Aristophanes’ Criticisms Of Philosophy On Behalf Of The City

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Philosophy and the City
Aristophanes wrote many comedies and “The Cloud” is one of the best known. In the cloud, Aristophanes attacks using logic in justifying self-serving or ridiculous ends. He also rejects the “Sophists” and considers them artificial and irrelevant (Rosen 399). There are many criticisms that Aristophanes leveled against philosophy on behalf of the city that seem to suggest that philosophy and the city are at odds with each other.
In “The Cloud”, Aristophanes accuses philosophers of many wrongful deeds. First, he claims that philosophers corrupt young people (West &Gracen.p). The corruption leads them to sexual vice and impiety. They are taught to lie and undermine the society through dishonest teaching from the philosophers. Aristophanes also accuses philosophers of encouraging the youth to pursue esoteric and trivial knowledge. Of all those accusations, the claim that philosophy corrupts the youth is the most serious. Aristophanes uses the case of Strepsiades and his son to demonstrate how corrupting philosophy can be.
The father is greatly indebted and paying his debtors would lead him to bankruptcy. Instead of doing an honorable thing by paying the debts, he learns that through philosophy, one can talk his way out of even the most difficult situation. He sends his son to learn philosophy, so that he can help him talk their way out of the debt situation. Instead of his son learning the good deeds, he discovers that he can do horrible things and talk his way out. He beats his father and tells him that he will be able to talk his way out of the problem. On the line 1407-1408, Pheidippides asks his dad:
“Let's return to my earlier point, the one you made me interrupt; / answer me this, to start things off: did you beat me when I was small?”
It is great that he learnt new rhetoric skills, but he uses them to suggest that he has the right to also beat his father, for he knows he can talk his way out of it. When he threatens to beat his mother because he can talk his way out, the father finds that too much to bear and his rage causes him to burn the Thinkery.
The Aristophanes’ main argument against the sophists is on their stance that “laws and moral imperatives are man-made and therefore can be rewritten, which he thinks will lead to all sorts of social ills” (Konstan 76) and the case of Pheidippides is a classical one. Before attending the classes, he believed in following moral values th...