A Take on Plato’s Parmenides

 

     The informality of the title of this essay is meant to convey that I here make no pretense to scholarship; indeed, my notions have little ambition even to be called philosophical.  My reading of Plato can only be justified by a reader who finds it poetic.  Yet I have always found that the subjectivity of poets offers an access to truth unavailable to logicians. 

 

     Plato’s Parmenides is to many a puzzler.  One modern reader has called it the philosopher’s “most enigmatic” work, [1] while another, equally Hellenic but preferring more contemporary jargon, finds it "aporetic." [2]   In most of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ interlocutors follow their guru like sheep, chorusing “of course, Socrates” and “how could it be otherwise, Socrates?” while at the same time the reader may be shouting, “but no!”  In the Parmenides the roles are reversed, and a youthful Socrates accepts the lead of the elder philosopher.  Parmenides even scolds like an indulgent parent, telling Socrates, “you are still young; the time will come, if I am not mistaken, when philosophy will have a firmer grasp of you.”  [3]  Plato’s point of view can always be elusive, given the dramatic dialogue format and the Socratic pose of knowing nothing, but where is the authority here?   The reader of this dialogue scarcely knows what to think as Socrates allows himself to be passively led first through a rejection of his own opinions and then to what looks like a strange sort of apologetic reconstruction of them, making the second portion if not a refutation a weaker reflected mirror image of the first.  Finally, through the entire dialogue the argumentation is so abstract, abstruse, and repetitive that even receptive readers may find themselves dizzy with fatigue after only a page or two, on the edge of concluding that the whole thing is gibberish. 

    If one persists, the effect soon becomes incantatory, hypnotic, at times an astonishing juggling act, at others more a magic charm or mantra, never a usable map of ratiocination.  Perhaps some savant might be able to lock in on the concepts here and follow the funabulistic thought, but could the effort of leaping and dancing and graceful turns lift a contemplative to the sublime?  A good many Hindu, Buddhist, and Scholastic logicians have constructed similarly grand and taxing mental gymnastics based on the conviction that it can.  Perhaps following a moment of surprising grace a certain sort of mind can only heap up argument after argument despite their never quite measuring up to the original flash.  (Does such a dynamo underlie Aquinas’ voluminous productivity?) 

     For me the Parmenides induces not active cognition, but rather its opposite, a surrender of logic in the face of mystery, a submission to circumstance, and a recognition that a human mind cannot encompass the cosmos.  The Milky Way simply will not be swallowed.  Yet that does not doom the philosopher’s equanimity.  In singing the song of powerlessness, in asserting obeisance to the unknown, in insisting on seeing reality naked, and then proceeding to make an exceedingly abstract yet shapely song of what cannot be understood, Parmenides and Socrates and Plato and the reader following along as well dare to affirm, to celebrate even, these borders and limits of humanity. 

     I imagine Plato winking over the centuries, acknowledging that the cumbrous superstructure of Forms (later overlaid with Neo-Platonic Emanations and by the time of Iamblichus crowded with deities and spiritual beings) is only a pastime, a high intellectual amusement.  In Plato’s wink, though it may exist only in fancy, the reader returns to the One, very much the same One that recurs so obsessively in the Parmenides.

     (Another Platonic actor may provide a parallel.  Gorgias had enthralled Athenians with his rhetoric while maintaining a rigorously Skeptical position.  Having concluded that nothing can be shown to exist; that if anything did exist, it could not be known by people; and that if anything were known, it could not be communicated to anyone else, he then spent his time weaving fabulous tapestries of words.  Sitting on a Mediterranean terrace in mid-life, he found he could entertain himself and his tasteful fellow-citizens with such playful projects as a defense of Helen or of Palamedes.  Behind such pleasant theatricals, though, there shone always the One, the Atman, the Ultimate Reality from which each person arises, though only temporarily.)

     This notion is not entirely a vagary of my own.  There is some evidence and a great deal of speculation about the Indian influence on Parmenides himself.  As early as 1894 the author of an article “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy” found “the most striking resemblance – I might almost say sameness – is between the doctrine of the All-in-One in the Upanishads and the philosophy of the Eleatics.”  He believed in actual influence from India “without intending to pass an apodictic decision.” [4]  Since then a variety of scholars have examined specific correspondences between Parmenides and Shankara and Nagarjuna. [5]  At least one professor of Buddhist studies argues that Parmenides must have traveled to study in India. [6]  

     While Plato’s precise position must remain ever obscure, considering the Parmenides I cannot avoid thoughts of his “unwritten teachings.”  Though no Rosicrucian or Theosophist, I thought of the old notion of Plato’s esoteric doctrines [7]  One reader, at least, of the Parmenides imagines a spark of the glory of absolute Enlightenment passing from one wounded human psyche to another, diluted and diverted by every possible imp of ignorance, yet casting still a clear light over thinkers of ancient Greece, already struggling, like their South Asian cousins, for a way to live in a cold world.  

