Best philosophy lecture to date
An in-depth analysis of what made Socrates and Plato both so revolutionary and powerful. About 30 minutes in are stunningly prophetic observations about democracies gone bad that sound like Plato was seeing our day.
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It reminds me of the kind of college humanities professors 'waxing eloquently' in their vague, flowery pontification that made me watch the clock waiting to get back to any serious engineering science course. But now I know better than to blame myself for not seeing value in it, and I know what is wrong with this sample from Hillsdale because it is so bad on so many basics.
It begins by announcing that the purpose of life is to "serve the Good", with the claim that studying philosophy will tell you what said "Good" is -- which the lecture never gets to. In the name of the purpose of philosophy we are expected to accept the false premise that the purpose of human life is to "serve", then accept what the "Good" is later by some kind of non-rational osmosis. No wonder he likes Plato.
The account of the Socratic method in Plato, misrepresented as critical thought, leaves out that the basic premise was that ideas do not come from examining reality, but rather by bringing out through leading questions an alleged innate knowledge from within you, prodded by your superior who will always know more than you through special insights. That is mystical from the outset.
Likewise, it leaves out of the account of the famous allegory of the cave -- in which people are trapped inside a cave able to observe only flickering shadows of reality -- that in Plato's philosophy this expresses that we are incapable of observing the true reality of the mystic World of Forms, of which our world is only an imperfect reflection. A guru with superior mystic insights is required to tell us what to believe.
That we are supposedly incapable of thinking for ourselves here in the material world was Plato's rationalization for a tyrannical dictatorship controlled by a "philosopher king" who knows the "true reality" of a mystic dimension inaccessible to others. Plato had no "stunningly prophetic observations about democracies gone bad that sound like seeing our day". He was arguing against Greek democracy as the only, at the time, alternative to his own ideal of tyranny: The Greeks had no concept of the rights of the individual and argued politics over who or what group should be in charge. The lecturer tried to sell Plato as "prophetic" by ignoring all that, recasting Plato on democracy in his own modern conservative rhetoric.
All subsequent philosophy has not been a "footnote to Plato" as the lecturer dramatically intones. He blanks out the other side of the fundamental philosophic debate. That began with Aristotle's emphasis on this world, reason, and happiness of the individual -- despite Aristotle having been a student of Plato, which left him with some Platonic influences. Aristotle, like other Greeks, did not have a political philosophy of individual freedom, and had no logical grounding for his individualist ethics of personal happiness, but he laid the groundwork for them and knew enough to reject Plato's tyranny.
Sadly, Plato won the first round of the debate when his neo-Platonic followers from Plotinus to Augustine set the intellectual course of Christianity and subsequently Dark-Age-wrecked the western world for over a thousand years. In that they were a lengthy footnote to Plato, but Aristotelianism returned, beginning with Acquinas' better side, culminating in Ayn Rand's this-world philosophy of reason today.
Extolling Platonism -- which is other-worldly mysticism, self-abnegation, collectivism and submission to a tyranny that the lecturer dared not admit, is not the call for a philosophy of reason and individualism that Ayn Rand urged as necessary to change the course of the culture and therefore its politics. It is the opposite. Followers of Plato are conventional intellectuals that are the cause of the problem.
Leonard Peikoff describes how the course of philosophy has been a "Duel between Plato and Aristotle", not a mere footnote to Plato, in the epilogue of his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and provides details in his Ominous Parallels and history of philosophy lectures that begin with the pre-Socratic Greeks. That is where you will find examples of the "best philosophy lectures", not in Hillsdale conservative traditionalists following Plato.
"It begins by announcing that the purpose of life is to "serve the Good", with the claim that studying philosophy will tell you what said "Good" is -- which the lecture never gets to. In the name of the purpose of philosophy we are expected to accept the false premise that the purpose of human life is to "serve" ..."
If one follows a moral philosophy, is he (or she) not a servant of that philosophy? Absolutely. Are you not a follower or servant of Objectivism? Yes. Do we not choose to follow that which we deem to be in our interest or "the Good"? Surely. Thus you follow Objectivism because you deem it to be "the Good". Everyone is going to have their individual take on the matter. If you spend all your time being offended because someone else doesn't start from your point of view, you're going to waste a lot of time being offended.
