Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader by Andrew Patrick
Plato’s Gorgias is my favorite Platonic dialogue.[1] It’s about rhetoric and justice, but I love it because Socrates is at his snarkiest. Socrates is masterful in handing the second-string interlocutor Polus his lunch. Socrates tells Polus, a student of the rhetorician Gorgias, that rhetoric is a “knack,” like baking. Not anything serious. In response to Polus’s impassioned plea that rhetoricians must be thought of as the most powerful members of society since they can persuade anyone of anything, Socrates tells him that people don’t even think of rhetoricians.
It's a Don Draper moment….cold…crushing.
But who was Gorgias?
Until I read this book, he was merely a figure in the dialogue. The figure in the dialogue appears past his prime, but Socrates treats Gorgias far more kindly than he does Polus. I understood that there was a Gorgias who was a well-known rhetorician, but beyond that, I had not a clue. So, it came as a complete surprise to me that we have a few of his speeches and a good knowledge of his life, which this reader fleshes out.[2]
Gorgias was Gorgias of Leontini.[3] He trained under the philosopher Empedocles. In On Rhetoric, Aristotle refers to Gorgias nine times.[4] According to Patrick, five of the positive recommendations of Gorgias’s techniques are noted, especially with respect to “his use of irony and humor.”[5] Two references are critical, and one “chides him for making too casual a beginning to his Encomium of Elis.” [6] Patrick notes, citing Will Durant, that Gorgias’ pupil Isocrates[7] founded “perhaps the first great school of liberal arts.”
Gorgias’ teacher, Empedocles, was a pre-Socratic philosopher who argued that the foundational elements of everything were not fire, air, or water. He was the first of the “pluralists” who argued that love and strife were the cause of being. Love is the cause of good things, and strife is the cause of bad things.
Patrick’s reader contains four texts from Gorgias and an essay that Patrick wrote as a student. The four Gorgian texts are:
An Encomium to Helen
The Defense of Palamdes
On Nature, or What is Not
Epitaphios
An Encomium to Helen is a defense of Helen of Troy. Gorgias exonerates Helen on the grounds that she acted either from love, persuasion by speech, or by force. The first two are obviously superceding causes.
With respect to speech, Gorgias argues that even there, Helen was imposed on. He writes:
8. But if it was speech which persuaded her and deceived her heart, not even to this is it difficult to make an answer and to banish blame as follows. Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity.
Gorgias of Leontini. Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader (p. 14). Unknown. Kindle Edition.
He goes on to state:
11. All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument. For if all men on all subjects had {both} memory of things past and {awareness} of things present and foreknowledge of the future, speech would not be similarly similar, since as things are now it is not easy for them to recall the past nor to consider the present nor to predict the future. So that on most subjects most men take opinion as counselor to their soul, but since opinion is slippery and insecure it casts those employing it into slippery and insecure successes.
Gorgias of Leontini. Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader (pp. 14-15). Unknown. Kindle Edition.
This is not too far off from the criticism of rhetoric that Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates, except it would seem that Plato believed the speech was a way of arriving at truth, rather than speech inherently obscuring truth.
The Defense of Palamedes is Gorgias’ defense of Palamedes against the charge of treason. Palamedes was assigned by Menelaus to convince Odysseus to fight in the Trojan War. In revenge, Odysseus framed Palamedes as a traitor with letters and gold. Palamedes was condemned, but Gorgias imagines Palamedes giving a defense speech, pointing out the manifold improbabilities that he would have conspired. Where are the confederates? Where is the evidence of a date, time, and place where the conspiracy was agreed upon? What was his motive? He didn’t need or want money. He didn’t want to rule resentful Greeks or untrustworthy barbarians. Palamedes concludes:
11. Lastly I shall speak of you to you. Lamentations, prayers, and the petitions of friends are useful when judgment depends on the mob; but before you, the foremost of the Greeks, I need not use these devices, but only justice and truth.
You must not heed words rather than facts, nor prefer accusations to proof, nor regard a brief period as more instructive than a long one, nor consider calumny more trustworthy than experience. Good men avoid all wrong-doing, but above all what cannot be mended; things can be righted by forethought, but are irrevocable by afterthought. This happens when men are trying a fellow-man on a capital charge, as you now are.
