warrior-poet

During the middle of the 5th century BCE saw the emergence of a class of people representing the classical prototype of the "warrior-poet", the professional soldier. These men essentially served the trading city states of merchants and often corrupt politicians as soldiers for hire, while allowing time and sufficient funds to consider the greater questions of life. Some of these came to be known as the "Sophists".



The name is derived from the verb sophizesthai, "making a profession of being inventive and clever," who, in contrast to the philosophers that had preceded them, also asked for money for philosophical instruction.
Unlike previous philosophers, the sophists saw less value in contemplating the world outside, but rather than world within. "What is the sense of such speculations?" they asked, since men do not live in these so-called real worlds. This is the meaning of the pronouncement of Protagoras of Abdera (mid-5th century) that "Man is the measure of all things, of those which are that they are and of those which are not that they are not." For man the world is what it appears to him to be, not something else; and, though he meant man in general, he illustrated it by pointing out that even in regard to an individual man it makes no sense to tell him that it is really warm when he is shivering with cold, because for him it is cold--for him, the cold exists, is there.
This humanistic and essentially practical view of the real world by the sophists was almost certainly influenced by the fact that many killed for a living and were therefore less inclined to be found dwelling on big thoughts and big ideas than methods to achieve immediate goals.


The Sophists were not only skeptical of what had by then become a philosophical tradition but also of other traditions. On the basis of the observation that different nations have different rules of conduct even in regard to things considered most sacred--such as the relations between the sexes, marriage, and burial--they concluded that most rules of conduct are conventions. What is really important is to be successful in life and to gain influence on others. This they promised to teach. The sophist Gorgias was proud of the fact that, having no knowledge of medicine, he was more successful in persuading a patient to undergo a necessary operation than his brother, a physician, who knew when an operation was necessary. The older Sophists, however, were far from openly preaching immoralism. They, nevertheless, gradually came under suspicion because of their sly ways of arguing.



One of the later Sophists, however, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (late 5th century), even claimed "right is what is beneficial for the stronger or better one"; that is, for the one able to win the power to bend others to his will. Thus the sophists were responsible for laying out the framework within western thought for the purely centric and selfish view of personal power which underpins many of today's courses and self-help and personal-power courses to succeed financially.