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Sophistication
Lyotard and Greek Thought:
Sophistry
Keith Crome , Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2004. 224 pp., £45.00hb., 1 4039
1238 6.
In this well-researched and thoughtfully articulated book, Keith Crome
presents a case for the serious consideration of the relationship between
Jean-François Lyotard – variously philosopher of desire, theorist of the
postmodern condition, disenchanted Marxist or acute reader of Kant’s Critique of
Judgement – and Greek thought. Or rather, he presents half a case, as this book
is only the first of a projected two volumes, dealing with, in turn, sophistry
and Aristotle.
Lyotard and Greek Thought is initially motivated by a concern that the
general tendency in Lyotard commentary has been to overlook the significant role
that Greek philosophy plays in his writings. Crome notes that this is something
of an anomaly given the more widespread appreciation of the role of the Greeks
in the writings of Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida (and, we should perhaps add,
Badiou). A significant result of this oversight has been that commentators have
generally failed to consider the crucial role that sophistry had in helping
Lyotard articulate his research problematic. In this volume, Crome charts the
genesis of Lyotard’s interest in the sophists – an interest that can be dated
back to the 1960s (with a projected text on sophist logic) and which appears
intermittently throughout his subsequent publications – a series of lectures he
delivered on Nietzsche and the sophists in 1974 and 1976 makes this interest
evident. More importantly, Crome argues for a profoundly ‘historial’ Lyotard,
whose philosophical project can be read as an attempt to put into play a
political and ethical way of thinking and existing which should be seen as
ultimately sophist in origin.
In keeping with the general thrust of the book, Crome devotes several
chapters to considering sophistry in relation to Plato, to Hegel – one of the
first, perhaps, to attempt the gesture of rehabilitation – and to Heidegger.
These discussions show how sophistry is caught up in philosophy’s determination
of its own identity and how for that reason an engagement with it is essential
if we wish radically to question the ‘philosophical disposition towards truth
and being’. Crome shows how the philosophical determinations of sophistry (can
there be any other?) undertaken by these thinkers pass over what will eventually
be the essential point for Lyotard: its challenge to the sovereignty of the
decision to philosophize on the basis of what is.
Crome does well to note the peculiar ambivalence of philosophy to this, its
intimate other. Indeed, it is a curious feature of Western philosophy that from
its Platonic inception it has had to negotiate with the margin of
indetermination that the ‘sophist effect’ induces in it. Plato, a little
hamfistedly, in The Sophist, finds himself being forced to make ‘non-being’ be.
Aristotle, with his curious demonstration of the principle of non-contradiction,
was forced to turn the sophist gesture of refutation into the very rationale for
his demonstration. Hegel, at the beginning of The Science of Logic, makes the
sophist confusion of being and non-being into a crucial moment of his dialectic.
Such gestures imply the possibility of a certain sophistication at the heart of
reason, a point which is clearly not lost on Crome. However, the key point that
Crome wishes to make in these chapters is that the philosophical delimitation of
sophistry precludes an analysis of its challenge to thought.
The argument about Lyotard really starts only once this preparatory work is
out of the way. The second half of the book rather painstakingly lays out the
grounds for what Crome sees as Lytoard’s restoration of sophistry. Where an
early text such as Discours, figure raises the spectre of sophistry in terms of
the need to displace the philosophy–sophistry dichotomy, the lectures on
Nietzsche and the sophists marked a shift towards recovering the practices of
the sophists and their ‘habitus’. Crucially for Crome these lectures outline
Lyotard’s appraisal of the sophist practice of ‘retorsion’ (although the concept
itself is derived from Aristotle). Libidinal Economy puts into play what Lyotard
was later to see as a sophistic challenge to philosophy, a point he makes in
Just Gaming in 1979. The latter text also provides Crome with the opportunity to
explore the curious but insightful rapprochement Lyotard makes between Kant and
the sophist Corax, and to follow through Lyotard’s own hesitations between an
ostensibly Kantian position and a sophist one.
Like the ideas of reason, the sophist’s plea at a tribunal in defence of a
strong man who has assaulted a weaker one forces the judge to overstep the
bounds of what is given in experience. It does this by adducing that the
probability that the judge will think it likely that the strong man did assault
the weak one – because common opinion has it that the strong always do this –
precisely becomes the reason why the strong man did not commit the assault. Both
the Kantian idea and the Greek doxa serve as a rule for judgement. The parallels
with Kant are, Crome argues, continued in The Differend, where the appeal to the
sophists is more direct and more explicit. Crome notes the resemblance between
Kant’s notion of the antinomies of reason and Lyotard’s conception of the
differend. As he reminds us, Kant himself was inclined to see in the antinomies
a ‘sophistication of reason itself’, something that arises from within reason
and not something superadded to them from the outside by the ill-willed or
stupid. Of course, for Kant, this regrettable sophistication was something to be
avoided at all costs and in a sense motivated the entire project of critique in
the first place.