 

 

1.      1.  Mitchell H. Miller, Jr., Plato's Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul. Princeton 1986.

 

2.     2.  R.E. Allen, Plato's Parmenides: Translation and Analysis (Minnesota 1983).

 

3.      3.  I use Jowett’s old translation.  The Greek is “νέος γὰρ εἶ ἔτι . . . καὶ οὔπω σου ἀντείληπται φιλοσοφία” (130ε).

 

4.      4.  Richard Garbe, “On the Connexion between Indian and Greek Philosophy,” The Monist Vol. 4, No. 2 (January, 1894).

 

5.      5.  See, for example, Chiara Robbiano, “Self or being without boundaries: on Śaṅkara and Parmenides” in Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought ed. Richard Seaford; Nathan Tamblyn, “Parmenides and Nāgārjuna: A Buddhist Interpretation of Ancient Greek Philosophy” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, vol. 4; and Kelly P. Dugan, Understanding Parmenides as a Numerical Monist: A Comparative Study, a University of Kansas dissertation that discusses Shankara in particular. 

 

6.      6.  Ferenc Ruzsa, “Parmenides’ road to India,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 42 (2002).

 

7.      7.  Though for a period little discussed, the issue has been revived in recent decades by Irmgard Männlein-Robert and others.  Plato's disputed Seventh Letter declares that the truth of the highest matters cannot be expressed in writing.  "And this is the reason why every serious man in dealing with really serious subjects carefully avoids writing, lest thereby he may possibly cast them as a prey to the envy and stupidity of the public. In one word, then, our conclusion must be that whenever one sees a man's written compositions—whether they be the laws of a legislator or anything else in any other form,—these are not his most serious works, if so be that the writer himself is serious: rather those works abide in the fairest region he possesses.”  Also “Whosoever, then, has accompanied me in this story and this wandering of mine will know full well that, whether it be Dionysius or any lesser or greater man who has written something about the highest and first truths of Nature, nothing of what he has written, as my argument shows, is based on sound teaching or study. Otherwise he would have reverenced these truths as I do, and would not have dared to expose them to unseemly and degrading treatment.”

 

8.      8.  Aristotle in his Physics explicitly refers to such unwritten doctrines (“ἄγραφα δόγματα”) of Plato.  

 

Poetry and Magic Spells

αἱ γὰρ ἔνθεοι διὰ λόγων ἐπῳδαὶ ἐπαγωγοὶ ἡδονῆς, ἀπαγωγοὶ λύπης γίνονται· συγγινομένη γὰρ τῇ δόξῃ τῆς ψυχῆς ἡ δύναμις τῆς ἐπῳδῆς ἔθελξε καὶ ἔπεισε καὶ μετέστησεν αὐτὴν γοητείᾷ.

Sacred incantations sung with words are bearers of pleasure and banishers of pain, for, merging with opinion in the soul, the power of the incantation is wont to beguile it and persuade it and alter it by witchcraft.

