Aristotle
cites Plato in a backhanded way as his source on the sophists: “And so Plato
was in a sense not wrong in ranking sophistic as dealing with
that which is not” (Bk. VI Pt. 2 Ross). What follows is a convoluted explanation of
the way sophists focus solely on “that which is not” or nothing, and thus, what
they study is not a science, which must focus on that which is. (Note: when
Plato and Aristotle talk about science they do not mean STEM, they mean any
systematic method of study and/or practice. Thus, metaphysics is a science.)
It's
easy to see how this assessment writes off the sophists as nihilists, and
Gorgias’s famous sound bite that, “Nothing exists; Even if existence
exists, it cannot be known; Even if it could be known, it cannot be
communicated,” doesn't help much.
How
do we see this as nothing more than nihilistic mysticism? Or, as Aristotle sees
it, as “that which is not” philosophy, and thus can be written off?
In
order to play this brain game, let’s think about our object of study, for right
now, Gorgias’s argument from On Nature above, as a sculpture rather than a
painting. When I look at a painting I see one surface. That surface may have
the illusion of perspective, as in Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Annunciation. But I
can’t step around it and see it from the back. For that, I need a sculpture. I
can walk around Michelangelo’s David, and at least until they put it behind
plexiglass in St Peter’s, his Pieta. Even behind the plexiglass, the light hits
Mary’s face at different angles depending on where the viewer stands. At one
angle we see her grace, at another, her anguish. From the front Christ’s body,
broken and emaciated, rests in her lap, yet our focus is on her face. From the
back, we see the folds of her robe, graceful and somehow serene. And Christ
cannot be seen at all. Let’s see if we can do that, change our perspective and
see entirely different objects, with Gorgias’s sophism.
In
order to step around the other side, rather than seeing these three phrases as
a syllogism that somehow makes an ontological statement that denies itself, let’s
think of it as a rhetorical statement.
Of course, one thing we’ve got to get
around is the tendency in philosophy to see rhetoric itself as outside the
pale. See this quotation from The
Internet Encyclopedia on Philosophy: “In 1930, French philosopher
Jacques Maritain remarked ‘[s]ophistry is not a system of ideas, but a vicious
attitude of the mind;’ the sophists ‘came to consider as the most desirable
form of knowledge the art of refuting and disproving by skillful arguments’
(32-33)” (Higgins). Maritain’s condemnation is common when our perspective
begins with philosophy.
When we begin with rhetoric we can, though I admit do not
necessarily, come to a different reading. In this reading, Gorgias denies Plato’s
forms. If we start from forms, from an axiom that must be true, that cannot be
denied, then what follows is simply a string of dominos. All will fall in their
proper order and place. There is no reason to seek for truth. From an axiom we
run the danger Charles Sanders Peirce identified as the “fixation of belief,”
our tendency to hold onto what we believe in the face of all opposition—a fault
that is as prevalent in philosophy and science as it is in religion.
Using Gorgias’s “nothing exists”
we sidestep fixation of belief. We start, not from a reified truth, but from
possible truths, each of which must contend with each other. As William James
puts it when writing about
God, “The truth of ‘God’ has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths. It is
on trial by them and they on trial by it. Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths
have been straightened themselves out together” (Pragmatism 52).
The synergy between Gorgias and pragmatism is evident in
this viewpoint that “nothing exists” isn’t an ontological statement, but the starting
point for dialectic. In this method there are no preexisting truths that cannot
be questioned, there are no sacred cows. Every truth has to stand the test of
dialectic. This might frighten some. It obviously has frightened many.
For a more nuanced academic discussion of Gorgias, take a
look at the citation on him in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/gorgias/
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