Gorgias
Gorgias was an ancient Greek sophist, pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger. W. K. C. Guthrie writes that "Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to ask miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies." He has been called "Gorgias the Nihilist", although the degree to which this epithet adequately describes his philosophy is controversial.
Prominent among his claims to recognition is that he transplanted rhetoric from his native Sicily to Attica, and contributed to the diffusion of the Attic dialect as the language of literary prose.
Life
Gorgias was born in Leontinoi, a Chalcidian colony in eastern Sicily that was allied with Athens. His father's name was Charmantides. He had a brother named Herodicus, who was a physician, and sometimes accompanied him during his travels. He also had a sister, whose name is not known, but whose grandson dedicated a golden statue to his great uncle at Delphi. It is not known whether Gorgias married or had children. Gorgias is said to have studied under the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles of Acragas, but it is not known when, where, for how long, or in what capacity. He may have also studied under the rhetoricians Corax of Syracuse and Tisias, but very little is known about either of these men, nor is anything known about their relationship with Gorgias.It is not known what kind of role Gorgias may have played in the politics in his native Leontinoi, but it is known that, in 427 BC, when he was around sixty years old, he was sent to Athens by his fellow-citizens as the head of an embassy to ask for Athenian protection against the aggression of the Syracusans. After 427 BC, Gorgias appears to have settled in mainland Greece, living at various points in a number of city-states, including Athens and Larisa. He was well known for delivering orations at Panhellenic Festivals and is described as having been "conspicuous" at Olympia. There is no surviving record of any role he might have played in organizing the festivals themselves.
Gorgias's primary occupation was as a teacher of rhetoric. According to Aristotle, his students included Isocrates.. Additionally, although they are not described as his students, Gorgias is widely thought to have influenced the styles of the historian Thucydides, the tragic playwright Agathon, the doctor Hippocrates, the rhetorician Alcidamas, and the poet and commentator Lycophron.
Gorgias is reputed to have lived to be one hundred and eight
years old. He won admiration for his ability to speak on any subject. He accumulated considerable wealth; enough to commission a gold statue of himself for a public temple. After his Pythian Oration, the Greeks installed a solid gold statue of him in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. He died at Larissa in Thessaly.
Philosophy
The philosophies of the pre-Socratic Greek Sophists are much debated among scholars in general, due to their highly subtle and ambiguous writings and also to the fact that they are best known as characters in Plato's dialogues. Gorgias, however, is particularly frustrating for modern scholars to attempt to understand. While scholars debate the precise subtleties of the teachings of Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus, they generally agree on the basic frameworks of what these thinkers believed. With Gorgias, however, scholars widely disagree on even the most basic framework of his ideas, including over whether or not that framework even existed at all. The greatest hindrance to scholarly understanding of Gorgias's philosophy is that the vast majority of his writings have been lost and those that have survived have suffered considerable alteration by later copyists.These difficulties are further compounded by the fact that Gorgias's rhetoric is frequently elusive and confusing; he makes many of his most important points using elaborate, but highly ambiguous, metaphors, similes, and puns. Many of Gorgias's propositions are also thought to be sarcastic, playful, or satirical. In his treatise On Rhetoric, Aristotle characterizes Gorgias's style of oratory as "pervasively ironic" and states that Gorgias recommended responding to seriousness with jests and to jests with seriousness. Gorgias frequently blurs the lines between serious philosophical discourse and satire, which makes it extremely difficult for scholars to tell when he is being serious and when he is merely joking. Gorgias frequently contradicts his own statements and adopts inconsistent perspectives on different issues. As a result of all these factors, Scott Porter Consigny calls him "perhaps the most elusive of the polytropic quarry hunted in Plato's Sophist.
Gorgias has been labelled "The Nihilist" because some scholars have interpreted his thesis on "the non-existent" to be an argument against the existence of anything that is straightforwardly endorsed by Gorgias himself. According to Alan Pratt, nihilism is "the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated." It is associated with pessimism and a radical skepticism that condemns existence.
Gorgias presented his nihilist arguments in On Non-Existence; however, the original text is no longer extant. We only know his arguments through commentary by Sextus Empiricus and Pseudo-Aristotle's De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia. Ostensibly Gorgias developed three sequential arguments: first, that nothing exists; second, that even if existence exists, it is incomprehensible to humans; and third, that even if existence is apprehensible, it certainly cannot be communicated or interpreted to one's neighbors.
