Gorgias as Philosopher of Being: Epistemic Foundationalism in Sophistic ThoughtAuthor(s): Frank D. WaltersSource: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1994), pp. 143-155Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40237799Accessed: 11/11/2010 03:30

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Gorgias as Philosopher of Being: Epistemic

Foundationalism in Sophistic Thought

Frank D. Walters

Whatever the Sophists may hâve contributed to the history and

development of rhetoric, and often because of their contributions, philosophy and its friends hâve long regarded them as intellectual

lightweights and moral relativists. George Kennedy 's assessment of Gorgias is typical: the Leontinian teacher was a clever borrower of the philosophers and poets, and from the former took what he deemed useful "not as a reflection of a theory of knowledge, but as a technique of speech" (31).

However, the récent revival of interest in the Sophists has begun to recover much of their original rôle in ancient Greek intellectual life as philosophers of Being. Part of this rôle included the inven- tion of a concept of logos that privileged rational thinking and that

sought a foundation for prose argument on issues of immediate social and politicai concern. Edward Schiappa has argued that "the

Sophists were représentatives of an intellectual movement that favored abstract thinking over what Havelock has called the poetic mind." As participants in the cultural shift in fifth-century Athens from mythos to logos, the Sophists called for "arguing rather than

merely telling" (56; emphasis in original). Also important to this

recovery is an account of the Sophists as epistemologists, who put speech at the center of the project of knowing. G. B. Kerferd's restoration of the Sophists begins with their belief "that there is no area of human life or of the world as a whole which should be immune from understanding achieved through reasoned argu- ment" (2; cf. 4-14). Observations such as Schiappa's and Kerferd's rescue the more prominent Sophists from the "haggling thorough- breds" Plato's Socrates wittily condemns in thè Theaetetus (154D), returning them to a status of philosophical respectability where

argument pursues lofty epistemological aims. It is because of this new understanding that we can speak of the

Sophists as professionally and intellectually disposed to the prac- tice of philosophy. Gorgias and Protagoras, of course, corne imme-

Philosophy and Rhetoric, Vol. 27, No. 2, 1994. Copyright © 1994 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park PA

143

144 FRANK D. WALTERS

diately to mind. No less than their contemporary Socrates, and Piato and Aristotle a génération later, they take Being as thè prov- ince of thought and discourse. Where thè Sophists differ is in argu- ing for thè epistemic, or language-bound, existence of Being, rather than for its essentialist, extralinguistic priority. I think it should be stressed, however, that we are beyond thè point now where we need continually to rehabilitate thè Sophists in terms of this dichotomy alone. We know, thanks to thè work of Mario Untersteiner and thè more récent studies of Kerferd, Schiappa, Richard Leo Enos, John Poulakos, and others, thè centrai tenets of

sophistic thought. Récent books by Jasper Neel and Susan Jarratt have extended and applied these tenets to problems in criticai

theory and composition. We have learned from these scholars that thè Sophists were more than "mere" rhetoricians and teachers of a

suspect art. Still, in almost every one of these cases, thè Sophists are pre-

sented as others, outside and against thè intellectual mainstream of Western philosophy begun by Piato and Aristotle. This otherness is certain to continue, but at thè possible expense of continuing thè

séparation of philosophy and rhetoric that places rhetoric always on thè negative side of thè équation. Although attempts have been made to reunite rhetoric and philosophy - reunite in thè sense that discourse and thè rhetorical arts bound to it are centrai to thè

problem of knowing - it is open to question how successful these

attempts have been in reconfiguring patterns of Western thought. In this essay I attempt, through a reading of one Sophist, Gorgias of Leontini, to describe a possible unification of rhetoric and phi- losophy through what I cali epistemic foundationalism.

My argument, in brief, is this: epistemology, thè problem of

knowing and of representing knowledge, is inhérent to thè Soph- ists' thinking and writing about Being; they make Being thè pri- mary object of intellectual and moral inquiry. In this sense they are

foundationalists, agreeing with their rivais that Being - what it is, how it is known, and how it should be represented - is thè great project of a rational and moral person's life. Where thè Sophists part Company with their rivais, however, is in their insistence that

Being can be known only in and through language. This insistence comes with a number of philosophical presuppositions about thè existence and reality of Being and thè nature of rational thinking, and these presuppositions will be taken up in thè pages that follow.