Gorgias, Helen



     In his ingenious defense of Helen of Troy, Gorgias argues that she cannot be blamed if she was misled by the power of words. Conflating rhetoric and poetry with magic formulae, he declares speech a “great power,” capable of accomplishing “divine works,” manipulating emotion, and in fact inducing pleasure and pain through a sort of “wizardry.” [1] Helen cannot be guilty if her acts were the result of a quasi-holy compulsion. According to the testimonia of antiquity Gorgias himself was the outstanding practitioner of just such powerful hypnotic language with the power of altering the reality of listeners through the use of words alone.
     The intimate connection between magic and poetry has long been evident from the work of anthropologists. Shamans and priests describe their visionary experiences and work their wonders in large part through words, though other arts, including dance, drama, and visual art (in the form of fetish objects and the like) also play a role. This relationship has hardly diminished in the contemporary age. The words of the Roman Catholic priest ego te absolve are meant to work in the real world just like any charm, while poetry enthusiasts often use figures of speech referring to magic to characterize their reactions and poets like W. B. Yeats, Jack Spicer, James Merrill and others tout their work as supernaturally inspired.
     Perhaps the deepest affinity between magic and poetry lies in desire. The magic worker seeks a prosperous harvest, healing from disease, victory in war, ends that are always in doubt but which the individual passionately desires. In this way the practitioner’s words, whether functionally efficacious or not, constitute a poignant statement of longing, of human uncertainty, frustration, and anxiety not so different from a poem. Though Tylor and most early analysts saw magic as a pseudo-science, an ineffective way of obtaining one’s way in the world which served for people until they developed more practical scientific and technical solutions, the survival of magical practices in current times indicates that such a view is insufficient.
     In archaic societies poetry and magic were often subspecialties of the same individual, a person who excelled others in manipulation of the symbolic values of language. Shamans visited the spirit realm and returned with stories and verses to counsel their fellows. In later institutional practice those who mastered the verbal rituals of sacrifice were priests whose aid was considered essential to human well-being. Still later their expertise may lose much of its magical potency and become more scholarly or more pastoral.
     Both spells and poems seek symbolic means to ameliorate the helplessness of our species. People have traditionally found solace in the claims of religion, ordinarily convincing themselves of providence or, when all seems to have gone wrong, in an afterlife in which everything is set straight. In the meantime one may try to alter one’s circumstances for the better through the use of charms and incantations. The language in which these claims are stated and by which they are invoked is regularly poetic. While many writers distinguish magic with its attempt to control events from prayer and other religious manifestations thought to be more lofty, they are identical in seeking to influence circumstances through verbal formulations. All are variations on the old principle do ut des, in which the believer’s actions are thought to elicit a positive response. While moderns may scoff at the idea that reciting a charm will, for instance, heal a sick calf, every traditional society valorizes such efforts and every modern one has its substitutes, be they priests, therapists, alternative healers, or “life counselors.” The fact is that all reality is subjective and people have always recognized that words can alter, reprogram as it were, an individual consciousness.
     From the beginning, but more conspicuously in modern times as faith in revelation has faded for many thoughtful people, art has supplanted religion in its fundamental role of making life livable. This general development is so well-recognized that it does not require documentation. Artists such as Wagner, Mallarmé, Wilde, and Wallace Stevens come to mind.
     Yet significant differences exist as well between incantations and poetry. Since magic is thought to compel its ends (unless, of course, it is opposed by a more potent magic), its words need be little more than a simple statement of desire, a human version of the divine fiat. In some cases nonsense syllables such as abracadabra, a Sanskrit mantra, or the vocables of much Plains Indian song suffice.
     In others a simple statement of the desired result serves. “I bind down Aristaichmos the smith before those below,” says an ancient Greek curse tablet, then going on to list three other enemies of the writer without the slightest further detail. [2] A Hebrew benediction of the same simple sort says the same thing six ways: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.” [3] The Vedda may set out on the hunt with confidence after he sings to his arrow, “Go and drop behind the body of the monitor-lizard/ Pierce it, dear cousin.” [4]
     Poetry, on the other hand, must generate its own power on the strength of its language without the aid of dogmatic belief or social consensus. The consumer of poetry will begin to read in an ordinary state of mind, unaffected by the words on the page. The experience of reading, however, may generate the strongest feelings, altogether undeniable when experienced.
     This is not at all always the case. Some of the Old English charms involve thick, sometimes obscure imagery and elaborate rhetorical structures not always clearly linked to the goal of the spell. The "Wið færstice," called “Against a Stitch,” runs twenty-seven lines, construing a sudden pain as the result of an assault by supernatural beings, either Aesir, elves, or witches (hægtessan) and briefly achieving a tone similar to that of heroic epics. Furthermore the poem itself is a component in a dramatic ritual, a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, prescribed in a preceding prose passage that recommends the preparation of a potion of medico-magical herbs boiled with butter.
     Poetry and magic have much in common. Both are verbal technologies that aim at making life more livable through symbolic manipulation. Both embody human desire and both construct world-views in which human values supplant the indifferent chaos of the data of reality. Both use hypnotic and little understood verbal rhythms and melodies to transcend and illuminate lived experience. Both also require accepting a set of learned conventions to function. In the case of magic this involves a belief that recitation of the appropriate words will bend nature and even gods to one’s will. Once such credulity in the old forms diminished, art for many filled its place.
     Yet art boasts no divine author. People compose poems without claiming (explicitly at least) to speak for the universe. It requires perhaps as much faith to take advantage of the redemptive power of a great poet as to utter a spell, but such aesthetic power arises more from the reader’s shared humanity with the author than from the poet’s unique ability to access truth. We moderns are surely as much in need of magic as our ancestors yet, lacking their socially approved avenues to gain some purchase on the unwieldy world, we face the challenge of manufacturing conviction out of whole cloth. For some this arrives through the supreme fiction, to use Stevens’ phrase, of poetry.