That being said, there is consensus in late 20th century and early 21st century scholarship that the label 'nihilist' is misleading, in part because if his argument were genuinely meant to support nihilism it would be self-undermining. The argument is itself something, and has pretensions to communicate knowledge, in conflict with its explicit pronouncement that there is nothing and that it can't be known or communicated. Gisela Striker argues: "I find it hard to believe that anyone should ever have thought that Gorgias seriously advocated the view that nothing is and that he was, therefore, a 'nihilist.'" Similarly Caston states: "Gorgias would have to be not merely disconsolate, but quite dull-witted, to have missed the conflict between his presentation and its content". Finally, Wardy says, "This sadly mistaken reading overlooks the most obvious consequence of Gorgias' paradoxologia : his message refutes itself, and in consequence, so far from constituting a theory of logos, it confronts us with a picture of what language cannot be, with what it cannot be assumed to aspire to be." Gigon and Newiger make similar points.
Rhetorical innovation
Gorgias ushered in rhetorical innovations involving structure and ornamentation, and he introduced paradoxologia – the idea of paradoxical thought and paradoxical expression. For these advancements, Gorgias has been labeled the "father of sophistry". Gorgias is also known for contributing to the diffusion of the Attic Greek dialect as the language of literary prose. Gorgias was the first orator known to develop and teach a "distinctive style of speaking".Gorgias' extant rhetorical works – Encomium of Helen, Defense of Palamedes, On Non-Existence, and Epitaphios – come to us via a work entitled Technai, a manual of rhetorical instruction, which may have consisted of models to be memorized and demonstrate various principles of rhetorical practice. Although some scholars claim that each work presents opposing statements, the four texts can be read as interrelated contributions to the up-and-coming theory and art of rhetoric. Of Gorgias' surviving works, only the Encomium and the Defense are believed to exist in their entirety. Meanwhile, there are his own speeches, rhetorical, political, or other. A number of these are referred to and quoted by Aristotle, including a speech on Hellenic unity, a funeral oration for Athenians fallen in war, and a brief quotation from an Encomium on the Eleans. Apart from the speeches, there are paraphrases of the treatise "On Nature or the Non-Existent." These works are each part of the Diels-Kranz collection, and although academics consider this source reliable, many of the works included are fragmentary and corrupt. Questions have also been raised as to the authenticity and accuracy of the texts attributed to Gorgias.
Gorgias' writings are intended to be both rhetorical and performative. He goes to great lengths to exhibit his ability of making an absurd, argumentative position appear stronger. Consequently, each of his works defend positions that are unpopular, paradoxical and even absurd. The performative nature of Gorgias' writings is exemplified by the way that he playfully approaches each argument with stylistic devices such as parody, artificial figuration and theatricality. Gorgias' style of argumentation can be described as poetics-minus-the-meter. Gorgias argues that persuasive words have power that is equivalent to that of the gods and as strong as physical force. In the Encomium, Gorgias likens the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body: "Just as different drugs draw forth different humors from the body – some putting a stop to disease, others to life – so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion". The Encomium "argues for the totalizing power of language."
Gorgias also believed that his "magical incantations" would bring healing to the human psyche by controlling powerful emotions. He paid particular attention to the sounds of words, which, like poetry, could captivate audiences. His florid, rhyming style seemed to hypnotize his audiences.
Unlike other Sophists, such as Protagoras, Gorgias did not profess to teach arete. He believed that there was no absolute form of arete, but that it was relative to each situation. For example, virtue in a slave was not the same as virtue in a statesman. He believed that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was the king of all sciences, since he saw it as a techné with which one could persuade an audience toward any course of action. While rhetoric existed in the curriculum of every Sophist, Gorgias placed more prominence upon it than any of the others.
Much debate over both the nature and value of rhetoric begins with Gorgias. Plato's dialogue Gorgias presents a counter-argument to Gorgias' embrace of rhetoric, its elegant form, and performative nature. The dialogue tells the story of a debate about rhetoric, politics and justice that occurred at a dinner gathering between Socrates and a small group of Sophists. Plato attempts to show that rhetoric does not meet the requirements to actually be considered a technê but rather is a somewhat dangerous "knack" to possess, both for the orator and for his audience, because it gives the ignorant the power to seem more knowledgeable than an expert to a group.