THE SOPHIST
in the daytime melodrama
of my imagination
you appear frequently
like a Shakespearean device
a witch or a madwoman
whispering asides to the audience
acting as the mouthpiece
of the protagonist’s doubts
about the validity
of his selfspun myth
his reasons and excuses
the words on your lips
are straight from the shadowed corners
and crevices of his soul
maddening in their cruelty
and truth
onstage
he slays your arguments
with superior rhetoric
whittles them down
to useless nubs
as you slink away
but soon return
with newfound confidence
and a knowing smile
like a Shakespearean device
a witch or a madwoman
whispering asides to the audience
acting as the mouthpiece
of the protagonist’s doubts
about the validity
of his selfspun myth
his reasons and excuses
the words on your lips
are straight from the shadowed corners
and crevices of his soul
maddening in their cruelty
and truth
onstage
he slays your arguments
with superior rhetoric
whittles them down
to useless nubs
as you slink away
but soon return
with newfound confidence
and a knowing smile
The Sophist -- Richard T. Scott
The figure in the painting is essentially a self-portrait of the artist. Ignoring the reality of the rocket launching into the impending storm, he is intent on using rhetoric rather than logic to persuade his audience. Logic is true only in itself, in the mind and not in the world. It leads to momentary metaphysical and ethical conclusions that are contradictory and ultimately not convincing. Platon claimed that an earlier philosopher, Protagoras, invented the role of professional sophist. He began as a porter, but Demokritos realized that he tied his load together with such perfect geometric accuracy that he must be natural mathematician and took him into his own household to teach him philosophy. He became a close friend of the Athenian dictator Perikles and, according to Plutarchus, once spent an entire day arguing with him about a hypothetical athletic contest in which a man had been accidentally killed by a javelin: "Was his death to be attributed to the javelin, to the man who threw it, or to the authorities responsible for the conduct of the games?" His book on the "Practice of Wranglings," referring to wrestling term for flooring an opponent, began with his best-known statement, "Man is the measure of all things: of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not." He devised a taxonomy of speech acts, such as assertion, question, answer, and command, and insisted on "orthoepeia," the correct use of words, as in his linguistic analysis of a poem by Simonides that Platon reported. He insisted that there are always 2 opposing arguments on any issue (Platon's student Aristoteles claimed that Protagoras' own objective was "to make the weaker argument stronger," although in actuality it was to promote pragmatism rather than some idealistic virtue.) His professed agnosticism caused Athens to expel him and destroy his books, though some fragments have survived. According to Diogenes Laërtius, these included "On the Gods," "Imperative," "On Ambition," "On Incorrect Human Actions," "On those in Hades," "On Sciences," "On Virtues," "On the Original State of Things," and "Trial over a Fee." He died at 70, a decade after Perikles, when Platon was 3 or 4.
ReplyDelete