Gorgias as Philosopher of Being: Epistemic Foundationalism in Sophistic Thought

Author(s): Frank D. Walters

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Source: Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1994), pp. 143-155
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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 FRANKD. 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 epistemicfoundationalism.
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 Companywith 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, correlatively, 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 FRANKD. 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 never 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 fosters 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 convert 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 FRANKD. 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 cognitively 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 FRANKD. 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 have 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 knowledgeis frustratedwith the gulf betweenthe
non-rationalityof the gods and the attemptedrationalityof his own
mind;further,manworkingto conveywhatpartialknowledgehe has
mustmove throughthe mediumof logoi and by genuspsyché,which
is as capableof diseaseas 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

becausethe meansby whichwe communicateis speechor logos, and

thislogos is not andcan neverbe the externallysubsistingobjectsthat
actuallyare. Whatwe communicateto our neighborsis never thèse
152 FRANKD. 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-
 GORGIASAS PHILOSOPHEROF 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 FRANKD. 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.

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