1. Gorgias’ phrases are λόγος δυνάστης μέγας ἐστίν, θειότατα ἔργα,and γοητείᾷ.

2. See Werner Reiss, Performing Interpersonal Violence: Court, Curse, and Comedy in 4th Century BCE Athens.

3. Numbers 6:24-26 KJV.

4. Quoted in C. M. Bowra, Primitive Song, p. 118.

A Skeptic’s Faith [Sextus Empiricus]

     I have pursued art rather than religion or philosophy because it seems to me to offer greater access to reality. Indeed, when the practitioners of those other realms appeal to me, in the person of the Buddha, say, or St. Francis, Plato, or Nietzsche, I assimilate them to art. After all, each of these sought symbolic manipulation that would in part make life seem livable. For me, understanding religion is largely a matter of interpreting metaphors, and philosophy’s most important role is that defined by the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese alike: to enable one to live a good life.

     Much of religion and art as well employs ample metaphorical mediation in rendering the world, often glorious and grand as in the Mahabharata or Dante. While I agree that the subtleties of human insight are more precisely expressed in the indirection of figuration, I also appreciate the early Daoists, and some among the practitioners of Zen and Vedanta who look at reality directly, without illusion or protective rhetoric and yet find illumination in that rigorously spare vision. I find elements of the same sort of consolation of philosophy digestible even to a faithless twenty-first century reader in certain of those philosophers of late antiquity, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, and Skeptics for whom the Olympian gods had become unsatisfying, but who were not attracted to the salvationist mystery cults of the era. I turn to the pre-Socratics for poetry, to Plato and Aristotle for magisterial system, but to Marcus Aurelius, Epicurus, stories of Diogenes, and to the Skeptic Sextus Empiricus for strategies aimed at a well-lived life.

     Though Pyrrho of Elis, whose ideas we know primarily from Sextus Empiricus, is often named the originator of Greek skepticism, his ideas were by no means altogether novel. The Greek σκέπτομαι means to look about carefully, to view or consider, and thus a skeptic would originally have been simply an inquirer. Indeed the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Sextus encourages continuous questioning and declines to be dogmatic even in its doubts, insisting that one must withhold judgment in the present state of knowledge while allowing for the possibility of knowledge through some future improvement in reasoning and perhaps through non-ratiocinative processes as well. Long before Sextus’ time, late in the fifth century B. C.E. the sophist Gorgias was the author of a lost book titled On Nature or the Non-Existent (an epitome is in Sextus’ Against the Professors) in which he maintained that nothing exists, though if it did exist, it could not be known, but even if it could be known, it could not be communicated, and, if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. A more thorough nihilism is difficult to imagine.

     In some dialogues, Socrates is portrayed as a doubter, saying in the Apology “I am wiser than this man; for neither of us really knows anything fine and good, but this man thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas I, as I do not know anything, do not think I do either. I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either.” [2] Similarly the conclusion of the Theaetetus seems to leave the question of what constitutes valid knowledge entirely unresolved.

     Academic skepticism descended through later thinkers associated with Plato’s school, constituting an alternative Skeptical tradition to Pyrrhonianism, embodied in the work of what was also called the New Academy of which Carneades was the most prominent exponent. As a kind of skeptic fundamentalist in this long-established tradition, Sextus aims at providing a systematic formulation of Pyrrhonian skepticism and thus mounting a persuasive and thorough polemic against the Dogmatists , meaning chiefly the Stoics, but including all believers of every sort. He rejected the Stoic faith in reasoning as well as their monistic pantheism and qualified acceptance of sense data as an accurate register of reality.

     Aiming at providing a thoroughly reasoned case even at the risk of trying his readers’ patience, Sextus repeats the same series of arguments a good many times. His most telling points called tropes or modes, were for the most part inherited from Aenesidemus. [3] His most often repeated argument is that of infinite regress. Since the reason justifying a conclusion itself requires justification, no proposition can be certainly established. [5] For Pyrrho and Sextus every criterion for truth must itself be proven and the criterion used for that proof in turn requires always another proof. The Skeptics insist, in opposition to the implications of everyone’s daily behavior, that we never can be certain we are in fact perceiving reality nor can we know that our own perception is the same as another’s. Since different thinkers come to different conclusions, not only about ideas but even about sense impressions, since all humans are limited by our sensory and cognitive apparatus, since consensus is inadequate as proof, [4] it is difficult or impossible to find truly “self-evident” propositions from which to rebuild, like Descartes, a structure of thought ascending all the way to the heavens.

