Gorgias and the art of rhetoric: Toward a holistic reading of the extant Gorgianic fragments

Abstract

T hroughout this essay, I argue that the three primary extant fragments of Gorgias of Leontini-On Non-Existence (or On Nature), the Encomium of Helen, and the Defense of Palamedes-are not disparate or contradictory statements, as is often assumed, but intricately interrelated and internally consistent contributions to a complex theory and art (techne') of rhetoric. Of course, we cannot argue that Gorgias composed these texts with a holistic rhetorical task in mind; however, reconstructing and interpreting On Non-Existence, the Helen, and the Palamedes holistically does shed significant new light on our current understanding of Gorgias' emerging theory and techne' of rhetoric. In brief, On Non-Existence describes the effects that externally given realities (ta onta) have on the human psyche (psuche), the Helen explores the unethical workings of the persuasive arts on the human psuche, and the Palamedes demonstrates rhetorical topoi for the invention of arguments designed to move the human psuche' of a forensic audience to ethical action. Reconstructed thus as a holistic statement, Gorgias' primary extant fragments theorize the social nature of linguistic symbols and explore their artistic uses for both unethical and ethical purposes; and as a holistic interpretation of the extant fragments demonstrates, Gorgias favors the topical invention of ethical arguments over the magical invention of false arguments, unsupported opinions, and deliberate deceptions. Criticism of Gorgianic rhetoric as inartistic is almost as ancient as the very texts themselves. Plato, who probably wrote some of his earliest dialogues while Gorgias was still living and teaching in Athens, argues that Gorgianic rhetoric is not a techne. In the Gorgias, for example, Plato (through the mouthpiece of Socrates) tells the character Gorgias that his conception and practice of rhetoric whose scope is logos is not a true art but merely a false art, a form of flattery because its goal is to elicit pleasure and not to discover the Good. Moreover, in the Phaedrus Plato explains that sophistic rhetoric is irrational and thus atechnical because it is not founded on truth discovered through the principles of philosophical dialectic. No activity, according to Plato, is artistic unless it begins with a foundation of pure universal knowledge discovered through dialectical inquiry, and it is precisely because those who claim to teach and practice the art of rhetoric are ignorant of dialectic that they incapable of properly defining rhetoric, and that in turn leads them to imagine that by possessing themselves of the requisite antecedent learning they have discovered the art itself' (269b). But if we accept Plato's philosophy/rhetoric demarcation along with the claim that all