"The account of the Socratic method in Plato, misrepresented as critical thought, leaves out that the basic premise was that ideas do not come from examining reality, but rather by bringing out through leading questions an alleged innate knowledge from within you, prodded by your superior who will always know more than you through special insights. That is mystical from the outset."
Observation doesn't bring about thought, it merely gives something upon which the intellect can act - dots to be connected as it were. You can stare at a block of marble for hours - it doesn't mean that the statue of David is going to suddenly jump out at you. Observation is one step in the process. There is an internal process in the mind by which connections are made, synapses fire, and understanding is gained - that "light bulb" moment. To me, Plato's description is fairly accurate - especially knowing the actual Greek words he uses. Translation is a fickle thing, however.
We don't have to re-invent calculus, metallurgy, or any number of other topics because we can study what has been discovered by others. In very fact, it is far more efficient to study what others have done than attempt to re-invent it ourselves. Why do we herald the inventor at all if not because we value the utility to be gained for which we did not have to individually labor? Why do we instinctively criticize the efficiency losses from someone trying to "re-invent the wheel"? It is because we inherently/innately realize that such is a needless duplication of effort. What is interesting is that we often reach the conclusion before really working out why. To me, this common phenomenon gives substantial credence to Plato's characterizations.
Side note: True Christianity did not derive anything from Plato or Socrates. See Paul's conversation with the Greeks on Mars Hill. The Greeks (and much of the Western World) only adopted "Christianity" after it had been co-opted and paganized by Constantine. Did it lead to the Dark Ages? Yup. And what brought us out of the Dark Ages? People rejecting the very paganism that had been ruling over them for a millennium.
"Leonard Peikoff describes how the course of philosophy has been a "Duel between Plato and Aristotle", not a mere footnote to Plato, in the epilogue of his Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, and provides details in his Ominous Parallels and history of philosophy lectures that begin with the pre-Socratic Greeks. That is where you will find examples of the "best philosophy lectures", not in Hillsdale conservative traditionalists following Plato."
I got through about halfway through the book and put it down, finding it dry. To me, it is in the application - the test of the hypothesis - that ideas are proved and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand focused on the epistemiology nearly to the exclusion of practical application. There were no doubt nuggets of wisdom, but I can't credit it with being in the "best philosophy lectures" section of my library. To each his (or her) own.
Duty to serve and follow is the diametric opposite of a rational ethics based on the requirements of human life. Thinking in accordance with rational principles that one understands is not "serving". Recognizing that distinction is not "being offended". Promoting a lecture that begins with a demand to "serve the good" and proceeds to extol Platonic mysticism as the "best" philosophy is the opposite of the purpose of this forum. Blarman is an overt religious mystic who wants, as he has put it, to "follow a master". A forum for Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason and egoism is not the place to obnoxiously and repeatedly promote his off topic religious thinking. The false and misleading history and traditionalist religious Platonic mindset of Hillsdale is not the "best" of philosophy. "Fascination" with mysticism is not the standard here.
I promoted a lecture that was on the ancient Greeks. That you choose to gain nothing from it is up to you. If the forum admins want to censor me for posting it, let them say so themselves. I don't answer to you. If you choose to think that this post was about religion, that also is your cross to bear - pun intended. Any rational person knows better.
Blarman: "You're playing semantics to try to justify yourself. If you choose to follow a philosophy created by someone else, you serve it - duty or not."
Contrary to Blarman's gratuitous personal speculation, I do not and do not need to "play semantics" to "justify myself". We are discussing what is wrong with the Hillsdale lecture and how it represents the non-objective pronouncements of traditional conservativism. Blarman's emotional hostility personalizes everything.
Understanding and acting on moral principles based on the requirements of a rational being to live for his own life is not "serving a philosophy" or anything else. This is a fundamental distinction, not "semantics". Principles one learns from others, when not original, must be understood in one's own mind, where they become part of one's own knowledge. Intellectual independence does not mean never learning from someone else. Acting on what one knows to be true is not "serving" someone else or his ideas.