Gorgias of Leontini. Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader (p. 23). Unknown. Kindle Edition.
As I said, Palamedes, an innocent man, was convicted, which makes us wonder about Gorgias’ confidence in reason as a mighty lord that would persuade all.[8]
“On Nature, or What is Not” seems to be a parody of metaphysics. If it is not, it is everything that Socrates accused the Sophists of doing. Here is an example:
In addition, it cannot be one. If something exists, it has size. But what has size can be divided into infinitely many things. And even if not infinite, tripartite with length, breadth, and depth. Hence, it cannot be one.
In addition, it cannot be many. The many is made up of the addition of ones, but the one does not exist. Hence, it cannot be many. Hence, nothing exists.
Gorgias of Leontini. Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader (pp. 26-27). Unknown. Kindle Edition.
More seriously, Gorgias argues that if anything is comprehensible, it must be incommunicable:
Communication is about speech (logos), not about the things that exist. That which we communicate is speech, and speech is not the same thing as the things that are perceptible (i.e., it is not light or sound, though light and sound may be used to convey written or spoken speech).
Furthermore, just as the perceptibles are not interchangeable, speech cannot be equated with that which exists, which is outside of us. Therefore, speech can never exactly represent the perceptibles any more than the eye can hear or the hand smell.
Hence (just as the sense organs cannot give their information to any other sense organ), speech cannot give any information about anything perceptible—it gives only information about what is spoken. Thus, if anything exists and is comprehensible, it is incommunicable.
Gorgias of Leontini. Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader (p. 28). Unknown. Kindle Edition.
This may be a serious point. Aquinas, following Aristotle, distinguished between things that were sensible and things that were intelligible. Sensible things were objects of the senses; intelligible things were objects of the intellect. Sensible things are evanescent, changeable, impermanent, and, so, ultimately incommunicable. However, sensible things incorporated forms, which were permanent and could be intellectually abstracted from the senses. As intelligible things, forms could be talked about.
Dionysius the Areopagite argued that being is convertible with intelligibility. Forms are intelligible, which means that they have being. Matter – particularly, prime matter, the primal stuff that can be anything because it lacks form – is entirely unintelligible and therefore lacks being. Form is active; it impresses itself on Matter, which is passive and potential; matter can be anything.
This is difficult stuff to wrap the mind around, but it may not be entirely parody.
If it is not, what does it say about rhetoric? It seems to justify Socrates’ charge that rhetoric is a knack, a skill, not a science, in that it is not directed to some being with rules and causes.
Patrick concludes with “An Encomium of Gorgias” where he seeks to exonerate Gorgias of the claims made against him by Plato. Patrick is a fine writer. He knows rhetoric and applies rhetorical skills to this section. He is particularly adept when he discusses Gorgias’ rhetorical style. It is a fun section and quite eye-opening with respect to the things that paying attention to style can bring to an essay.
Patrick faces a difficult case in trying to exonerate Gorgias from the charge that he taught lies and lying since Gorgias admitted that speech necessarily deceives. (“All who have and do persuade people of things do so by molding a false argument.”)
Patrick begins his defense with the observation that there is a difference between a lie and an untruth. An untruth does not correlate with reality; a lie is a known untruth that is used to persuade people to change their position to the advantage of the persuader. In his writings, Gorgias points out the inferiority of opinion to truth and the disconnect between what can be said and what is. Anyone who has had to take facts and construct a persuasive argument knows that there is a process of selection that necessarily occurs. Facts are infinite; time is not. Some facts are simply irrelevant to making a decision. Is it important that a murder occurred on a sunny day if the murder occurred deep inside a mine? Does it matter what mineral was mined in the mine? Does it matter that the victim had an appendix?
The answer is, who knows? These things might matter or they might not, and whether they matter is invariably a matter of opinion.[9] If we filled up the narrative with all facts without making such judgments, then no decision could ever be made because the presentation would never end, the nature of facts being iterative, e.g., the reaction of someone’s reaction to another person’s reaction might itself be a fact. Patrick observes:
We may thus draw the common thread: on the one hand there is truth and knowledge, on the other, doxa, or opinion, and logos, or speech. Both logos and doxa are essentially deceptive, but just as Palamedes must defend himself by speech, truth must be appealed to by logos.[43] And as both the truth and falsehood can be spoken aloud, we must distinguish between good and evil speech.
