Górgias

Gorgias (late 5th century bc)

The most important of the fifth-century bc Greek Sophists after Protagoras, Gorgias was a famous rhetorician, a major influence on the development of artistic prose and a gifted dabbler in philosophy. His display speeches, Encomium of Helen of Troy and Defence of Palamedes, are masterpieces of the art of making a weak case seem strong, and brilliant exercises in symmetrical and antithetical sentence structure. Of philosophical importance is his treatise On Not-Being, or On the Nature of Things, an elaborate reversal of the metaphysical argument of Parmenides, showing: (1) that nothing exists; (2) that if anything exists, it cannot be known; and (3) if anything can be known, it cannot be communicated. This nihilistic tour de force is probably a caricature rather than a serious statement of a philosophical position. Gorgias is a master of the persuasive use of logos (discourse), understood both as eloquence and as argumentative skill.

1 Career

Born in Leontini in Sicily, Gorgias came under the influence of the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles as well as the local school of rhetoric associated with the names of Corax and Tisias. In 427 bc Gorgias led a delegation from Leontini to Athens, where his new oratorical style proved to be a great success. His lessons were very highly paid, and as a teacher he travelled throughout Greece. He gave public speeches at Olympia (where he urged the Greeks to unite against the Persians), at Delphi and elsewhere. His written works, such as the epideictic or model speeches Encomium of Helen of Troy and refid="A052bibent4">Defence of Palamedes, created a new, elaborate prose style which profoundly influenced the development not only of oratory but of literary prose generally. His pupil Isocrates founded the first school of rhetoric and the first institution of higher learning in Athens.

Gorgias lived to be over one hundred years old, and he is said to have read with amusement Plato’s dialogue named Gorgias (written c.395–387 bc) and remarked: ’How well Plato knows how to make fun of people!’.

2 Teaching

Unlike Protagoras (§2) and many later Sophists (see Sophists), Gorgias made no claim to train students in moral and political virtue, but only to make them skilful public speakers. He developed both the theory and practice of persuasive speech (logos) as a technique of power (see Logos §1). Comparing the effect of speech on the soul to the action of drugs on the body, Gorgias describes how ’some speeches cause grief, some cause delight, some produce fear in the hearers while others produce confidence, and some by an evil persuasion drug and bewitch the soul’ (Helen 14, fr.11). Hence in legal and political competitions ’a single logos delights and persuades a great crowd, because it is written with art, not because it is spoken with truth’ (Helen 13, fr.11). In the dialogue Gorgias, Plato calls attention both to the power and to the lack of moral responsibility involved in Gorgianic training in rhetoric. And by presenting as followers of Gorgias the subsequent speakers Polus and Callicles, who systematically attack traditional Greek notions of morality, Plato’s dialogue clearly implies that ’Gorgias’ teaching is the seed of which the Calliclean life is the poisonous fruit’ (Dodds 1959: 15).

Gorgias’ own conception of ’writing with art’ produced a highly ornamental prose style, where balanced clauses and euphonious word choice dazzle the ear and titillate the mind in sentence after sentence. We can still appreciate this effect in the extant Encomium of Helen and Defence of Palamedes, two display pieces that were apparently written as models for his students to memorize and imitate. A later taste finds this style artificial and exaggerated, but as a sheer technical exploit Gorgias’ compositions made such an impression on his contemporaries that the art of writing in prose was permanently changed. Agathon’s speech in Plato’s Symposium (194e–197e) is one of the more elegant examples of direct Gorgianic influence. Gorgias’ most distinguished pupil, Isocrates, established the classical style in Greek oratory with milder, less mechanical forms of parallelism and antithesis in sentence structure, which Cicero was later to reproduce in Latin.