Following a moral philosophy does not, as Blarman insists, make one a "servant of that philosophy", and we are not "a follower or servant of Objectivism". That is a contradiction in terms, which is apparent from the meaning of the concepts, not "semantics". It is Blarman who has insisted several time that he wants to "follow a master"; he apparently can't conceive of any other way or what intellectual independence means.
He is not alone. The religious conservative lecturer at Hillsdale assumes the traditional duty ethics of a life of service to something outside and above oneself as the "good". In promoting that premise as inherent in philosophy itself he excludes from the concept of morality anything other than some form of "service". That is typical of traditionalist conservativism and religion (and more). It is antagonistic to the Aristotelian egoist tradition and to Objectivism in particular. It excludes their very possibility from the realm of ethics. Their false premises of what morality must be as "service" prohibits them from thinking any other way. (This is a good context in which to review Ayn Rand's "Causality versus Duty" in her anthology Philosophy: Who Needs It?, in conjunction with the basic ideas in "The Objectivist Ethics" in her The Virtue of Selfishness.)
The fallacy is also consistent with and part of the Hillsdale lecturer's broader confusion that all philosophy is a "footnote to Plato", in which he obliterates all philosophy in the Aristotelian tradition of living for one's own happiness, in this world as the only world, known by reason -- in contrast to the other-wordly mysticism and the self-abnegation and service of the Platonic-Christian tradition. He does not recognize that philosophy since the Greeks has been a duel between Aristotle and Plato, not a footnote to Plato.
The primitive mysticism of the Jesus and other mystery cults mixed with neo Platonism to form the Christian ideology was not "pagan". Augustine and other early church leaders were not "pagan". They were the religious thinkers spreading the bad ideology, not ruling politicians. The superstition, supernaturalism, mysticism, and demands for human sacrifice renouncing this earth were the Dark Ages; they did not lead the world out of it, which came from a revival of reason despite the mystics of "True Christianity". Blarman's repeated promotion of religious apologetics substituting for history on this forum is as obnoxious as a persistent Jehova's Witness who pesters people as his life "calling".
Pagans went to temples to repeat rituals. City people like Augustine went to schools of philosophy -- until they were closed. It was why Augustine wrote about "the city of God" versus the city of man, the "city on a hill" and so on. He thought in those terms. It was the world he knew.
And for all of Augustine's very many errors, in there was still that spark of intelligence, of inquiry, of reasoning, arguing to win the point with logic -- however bad or misguided. Pagans had no need of that. Thinking is not fundamental to pagan religion.
One thing people do well is follow leaders. What we do not do well is measure leaders against an objective standard. The best paradigm I know for intellectual trends is "kindergarten soccer": everyone chases the ball. The objective facts are that some balls and some goals pay better dividends. So, when Italian cities of the late Middle Ages held algebra contests in the public square, that somehow reinforced the rediscovery of Roman and Greek works that were always around, stored in monasteries and left unread until two men, Plutarch and Dante, sought them out. But, again, as with Augustine, it was not just that they did that. Other people needed to care about it for it to be brought forward, extended, and expanded.
In The Nature of the Gods, one of Cicero's guests says, "We know that the gods exist because people have reported seeing them, and the senses are valid." As Euclid said to Ptolemy, there is no royal road to knowledge. This ain't easy.
I, for one, appreciate your making the time to come here and write. I can only suggest that your clear expositions of fact are actually resonating with many of the 20,000 silent readers who also benefit from your work.
The Greek tradition was notable, developed independently, and prospered in large part because at one point the Greeks ruled the Mediterranean and the trade that came with their empire spread their language. Christ was a Jew, however, not a Greek. Unlike Paul, there is no record of Christ speaking Greek or travelling to Greece (Paul spoke at least Hebrew, Latin, Aramaic and Greek). Christianity was a fulfillment of Judaism - which predated Greek philosophy (and culture) by at least a millennium historically - even further if one believes the record of the Torah.
What is pagan btw? Pagan was a word mainly invented and used by Christians to denote anyone not of that faith - similar to the word heathen. By very definition, Christianity is excluded from being regarded as "pagan". When I used it, it was in its true sense: Constantine was a sun worshipper - not a Christian - who took pagan (non-Christian) elements from his own and other religious traditions and incorporated them into what then was propagated as "Christianity". The "Christmas Tree" is one such element. (Santa Claus et al is another but much more recent introduction, primarily popularized by Coca-Cola.)