     Perhaps the most surprising result of Pyrrhonian skepticism as described by Sextus is the state of mind that can occur after one admits one’s ignorance. According to Sextus the goal (or τέλος) of skepticism is ἀταραξία , a quietude in mind. According to Eusebius’ account of Pyrrho’s follower Timon the skeptic experiences “first speechlessness, and then imperturbability, but Aenesidemus says pleasure.” [6] Sextus readily recognizes that this calm may be imperfect and he allows for “moderate feeling” when “unavoidable.” [7] For Sextus as for Buddha, desire is the source of pain. When one suffers what seem to be “natural evils,” one “deems himself to be pursued by Furies, and when he becomes possessed of what seems to him good things he falls into no ordinary sense of disquiet both through arrogance and through fear of losing them.” [8] Pyrrho himself was said to have traveled eastward with Alexander and to have studied with Indian yogis (the gymnosophists or “naked philosophers” whom the Macedonian king himself regarded most highly) as well as with Persian magi before returning to Greece. Many of the anecdotes recorded about him after he set up as a philosopher upon his return relate to his detachment and imperturbability, though tales of his needing to be protected from walking off cliffs or being run down by carts are doubtless hyperbolic. He so impressed his fellow-countrymen that he was made chief priest during his life (his agnosticism having been found no impediment), and statues were erected in his honor both in his native town of Elis and in Athens.

     Sextus emphatically insists that his skepticism in no way denies appearances which he recognizes “induce our assent involuntarily.” [9] To him the problem is in the account given of the appearances. We cannot deny, he says, that honey seems sweet, “but whether it is sweet in its essence is for us a matter of doubt.” He is not performing intellectual stunts (as one might suspect Gorgias of doing) but rather, as he says, “pointing out the rashness of the Dogmatists.” [10] Like all people, he relies constantly on his sense impressions and his cognitive abilities. He differs only in thinking that these useful abilities may fall short of delivering Reality to the consciousness. This is far from being a cul de sac for him; it is rather a beginning. On the first page or so of his book, Sextus warns his readers that he does not “positively affirm” of any of his statements “that the fact is exactly as we state it, but we simply record each fact, like a chronicler, as it appears to us at the moment.” [11] He later restates the concept while commenting on the highly practical matter of his own medical professions’ remedies: “we are unable to say what is the true nature of each of these things, although it is possible to say what each thing at the moment appears to be.” [12]

     For Sextus the same tentative acceptance of the phenomena of everyday reality applies to dialectic, the art of logical argumentation. Thus Sextus concludes his book with a curious passage in which he says that the skeptic sage, being a “lover of his kind,” wishes, like a good physician, to “cure” the delusions of others. He will select the argument to use in a given situation, not on its rational superiority to other possible arguments, but on the basis of what is appropriate to use with a given opponent. [13] “Proof” is not a matter of positivistic conclusions, but rather of rhetorical victory, the verbal formulation that will accomplish the speaker’s task.

     Both this acceptance of admittedly imperfect vision and the elaboration of rhetorical goals sound to me very like poetry. While we cannot grasp at Truth and hold it firm in the hand, we can record a snapshot of the play of subjective mind, and, if we do so accurately enough, it will resonate in others. Every poem, every work of art, no less than the propositions of a skeptic, might begin with the words “it is as if . . .” If such a declaration is the closest we may approach to Truth, it is the part of wisdom to accept that reality and follow Pyrrho and Sextus and those Renaissance writers whom they influenced such as Montaigne in making the most of it.


1. See Sextus Empiricus I, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 21d. I use the Loeb Classical Library edition with a translation by R. G. Bury. Though quotations are in English, references are to sections of the original text. See also Diogenes Laertius II.32.

2. Apology 21, d.

3. Ancient skepticism described their basic arguments as tropes or modes. Sextus Empiricus’ attempt to set forth his position systematically leads to a great deal of repetition. Modern comments taking his arguments into account include those by Karl Popper and, later, Hans Albert who coined the term “Münchhausen trilemma” to describe the choice between dogmatism, infinite regress and “psychologism” (trusting sense impressions) in terms very similar to those used in antiquity.

4. See Sextus Empiricus I, II, 43 on consensus of the majority. The Academic Skeptic Carneades had attacked consensus as a basis for theism.

5. See, for instance Sextus I, I, 116.

6. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, Bk.XIV, ch. 18, 1-5.

