philosophical objections but also accusations of perverting the truth. Xenophon had this to say: “I’m astonished that the men called Sophists today maintain that they often lead young people to virtue, when in fact they do the contrary. . . . They render them skilled with words, but not skilled with ideas.”21
The Sophists were also criticized because of their ostentatious posturing and contrived manners. In the second century C.E., Philostratus of Lemnos, who admired them and wrote The Lives of the Sophists to exalt them, argued that a true Sophist should speak only in a setting prestigious enough for his status: a temple would be acceptable, a theater as well, even an assembly or some place “proper to an imperial audience.” Facial expressions and gestures should be carefully controlled. Faces should be cheerful and confident but serious, the eyes steady and keen, though this might vary according to the subject of the declamation. During moments of intensity, a Sophist might stride about, sway from side to side, slap his thigh, and toss his head with passion. A Sophist should be fastidiously clean and exquisitely perfumed; his beard should be well cared for and daintily curled, and his dress scrupulously elegant. A generation earlier, Lucian of Samosata, in his satirical The Rhetorician’s Vade Mecum, recommends that the Sophist seek “bright colours or white for your clothes; the Tarentine stuff that lets the body show through is best; for shoes, wear either the Attic woman’s shape with the open network, or else the Sicyonians that show white lining. Always have a train of attendants, and a book in your hand.”22
Socrates, however much he believed in justice and truth, did not believe in the equality of all human beings. The Sophists (though one must be careful not to attribute the same opinions to all those grouped under the Sophist label) did. A few, such as Alcidamas, went so far as to challenge the institution of slavery—something Socrates and his disciples never did, any more than they questioned the right of a select enlightened few to govern. Hippias, instead, believed in a kind of practical cosmopolitanism, a universal solidarity that justified opposing even national laws for the sake of a better relationship with all men. One of the sources of this belief may have been the tolerance of foreign cults practiced at Delphos, which resulted in the unity of Greeks and “barbarians” in the age of Alexander, and also to the dissolution of the Greek polis that was so dear to Plato’s heart.23 For Hippias, laws preserved merely by tradition have no value because they are contradictory, allowing for unjust acts; the laws of nature, however, because they are universal, can eventually become the laws of a democratic political life. Hippias defended unwritten against written laws, and argued for the well-being of the individual through the well-being of the community. In Plato’s Republic, where none of the existing states that are discussed is ultimately chosen as ideal, it becomes clear that Socrates (Plato’s Socrates) believes in a society ruled not by democratic laws but by philosophical tyrants trained from their childhood to be “wise and good.”24
The half-century of Plato and Hippias was also that of Pericles, who for a short, miraculous time fostered in Athens a climate of rare political and intellectual freedom, as well as an effective government administration: even the plan of erecting new buildings on the Acropolis was perhaps devised by Pericles as a way of countering growing unemployment. After Pericles, every Athenian citizen could hope to have a voice in the running of the state, as long as he possessed the gifts of rhetoric and logic. Such an ideal society attracted a variety of people from many other cities, some escaping tyranny, some seeking an outlet for their talents, others looking to ply their trade profitably and freely. Among these immigrants were the Sophists. In contrast to Athens, Sparta, with the excuse of preserving moral order and secrets of state, regularly banished resident aliens from within its walls. Athens never adopted Sparta’s xenophobia, though Athenians did banish and even condemn to death those who opposed their way of life, Socrates among them.
In one of the dialogues of Plato’s middle period, Protagoras, the Sophist of that name, a critic of Hippias and a friend of Pericles who admired the regime Pericles had instituted, tells Socrates a myth to illustrate his conception of an efficient political system. To explain how it came about that irascible humans managed to live in a peaceful society, Protagoras explains that at a time when constant bickering threatened to destroy the entire human race, Zeus sent Hermes down to earth with two gifts that would enable humans to live together in relative harmony: aidos, the sense of shame that a traitor might feel on the battlefield, and dike, a sense of justice and respect for the rights of others. Together they are the essential components of the art of politics. Hermes asked whether these gifts should be distributed only to a select few who would specialize in the arts, or whether the art of politics should be given to all. “To all” was Zeus’s reply, “because cities cannot be formed if only a few posses aidos and dike.” Socrates does not respond to Protagoras’s story. He sarcastically dismisses the myth as “a great and fine sophist performance” and then drops the subject altogether in order to grill Protagoras on whether he believes that virtue is teachable. The question of democracy is not something that Socrates would, even for a moment, consider. And neither is the meaning of virtue, supposedly the subject of the dialogue.25
Just as Protagoras avoids a discussion of virtue itself, Hippias Minor is a dialogue about the definition of a truthful man that avoids a discussion of what constitutes truth. Hippias has just finished lecturing on the poets, in particular Homer. One of the listeners asks Socrates whether he has anything to say about such a magnificent speech, either in praise or to point out its errors. Socrates confesses that indeed certain questions have sprung to his mind, and with dangerous meekness he tells Hippias that he can understand why Homer calls Achilles the bravest of men and Nestor the wisest, but he can’t understand why Odysseus is called the most wily. Did Homer not make Achilles wily as well? Hippias answers that no, he didn’t, and quotes Homer’s words proving that Achilles is a truthful man instead. “Now, Hippias,” says Socrates, “I think I understand your meaning. When you say that Odysseus is wily, you clearly mean that he is false?”26 This leads to a discussion on whether it is better to be false intentionally or unintentionally. Socrates gets Hippias to admit that a wrestler who falls purposefully is a better wrestler than one who falls because he cannot help it, and that a singer who sings false deliberately is a better singer than one who has no ear at all. The conclusion is a sophistry to outdo all sophistries:
SOCRATES: And to do injustice is to do ill, and not to do injustice is to do well?