St. Augustine was a monk who grew up in this environment of centuries of Constantinian "Christianity". I've read several of his works and applaud the man greatly for being willing to step up and denounce some of the major provisions of his own religion and original thought. As to whether or not he was spreading "bad thought", one can assert that about any philosopher one does not follow or attend to. It's a meaningless criticism.
What happened during the Dark Ages that led to the Enlightenment? The printing press. The Gutenberg press. And what was that press used for more than anything else? To print copies of the King James Edition of the Bible - also known as Gutenberg Bibles. You are welcome to dismiss this fact, but the influence it had was directly responsible for most of the upheaval and rejection of the traditional ruling clergy and the push for Protestantism and the mass migrations to the New World. It enabled the patronage of science without the auspices of clerical veto such as that experienced by Galileo.
You are welcome to denigrate "religion" or theism, but the plain truth is that atheistic secularism was not the driving force behind the Jews, the Greeks (including Aristotle), the Enlightenment, nor of the Founding of the United States of America. And anyone who is willing can look up and verify this for themselves. History of the world of philosophy is the history of religion.
I like the fact that with historical perspective, someone born in the 19th century and who died in the 50s could be almost my contemporary. We're two people who lived around the "same time period" when transatlantic telegraph and Internet were changing the world. It's like in Arthur C Clarke's 3001 someone is frozen a revived 1000 years later. People say "you lived around the time of space flight and Ben Franklin, the world of about 1000 years ago."
Sorry to interrupt.
It is one of the consequences of freedom and liberty that derived from the rebirth of reason. We call them the Dark Ages; and Objectivists dislike the Middle Ages on the same basis. But there were inventions and discoveries. It is just that they were few and far between because the culture of the times did not celebrate life on Earth.
Fighting a revolutionary war over the pursuit of happiness was highly important. It is why we went from the steam age to the space age in one lifetime, from electricity to electronics, telephone to television.
Some conservatives here align with the progressives who oppose what they call "neoliberalism" and "globalism." Those broad trends are very much a consequence of the ideas of Ayn Rand. Millions of copies of her books influenced very many people who are not Objectivists, but who did understand and accept many salient points.
I feel that Bill Gates read Atlas Shrugged and accepted maybe 30% of it. Eric Schmidt read it and rejected all of it. Elon Musk? Hard to say... T. J. Rodgers maybe 100%... Mark Cuban maybe 50-50...
By comparison and in respect to this topic and the topical lecture, the Hellenistic social context was possible because of the ferment, the open discussion based on reason. It had a lot of problems, but it was a time of changes.
We have discussed the Antikythera Device here. It is amazing what they were on the verge of.
Unfortunately, Rome ascended by brute force with nothing in its head. The Roman "intellectual ferment" was over the importation and adoption of different oriental mystery cults like Christ and Mithras.
An abridged version of the lectures with supplementary material is on the web at https://campus.aynrand.org/campus-cou...
The complete lectures in original form on mp3 are well worth the $25 cost at
https://estore.aynrand.org/p/95/found...
The Hillsdale lecture promotes Plato as the essence of all philosophy, with everything else a "footnote" to Plato. That is outrageously false. They are blanking out the entire this-world Aristotelian tradition of reason and individualism in contrast to their Platonic, Christian tradition. That is one reason why the lecture is so bad and misleading. It is not an "in depth analysis".
St. Augustine was a leading Christian, not a "pagan". The influence of neo-Platonic mysticism (including on Augustine) in turning the primitive mystery cults into church doctrine as religious philosophy is well known. Rambling about Christmas trees and Coca Cola is irrelevant.
The revival of reason, not printing the Bible, put an end to the Christian era and resulted in the Enlightenment. Printing was a mechanism for disseminating information, not the content, and didn't tell people what they had to think.
Religion is a primitive form of philosophy. The history of philosophy is much more than religion, philosophy is not a footnote to Plato, and the Enlightenment and the founding of this country were not based on religion.
To pretend that anyone from a religious background can not teach a lecture about the Ancient Greeks or philosophy stems from your own ivory tower complex - not rational thought. Rational thought takes ANY opinion and chooses to look for what is correct and what is not correct. Prejudice only looks at the origin of the person's background for something disagreeable to complain about.
