The Birth of Rhetoric

Gorgias, Plato and their Successors

Robert Wardy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134757299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

What is rhetoric?
Is it the capacity to persuade? Or is it 'mere' rhetoric: the ability to get others to do what the speaker wants, regardless of what they want? This is the rhetoric of ideological manipulation and political seduction. Rhetoric is for some a distinctive mode of communication; for others, whenever someone speaks, rhetoric is present.
This book is devoted to helping readers understand these rival accounts, by showing how it has happened that there are so many conceptions of rhetoric. Any such approach must be rooted in classical antiquity, since our ideas of rhetoric are the product of a complicated historical process starting in ancient Greece. Greek rhetoric was born in bitter controversy. The figure of Gorgias is at the centre of that debate and of this book: he invites us to confront the terrifying, exhilarating possibility that persuasion is just power.

1
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
Gorgias’ On What Is Not

I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.’

(Wittgenstein, On Certainty 467)

WHO WAS GORGIAS?

Who was Gorgias? Philostratus, a second- (or third-)rate writer of later antiquity, reports that Gorgias is the man ‘to whom we believe the craft of the sophists is to be traced back as it were to its father’ (Buchheim test. 1).¹ Philostratus’ mediocrity is precisely what renders his opinion valuable: it reveals how Gorgias eventually appeared to the ancient world. But why did it seem appropriate to make him the father of sophistry? First, because of rhetorical innovations at a basic technical level which Gorgias is supposed to have ushered in, involving both structure and ornamentation (for example, poetic diction and periodicity); second, and of considerably more interest, because he introduced paradoxologia, which embraces both paradoxical thought and paradoxical expression. On the occasion of his famous embassy to Athens seeking military aid for his home-city, Leontini, in Sicily, his skill in speaking extempore reputedly brought nearly all the leading politicians and intellectuals under his influence (test. 1). Of the three most striking claims preserved in the largely anecdotal biographical reports, one is that he pioneered improvisation, so that ‘on entering the Athenian theatre, he cried out “Give me a theme!”…in order to demonstrate that he knew everything’ (test. la; again, this comes from Philostratus; but the claim is already to be found in Plato, Meno 70B, test. 19); the second, that his fancied pupil Isocrates declares in an apparently neutral tone that Gorgias accumulated relatively great wealth by travelling about unwed and childless, thus avoiding the civic and educational expenses of the paternal citizen (Antidosis 15.156, test. 18); the third, that ‘among the Thessalians “to orate” acquired the name “to gorgiasise”’ (test. 35).

Clichéd as they now are, these fragmentary portraits raise all the important questions about Gorgias. Why is Gorgias a ‘sophist’, and not only that, but the great original? And is there really such a thing as ‘the craft of the sophists’? Whatever ‘sophistry’ might be, is it necessarily akin to ‘rhetoric’? A ‘paradox’ is literally ‘what opposes opinion’: if Gorgias in some manner affronts people’s beliefs, how can he successfully persuade them? Isocrates’ denial of familial and civic identity to Gorgias does not sit easily with Gorgias’ rôle in obtaining Athenian aid for his fellow-citizens: how, then, does rhetoric connect with political activity? An ability to improvise fluently gives the skilled speaker an obvious advantage; but need a sophist/rhetor really claim omniscience about the themes on which he can readily extemporise? What does the performative aspect of rhetoric (Gorgias impressing his public in the theatre) reveal about its nature?

Finally, to compound the confusion—reminiscent of the plurality of answers to our first question, ‘what is rhetoric?’—many scholars lengthen the list of Gorgias’ accomplishments with the title ‘philosopher’, albeit usually only for the early stages of his career.² The ancient sources claim a linkage with Empedocles: ‘Empedocles was a doctor and supreme rhetor. Indeed, Gorgias of Leontini, a man excelling in rhetoric, became his pupil’ (Diogenes Laertius 8.58–9, test. 3). Ancient doxographers’ fondness for tutelary relationships as a standard organisational principle means that such statements must always be treated with extreme reserve. In this instance, however, whatever the historical fact of the matter might have been, one feature of the characterisation of Empedocles has the effect of harmonising the suggestion that he taught Gorgias with the other evidence. We might standardly think of Empedocles as a philosopher, with medicine and magic as more or less reputable sidelines, but Diogenes adds rhetoric. Furthermore, Sextus Empiricus reports that Aristotle in a lost work actually identified him as the founder of rhetoric: ‘Aristotle says in the Sophist that Empedocles first set rhetoric in motion’ (Against the Mathematicians 7.6, test. 3). Just as sophistry is traced back to Gorgias, so rhetoric is attributed to his teacher; just as the sources are unwilling or unable to keep Gorgias within a single pigeonhole, so too Empedocles is portrayed as crossing the boundary, usually so very strict, between rhetoric and philosophy. A reading of On What Is Not and The Encomium of Helen will reveal that this difficulty in classifying Gorgias, so far from being a mere taxonomic side-issue, goes to the heart of his unparalleled contribution to the history of rhetoric.