7. Sextus I, II, 25.

8. Sextus I, III, 237.

9. Sextus I, I, 19.

10. Sextus I, I, 20.

11. Sextus I, I, 3-5.

12. Sextus I, I, 93. As a physician, his name Empiricus would seem to suggest that he practiced in the Empiric tradition though he notes at one point that the Methodic school had much in common with Pyrrhonism, in that it “follow[s] the appearances and take[s] from these whatever seems expedient.” [Sextus I, I, 237] Both schools were opposed to the Dogmatists.

13. Sextus I,III, 280-281.

Gorgias of Leontini

This is a revision of one of a number of pieces I wrote for Bruccoli Clark's Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Though it betrays its reference book parameters, I did seek to make some original observations about a fascinating figure.


     Although Gorgias made major original contributions to philosophy and rhetoric, he is probably best-known as the antagonist of Socrates’ ideas in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name. Gorgias is, indeed, an appropriate if outstanding representative of the sophists and rhetoricians of the ancient Greek world, and, in spite of the aura of disrepute often associated with these schools, much of his thought seems today strikingly modern, anticipating twentieth century trends in literary theory and epistemology. Both the Gorgias known from the fragmentary remains of his writings and that preserved by Plato are influential and significant for the provocative and skeptical challenges to conventional ideas of truth and poetry and for their positive construction of the role of art in a world of imperfect knowledge.
     Gorgias was born in Leontini in Sicily about the year 485 B.C.E. He is said to have been a student of Empedocles and doubtless began his career as a philosopher, including speculating on natural science, but his time and region were the fountainhead of the new discipline of rhetoric, and he turned his attention to language at an early age. His teacher Empedocles is called the founder of rhetorical studies, and Gorgias is also described as a student of Tisias who had learned rhetoric from Korax, the man most often named as the first systematic rhetorician.
     The nihilistic theses of Gorgias book on nature may suggest that the author, having devastated scientific positivism, abandoned the pursuit of ultimate truth as inaccessible and turned instead to oratory as an alternative in which unknowability is not necessarily a defect.
     When he came to Athens About the year 427 C.E. as leader of a delegation requesting military aid against the Syracusans, he dazzled the local orators with his highly ornamented and rhythmic style of speaking. He was not only successful in persuading the Athenians to make an alliance with Leontini; he had made such an impression that he moved to Athens himself and took pupils, reputedly at a very high tuition. His flair for the spectacular persisted, in his extremely poetic, almost incantatory style and in such gestures as his offering to speak extemporaneously on any subject proposed.
     Though he took a good citizen’s active part in political and religious affairs, and a statue of him was erected in a temple of Apollo, his radical philosophic skepticism, his remunerative teaching, and a general suspicion of the deceptive powers of language made him an ideal target for attacks on the new sophistic. Many of the charges unfairly leveled against Socrates in Aristophanes' The Clouds, for instance, might with more justice have been directed at Gorgias.
     He traveled to other Greek cities, teaching and delivering speeches, but very little of his work remains. He is said to have maintained a very abstemious lifestyle, including remaining a bachelor and refusing invitations to symposia. These austerities may have been salutary, for he is said to have lived well past his hundredth birthday.
     The notorious series of propositions first set forth in the lost volume Concerning Nature or What is Not may be conceived as a riposte to Empedocles who had written a text On Nature, but it is thoroughly rooted in Eleatic philosophy. Basing himself on Parmenides and Zeno while adding Protagoras’ insights on the limitations of human knowledge, Gorgias declared first, that nothing can be shown to exist; second that if anything did exist, it could not be known by men; and third, that if anything were known to a person, it could not be communicated to anyone else. Surely a more radical epistemological questioning is difficult to conceive.
     While following earlier monistic theories of reality and earlier claims of the relative and limited nature of truth, Gorgias made a distinctly original contribution by extending the doctrine to the inadequacy of language. Here he may be considered the earliest known analogue for such twentieth century theoreticians as Ferdinand de Saussure who argues the arbitrariness of signs and insisted on the inevitable gap between signifier and signified or Derrida whose deconstruction likewise radically questions the ability of language to bear meaning, but who, like Gorgias, does not conclude the issue with genuine nihilism or barren agnosticism. For, while the accounts in Concerning Nature or What is Not in Sextus Empiricus and in the anonymous De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia are almost altogether destructively skeptical (though brilliantly so, recalling Nagarjuna’s Buddhist metaphysics in their uncompromising daring), the Palamedes suggests certain positive principles.