To explain and illustrate thè epistemic foundationalism implicit

GORGIAS AS PHILOSOPHER OF BEING 145

in sophistic thought, I will conduci a detailed reading of the surviv-

ing fragments of two of Gorgias's works, the Encomium to Helen and On Nature, or Noî-Being.1 The point I wish to make now, however, is that the attention the Sophists give to the foundational

problem of Being exists and thrives only within the epistemic atmo-

sphère of discourse. Where there is no discourse, there is no knowl-

edge and, correlati vely, no possibility of knowing Being in any philosophically justifiable way.

Sophistic antilogie and the problem of Being

Let me begin with thè term antilogie, which scholars view as a

theory of argumentation that stands in opposition to dialectics, either Platonic or Aristotelian. Generally, we define antilogie in a

social-epistemic (or social-constructionist) context: a community of speakers using the resources of argument to construct a com-

monly accepted body of truths, which can then be disseminated as

knowledge. Without abandoning this définition, I wish also to look at antilogie as a method with its own recognizable philosophical imperatives, a method that resists the totalizing aims of dialectics but is not itself a formless and aimless verbal exercise. Its différ- ence from dialectics is this: dialectics insists that among contested thèses only one will, and should, emerge as true (cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1355a21ff); antilogie plays one thesis against another, nei- ther claiming to be thè ultimate truth, with the aim nonetheless of

yielding knowledge human beings can live and work with. One other distinction between dialectics and antilogie ought to be men- tioned. Dialectics posits that once the truth is found, the search for

knowledge ends and the knowledge gained is total. Antilogie posits no such utopia; it is a continuous and recursive process. Though it

yields knowledge, the knowledge gained is yet a new logos for the continuation of thè antilogie process.

The distinction between antilogie and dialectics reveals separate epistemologies that récent studies are now beginning to appreci- ate. Of thè antilogie impetus in Gorgias, Richard Leo Enos ob- serves that Gorgias "believed . . . that 'knowledge' was revealed

by understanding the dichotomies inhérent in the diverse nature of individuai concepts" (44). Although dialectics was also concerned with dichotomies, its heuristic - the question-answer format of a Socratic exchange, for example - set out to eliminate diversity and to unify knowledge around a single idea. But as Enos suggests,

146 FRANK D. WALTERS

knowledge in thè antilogie sense is not conceived of as something total and final - knowledge of a thing in its singularity. To know

singularity and not dichotomies is, from thè antilogie position, to know nothing by claiming to know ali. But a grasp of dichotomies, of thè inhérent contradictions of concepts, implies a higher intellec- tual achievement, a knowledge of something, even if such knowl-

edge is neither absolute nor certain. Enos underscores an important, and problematic, epistemologi-

cal value in antilogie. If we cannot say that we have knowledge of truth prior to speaking, then we cannot say that our speech re-

presents thè phenomenon nor thè actual expérience we have of

Being (Enos 44-46). For this reason, speech is deceptive, for while it présumes to re-present Being, it does so in a way that cannot be checked against any independently verifiable Being available to us

through some epistemological System. We say that we know only as a convention of thè power inhérent in logos. If this is as much as we can say about thè discourse of knowledge, then speech truly is thè enemy to truth Piato claimed it to be. But Enos's argument is that thè deceptiveness of speech opens to human beings possibili- ties for knowing that would be denied them without speech and that are disallowed within thè confines of a dialectics. Dialectics

points toward thè closure of an essentialist foundation of truth on which knowledge is to be based. Epistemic foundationalism offers a degree of freedom not otherwise available in dialectics, although thè price for this freedom is thè epistemological uncertainty and

undecidability that are thè hallmarks of sophistic philosophy. It is

impossible to know absolutely, and impossible to communicate absolute knowledge absolutely, but through speech men and wom- en come to know what, in any e vent, they can ne ver assert with absolute certainty.

Kairos as thè motive force of antilogie

John Poulakos defines sophistic rhetoric as "thè art which seeks to

capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and at-

tempts to suggest that which is possible" (36; emphasis in originai). Poulakos, like Enos, points to much thè same generative force

implied by antilogie. Its rootedness in thè phénoménal world of social and politicai action, and its no less evident desire to establish itself on firm epistemological ground, produce a rhetoric that

grants discourse thè highest ethical value. Untersteiner speaks of

GORGIAS AS PHILOSOPHER OF BEING 147

this desire in terms of kairos (implied above in Poulakos's défini- tion as "opportune moments"), a theory of opposites attributed to

Pythagoras, by which one is able to distinguish those times when

speech will most likely persuade from those when it will fall on deaf ears no matter how fine the style (118-21). As Michael Carter contends, kairos as an ethical imperative f osters in discourse a

