Soul-Destroying Sophistry Is Fake Wisdom, a Hot-Bed of Doubts and Conjectures

Samuel Taylor Coleridge · Black versus White Magic Series · 17 pages

Seventeen pages of Coleridge on the Sophists of Greece, and a small lesson in etymology that carries the argument. Pythagoras had called himself a philosopher — a lover of wisdom, and no more. Protagoras, followed by Gorgias and the rest, found that title too narrow and assumed instead the name of Sophist: one who professes the power of making others wise. Coleridge's gloss is unimprovable — a wholesale and retail dealer in wisdom, a wisdom-monger, in exactly the sense of an iron-monger or a fish-monger.

From there he distinguishes the serious sophists from the rest, and is unsparing about the rest: Euthydemus and Dionysiodorus among them, empty disputants and sleight-of-hand men whose art lay in argument rather than in knowledge. The document sits in this series because the parallel is meant to be drawn forward. A technique for producing conviction, detached from any concern with what is true, is on the reading this collection applies a form of the same inversion it calls black magic — and the wisdom-monger is its most respectable practitioner.

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