sophistry

why I am bad at it; why Thrasymachus is mad at it

There’s a promotional video for my undergrad place, the St. John’s of Annapolis, that was shot in the fifties, and is something that I think about all the time. It’s a strange sort of hagiography, a day in the life of someone over thirty pretending to be twenty-two, but there’s one moment in particular that stands out.

At an impossibly narrow seminar table (class size, sixteen, eighteen?), shot from the narrow end facing down, college “freshmen” are debating Plato’s Republic, specifically the part in the first tenth where Thrasymachus is arguing with all the passion of his hometown being overtaken by imperial Athens, that justice is the advantage of whoever happens to be stronger, full stop.

In the film, our hero is sitting at this table and listening to various forms of mid-century cynicism, while the tension builds and builds. He doesn’t know what to do but then finally, when another student makes a dressed-up worldly-wise version of the original Thrasymachian claim, something snaps.

“That’s not true,” he says, almost starting out of his chair. “That’s not true, and you know it!”

The narrative sets you up to feel a little like the viewer of a newly post-Hayes-code moviegoer, where you are enjoying the sentimental payoff but you are also asking yourself how strong the guilt that accompanies nausea will be in the next five.

But I love this cinematic moment so much. It embodies all too well the sick feeling when you, a young person who has zero ability to predict how well you will be able to make your point in the seething sea of others, see someone manage exactly what you want to do but know not how. The grace and artifice of narrative give you an image of what it would look like if you (at thirty) could walk backwards in time and really stick it to the people who were, after all, so wrong.

Thrasymachus is wrong, although he has a point: it’s one thing to watch the heirs and hangers-on of imperial Athens speak in rosy terms of true true justice, the kind to whom their polity pays elegant and hollow homage, and quite another to sit there and let them get away with it. In an important sense, what Thrasymachus presents as his very own incredibly intelligent point, is nevertheless an attempt to skewer what he perceives as the ugliest and most galling form of sophistry, that you could say one thing and have the burden of your life mean quite another.

For me, I often sat in undergrad class when people were saying things so laughably untrue that I didn’t know how to exist in the same place as them. And then you knew that most of the time they didn’t even mean it, either, they were just stirring the pot for reasons quite unknown to me.

And there is also something true about me that I am still trying to figure out: when someone is heinously wrong on purpose, on exactly on purpose, for the purpose of being wrong, one might even say, for the delight of making the weaker speech the stronger, I actually don’t know what to do. Usually and to this day, I sit there with that own peculiar sort of nausea, lost in the headlights of the human being who would choose to do that, on purpose; and crucially, without having anything immediate to say in return. As you can imagine, this continues to pose practical problems for me. It’s one of the reasons I love being a teacher, because in the classroom, I have just enough leverage that I can often tease people into saying their real opinion—and then we can talk.

And so that’s why I love the hero of the video: “that’s not true,” he says, and fair enough. But it’s the next line that’s the real one: “that’s not true,” he says, “and you know it” —what on earth would it take for me, a human being, to look someone in the eye and tell them what they do in fact know better? Until I figure this out, I’m at the mercy of shamelessness; shamelessness I can’t even punch in the nose.