"generative principle" that seeks to go beyond individuai and paro- chial interests (104-5). The speaker recognizes in the rhetorical situation that opportune combination of ethical, linguistic, and

psychological factors that makes hearers, in Poulakos's words, "de- sire to be other and to be elsewhere" (42). The speaker applies kairos to con vert non-Being into Being, the impossible into the

possible, the probable into the actual, the unreal into the believ- able. In Plato's Gorgias (456A), Socrates' rival sophist points to this same generative power in rhetoric to move speech beyond itself and into the realm of the possible by suggesting that "rhetoric

comprehends and holds under her sway all the inferior arts." Untersteiner locates kairos specifically in the distinction the

Sophists made between falsehood and déception. Falsehood is "the objective aspect of thè false, without regard to the diversity of the subjective process which has decided it" (108). False state- ments issue from a willful or ignorant disregard for the possible things that can be known. They are expressions of the singularities blind to the dichotomies of lived reality. Déception, on the other

hand, is an "intention" (108). But intention and déception hère must be understood as tied to the inévitable and tragic consé-

quences of our uncertain and incomplete knowledge. If it is our intention to link speech with Being, it is the tragic failure of this intention that produces deceptive discourse, for we deceive be- cause there is no verifiable correspondence between our words and

Being. If we speak falsely, we attempi to persuade our listeners that our singular correspondence is the only true correspondence, and that ali others are false. If we speak deceptively, we off er our

correspondence as food for thought, as one among many possible correspondences, and as an occasion for continued speech. Kairos, then, is identified with "the radical contradiction of existence"

implicit in logos (Untersteiner 112): that which we say is, we, or someone eise, also can say is not. For the Sophists, logos proposes a thing's existence, but in doing so unembarrassingly proposes its own antithesis.

For a philosophically minded sophist such as Gorgias, knowl-

148 FRANK D. WALTERS

edge can be none other than thè expérience of thè irrational and thè impossible. Gorgias's paradoxical Statement in On Nature, that

"proofs deceive," merely says that "knowledge is contradictory." Logos is thè expression of Being in terms of what it is not, its non-

Being. But an assertion of non-Being rests upon thè unspoken assertion of Being. In discussing, for example, thè fragment of

Gorgias's funeral oration, thè Epitaphios, Untersteiner finds kai- ros mediating thè logicai undecidability of two opposed truths, each justified as assertions of Being, each canceling thè other out: "thè duty to respect thè divine sanctity of life and that of fulfilling a divine end by préservation of thè Polis [by sacrificing one's life in défense of thè state]" (177). Did thè slain Athenians violate or

obey divine law - demonstrate a true knowledge of Being - by dying to save Athens? Their décision to act could not be made on thè basis of logicai analysis, on thè supposed but false correspon- dence between logos and truth.

Gorgias and thè rhetoric of Being: The Encomium to Helen

In thè Encomium to Helen, Gorgias défends Helen from thè accu- sation that she was a willing party to her own abduction. Gorgias's Helen is problematical in one sensé, for though he calls it an enco- mium (by convention a speech in praise of some individuai), he

actually delivers a legai défense of Helen's actions. Isocrates noted this, and in his own Encomium on Helen accused Gorgias of com-

mitting "a slight inadvertence" (67). The différence in genres is cruciai, and hardly slight at ali, for a défense of an accused's inno- cence présumes that thè true and thè false will be discovered in thè

exchange of arguments between advocates. A legai argument would take thè form of dialectics, as Gorgias concèdes in thè open- ing paragraphs of thè Helen, where he pronounces truth to be thè

glory of words and says that "it belongs to thè same man both to

speak thè truth and to réfute falsehood" (131). Helen, he main- tains, has been unjustly accused, and he intends to "rescue her from ignorant calumny" (131). Tradition assigns four charges of her guilt: she openly defied thè gods, she gave in to physical force, she surrendered to persuasion, and she succumbed to thè "decree of necessity" by falling in love with Paris.

To réfute thèse charges, Gorgias argues one proposition against its contrary, with thè aim of presenting his side as thè truth of thè case. But on closer inspection, thè legal argument permits him to

GORGIAS AS PHILOSOPHER OF BEING 149

enter into a deeper philosophical problem posed by the opposition of thèses. Knowledge of Helen's guilt or innocence is a product, not of one proposition overcoming the other, but of both caught in a conflict without resolution, thè eternai play of contradictory reali- ties that is the tragic texture of human life itself. The legal argu- ment is rendered insignificant against the philosophical argument implicit throughout the Helen that truth is language bound.

