The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato, and Their Successors

“To learn about Gorgias is to learn about what continues to matter in rhetoric” (3). For this reason, Robert Wardy wrote this book about rhetoric as a book about Gorgias. For Wardy, Gorgias is the one who voiced the greatest challenge to the Greek philosophical project and inaugurated the great debate between rhetoric and philosophy.

Wardy argues that rhetoric—as a Greek achievement initiated in the fifth century b.c.e. and culminating in the fourth (2)—was born from a great debate about the opposing possibilities of the power of persuasion. Since Wardy believes that wide-ranging surveys of ancient Greek rhetoric, which include everything from examinations of individual orators to studies of rhetorical handbooks, often “disastrously leach” the debate from which rhetoric was born, he chooses to focus his attention sharply on Gorgias. By choosing Gorgias, Wardy is able to tell of this great debate, to tell of the plurality of conflicting responses to questions arising about persuasive ability and practice, a commonplace that, Wardy argues, would eventually be called “rhetoric.” Moreover, writing about Gorgias allows Wardy to tell of the one figure he believes to be the most central, the one who “not only inaugurated the great rhetoric debate, [but also] gave unequalled expression to some of its most vital components” (3), in particular, the terrifying yet exhilarating possibility that persuasion is a manipulative power neither absent at any moment nor innocent in human contact.

Wardy attends to readers with general or technical interest: “My intention is that, since I am writing for readers keenly interested in the cardinal question of rhetoric, and such readers come from widely different backgrounds, they should not be put off by the rebarbativeness of a learned apparatus concealing the chief lines of the argument” (3). Toward this end, Wardy does not interrupt his writing with his expansive knowledge of scholarship or assume that his reader would be with him, or that they even would want to be with him. Instead, he uses endnotes to signal that no prior involvement in the scholarship is assumed and that no future involvement is expected. However, readers should know that some of Wardy’s most pointed remarks appear in these notes: he brings to light that “[Thomas] Cole’s reading of [Buchheim] fr. 23 [Plutarch on Gorgias] is consistent with his systematic misinterpretation” (157; chap. 2, n. 13); he forcefully describes how the analytical and scholarly shoddiness of Brian Vickers’s treatment of Gorgias and the Gorgias in In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988) could be multiplied almost indefinitely (167–68; chap. 3, n. 9). With notes such as these, Wardy rewards readers’ efforts to turn to the back of the book, whether they do so out of general or technical curiosity.

Wardy meticulously attends to the various procedural concerns that arise in his examination of rhetoric. Most notably, he addresses the question of whether we can talk of rhetoric and philosophy in the work of Gorgias, which most agree antedates the coming of these distinct disciplines. He argues that we can, indeed, talk of rhetoric and philosophy in Gorgias: “[I]t would be rash to maintain that those thinkers we now call ‘philosophers’ used that very term to mark their special identity; but it does not follow that they therefore also lacked the unique self-conception that by the fourth century was called ‘philosophical’” (9). When Wardy tries to tell of rhetoric’s official birth, he seems to recognize that he is as unable to say that rhetoric was born in the fifth century b.c.e. and culminated in the fourth as he is to say that rhetoric is a cultural universal, or a commonplace of human experience. If he settles for the former, he risks underestimating, not only the commonplace of persuasive ability and practice, but also that of the recognition of the necessity and power of persuasion in human experience, which existed long before the official naming of “rhetoric.” If he settles for the latter, he risks not paying enough attention to the multiple, profound differences that exist between what we mean by rhetoric and what another society might mean by some other term or some similar collection of abilities and practices that we think approximates it (2). He must somehow negotiate a middle ground from which to talk about rhetoric’s birth.

However, on this procedural task, Wardy seems to fall short. Since Wardy argues that conceptualizations of “rhetoric” and “philosophy” existed prior to their distinct codification as disciplines, which involved, first and foremost, their being named, one would expect him to be less adamant about considering Gorgias to be the one who inaugurated the debate over the nature and value of rhetoric and its relationship to philosophy. If rhetoric and philosophy could exist prior to their being named, it seems likely that even earlier expressions could have inaugurated the debate, perhaps Aristophanes’ portrayal of just and unjust speech in The Clouds or even Homer’s portrayal of the tension between Achilles and Odysseus, the former despising anyone who holds one thought in his mind while saying another (Iliad 9.312–13), the latter reveling in his ability to do just that. I am not at all sure that Wardy can have it both ways: to have us believe in the possibility of a conceptual debate over rhetoric and its relationship to philosophy prior to either discipline being formalized and to discourage our belief in the possibility that this debate existed prior to Gorgias’s inaugural voice. While I can assent to Wardy’s claim that Gorgias gave unequalled expression to some of the vital components of the great debate between rhetoric and philosophy, I am less willing to grant that he alone inaugurated it.