     After restating the claim that truth is inaccessible to the human understanding and that logos could not in any event communicate it, Gorgias goes on to make the surprising claim that this is most appropriate and fitting. The irrational character of the mind answers to the nature of the universal; the ambiguous and contradictory attributes of knowledge are then, in a deeper sense, realistic; and the tragedy of life is best embodied in language. The “fallen” word is not merely adequate, but eloquent in a fallen world.
     The Helen elaborates much more fully on these enigmatic ideas. Though Gorgias referred to it as a jeu de’esprit (paignion), the speech hints in artful ways, suggestive rather than dogmatic, at a theory of literature that in some critical points anticipates the Aristotle of the Poetics. Both the authentic verifiable potential and the limitations of language are inherent in this attempt to exonerate Helen. She is innocent, Gorgias argues, if her leaving Menelaus for Paris is due to the will of the gods, to force, to love so great she could not have acted otherwise, or to Paris’ powers of persuasion. It is, of course, this last possibility that most concerns Gorgias.
     Admitting that language has the ability to deceive, to beguile, (the Greek is apateo), he nonetheless insists that this is not identical to fraud or lying. In fact, according to Gorgias, the “deceived” man may be wiser than the “undeceived.” Some people, indeed, are too limited, too lacking in humanity to be “deceived.” Tragic drama creates a deception of a sort that embodies reality more fully than everyday perception.
     This is a subtle and novel response to an old question. When Hesiod’s muses appeared to him, virtually the first words they said to him were, “we know how to speak many false things as though they were true, but we know, when we want, how to utter truth. Plato’s opposition to the poets was based on this equivocal relation to truth, though balanced by his respect for their potentially divine inspiration, and Aristotle’s claim that poetry “is more worthy of serious attention” than history indicate the importance of the issue for ancient literary theory. The question continued to be debated through Augustine’s grudging allowance of art in support of revelation, medieval didacticism, through nineteenth century “realism” up to such recent formulations as Umberto Eco’s definition of the sign as that which may be used to lie and deconstruction’s profoundly ambivalent attitude toward the truth of the word.
     For Gorgias in the Helen, logos is “a great thing,” divine, universal, the source of love for mankind; it is “potent like a drug” (this simile, so richly ambiguous, was mined by Derrida in his Pharmakon). Tragic knowledge, for Gorgias as for Aristotle the primary type of poetic knowledge, is clear and unclouded as contrasted with the seeming reality which constitutes daily human experience. The piece may then be read as a paean to poetry’s powers for penetrating truth, though it is possible to involve this very text in the contradiction it raises by stressing Gorgias’ reportedly light-hearted comment on it and reading it as a cynical exercise in manipulating an audience to vindicate an immoral wrong-doer by pleading the irrational domination of the soul by the same sort of artistic language that constitutes the speech itself.
     The same issues form the heart of Plato’s Gorgias, though there the problem is viewed in the perspective of Platonic idealism which will finally allow little room for the aesthetic. Though Socrates treats Gorgias with respect, the skepticism which for him enables and ennobles the role of art is given little expression, and his opinions are thus deprived of their foundation, misrepresented and trivialized. The dialogue features Socrates and his disciple Chaerophon disputing with Gorgias, his pupil and admirer Polus, and Callicles, a politician who serves to take supposedly Gorgian ideas to greater and more easily assailable lengths than could have been attached to the name of Gorgias himself. For Plato the prince[pal object seems to have been to demonstrate the superiority of philosophy over rhetoric from a moral point of view and to insist on the primacy of justice over opportunism in words and deeds.
     The dialogue opens when Chaerophon at Socrates’ instance asks Gorgias what he professes to be, thereby inquiring after a definition of rhetoric. Gorgias says that rhetoric is great because it allows to men the very highest power, the ability to work their will in society. Though his admirer Polus calls him “one of the best” at the “noblest of arts,” this definition allows Socrates to relegate it to the sphere of persuasion and attacking it as no art at all, but only a “knack” acquired from experience of how best to manipulate an audience, a variety of flattery and an ignoble part of politics. Socrates further disparages rhetoric’s pretension by likening it to cookery, hardly an art, but rather an learned practice which might sometimes give pleasure. It cannot qualify as an art because it lacks theory and is essentially irrational. Finally, Socrates says that relation between cooking and medicine is analogous to that between rhetoric and justice in that the former term of each pair aims at mere pleasing while the latter aims at the true good. With high seriousness Socrates proceeds to demonstrate that doing wrong is a greater evil than suffering wrong and that the worst misfortune would be to remain without punishment after having committed a wrong. Socrates admits that rhetoric may serve a function, then, in aiding one to expose his own errors and to ask for just punishment and, secondarily, in defending oneself or defending even enemies should they be unjustly accused,