To show that reason might be somehow instrinsically sophist-icated, Crome
reverts to a discussion of the Ancient Greeks and in particular to the sophist
demolition of Parmenides’ poem ‘On Nature’, on the basis of the tenor of
Lyotard’s references in The Differend. The case for the intrinsic sophistication
of reason is strong when one examines the way in which Gorgias’s Treatise on
Nature or Non-being shows how the self-evident presence of nature – revealed by
a goddess to Parmenides in stark terms as being the One that is – is really a
complex verbal construction. Gorgias achieves this by turning the phrase
articulating the revealed truth – that what is is – into a logical argument.
Crome follows among others Cassin to claim that the philosophical demarcation of
itself from sophistry collapses with this demolition of the first evidence of
ontology, the very ‘evidentiality’ of the evident. Both become modalities of
‘logology’ and imply the primacy of an ethical and political – Lyotard would
perhaps say ‘judicial’ – practice of thinking and language. If we then accept
that both sophistry and philosophy are possibilities of language, the differend,
which bespeaks an irreducible conflict within reason, becomes constitutive. To
support this view, Crome draws a parallel between the differend and the Greek
notion of steresis, the privation of the ability of speech to speak about
something.
In many respects, Crome’s account of the role of the sophists in Lyotard’s
work is a useful corrective to the predominant image of Lyotard in
Anglo-American academia as the prophet of the postmodern condition. In fact it
balances the correction of this misapprehension, which insists on the crucial
importance of Lyotard’s earlier works, Discours, figure and Economie libidinale.
And it adds something of a nuance to the view of Lyotard as having produced a
philosophy of language. Emphasizing the philosophical importance which sophistry
had for Lyotard is an intelligent way of drawing our attention to the depth,
subtlety and – let’s say it – sophistication of Lyotard’s enterprise. Very
sensibly, Crome does not try to pretend that his reading of Lyotard is
definitive; nor does he try to minimize the importance of Lyotard’s alleged
Kantianism, libidinal economics and so on. However, the emphasis on the
relationship of Lyotard to Greek thought does entail a certain rejigging of the
stakes of Lyotard’s work. By drawing our attention to the use that Lyotard makes
of Gorgias, Crome situates the stakes of The Differend directly in relation to
ontology and to the general (im)possibility of first philosophy. And this of
course means, to anyone who has followed the developments of continental
philosophy over the last half-century or so, taking up the cudgels for and
against Heidegger, as it is Heidegger who has been largely responsible for
stimulating the resurgence of interest in ontological questions and in promoting
‘historial’ arguments. However, it is by no means evident that the line which
runs from Parmenides to Kant and from Kant to today is a straight one. Western
rationality certainly has a history – or perhaps histories – but there are clear
problems entailed in assuming that it should receive its directions from
philosophy in the manner Heidegger would like it to (qua ‘the innermost basic
features of our Western-European history’). One then slips quite quickly into a
prognostic of the ‘fate’ of philosophy and the attendant pathos of ‘the end’,
muted but implicit in this book.
The issue is not, perhaps, whether or not sophistry might help us develop a
somewhat different appreciation of our modernity. Clearly for Lyotard it does;
and Crome takes care to show how Lyotard’s interest in the sophists shows up in
The Postmodern Condition. It also features in other accounts of modernity and
the fate of rationality – for example, the recent writing of Isabelle Stengers,
which similarly revives the importance of opinion (but against the
modernist gesture par excellence of critique) and emphasizes the construction of
nature and the given. The issue is rather one of how we should think this
through and whether the idea is of a ‘restoration’ or ‘rehabilitation’. Stengers
for one manages to avoid the linguo-centric bias of the ‘discourse with
everything’ approach, and in this respect it is perhaps noteworthy that in many
places in his book Crome draws so heavily on Aristotle – particularly in the
last chapter where the classic determination of man (sic) as zoon logon ekhon
supports Lyotard’s claim for the constitutive role of the differend. Of course,
he is not wrong to do this as Lyotard does as much himself, but it does force us
to continue to frame the problematic around discourse or logos, leaving us
wondering whether this is really the way radically to question the canonical
history of reason.
Andrew Goffey
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