Gorgias of Leontini. Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader (p. 44). Unknown. Kindle Edition.
Patrick concludes:
Rather, we here make our distinction, with Gorgias’ help, between a lie and something false. The former is an attempt to deceive, the latter is but an expression erroneous or incomplete. If we accept Gorgias’ notion that language incompletely expresses the fullness of any thing it attempts to describe, if we agree with him that language is limited; we agree that, to the extent any speech claims to express the whole truth, it is deceptive, because no speech can. Gorgias, in all of his works that survive, takes pains to point out this limitation, or falsehood, of language. And to point out a falsehood is but to speak a truth.
Gorgias of Leontini. Language is a Mighty Lord: A Gorgias Reader (p. 45). Unknown. Kindle Edition.
I am persuaded. Is a map a lie? A map is incomplete. It does not fully reflect the territory. It requires interpretation. It may mislead in subtle ways. It cannot communicate the whole truth.[10]
This is a slim book. I came out of it with a much better appreciation of why Plato was making the case he was against rhetoric. It offers an additional dimension to the reading of Plato’s Gorgias.
Footnotes
[1] Doesn’t everyone have their own favorite dialogue? I think it is a perfectly normal thing.
[2] I am always being surprised about how much material we have from the past. I was surprised to learn that we have the trial transcripts from the trial of Galileo. Last week, I learned we have military transcripts, including signed letters, from Simon Bar Kochba of the Bar Kochba Revolt. Now, it turns out that we have a few speeches from a fifth-century rhetorician who is a character in Plato. Who knows what is still out there?
[3] Leontini is in southeastern Sicily. Gorgias visited Athens in 427.
[4] Gorgias seems to have been fast on his feet. Speaking about metaphors, Aristotle offers this story about Gorgias:
As for what Gorgias said to the swallow, when she flew down |1406b15| and let fall her droppings on him, it was in the best of tragic styles, since he said, “Shame on you, Philomela.” For, though shameful for a maiden, if a bird did it, it was not shameful.896 He well-rebuked her by calling her what she was, then, but not what she is.
Aristotle; Reeve, C. D. C.. Rhetoric (The New Hackett Aristotle) (p. 118). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Honestly, I don’t get it, but, apparently, it was memorable for the time.
[5] Aristotle endorses Gorgias about using jokes against the serious:
As for jokes, since they seem to have some use in debates, and Gorgias rightly said that one should “destroy the opponents’ seriousness with laughter and their laughter with seriousness,” |1419b5| we have stated in the Poetics how many kinds (eidos) of jokes there are.
Aristotle; Reeve, C. D. C.. Rhetoric (The New Hackett Aristotle) (p. 149). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
[6] This seems to be a lost work.
[7] It seems like Isocrates might have picked up something from Socrates:
Isocrates encouraged his students to wander and observe public behavior in the city (Athens) to learn through imitation. His students aimed to learn how to serve the city.[8] "At the core of his teaching was an aristocratic notion of arete ("virtue, excellence"), which could be attained by pursuing philosophia – not so much the dialectical study of abstract subjects like epistemology and metaphysics that Plato marked as "philosophy" as the study and practical application of ethics, politics and public speaking".[2] The philosopher Plato (a rival of Isocrates) founded his own academy in response to Isocrates' foundation.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isocrates
[8] Also, we might reflect on the fact that Socrates was also an innocent man convicted and condemned to death by a passionate jury.
[9] As a trial attorney, I find that writing the “statement of facts” of a brief to be the hardest part of writing. I want to be accurate; I want to be succinct; I don’t want to bore; I don’t want to be accused of non-disclosure; and I am doing it with a word limit. These are often mutually exclusive goals.
[10] Last month, I was in Alaska and took a road trip from Wasilla to the Matsuka glacier. The maps of this route said NOTHING about how beautiful the scenery was. I can’t even begin to communicate how beautiful the scenery was. Even a picture is only a partial communication of the beauty of the scenery.