From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 235
only means we have of attempting to do this is by means of words. Words
transfer only themselves and not the things to which they refer. I believe that
much further work is needed before we can hope to arrive at an adequate
interpretation of Gorgias’ treatise. It does not matter if the account just outlined
above is dismissed as simplistic. What would be of the greatest importance
would be that Gorgias in his treatise was perhaps the first thinker to grapple
directly with the problem with which we have come to be familiar for rather
more than a hundred years, namely the distinction made by Frege between
meaning and reference.
Plato in the Meno (76c–e) is quite explicit that Gorgias had a precise theory of
perception based on Empedocles’ doctrine of effluences from physical objects.
Perception takes place when one or more effluences from a physical object fit
exactly into pores or passages in the human body, and for them to do this they
must be neither too large nor too small. It is such shapes or effluences which
provide us, for example, with our perception of colours. Gorgias followed
Empedocles in his contention that no one sense can perceive the objects of any
other sense. We do not have precise details as to how Gorgias developed his theory
of perception, but there is every reason to suppose that it was a matter of great
importance to him.
The gulf between words and things was apparently also exploited by Gorgias
in his teachings on rhetoric, both in theory and in the practice to be followed by
speakers if they were to hope to be successful. At the practical level he stressed
the importance of being able to speak briefly as well as at length according to the
needs of the situation, and also the importance of appeals to the emotions as
a means of persuasion. In addition he recommended an elaborate series of
stylistic devices, listed by later writers under technical names such as antithesis,
isokolon (two or more clauses with the same number of syllables), parison
(parallelism of structure between clauses), and homoeoteleuton (a series of two or
more clauses ending with the same words or with words that rhyme). At the
more theoretical level he developed a doctrine of attention to the right time and
situation, in Greek the kairos. Secondly he stressed the need to devote attention
to things that are probable, and thirdly to arguments which are ‘suitable’ or
appropriate. Finally he gave expression to a doctrine of ‘justified deception’.
This he used to give a theoretic basis for literature, above all for tragedy, and he
seems to have applied this also to the practice of making speeches, contending
that the man who indulges in this practice is acting with more right on his side in
his use of myths and appeals to emotions than is the person who is not acting as a
deceiver. But the end result is that the person who is deceived in this way is the
wiser because a man who is not without experience in the reading of literature
will let himself be won over by the pleasure of spoken words. Clearly the doctrine
involved was highly technical, but the implication was probably that a man’s
view of the world around him is improved by the study of literature and the
teaching he receives from the sophists. 8