Gorgias says, "Nothing Exits."

"Nothing exists. If anything existed, we couldn't know it. If we could know it ,we couldn't communicate it."

Gorgias's oft repeated statement on reality (ironic? satirical? even whimsical?) has either tickled the fancy of the post-structuralist inclined, or thoroughly irritated those more devoted to analytical philosophy, IE those who like to think of themselves as logical, what William James refers to as "hard-headed" thinkers. (Might we, in our own whimsical mood, refer to these two entrenched camps as the army of the right-brained and the army of the left-brained?) It is possible, however, that this claim can make sense, and not simply be a mystic expression of an inexpressible metaphysics--or perhaps a bit of overly clever wordplay.

In order to take the slight of hand out of Gorgias's playful denial of the real, I'm going to go back to something that confused me for a long time listening to both Plato and Aristotle, the reference in each of the monad. This term is significant enough that it has its own listing in the Catholic Encyclopedia: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10447b.htm.   And yes, I start with the Catholic Encyclopedia to emphasize how the term has been reified (syntactical deification; or perhaps a better word, hypostasize) in scholasticism. Eventually, after the word popped up without explication more times than I was comfortable with, started to feel like I might have some inkling of what the term might be getting at when I listened to Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics. Here he talks about the monad and the duad. Simple one and two? I might accept that. It wasn't that doing so didn't make sense, it was that it didn't make enough sense. Then, Aristotle throws in a triad, but not simply a triad, a triangle. He'd already talked about how the duad was more than the two because it couldn't be simply divided into two monads since there is only one monad.The only way his discussion worked, that is, wasn't gibberish, was if the monad, rather than a number, is a point, the duad a line, and the triad a triangle.

A point has no space. When we draw a dot, we are simply making an "imitation" of what isn't there. A line can be divided, but doing so doesn't make the line two monads. The remainder stays a duad--and, remains unmeasurable. Then we come to the triad, the beginning, or basis of the physical world. It would be easier to see this as three dimensions. That, however, doesn't work out, since a line only has one dimension, and a point, no dimension at all.

Here is how this all connects to Gorgias: Since a monad (or a duad for that matter) does not actually exist, I.E. does not take up dimensional space, it cannot be known, since our senses cannot detect it. It can be represented, but since the representation does not refer to the actual, which doesn't exit anyway, it cannot be communicated. Certainly, something we refer to as a point or a line can be communicated. But, just as a dot "." on a screen or page is not actually a point, but only the symbol of a point, that symbol, no more than our words, can actually communicate what isn't there.

I admit, I'm not entirely sure how the triangle fits here, though Aristotle finds the triangle significant, since the 90 degree angle of a right triangle is the constant whereby squares are constructed, which he says makes triangles a first principle.

I also admit that this is an entirely off the wall interpretation, one that is no more explicit in Aristotle than in Gorgias. But, it works. Until someone else can come up with an interpretation of Gorgias's maxim that works better, I'll go with it.

The full text, at least Sextus's version, can be found at https://users.wfu.edu/zulick/300/gorgias/negative.html (Thank you Dr. Zulick. Also see http://rhetoricalgoddess.wikia.com/wiki/Rhetoricalgoddess_Wiki) Sextus's outline of Gorgias's argument is reminiscent of so many arguments about the one and the many that the sophists loved. Zeno's Arrow, designed to show how preposterous the other side's argument was, is just the best known. Plato's Parmenides and Euthydemus are examples of this mode of argumentation. As Plato implies in Euthydemus, such sophism shouldn't be taken seriously because one is never sure what the sophist actually believes, or is just saying to "make the worse case the better." Personally, I'm drawn to lines 83 through 86, and particularly this statement, "is is not possible to say that logos has substance in the way visible and audible things have," because this supports my argument, at least tangentially.