Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy. Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people... there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind's first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That's what it is all about.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Socrates fought a cultural war between absolute and relative truth, viewing Sophists as enemies of the immutable Immortal Principle.
- In plain terms
- Socrates defended absolute truth against relativistic Sophists.
- What can you take from it?
- Recognize the stakes in debates over truth.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Is truth ever truly absolute?
- How do cultural contexts shape our view of truth?
Another view
The binary framing oversimplifies complex intellectual landscapes.
More from Robert M. Pirsig
The Immortal Principle was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes called it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the first to see the Immorta…
Permalink to quote #45 The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea o…
Permalink to quote #47 Many of the older Sophists were selected as 'ambassadors' of their cities, certainly no office of disrespect. The name Sophist was even applied without dispara…
Permalink to quote #44
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