This philosophical argument adumbrates the epistemological ten- sion "between the essence of a fact and the possibility of objective judgment" Gorgias explores in the Helen (Untersteiner 102). Helen's accusers make their case by uniting the will of the gods, who pass judgment on Helen, with the essence of a fact. Her accusers take their words to be one with the words of divine con- demnation. But Gorgias, by aiming at the point where divine meets human reality, collapses the contradiction between essential facts and objective judgment, for both are objects known only imperfectly in the phénoménal world: Helen's accusers cannot know the minds of the gods and for this reason cannot apply divine

logos to the realm of human law (nomos). And not only is the divine mind humanly unknowable, so too are the methods of di- vine reasoning. Human beings will speak as if the unknown and unknowable transcendent were présent in the world of actual

events, and without e ver knowing for certain if the présence is real or in any way cogniti vely ascertainable. Gorgias has erased the gulf between the two worlds by combining them into one, and then

defining that one in terms of the phenomena presented to percep- tion. Helen's actions, then, must be judged on the basis of her situation as she presumably perceived it, and for which no logos was available to determine the proper décision (Sheard 293-96).

The centerpiece of the Helen is Gorgias's élaboration on the

persuasive power of speech (132-33), where he exonérâtes Helen from the third charge, but also lays the groundwork for the

epistemic-foundational value of speech. Speech, Gorgias begins, receives its power from poetry, through which it can "induce plea- sure and avert grief" (132). It has ail the gnomic trappings of

magie, "for thè power of the incantations, uniting with the feelings in the soûl, soothes and persuades and transports by means of its

wizardry" (132). Gorgias discerns two types of wizardry, "errors in the soûl and déceptions in the mind" (132), which roughly parallel the sophistic division between falsehood and déception, and which

Gorgias links respectively to doxa (opinion) and logos. Regarding

150 FRANK D. WALTERS

thè wizardry of doxa, Gorgias echoes philosophy's complaint against rhetoric: "persuasion by speech is équivalent to abduction

by force," which effectively shifts thè blame to Helen's abductor

(Helen 132). Gorgias is also well aware, however, that thè wizardry of logos,

despite his carefully separating it from doxa, can likewise be a kind of abduction by force. Hère, thè distinction between falsehood and

déception, discussed earlier, becomes problematical. For if Gor-

gias's intention is to défend rhetoric and at thè same time reveal thè truth about Helen's actions, how is it possible for logos to do thè latter when it has already been said that knowledge of thè truth is humanly impossible? this question, Gorgias would answer that thè only world we know is thè world of contradictory realities we inhabit. We are condemned - at thè same time enabled - to

express, but always imperfectly, what we know by using thè power of logos to overcome doxa and make thè best case possible. Al-

though logos is superior to doxa in Gorgias's thought, logos is also, like doxa, thè expression of incomplete knowledge. If thè distinc- tion between opinion and déception parallels that between thè essence of a fact and thè possibility of objective judgment, then by calling opinion "unreliable" (Helen 132) Gorgias is saying simply that any expression of thè essence of fact is false. Cynthia Mieczni- kowski Sheard suggests a similar interprétation of thè Helen: "AH

arguments are necessarily 'false,' for they ha ve no direct claim to absolute truth" (293). Logos reaches for judgment by drawing on thè realities of thè world, where thè essence of fact is thè history of contradiction. This view of logos is, in brief, thè argument of On Nature.

Logos and reality: On Nature, or Not-Being

Richard A. Engnell has described Gorgias's epistemology as an irrational method of contradiction and continuai self-deconstruc- tion (174-89). As Engnell reads Gorgias, ali reality is contradic-

tory. For one to know, a judgment between contradictory realities must be made, with no absolute assurance that judgment is on thè side of truth. Speech expresses what one knows, but expression is

only thè appearance of truth. The alternative, silence, indicates thè absence of (or thè refusai to make) judgment. Speech proceeds from intellectual indeterminacy; silence is intellectual (and moral) paralysis. But thè passing of judgment is tragic, for judgment never

GORGIAS AS PHILOSOPHER OF BEING 151

issues from the knowledge of Being, but only from the déceptions of words themselves. One constantly returns to thè reality of logos, only to discover that its présence signifies the point where logos separates from truth. Logos erases logos, just as judgment erases contradiction. One has no choice but to self-deconstruct one's own

logos to make room for more logos, an endlessly recursive episte- mological nightmare.

