Socrates, knowing that he knows nothing and that he is the wisest man in all of Greece, knows that others know no more than he does. He begins to refute all the pronouncements of the elite, demonstrating that they are all wrong. Plato transforms this Socrates: he presents him not as the one who comes to destroy the claim to truth in all discourses, but as the one who possesses the truth and shares it in his speeches. The narrative shifts from "you are all wrong" to "I have the truth." Aristotle will believe in the concept of truth and will unite against all those who do not revere it: the Sophists. In truth, Socrates was against all the Sophists, all the rhetoricians; perhaps we could even say all public orators. Plato, himself a Sophist, appropriates Socrates in his dialogues to assert that a truth exists and that he can share it with the Academy. Like the other Sophists, he sought to train orators in Athens, and he succeeded in producing the greatest Sophist of all time: Aristotle, the first Sophist who was convinced he wasn't a Sophist—in other words, the first philosopher. This thesis delves into the very foundations of philosophy, knowledge, and the concept of truth itself.

Staging

We are in ancient Athens, where democracy, and therefore rhetoric, reigned supreme. Every powerful citizen was powerful because they managed to convince other citizens to vote in their favor. Naturally, it was an arena where everyone was against everyone else. Parents wanted their sons to become the best public orators in order to benefit the family in the political arena. The Greeks therefore sent their sons to sophists who taught them the art of persuading other citizens.

At this stage, the concept of truth doesn't really matter, at least not to the elite: the game is to convince others. Truth was something created for the followers. The idea of ​​"real truth," independent of discourse and to which discourse must pay homage to be considered valid, is a completely counterintuitive notion. The very word for truth in ancient Greek, aletheia, refers to a revelation of what was previously hidden from view, not to a truth independent of all vision, or even independent at all.

The concept of truth was therefore invented, as if by magic, by Plato when he overturned Socrates on his head, and produced Aristotle who, having believed in it, became its greatest spokesman and through his posterity rivaled the Sacred Texts in the world's greatest religions.

Socrates, against all odds

Socrates learns from the Oracle of Delphi that he is the wisest of all. But he knows nothing, and he knows it. If he knows that he knows nothing, and that he is the wisest, then it follows that no one knows anything at all. Yet he has seen all his life these noble people convincing the populace as if they knew everything. He now knows that no one else knows anything and that they are all pretending. With this newfound confidence in his wisdom, he sets out to conquer Athens.

He begins talking to everyone who seems to know something, just to show everyone that they are all as ignorant as he is. It is because he knows they know no more than he does that Socrates manages to find the rhetorical path to dismantle the semblance of logic. The Sophists are thus thwarted, for no matter what they tried to convince Socrates of, he always found a way to show them that they know nothing… because he himself knows nothing. How do you disarm an opinion-maker? Simply not having any renders him powerless.

Powerful citizens saw this as a threat to their power. Socrates undermined the voices of the powerful and discredited them in everyone's eyes. While the game was a struggle of all against all, Socrates forced the elite to unite to get rid of him. The rest of the story is well known: he was condemned to drink hemlock and die, having been found guilty of impiety for "introducing new deities into the city" and "thus corrupting the youth."

Plato counterfeits the anti-Socrates

Plato was like all the other Sophists. He tried to teach the sons how to persuade other citizens. And he saw a golden opportunity in Socrates to elevate himself above all the other Sophists. Socrates had shown everyone that they didn't possess the truth while pretending to. He had turned the elite's weapon against itself. Plato would capitalize on Socrates' death to make him a Promethean figure, giving truth to a world that wasn't ready to receive it. Plato, perhaps he had actually studied Socrates, fantasized about him and created a completely unique school of rhetoric: the first self-negating school of rhetoric.

While Socrates said, "None of you is right," Plato transformed it into, "I am right, I have the truth." And thus, Plato invented truth as something real and independent of all discourse. If Socrates had the upper hand over all the Sophists, it wasn't through some kind of divine madness that seized him when he went against all the rhetoricians of the city after being infected by the idea that he was the wisest. It is a Socrates who knows that we will find in Plato's speeches. A Socrates who doesn't merely discredit the discourses of the elite, but who guides his interlocutors toward the truth that he himself would have contemplated, and the others would not.