The philosophical references in the lecture were to Plato, not Greek philosophy in general. It misrepresented several features of Plato and misrepresented Plato as the basis for all subsequent philosophy. I did not arbitrarily choose to associate Hillsdale and Plato with religion, they did it themselves. Platonism is all though Christianity and Hillsdale announces itself as in the Platonic-Christian tradition.
Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand does not focus on "epistemiology" [sic]. The first half is about the metaphysics and epistemology because a basic understanding of existence and its relation to our conscious awareness of it, and how we know anything with our rational conceptual faculty, are the foundations of philosophy on which ethics and politics are based. Proper thinking is an "application" of rationality that mystics find so "dry". The second half of the book, which Blarman did not read because he "put it down", is about the principles of ethics and politics, not "epistemiology".
The "lectures" I referred to as where one "will find examples of the 'best philosophy lectures'" in contrast to the "Hillsdale conservative traditionalists following Plato" are Leonard Peikoff's lecture series on the history of philosophy, not his book on Ayn Rand's philosophy. In contrast to the inaccurate Hillsdale promotion for Plato's mysticism and tyrannical politics, the lectures cover the basic ideas of the major philosophers from the pre-Socratics to the 20th century analysts, showing how they addressed the major questions of philosophy and reacted to previous ideas, leading to the dominant ideas in the culture today.
"All gentlemen were supposed to be able to cite Plato and Aristotle, but when they did so, it was usually by way of oratorical flourish rather than out of genuine appreciation, approval, or even knowledge. Rush and Rittenhouse thought Aristotle a "tyrant" and his works utterly useless—an opinion shared by Jefferson and Adams. As to Plato, Jefferson raged against the "whimsies, the puerilities and unintelligible jargon" of The Republic as being the "sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities of a foggy mind." Adams said he learned only two things from reading Plato: one was where Franklin had plagiarized some of his ideas, and the other was "how to cure the hiccups." By contrast, a goodly number of Americans read Machiavelli, though few found it expedient to cite him." -- http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/foun...
Donald S. Lutz also compiled an inventory of the works most often cited by the Founders. His “Top 40” (actually 37) can be found here at the Online Library of Liberty ...
Prof. Lutz’s Top 10 are:
St. Paul
Montesquieu
Sir William Blackstone
John Locke
David Hume
Plutarch
Cesare Beccaria
John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon
Delolme
Samuel Pufendorf
(http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...)
Even the religious have denounced the use of Lutz's counting to argue for Biblical influence https://americanvision.org/9760/chris..., along with general debunking https://www.alternet.org/story/147497...
Plato was a mystic and a totalitarian, and even Aristotle had no idea of the purpose of government as protecting individual rights; his political writing was mostly descriptive of Greek city states. The influence of Aristotelian reason and individualism in politics had progressed much farther through other authors by the time of the Enlightenment, and Plato was in the wrong direction on all counts from the beginning. Not as well known is the influence of science and the Newtonian revolution on the founders: I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams & James Madison.
You need to be more specific about who "they" were, as several were ministers in their churches, just as others were merchants and farmers, and at least two were true scientists, perhaps three if you add fractions of lifetime interests.
Thanks, also, for the reminder about Cohen (NYT obit here: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/28/us/... ). I used his edition of The Principia as part of the research for my award-winning biography of Newton's tenure as warden and master of the British Royal Mint. Allow me to recommend The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris. It has flaws, of course, but still offers good history and insight.
"The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature by Timothy Ferris is excellent assembly of cogent essays is an extended argument for freedom and science. The scientific revolution and liberal democracy are inseparable. To limit one is to defeat the other. According to Ferris, the scientific method is the root of political freedom. In that, he continues the case made long ago by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Like Popper, Ferris misses the center of the target. It is not “liberal democracy” but capitalism that enabled and was empowered by the Enlightenment philosophy of rational-empiricism that we know today as Objectivism. To be fair, though, Ferris does devote an entire chapter to “The Science of Wealth” where he praises both free market capitalism and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations."
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...
