Ancient Philosophy - Lecture 7 (Part Two)
The position most strongly associated with the sophists, however, is probably their suspicious attitude towards the truth-revealing as opposed to the persuasive capacities of human reasoning. This attitude emerges particularly clearly in the case of the sophist Gorgias, and it contrasts quite striking with the apparently naïve confidence of someone like Parmenides in his chains of a priori metaphysical reasoning.
One fascinating surviving fragment of Gorgias’ writings is his ‘Encomium of Helen’. This is basically a defence of Helen of Troy against the charge of being responsible for the carnage of the Trojan War, and it seems to have been produced as a demonstration of his rhetorical powers. Given the notorious status of Helen in (male) Greek thought at the time, it amounts to an attempt to produce a plausible defence of the seemingly indefensible. Gorgias’ principal tactic is to argue at length that persuasive speech of the kind directed towards Helen by Paris seizes control of the intellect in the same way that a person’s body can be forcibly seized by kidnappers. And just as in the case of physical kidnapping we would blame the kidnappers rather than the victim; so too we ought to blame not Helen herself but Paris for taking control of her will and judgement through his rhetorical manoeuvres. Now it seems plain that we should not regard Gorgias as holding that he has given us good reasons for supposing that Helen is not blameworthy: indeed the attempt to interpret him in that way would surely be in strong tension with the position that he has taken up in his defence. So what, then, is the point of Gorgias’ performance? The most plausible answer would seem to be that it is intended to drive home to us both the power and the potential deceptiveness of rhetoric and verbal argument.
With this example in mind, then, we can turn to another famous piece of Gorgias’ writing. In this second case we are dealing with a summary of what he said rather than anything that purports to record his actual words. Gorgias is reported in his work On nature or what is not as having put forward arguments that purport to show (1) there is nothing, (2) even if there were anything, we could never know about it, and (3) even if we could know about it, we could never communicate it to anyone else. Now some ancient authors were content to interpret Gorgias as a genuine and sincere metaphysical nihilist. However if we do interpret Gorgias in that fashion, his entire enterprise seems utterly self-defeating. Consequently it seems sensible to take some exegetical clues from his defence of Helen. Just as we interpreted that as an attempted demonstration of the way in which rhetorically sophisticated reasoning can overturn or at least come close to overturning our initial assessments of the plausibility of even apparently obvious evaluative judgements, it seems equally legitimate to treat the reasoning in On nature or what is not as an attempt to take on an even more difficult task of persuasion in the field of philosophy. Other thinkers, especially the pre-Socratic naturalist philosophers, place their faith in chains of abstract reasoning to reveal profound and hidden truths about the ultimate nature of reality. But what if it were possible to construct a web of apparently plausible but spurious arguments of a similarly abstract kind that would compel people to concede that they do not know how to avoid a conclusion as bizarre as the conclusion that nothing at all exists? That would surely serve as both an illustration of the astonishing powers of persuasion possessed by a trained rhetorician and a warning against putting one’s confidence in the truth-aptness of such reasoning. And as the evidence from ancient authors makes it plain that the sophists purported to have the skills to make the lesser argument into the stronger and more persuasive position irrespective of where the truth actually lay, it seems appropriate to view Gorgias’ arguments as an attempt to provide a striking demonstration of these supposed skills. After all, the same skills that can obscure the obviousness of the thesis that something exists should be amply sufficient to provide a plausible speech in support of the thesis that weapons of mass destruction exist somewhere in the evil Persian empire! However reflection on the existence of such capabilities will, if carried far enough, lead to a further conclusion, namely the conclusion that rhetorically-informed reasoning is alarmingly indifferent to issues of truth: its persuasiveness can readily be exploited by a skilled practitioner in support of falsehoods. And as a later Pyrrhonean sceptic observes:
If reasoning is such a deceiver that it all but snatches even what is apparent from under our very eyes, surely we should keep watch on it in unclear matters, to avoid being lead into rashness by following it. (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Book One, 20)
What, then, should we say about the hope expressed earlier that if we are unimpressed by the paradigms of philosophical inquiry provided by Plato and such pre-Socratic philosophers as Parmenides and Heraclitus, we might find something more congenial in the reflections of the sophists despite their infamous reputation? It certainly seems to be true that the sophists are commendably cautious about the legitimacy of relying on our reasoning powers to arrive at truths that lie deeper than the realm of how things appear. Moreover they are noticeably willing to explore ways of understanding particular patterns of discourse that do not simply assume that the referring terms within such discourse need to correspond directly to aspects of reality that exist independently of human conventions, desires and beliefs. And given the very limited amount of material that has survived from this group of thinkers, it seems remarkable that in these two respects at least they seem closer to modern philosophical trends than their more respectable and much-lauded contemporaries and immediate predecessors.
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