HIPPIAS: Yes.
SOCRATES: And will not the better and abler soul, when it does wrong, do wrong voluntarily, and the bad soul involuntarily?
SOCRATES: And the good man is he who has the good soul, and the bad man is he who has the bad?
HIPPIAS: Yes.
SOCRATES: Then the good man will do wrong voluntarily, and the bad man involuntarily, if the good man is he who has the good soul?
HIPPIAS: Which he certainly has.
SOCRATES: Then, Hippias, he who voluntarily does wrong and disgraceful things, if there be such a man, will be the good man?
But here Hippias can no longer bring himself to follow Socrates’ reasoning. Something stronger than faith in logic overcomes Hippias at last, and instead of taking the next fatal step in Socrates’ tortuous argument, he refuses to submit to what he knows not only to be perfidious but what is worse, absurd. “There I cannot agree with you,” says the honest sophist.27
“Nor can I agree with myself,” is Socrates’ surprising answer, “and yet that seems to be the conclusion which, as far as we can see at present, must follow from our argument. As I was saying before, I am all abroad, and being in perplexity am always changing my opinion. Now, that I or any ordinary man should wander in perplexity is not surprising, but if you wise men also wander, and we cannot come to you and rest from our wandering, the matter begins to be serious both to us and to you.”28
Socrates’ intention, to ridicule Hippias’s pretensions to wisdom, is of course clear, as is his own position, that the pursuit of knowledge of what is good, true, and just is an ongoing endeavor with no absolute conclusion. But the method by which he exposes Hippias is beneath Socrates’ reputed dignity. Of the two, it is Hippias who stands out in the dialogue as the stronger and more serious debater. Certainly, Socrates appears to be more wily, an Odysseus to Hippias’s Achilles, thanks to whom the debate on paradox has “turned into slapstick.”29 What emerges too, and very powerfully, is that rather than Socrates demonstrating the vacuity of Hippias’s teaching, Hippias ends up showing that the Socratic method of leading an interlocutor through a series of questions to the discovery of a contradiction in his affirmations can be dangerously unsound. Socrates himself recognizes this, aware as he must be of the difference between an unjust action performed justly and a just action performed unjustly.
Montaigne (quoting Erasmus) relates that Socrates’ wife, upon learning the verdict of the court condemning him to drink poison, exclaimed, “Those wretched judges have condemned him to death unjustly!” To which Socrates responded, “Would you really prefer that I were justly condemned?”30 But in the Hippias Minor, however thick Socrates lays on the irony, the unavoidable conclusion is that his arguments have led to a wrong, humanely unacceptable, conclusion. Probably this is not what Plato intended.
It is important to remember that just as the man called Hippias who has come down to us is almost entirely the interpretation of Socrates, the Socrates that we know is largely the version of Plato. “To what extent,” asks George Steiner, “is the Socrates of the major dialogues a partial or largely Platonic fiction, perhaps surpassing in intellectual impact, in both tragic and comic resonance a Falstaff, a Prospero or an Ivan Karamazov?”31 Perhaps, just as beneath the vast bulk of Falstaff we can glimpse the shadow of a different Prince Hal, and beneath the scholarly Prospero a different kind of Caliban, and even through the brutish Ivan Karamazov (the thought is very disturbing) his younger and compassionate brother Alexei, through Plato’s Socrates we can discern, not the Hippias whom the inquisitive philosopher taunts and mocks, but a different, lucid, discriminating thinker, curious about the logic of curiosity.
The society set up by Pericles did not survive the Macedonian armies or, later, the Roman colonists. Nor did the philosophy of the Sophists, except in the quotations of their detractors. Their books vanished, as did most of the details of their lives, but the remaining fragments of their work, and the depictions of their characters in the works of others, reveal a thriving desire to know more in a complex constellation of ideas and discoveries, not the least of which is the refusal to follow the apparent logic of the man who called himself “the midwife of thought” up a particularly devious garden path.32