Other sources suggest that Gorgias’ pioneering enthusiasm spilled over into naïvely exaggerated effects, and this reflects a somewhat embarrassed uncertainty about how it was that he made such a remarkable impression. One authority tells us that ‘he was the first to use figures of speech rather unusual and remarkable for ingenuity …but what then commanded approbation on account of the novelty of the construction now seems laboured and often appears ridiculous and excessively contrived’ (Diodorus, Bibliotheca historica 12.53.2, test. 4). Evidently later writers were hard put, on the basis of works in their possession ascribed to Gorgias, to understand what all the fuss was about. At least to some extent, what survives under Gorgias’ name bears out Diodorus’ negative judgement: it is true that Gorgias’ prose is very highly wrought, in that it freely employs a large variety of aural effects, daring figurative language and formal patterns very far beyond the pale marked out by the (relatively) restrained srylistic taste of later Greeks. One way ancient scholars tried to make sense of history was in terms of a category of ‘the first discoverer’: they attempted to impose order on their past, real or imaginary, by setting up genealogical trees for each significant cultural domain, with an august ‘first discoverer’ at the root. This practice could clearly function in part as a way of smoothing over the awkwardness of Gorgias’ perceived stylistic strain and bad taste— what more does one reasonably expect from a pioneer?

I am not concerned either to support or to reject this condemnation of Gorgias’ style; such evaluation is notoriously a matter of fixed expectations verging on prejudice, for ancient and modern alike. What I am at pains to emphasise is that the puzzlement over Gorgias’ merit might betray a much deeper insensitivity towards what he was really about. However these later thinkers might react to Gorgias’ works, they take it for granted that the proper criteria to be brought to bear in evaluating them are those deriving from the elaborated rules of ‘rhetorical’ aesthetics, where ‘rhetorical’ is to be understood with reference to the technical handbook tradition. It was inevitable that Gorgias would not appear to best advantage in this light. In part his ‘impropriety’ is just the unsurprising consequence of his failing to adhere to conventions not as yet formulated, rather as if one were to impugn Monteverdi’s musical credentials on the grounds that his operas do not conform to eighteenth-century standards. But, much more importantly, Gorgias was bound to disappoint because his greatest originality lay in deliberately subverting generic expectations: not only in confusing one type of rhetorical discourse with another, but also in eroding the distinction between rhetoric and philosophy itself.

It might be objected immediately that this suggestion cannot possibly be right, because such expectations only came into existence in the aftermath of self-conscious Greek recognition of distinctive literary or rhetorical genres and intellectual tasks; but (so the objection runs) Gorgias’ context antedates any such recognition. The situation then, in the fifth century BCE, was intellectually fluid, compared with later rigidity. At this early juncture ‘sophist’ simply means ‘wise man’, primarily a poet, in contrast to the Platonic designation of a (sub-) philosophical type; and at this date there was no such thing as ‘philosophy’ as opposed to ‘rhetoric’, only very different would-be ‘wise men’ who came to be generically isolated long after the fact. The objection does not hold water. True, it would be rash to maintain that those thinkers we now call ‘philosophers’ used that very term to mark their special identity;³ but it does not follow that they therefore also lacked the unique self-conception that by the fourth century was called ‘philosophical’. And a far stronger, positive defence is available: Gorgias unmistakably challenges us to respond to On What Is Not against one quite specific and revolutionary philosophical backdrop, that of Parmenides’ great argument. Accordingly our next move must be to extract some vital information from the figure depicted by Plato in the Parmenides as the father of philosophy, to match Gorgias as the father of sophistical rhetoric.

THE CHALLENGE OF PARMENIDES

Parmenides’ spokeswoman, the goddess Justice, announces to him early in his philosophical poem: ‘you must hear everything, both the unmoved heart of persuasive alētheiē and the opinions of mortals, wherein there is no alētheiēconviction’ (Coxon fr. 1).⁴ ‘Alētheiē’ is conventionally rendered either ‘truth’ or ‘reality’, and often the context clearly favours one over the other. The problem here is that Parmenides seems not only to fuse the real with the true, but also to suggest that truth/reality, unlike mere opinions, is objectively persuasive.⁵ Persuasion in this special sense recurs significantly throughout the deduction: thus ‘this road of inquiry, that it is and cannot not be, is the path of persuasion, for it follows truth/reality’ (fr. 3).

