Response to Gorgias' On Not Being

14 February 2013

In this short paper, I am responding to Gorgias’ “On Not Being.” In particular, I am focusing on Gorgias’s (somewhat ironic) use of what seems to be the precursors to Cartesian-based formalized logic. In this case, though, he uses contraries toward different ends; namely, to demonstrate and problematize the human ability to know and make such knowledge knowable to another/ourselves. Yet, before I respond specifically to the text, I wish to review Laurent Pernot’s (2005) exposition on the Sophists to establish some context.

In Rhetoric in Antiquity, Pernot claims that sophists created the philosophic parameters, where “all standards are undermined here to the benefit of. Phenomalist and relativist conception of the world” (p. 13). They practiced a “situational ethics” dependent upon “‘the critical moment’ (kairos)…, where “justice and truth are constructed in the moment… in and through the discourse that gives them life.” From this point, I also gather that Gorgias’ concern with Being is not as much about reality, (which is the topic of much deliberation today), but moreso the hot topic of his time: truth and the existence of a big “T” truth.

Sophists were concerned interested in situations where truth had not yet been identified. Here, values and probabilities are paramount and axioms and formal logic are but stances to be contested. Gorgias is the exemplar of these points, as he is well known for criticizing ontological bases via his demonstrations of argumentation that embody the aforementioned situational ethics of the sophists. While Being is knowable, it cannot be communicatable to another seems to be his major concern. This ontological position, in effect, “makes language relative,” claims Pernot, “by admitting that in the absence of a speech charged with truth, there exist discourses, multiple and variable” (p. 16). It’s along these lines, where truth, through language, is relative that I wish to focus my response.

Gorgias begins his demonstration by constructing a series of contraries that essentially state that being and not being are reflexive, where “not being is being,” (p. 207) but “being also is being,” so the opposite is also true. Accordingly, he is left to conclude that the two states are either true or false, where true means that they are the same thing, while false suggests being/not being are both null and void.

Gorgias continues by claiming that this line of reasoning leads us to only potentialities of truth, where, “If there is anything, it is either unborn or born” (p. 207). He uses these concepts to prove how both “are impossible,” so what follows is the reason that “it is impossible for there to be anything.” At face value, taking these concepts literally, it is hard to decipher what Gorgias means by these proofs. Yet, I seem to recall Professor Graff talking about how Aristotle would later recognize Gorgias for many things, but one of which was his style and use of metaphor.

If this demonstration is about truth – on it being and not being – then I find Gorgias’ proofs highly insightful with regards to his context, living in a time where the art of rhetoric and dialectic, led by Socrates, aimed for the revelation of Truth on each matter. Gorgias, in response to this type of rhetoric, seems to fold more complexity into account than Socrates’ modus operandi.

Socrates, who is a master of the dialectic, sought truth and outwitted everyone with his one-on-one techne. Yet, his method did not scale well in the midst of a larger audience, where a rhetor must attempt to persuade the minds of many, which according to the lectures so far, we have learned was a competive venture to win the adherence of the majority. In Gorgias’ mind, I read “On Not Being” as a speech that discusses the complexities of rhetor-audience relations, where truth is situational.

He talks about truth as spatial, as something that moves, “is moved,” and then ceases to “be continuous but would be divided and not in that [same] place” (p. 208). This division reminds me of how Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca complicate argumentation in The New Rhetoric by bringing back audience and opinion, where truth and formal logics (ironically so here with Gorgias’ demonstration) isn’t the strongest force to gain the adherence of minds.

What we are left with, argues Gorgias, is nothing, because even our senses are many and multiple amongst many diverse people, so even if there is “anything, it is unknowable” (p. 208). I would like to suggest that Gorgias is sensitive to what we call mediation. Where language and empiricism grant us access to knowing something about something, but there’s still something else to be known or said or attempted to make “evident” to another. He asks, “if someone does not have a notion of something, how could he acquire a notion of it from someone else by a word or by some sign different from the thing… ?”

Here, Gorgias creates a litany of the senses and modes of discursiveness to highlight how none of these things are the things themselves, so how, in fact, are we to know the Truth? Language is not a set of discrete packets of information to be sent objectively from one person to the next, argues Gorgias. He claims that “It is impossible for the same thing at the same time to exist in several persons separately, for then the one thing would be two.” This suggests the possibility for some objective truth, but he continues this line of reason by saying “… it is apparent that even the same person does not perceive the same things at the same time, … that it is scarcely possible for one person to perceive the same thing as another.” Accordingly, knowing something about something else does not permit any method of making such truth evident to another, argues Gorgias. “[T]hings are not words,” says Gorgias, “and because no one has the same thing in mind as another.”

In my response, I am very impressed with Gorgias’ set of contraries and ideas that seem to still be up for deliberation presently. As a quick aside, I have read Actor-Network Theorists, such as Anne Marie Mol, Bruno Latour, and John Law, who have all argued similar things in different ways, where ontology is many and mediated through our methods and tools of examination and art of rhetoric. These arguments have more to do with reality than truth, but this is where I leave off with a question that is burning in my mind: what is the difference between truth and reality? Is this a concern for any of the classical rhetorician/philosophers? I’m now curious how Plato will respond in his work the “Sophist”.

These questions, I feel, but am not sure, will provide some insight into the “ontological turn” that rhetoric is currently taking–for better or for worse. With many rhetoricians looking to the aforementioned ANT theorists, (which includes myself), I am curious how our discussions in and out of class on the sophists and Plato’s response to the sophists will aid in my future work as a rhetorician and researcher.

References

Gorgias. (1995). On not being. In M. Gagarin and P. Woodruff (Eds.), Early Greek political thought from Homer to the sophists (pp. 206-209). Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Pernot, L. (2005). Rhetoric in antiquity (W.E. Higgins, Trans.). Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. (Original work published in 2000)