But altruism and religion are two different matters. The Enlightenment emphasis on reason and individualism did not have a rational ethical theory defending the then widely accepted principle of the right to one's own life, liberty, property and pursuit of one's own happiness in accordance with one's own chosen goals on earth. But it also did not embrace an altruist ethics of a duty to live to serve others, which came much later and was not yet there to break bonds to.
The Enlightenment rejected the mystical self abnegation and other-worldliness of the Christian era, despite the remnants of ignorance and wild-eyed preachers with their fire and brimstone, but even the Christians were 'egoistic' in the sense of having a goal to save their own souls in a supernatural realm. 'Loving others as oneself' on this earth was a distant second, and even that did not completely reject the self as in the later altruism.
There were still bad premises in ethics regarding sacrifice to others and which undermined the subsequent course of this country, but it wasn't what counter-Enlightenment altruism later came to be and it wasn't religious self-abnegation following a master and denouncing this world.
Ferris on the inherent relation between science and freedom sounds interesting. (And so was the NYT background on Cohen.) A philosophy of reason as such is required for political freedom, and freedom is required for science and reason to flourish. They have to grow together. A scientific attitude and method as an advanced use of reason is required to establish principles of ethics, political philosophy and legal formulations of proper government, and people doing that must be free of entrenched statism and mysticism. That was counted on by the founders of the country, and cannot be today. Conservatives pushing platonism and religion such as at Hillsdale and characteristically more broadly are not helping.
The real burst, however, as you know, came at the Renaissance. The quest for personal glory shattered the ethos of the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, you had a "calling" a "vocation" that God assigned you. In the Renaissance, those who could pursued "l'uomo universale" being the universal man who could paint, play a musical instrument, fight with a sword, etc. Even today, we call a polymath a "Renaissance Man."
In the late 1500s, the word "atheism" was tossed about (by Bacon or Gilbert, I forget which) not in our strict meaning, but more to mean "free thinking" not tied to dogma; not sure what "God" is but being pretty sure no one else knew, either.
Like their individualism, it was not grounded properly or consistently, but it was correct. And to the point here, it was not Platonism.
In his lifetime, what we call "the Socratic Method" was known as "the Milesian way." It was brought to Athens by refugees from Miletos after the collapse of the Ionian Revolt. Apsasia of Miletos was "the woman who brought philosophy to Athens." She was the paramour of Pericles. He defended her in court when the citizens sought to banish her for impiety. Aspasia hosted symposia in her home. That was where Socrates learned to ask questions. (http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20... )
As for those questions, the Socratic Method offered by Plato is based on Plato's wrongful epistemology. Plato said that we are born with ideas in our heads. EIDOS = form. The goal of Socratic inquiry is to draw out from you what you already know. Plato demonstrates this when he has Socrates talk a slave through the doubling of a square in the Dialog of Meno.
The Parable of the Cave elaborates on that, being Plato's view that we have no hope of true perception, but, apparently, some special people do, thus, the need for philosopher-kings to rule us.
As for the dangers of democracy, yes, we all know that. However, in particular, Prof. Terrence Moore conflates the actual history of Athens, confusing the time of the Thirty Tyrants and the subsequent return to democracy with the rule of the 500 who did bring state power to their personal vengeances, expropriating the property of certain wealthy citizens. That was parodied in Aristophanes's play, The Council of Women. Aristophanes also lampooned Socrates in The Clouds. Moore does not mention that Pericles also brought Anaxagoras to Athens, and that Anaxagoras was exiled for claiming that the sun is a hot rock, not a god.
Dangerous as democracy is, no form of government can be imposed to the benefit of society. Moreover, to the Greeks the word "tyrant" had special meaning and not the one we assume today. In fact, tyranny was the first form of popular rule, overthrowing hereditary kings in the late-600s to mid-500s BCE. It was when philosophy replaced religion, coined money replaced cows as money, merchants replaced farmers as the engines of wealth, geometry was invented, and citizens at assemblies took control of their governments. That was when the Greeks of Ionia invented the hoplite form of fighting, with dressed lines. And those warriors were (1) in the field because they voted to go to war; and (2) they were paid to be there, not just attached by the bonds of the tribe.
If you read the Platonic dialog "Protagoras" you get a better view of sophistry and democracy, as Socrates and Protagoras engage on the question of whether justice can be taught.