From the Beginning to Plato

234 THE SOPHISTS
parody or joke against philosophers. If it had any serious purpose it was to be
seen as a purely rhetorical exercise in a method of argument which philosophers
were supposed to have used and which simply made them ridiculous. 5 A second
stage in the interpretation of Gorgias’ treatise was reached by those who were
prepared to take it seriously, and who took it as an elaborate attack on the
philosophic doctrines of the Eleatics, and to a lesser extent the doctrines of
certain physical philosophers among the pre-Socratics. 6 On this view the verb ‘to
be’ in Gorgias’ treatise has the meaning ‘to exist’. The treatise itself is divided into
three parts. The first part maintains that nothing exists, and this is established by
arguing that ‘not-being’ does not exist, nor does ‘being’ exist. This is directed
against the contention of Parmenides that only being exists. Gorgias by his
arguments thus achieves a position of philosophic nihilism. Parmenides had
destroyed the manifold world of appearances, but he kept the unitary world of
true being. Gorgias completed the negative process begun by Parmenides by
denying also the world of being, so that we are left simply with nothing.
This second stage in the interpretation of Gorgias’ treatise had at least one
advantage; it took the treatise seriously and did assign to Gorgias a place in the
history of philosophy, albeit one that was negative and destructive. The second
part of Gorgias’ treatise on this view tried to ram home the argument by
contending that even if something does exist it cannot be known by human beings.
In the third part it is argued that even if something exists and is knowable, no
knowledge or understanding of it can be communicated to another person.
But if this second approach is an improvement over the first, it now begins to
seem that perhaps it does not go far enough. What is happening is that we are
now beginning to have a certain reassessment of the uses of the verb ‘to be’ in
ancient Greek in the light of certain modern doctrines. It is now common to
make a clear distinction between ‘is’ as a copula followed by a predicate, as in ‘X
is Y’, and an existential sense where the verb has the meaning ‘exists’ as in ‘X
exists’. But we can understand the claim that anything which exists
must necessarily be something. From this it could follow that the existential use
of the verb ‘to be’ is always to be understood as implying one or more predicates.
This in turn has the effect of reducing the existential use to a special case of its
use as a copula, namely one in which predicates are necessarily involved, but are
not actually expressed. We are now also familiar with the view that in order to
understand the function of language it is necessary to pay attention to two
distinguishable things, namely what is the meaning of words and phrases, and to
what if anything they refer. It is now beginning to seem to be the case that
Gorgias may have been attempting to make use of just this distinction. On this
view it is the relation between words and things with which he is concerned. 7
This, it can be argued, emerges in the second and third parts of his treatise, where
he is arguing that it is not possible for a thing to be known by human beings
because we are only indirectly in contact with objective things, either by
perception or by the use of words to describe them. Likewise no knowledge or
understanding of things can be conveyed from one person to another, since the