Bruce E. Gronbeck has described the Gorgianic tragedy of

knowledge in différent terms:

Man seeking true knowledge is frustrated with the gulf between the non-rationality of the gods and the attempted rationality of his own mind; further, man working to convey what partial knowledge he has must move through the medium of logoi and by genus psyché, which is as capable of disease as thè body. (31)

"Déception," for which Engnell's and Gronbeck's Statements may stand as opposed commentaries, is a crucial concept in Gorgias's epistemology, and scholars like W. K. C. Guthrie hâve argued that it reveals the extent to which the Sophists confined ail knowledge to the extreme relativism of rhetoric. "Truth," as Guthrie says of

Protagoras and Gorgias, "is relative to thè individuai" (219). We find a strong case for epistemic knowledge construction in

Gorgias's only surviving philosophical work, the fragmentary trea- tise On Nature, or Not-Being. In it he argues the paradoxical threefold proposition that (a) Being does not Exist; (6) if Being does exist, it cannot be known; and (c) if Being can be known, it cannot be communicated. The first expresses Gorgias's skepticism toward ontological foundationalism. The second concèdes founda-

tionalism, but renders it irrelevant because knowledge is un- decidable. The third concèdes decidability, but déclares it beside the point because logos implies its own contradiction. Récent discussions of the treatise show it to be an important philosophi- cal Statement decreeing the impossibility of linguistic référence while at the same time acknowledging, even celebrating, language as central to the construction of knowledge (Guthrie 193-200, Untersteiner 145-59, Gronbeck 29-31, Kerferd 92-99). Knowl-

edge of Being, in Kerferd's summary, even if possible, cannot be communicated

because the means by which we communicate is speech or logos, and this logos is not and can never be the externally subsisting objects that actually are. What we communicate to our neighbors is never thèse

152 FRANK D. WALTERS

actual things, but only a logos which is always other than thè things themselves. (80)

The dissociation of logos and things naturally encourages anti-

logie. In advancing thè second part of his proposition, for example, Gorgias distinguishes things as material objects of cognition from thè mental catégories by which we organize cognition: "If thè con-

cepts of thè mind are not realities, reality cannot be thought" (On Nature 129). He is refuting thè claim, codified later by Aristotle but

présent in Gorgias's day, that mental expériences are thè same for all (On Interpretation 16a5). Our thinking, Gorgias adds, is not about the thing itself, say a person's height, but about the mental

catégories we invent in trying to give meaning to the concept of

height (On Nature 129). Furthermore, Gorgias denies that thought can be about things in any form: "If the thing thought is non-

existent, then non-existence is thought about; this is équivalent to

saying that 'existence, reality, is not thought about, cannot be

thought' "

(129). It is possible, as Gorgias notes, to think of things which are not real, such as chariots racing on the sea. Though we think of them, they are nonetheless not real, and their non-reality is the objeet of our thought.

The undeeidability of knowledge is sufficient warrant for Gor-

gias to see a similar undeeidability in speech. We express knowl-

edge as logos f and we predicate Being in the form of a proposition. But knowledge is not propositional: Gorgias insists that "reality is not the objeet of thought, and cannot be comprehended by it. Pure mind, as opposed to sense-perception, or even as an equally valid criterion, is a myth" (On Nature 129). And yet it is the unavoidable funetion of a deceptive logos to communicate thought as though it were, in fact, fixed and total knowledge. The dissociation of logos from things, Enos notes, "could not oeeur without déception; that is, words had to appear to be synonymous with expériences actu-

ally pereeived and not their mere symbolic représentation" (45). To link the three parts of his paradox into a cohérent philosophi-

cal whole, Gorgias provides his own psychological explanation of

perception in opposition to Plato's analysis in the Theaetetus

(156A-157B). There, Piato had argued that perception was unreli- able in all respects, for it was fixed on the shadowy and imperfect things of the phénoménal world, rather than on the ideal and stable world of the Forms. For Gorgias, things in the material world are the only objects of perception, and they are appre-

GORGIAS AS PHILOSOPHER OF BEING 153

hended by thè appropriate sensé organs. Of course, Gorgias con-

cèdes, there can be no communication between perceptions of the différent sensés. What the eye perceives cannot be communicated to the ear. At the same time, speech, the means by which we communicate perceptions, is not the same thing as the perceptions themselves; speech communicates only itself (On Nature 129). The dissociation of perceptions from speech seems to parallel Plato's

judgment that words are unreliable, but what Gorgias is actually doing is constructing an analogy which compares the incommunica-

bility between the sensés with the incommunicability between words and things. Thus, Gorgias writes, "Just as that which is seen cannot become that which is heard, so our speech cannot be

equated with that which exists, since it is outside us" (On Nature

129). Gorgias is making a deceptively simple point to stress a more

important point: one cannot "hear" Helen's height; thè word tali has no aurai qualities. The real point is the incommunicability of

perceptibles in speech, "so that it is not speech which communi- cates perceptibles, but perceptibles which create speech" (129).

