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with them. In a similar fashion, a sophist always appears to be entering
and leaving the city’s gates physically and ideologically, accepting, to
some degree, the community’s norms and values, while also critiquing
or adding to them, depending upon the contexts to which his speech
is made. Thus, when Gorgias reappraises a controversial historical and
literary figure like Helen, he reverses the popular, unchallenged view that
holds her vanity and disloyalty culpable for causing war and division.
Instead, skillfully, through speech, Gorgias transforms her faults into
virtues, makes her an earnest victim of passion and the “powerful lord”
of speech (Bizzell and Herzberg 45). Helen thus emerges from Gorgias’
rhetorical performance as a fully embodied and empathetic figure who
must be praised for “bringing together many bodies of men thinking
great thoughts with great goals” even if such a meeting eventually resulted
in war and tragedy (Bizzell and Herzberg 45). Gorgias, in one of the more
spectacular displays of a sophistic performance, manages to effectively
corporealize Helen from the abstractions of myth and legend. By making
her flesh and blood, Gorgias is able to make her vulnerable to the same
human foibles, the “drug” of persuasive speech and sexual seduction, as
any of his listeners.
Gorgias’ ability to make what was foreign and censurable in Helen
familiar and pardonable to his listeners during his performance illustrates
the ambiguities of, to reference Burke, ethical “substance,” the underlying
whims and passions that motivate human behavior, eventually facilitating
a shift away from division to identification with Helen, an identification
won “symbolically” through language. Gorgias therefore persuades his
audience to reassess the historical and abstract Helen through a concept
Burke calls “consubstantiation”—that is, by aligning her capitulation to
desire with their own human propensities and weaknesses. Such a rhetorical
move not only has the potential to transform individual opinions and
beliefs, but to some degree, the community’s, insofar as uncritical popular
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opinion and sedimented assumptions have been temporarily uprooted
or even discredited (Bizzell and Herzberg 1326). Sophistic rhetoric
achieves such transformation not by mere opposition, i.e. dialectic and
antithesis, but by shifting perspectives ever so slightly, so that the object
under investigation—in this case Helen and her alleged treason—can
be viewed anew and sympathetically by a receptive audience. Epideictic
performances like Gorgias’ were thus fundamentally historicist, every
bit as much about critiquing contemporary values as they were about
adjudicating the past. The success of this performance depended heavily
upon the sophists’ keen awareness of kairos, the tailor-making of their
speeches and arguments to “the local nomoi, community-specific customs
and laws,” a concept postmodernists centuries later would conspicuously
incorporate in their various formulations and critiques (Jarratt 11).
While Gorgias is able to achieve this with a famous mythical or
historical personage, the anonymously written Dissoi Logoi does this
with topoi or the rhetorical commonplace. The anonymously authored
text, the Dissoi Logoi, is structured through the concentrated use of “antilogic,”
which multiplies premises but perpetually withholds conclusions,
predicated on the view that every proposition engenders another.
According to Jarratt, it is a method credited to the oldest of the sophists,
Protagoras, that directly opposes Aristotle’s “law of non-contradiction”
asserting that two propositions cannot be true and untrue at the same
time. Critics of the Dissoi Logoi believe the text uses contradiction or
anti-logic heuristically, as a way of “discovering a truth rather than
the expression, from a distance, from a separate, single Truth within
phenomena” (Jarratt 49). Hence, the author of the Dissoi Logoi privileges
embodied experiential “truths” over received wisdom or dialectical proof.
In this sense, the natural exterior world is neutral, but it is only our
(often fallible) interior perceptions that ascribe value and meaning to it.
As Eric Havelock has recognized, the method of reasoning on display
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