     At this point Callicles, the wholly amoral cynical politician of the piece, asks in amazement whether Socrates can be serious.  He then mounts a thorough and self-conscious exposition of the principle that might makes right and that the natural man is altogether selfish, seeking only his own interest in both personal and social arenas. For Callicles law, morality, and social convention are merely for the weak, and a “man of courage” would pay them no heed and pursue only pleasure. Here Gorgias, like Epicurus, is associated with hedonism, although his own pleasures seem to have been highly refined and spiritual. For Socrates, though, pleasure is inevitably identified with goodness, and he proceeds to show that human nature need not be accepted in its natural state but may be cultivated and improved. Callicles remains obdurate, and Socrates reiterates his critical opinions of rhetoric. The dispute is resolved in Socrates’ favor only by a philosophical deus ex machina as Socrates invokes the concept of retributive justice in the afterlife to seal his point, although for him the mythological apparatus only dramatizes the necessity of a virtue which is self-justifying.
     The dialogue is quite moving as an idealistic credo, but it wholly neglects the unique powers of language to investigate and formulate visions of reality. What, after all, is Socrates’ medium when he is not relying on psychic telegrams from his daimon? Historically, the dialogue indicates the depth of distaste for new verbal and intellectual technologies that led to Socrates’ own execution. The same moralistic ideological bias is evident in attitudes toward literature from more modern sources, as well, including some Christians and communists. The suspicion of verbal play and the austere definition of pleasure Socrates present also contrast markedly with his own practice: his delight in confounding his interlocutors and the war, erotic glow that envelops so many scenes of the dialogues. The reductive view of the rhetorician as irresponsible antinomian not only ignores the subtleties in Gorgias’ thought; it also obscures difficulties in Socrates’ train of reasoning. Apart from not questioning the accuracy of words when used for stating philosophic doctrine, Plato also has his Gorgias accept without question the reality of the transcendental categories of truth and justice and the possibility of gaining access to them, and yet still defending rhetoric as the highest art. Still, the Gorgias memorably enacts the collision between idealism and skepticism and, from a partisan point of view, delineates attitudes toward language associated with each position.
     Gorgias is a major, if little-recognized, figure in the history of literary criticism. As the individual responsible for transmitting rhetorical theory to Athens, he helped to lay the foundation for the two millennia of dominance of rhetorical terms in critical thinking about the nature of literature. As a pioneer in developing self-reflection about an art which the Greeks had practiced for centuries, he made numerous specific contributions, among them the elevation of prose to a position potentially equal to that of poetry, particularly through the lavish use of ornaments both in sound pattern and in concepts. His direct influence as a teacher was considerable; Alcibiades, Thucydides, Isocrates, and Antisthenes are numbered among his pupils.
     In philosophy he resembles certain modern existentialist authors in taking skepticism almost to the point of nihilism and yet salvaging humanistic values. He extended the Eleatic dialectic to its ultimate logical conclusions, and yet, having eliminated all possibility of meaningful knowledge, managed to reconstitute literature as the sole remaining viable discourse. He was the antagonist whose challenges inspired Plato not only in the Gorgias but in many of the late dialogues. In him can be seen the iconoclastic innovations in thinking that evoked admiration as well as hostility from his contemporaries.
     He transformed the practice of rhetoric no less than its theory. His daring use of a superabundance of poetic devices such as antithesis, paronomasia (double meanings), pariosis (repetition of an expression in different connections), and a host of other figures opened the possibilities of artful prose writing forever even as their less effective use led to absurdly labored or tedious compositions. In different ways euphuism, Victorian schoolmaster like Blair, Finnegan’s Wake, and the rhythmic, hypnotic messages of American advertising might be seen as Gorgian. The disputes between those raising the supposedly opposing banners of style and content might be traced to those ancient controversies in which Gorgias played such an important role.
     Of Gorgias’ writing we possess only a few fragments. His lost work On Nature or On What is Not is summarized by Sextus Empiricus in in the anonymous De Melisso Xenophane Gorgia. The Encomium of Helen and Defense of Palamedes exist in their entirety while passages are preserved from the Epitaphios and the Olympicus. He is actually most prominent as a reputation (for instance in his appropriation by Plato) and other authors often refer to him either as an example of the nihilistic dangers of sophistry or of the excesses (or extravagant beauties) of language carried to its most elaborate, literature pushed to the limit.