3 Philosophical work

It is not clear that Gorgias made any major contribution to the development of Greek philosophy. Whether or not he was personally a pupil of Empedocles, as an ancient tradition reports, he was certainly familiar with the new natural philosophy which had come from Ionia to Sicily by the middle of the fifth century bc, and he made use of it in his teaching. Thus Meno, who is represented by Plato as a pupil of Gorgias, is fond of physical explanations of sensory perception in the style of Empedocles (Meno 76c–e) (see Empedocles §6). To this extent, as a popularizer of the new science Gorgias was (like the other Sophists) a typical representative of the fifth-century Enlightenment. His own, more personal, achievement is represented by a treatise On Not-Being or On the Nature of Things, which has come down to us in two later summaries, one in the Aristotelian corpus (the pseudo-Aristotelian text On Melissus, Xenophanes and Gorgias, 979a–980b) and another version given by Sextus Empiricus (Against the Professors VII 65–87).

It would seem that the title of this treatise is already a joke, since it equates a discussion of nonentity or nothingness (the Parmenidean notion of not-being) with the Ionian investigation of the nature of things (peri physeōs) (compare Parmenides §2). Even if the intention of the author is not entirely serious, the text is of considerable historical interest, on several counts. It contains the longest example of continuous argumentation that has reached us from the fifth century bc. The closest precedent is provided by the poem of Parmenides and the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea). Gorgias’ argument is in fact a direct inversion of Parmenides’ reasoning in favour of being, which, according to Parmenides’ argument, is the only subject that can be known and described in rational language. By contrast, Gorgias argues: (1) that nothing exists, or that there is no being at all; (2) that if anything exists, it cannot be known; and (3) if anything can be known, it cannot be communicated in language. Gorgias’ reversal of Parmenides’ reasoning follows the original so carefully that it has permitted modern scholars to reconstruct some features that are badly preserved in Parmenides’ text. Gorgias’ reasoning is indirect in form, like Parmenides’, and it has benefited from the additional subtlety introduced by Zeno’s paradoxes. Gorgias’ work thus served to popularize not only natural philosophy but also Eleatic logic.

This treatise is, like the Encomium of Helen, a paignion or plaything. But what Gorgias is playing with is Parmenidean ontology and Zenonian dialectic. Consider the argument for the first thesis, ’that nothing exists’ or ’that there is nothing’. (Translation is difficult, since in Greek the verb esti, ’is’, and the participle on, ’being’, cover both existence and predication; the notion of being represents a fusion of the two.) In the version of the argument given by Sextus, the proof of this thesis begins with a trilemma, echoing the three Paths of Parmenides’ discourse on Truth. ’If something exists, then either Being (to on) exists or Not-being (to mēon) exists or both Being and Not-being exist’. The three options are then eliminated seriatim. First of all, ‘Not-being is not (does not exist). For if Not-being exists, it will at the same time be and not be. Understood as Not-being, it will not be. But insofar as Not-being exists it will also be. But it is utterly absurd for something at the same time to be and not to be. Therefore Not-being does not exist’. The proof that being also does not exist begins again with a trilemma: ’If Being exists, it is either eternal or generated or both’. All three possibilities are then refuted.

The arguments to show (2), that, if anything exists, it is unknowable, and (3), that, if anything is known, it cannot be communicated, are of philosophical interest inasmuch as they emphasize the gap between thought and reality on the one hand, and between thought and language on the other. But the preserved arguments seem grossly fallacious. They are good illustrations of the later notion of sophistry as making use of specious argument. On the other hand, the general form of the reasoning is reminiscent of the dialectical second part of Plato’s Parmenides. Since we do not have Gorgias’ own wording, it is difficult to know whether Plato is imitating Gorgias or whether our text has been reshaped under the influence of later, more sophisticated argumentation.

Besides displaying the virtuoso skills of its author, Gorgias’ treatise seems designed to discredit ambitious philosophical reasoning of the sort initiated by Parmenides and Zeno. This is in any case the conclusion drawn by Isocrates (Gorgias fr. 1): if these theses can be logically argued for, why should we take any such arguments seriously? In a more light-hearted way, but with greater technical sophistication, Gorgias thus joins the attack on Parmenidean dogmatism that was launched by Protagoras with his ’Man-the-measure’ thesis.