Modified: 2010-01-31
Gorgias was from Leontini, Sicily, where he may have been Empedocles’ student. He first came to Athens, late in his life, as an ambassador from Leontini seeking Athenian aid against Syracuse, another city-state. His oratorical appeals to the Athenians were sensational and achieved their purpose. Athens and Leontini, two democratic city-states entered into an alliance. Afterwards, Gorgias remained in Athens and began to instruct others in rhetoric, his specialty. Gorgias’ rhetorical skills were legendary. He loved to take the poorer argument and make it the winner. His speeches rhymed, were full of metaphors and euphemisms, and were overly full of words.
Plato so disliked Gorgias and his methods that he wrote a dialogue, Gorgias, depicting an imaginary conversation between Gorgias and Socrates. In that dialogue, Plato overstated his case against Gorgias’ rhetorical methods (Woodruff, 1999). More of Gorgias’ writings have survived than for most of the philosophers thus far discussed in this chapter. One of them attempted to absolve the long-dead and possibly mythical Helen of Troy from any guilt for having gone to Troy with Paris, an act that led to the Trojan War as described in Homer’s Odyssey. If anything, that work was an exercise in rhetoric because the Athenian public had long held Helen culpable. If he could convince that audience that Helen was innocent, then he could convince anybody of anything. On Nature, one of his lost works, was more philosophical and was an attempt to refute the thinking of Parmenides and the Eleatic school. In that book, he proposed, “for anything you might mention: (1) that it is nothing; (2) that, even if it were something, it would be unknowable; and (3) that, even if it were knowable, it could not be made evident to others (Woodruff, 1999, p. 305). These three statements parodied (another sophist technique) Parmenides’ proof that matter was eternal and could not be destroyed.Because of these statements, Gorgias is often considered a nihilist.
Marginal definition: nihilism-the belief that nothing that exists can be known or communicated.
Because of the lack of context, however, it is not clear that such a label truly applies to him. Sophism was a response to the older forms of natural philosophy that narrowed the scope from the study of nearly anything and everything to primarily the study of humans and their words. Sophism’s effect on philosophy’s subsequent development was large, if not directly, then indirectly in the efforts of Socrates and Plato. That intellectual tension, combined with long periods of war and unrest explains much about the dominant philosophies that emerged after sophism in the fourth century BCE.