On reflection, this is precisely what Plato's allegory of the cave is really about. The elite move objects in front of the fire to cast shadows on the wall. The prisoners are the other citizens, who watch the shadows as if they were real things. They are not among those who put on the show, and they lack the understanding of artifice that the sophists and rhetoricians possess, who know how to construct speeches. Plato invents the figure of the philosopher who turns away from the fire to leave the cave and contemplate the true sun of truth. But Plato himself does not believe in truth; his theory is meta-artifice. His theory of Forms is the noble lie! The noble lie he needed because he was trying to create something grand: Aristotle. Plato elevates himself above all other sophists by discrediting them for being artificers, while having Socrates say, "My discourse is not artifice, for I have contemplated the true forms and I remind you of them."

Aristotle, duped, dupes the world

Aristotle is Plato's greatest creation. He was the first sophist who wasn't aware of being a sophist. The first sophist who believed in truth independent of discourse, a truth to which discourse must conform to be credible. And so, Aristotle became the first philosopher, and the greatest of all time. Aristotle's renown rivaled that of God among Christian intellectuals like Thomas Aquinas and among the philosophers of Muslim falsafa. In the two major world religions, Aristotle's writings and the sacred texts had to be reconciled in some way. Plato introduced a new divinity, truth, with which even God himself had to contend.

Aristotle believed so strongly in truth that he invented the principle of non-contradiction in his Metaphysics, Book Gamma, Chapter 4. He states that the principle of non-contradiction cannot be proven, but since it is impossible, in an assembly, to vote both for and against a given proposition, he elevated this rule of democratic politics to a veritable metaphysical affirmation. This was his best weapon against the other Sophists, those who did not believe in truth and contradicted themselves constantly. But in truth, the principle of non-contradiction is a fiction. Nature contradicts itself all the time: "it is raining and it is not raining" is certainly contradictory, but it is also a tautology in that it is always raining somewhere while it is not raining elsewhere. A contradiction is not synonymous with "untrue" discourse. Claiming the opposite often falls under the slippery slope fallacy when saying things like "if we accept a contradiction, then we can prove anything" as if rain and not raining could be used to prove that unicorns exist!

Aristotle could simply point out their contradictions and discredit the public speaker in the eyes of the followers, who were unaware of all the artifice involved in crafting speeches. He was so powerful against the elite citizens that they once again banded together to get rid of Aristotle, who was becoming too much of a nuisance. Aristotle was exiled from Athens because his conviction of truth had the same effect as the knowledge of Socrates' ignorance. They didn't kill him this time because they realized that by capitalizing on Socrates' death, Plato had made him a martyr and was able to inspire a second, even more powerful Socrates in the person of Aristotle, and all the more dangerous because he could rally the masses around a supposed truth while alienating them from other rhetoricians. A Socrates who not only said "you know nothing," but who had also created the conviction that he did know something.

conclusions

This explains why Plato didn't include himself in his dialogues! It's as if he knew he was doing something shameful and didn't want his own name associated with it. However, not all of his dialogues represent his true philosophy; they amount to a noble lie that served to bring about the philosophical conception of truth.

Plato was the greatest sophist of all time, producing the finest public orator of all time. Aristotle was so good that he had to be exiled because he so thoroughly outshone the competition that they conspired against him, just as they had against Socrates before him. From his exile in Athens, it was Alexander the Great himself who recruited him to be his teacher.

Aristotle's texts then became the most important until the Renaissance. Islamic philosophers considered Aristotle the greatest thinker, and even Christian scholastics like Thomas Aquinas held him in such high esteem that they tried to reconcile Aristotle's texts with the Bible, and the Quran for the falsaf. Plato ventriloquized Socrates, thus producing Aristotle, who inaugurated the religion of truth, which is none other than philosophy, the mother of all sciences.

Frequent

This narrative raises several major questions. Scratching the surface of philosophy, do we find anything greater or lesser than sophistry? Has philosophy perhaps invented the worst kind of god: one who is completely indifferent to us, impossible to reach, and yet simultaneously determines us entirely? At least the God of monotheisms doesn't intervene to preserve our free will… but isn't truth precisely what intervenes all the time? Does truth truly exist, or is it merely the belief Plato convinced us of? Does the religion of truth, whose priests are scientists, serve us, or do we serve it? After all, if we can never be certain of having attained Truth, we are all forever condemned to be wrong.