Elsewhere the goddess warns Parmenides against any reliance on sense perception (and, perhaps, conventional language), since what we perceive (and, perhaps, say) invariably and fundamentally misrepresents the way things really are: ‘do not permit greatly experienced habit to force you down this way of using an aimless eye and a ringing ear and tongue’ (fr. 7). At this point, ‘force’ is attributed to pernicious, habitual delusion. It has long been recognised that one of the pre-eminent defining features of Greek culture is its concept of persuasion. In the first instance, this is a polar concept: persuasion is thought of as systematically opposed to force or compulsion. (This conceptual structure is most vividly portrayed at the conclusion of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, when Athena uses persuasion on the Furies so as to break the horrific cycle of compelled violence which propels the action of the Oresteia.) So, since we have already been told that ‘the path of persuasion’ ‘follows truth/reality’, it would be reasonable to infer that Parmenides intends us to associate positive persuasion with what is, the only possible route of enquiry into any subject whatsoever, negative compulsion with what is not, what is impossible even to conceive or speak of.⁶ And that is not surprising, since in the persuasion/force polarity, persuasion is usually, if not invariably, the positive member.

Later in the poem, however, the associations apparently shift: speaking of the ‘one being’, the goddess asks:

how and whence could it have grown? I shall not permit you either to assert or to think ‘from what is not’… And what necessity would have forced it to begin growing from nothing later rather than earlier?… Never will the strength of conviction permit something additional to come to be from what is not; that is why justice has released neither generation nor destruction by loosening their bonds, but holds them fast.

(fr. 8)

These later declarations add the paradoxical dimension that persuasion, despite the standard opposition to force, actually shares in necessity; likewise, judicial imagery recurs in the famous claim that ‘powerful necessity holds what is in the bonds of a limit’ (fr. 8). Not only that, but rational conviction also seems to act on, or at least with, what is—so that, for example, ‘generation and destruction have wandered very far away, pushed back by alēthēs conviction’ (fr. 8)—as the goddess associates reality with reason ever more intimately; just as the goddess does not permit Parmenides certain thoughts, so the sole object of thought, what is, is itself constrained by what it must be.

Insofar as rational conviction acts in concert with what is and derives its persuasiveness from reality itself, the philosopher empowered to instil it would appear to possess complete control over our intellects. Yet when she passes from truth to human delusion, the goddess implicitly acknowledges that reality is unfortunately not alone in swaying minds,⁷ although at the same time she emphatically divorces falsity from conviction: ‘now I put an end to persuasive logos and thought about reality/truth, and from this point do you learn mortal opinions by listening to the deceptive kosmos of my words’ (fr. 8). Two words in this programmatic statement have been merely transliterated because neither can be rendered straightforwardly into English. Logos resists translation even more than alētheiē. First, it often means ‘verbal account’; but here it approximates to ‘argument’ or ‘reasoning’, and thus stands in polar opposition to the (mere) ‘words’, highlighting the exclusively logical, rational character of truth. Second, and crucially, we shall see that the debate between philosophy and rhetoric can be effectively formulated as a conflict over the very meaning of this word ‘logos’, so that we must take care not to beg any questions about its semantics. What is a ‘kosmos’? Anything ordered or harmonious, but also, by an obvious extension, anything adorned by virtue of arrangement hence our ‘cosmetics’. Just as a painted face deceives the onlooker, so the goddess’ phrase suggests the disturbing possibility that a kosmos of words—a logos, perhaps, albeit not hers—might mislead precisely in that these words wear an attractive appearance of superficial order masking essential incoherence.⁸ Indeed, the kosmos the goddess goes on to describe (or construct), a kosmos akin to those constructed by Parmenides’ more orthodox contemporaries and predecessors, the ‘cosmologists’, turns out to be a stunningly complex and complete fabrication, merely a kosmos of words—as any account of the world but the goddess’ own monistic logos must be.

Why, then, utter such deceitful falsehoods at all? ‘So that never shall any mortal outstrip you in judgement’ (fr. 8). Thus the masterpersuader Parmenides can be seen from our perspective as at once philosopher and rhetorician: philosopher, insofar as he has access to a logos whose inescapable logic persuades all those wise enough to follow the argument; rhetorician, insofar as his deception will— Parmenides assumes—persuade all those foolish enough not to grasp the repercussions of the logos—and will do so more effectively, in fact, than any other ‘cosmology’.⁹ But, in line with the qualifications expressed at the end of the previous section, it is essential that we do not import this possible conception of Parmenides’ (claimed) status into his own self-conception. Explicit, contrastive definitions of philosophy and rhetoric first emerge in Parmenides’ wake—in fact, emerge by way of various attempted resolutions of the tension created for his successors by his combination within a single work of geni...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING: GORGIAS’ ON WHAT IS NOT
• 2. IN PRAISE OF FALLEN WOMEN: GORGIAS’ ENCOMIUM OF HELEN
• 3. IN DEFENCE OF REASON: PLATO’S GORGIAS
• 4. AFTERLIVES
• 5. ARISTOTLE’S RHETORIC: MIGHTY IS THE TRUTH AND IT SHALL PREVAIL?
• 6. EPILOGUE: DOES PHILOSOPHY HAVE A GENDER?
• 12. NOTES
• 12. BIBLIOGRAPHY