But now we must ask: If perceptibles create speech, does not the

speech created communicate thèse same perceptibles? And if per- ceptibles themselves are not realities, how can they create speech, and what, at last, does speech communicate? Gorgias has brought himself (and us) to the point where anything may be said of any- thing, where nothing can be said that is neither true nor false. We seem to hâve corne face-to-face with the relativism of nomos unen- cumbered by the divine sanctions of physis and condemned by the

philosophical tradition. For Guthrie, this contradiction pins the

Sophists on thè horns of a dilemma of their own making:

The Sophists could not, any more than other pretenders to serious

thought, brush aside thè Eliatic dilemma, which forced a choice be- tween being and becoming, stability and flux, reality and appearance. Since it was no longer possible to hâve both, the Sophists abandoned thè idea of a permanent reality behind appearances, in favour of an extreme phenomenalism, relativism, and subjectivism. (47)

Gorgias's solution to this dilemma is to propose separate phénomé- nal realities to perceptibles and to speech, since thè two are, in his

theory, cognitively separate as well: "Speech can never exactly represent perceptibles, since it is différent from them, and percepti- bles are apprehended each by the one kind of organ, speech by another" (On Nature 129). The cleverness of the solution is con-

154 FRANK D. WALTERS

tained in thè drawn-out analogy Gorgias has been making between

perceptibles and speech: Speech is distinct from perceptibles in thè same way that sight is distinct from hearing. Speech, then, is a

perception in its own right, and thought is its organ of appréhen- sion (Untersteiner 157).

There is évidence enough in what we have of Gorgias's surviving works to suggest that he was looking to place speech on a more solid

epistemological footing than that provided by subjective relativism. Enos shows that Gorgias had learned from thè pre-Socratics, espe- cially his teacher, Empedocles, and from Parmenides and Zeno, thè notion that opposed thèses permitted speech to move from persua- sion to philosophical inquiry (40-41). The déception logos would thus employ thè opposition of thèses as an epistemological tool. For

Gorgias, speech becomes philosophical inquiry by releasing itself into an atmosphère of probative inquiry, where thè construction of

knowledge takes precedence over thè démonstration of truth. The construction of knowledge is preeminently a philosophical and a rhetorical activity. This combination promotes a mode of discourse in which thè opposition of thèses reconfigures inquiry from a search for absolutes to a validation of plausibilities, from essentialist foun- dationalism to epistemic foundationalism, from a state of certainty to what Nicholas Rescher has called an "epistemic inclination . . . that falls far short of outright commitment" (35). Such an inclination

places an immense bürden on the mind, already determined to be

incapacitated by its inability to know truth. But this same bürden also converts a state of seeming intellectual incapacity into thè gen- erative epistemology of antilogie discourse, insofar as we incorpo- rate a thesis "into our cognitive scheme of things in view of the

standing of the sources or principles that vouch for its inclusion"

(Rescher 38). What then happens, as Enos describes, is that we gain deeper insight by studying contrary thèses as plausible in them- selves, not as opposi tes laying out the boundaries of the true and false (44).

We may never reach a position from which to make final pro- nouncements about the Sophists, and that is probably how they would have preferred it. Gorgias speaks of the impossibility of

knowing, but he understands knowing as a valid human response to life, the life of the polis, and thè problems of thè state. Given the central rôle he allows for language and its users, he could

hardly do otherwise and maintain a consistent belief in either the moral project of philosophy or the ethical responsibilities of the

GORGIAS AS PHILOSOPHER OF BEING 155

speaker. Charges that he denies thè existence of an absolute

reality - a Platonic "second story," or an Aristotelian teleology that leads inexorably to a final knowledge of substance - overlook the properties of language that encourage the very kind of inquiry that marks the history of philosophy, and that philosophy helped invent. One of those inventors was Gorgias.

Department of English Auburn University

Note

1. Références to Gorgias's texts are to page numbers in Freeman, Ancilla.

Works cited

Carter, Michael. "Stasis and Kairos: Principles of Social Construction in Classical Rhetoric." Rhetoric Review 1 (1988): 97-112.

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