With this possible exception, Wardy proceeds cautiously and consistently through his analysis of select works of Gorgias, Plato, Isocrates, Cicero, Aristides, and Aristotle to portray what he calls the “Gorgias/Gorgias Problematic.” In short, this problematic is reducible to the rhetoric/philosophy problematic, which is reducible to the fundamental debate over opposing considerations of logoi, a term that Wardy rightly identifies as resisting translation. The Gorgias/rhetoric pole holds that logoi are persuasive. For Gorgias, Wardy explains, logoi are all alike emotionally manipulative and different only in mode of operation and, presumably, effectiveness. The Gorgias/philosophy pole holds that logoi are philosophical. Wardy explains that the phrase “philosophical logoi” approximates “argument” or “reasoning,” which highlights the exclusively logical, rational character of truth. A philosopher has access to a logos “whose inescapable logic persuades all those wise enough to follow the argument” (12).

Wardy uses the Gorgias/Gorgias problematic—including Gorgias’s direct opposition to Parmenides (chaps. 1–2); Plato’s reinstatement of Parmenides in the Gorgias (chap. 3); Isocrates’, Cicero’s, and Aristides’ evasive tactics in the problematic (chap. 4); and Aristotle’s ambitious attempt to establish a middle ground between the extremes (chap. 5)—to create a picture of how these people can be seen talking to one another, in particularly argumentative ways, about the nature and value of rhetoric and its relationship to philosophy. With this picture, Wardy shows how rhetoric was born from bitter controversy and sustained by heated debate. Of course, the point that this is radically different from being born from meditation and sustained by doctrine is not lost on him. In the end, Wardy’s consideration of the Gorgias/Gorgias problematic remains inconclusive because, as he explains, the problematic “is something to be continuously thought through, not solved, disposed of once for all” (148).

Wardy’s analysis is characterized by his circumspection. His ability “to see all around” allows him to tell of novel, or at least refreshingly retold, connections in the study of rhetoric. Examples abound. When he directs attention to the commonly unnoticed connection between Parmenides and Gorgias and to the way that their relationship establishes the issues in the great debate,Wardy retells the story of the Greek philosophical project and its relationship to rhetoric. He argues that the Gorgias/Gorgias problematic begins when Gorgias expresses the impossibility of knowing and/or communicating “what is.” He shows how one can view Gorgias’s “On What is Not” as the inaugural voice of opposition to the Parmenidean legacy that truth/reality exists and is, in and of itself, persuasive. He shows how Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen makes philosophical argument just another species of logos. In the end, we see how Gorgias deliberately ignored Parmenides’ insistence that deductive logos is, as Wardy puts it, sui generis (45). Wardy shows that, for Gorgias, “all varieties of logos are alike displays of persuasive contention; despite its pretensions, philosophy does not establish stable, well-founded judgement, but only demonstrates the mutability of passive belief as now one, now another participant in philosophical contests gains the upper hand” (46). By highlighting this debate between Parmenides and Gorgias, Wardy revises the received tradition of attributing the Greek philosophical legacy to Plato. As Wardy tells it, Plato only reinstated—albeit emphatically—what Parmenides had already said. Furthermore, highlighting this debate gives Wardy all the more opportunity to argue that conceptualizations of what would eventually be called “rhetoric” and what would eventually be called “philosophy” were manifest prior to their formalization as distinct disciplines. Ultimately, highlighting this debate shows how Gorgias systematically erodes the distinction between two opposing conceptions of logoi and what would eventually be called “rhetoric” and “philosophy.”

Particularly noteworthy is Wardy’s description of the Gorgiannic program as one that erodes the fundamental structural polarities in the culture of ancient Greece. In addition to showing Gorgias’s erosion of the division between logoi, Wardy takes care in showing how Gorgias deliberately confuses the persuasion/coercion division underlying much of the ancient Greek culture. He shows that, for Gorgias, persuasion can be understood as a cooperative and mutually pleasurable deception, with a deliberate deceiver and an audience who is willing to be deceived. To make his point, Wardy analogizes the experience of Gorgiannic persuasion to that of tragedy. He argues that, for audiences of tragedy to enjoy the tragic experience, they must imbue the playwright’s imaginary world with reality by means of the willing suspension of disbelief (36). In the same way audiences allow themselves to believe in the world that Euripides creates, audiences allow themselves to be persuaded by Gorgias’s logoi. We know of the potential to read the Encomium as a fiction because of Wardy’s attention to the way in which Gorgias hovers between the serious and the playful, the real and the fictional, particularly evident in Gorgias’s last line of the Encomium of Helen: “I wished to write the logos as an encomium of Helen, but as an amusement for myself” (50). If the Encomium can be regarded as a fiction, then the idea of cooperative deception can be (cautiously) generalized. Wardy writes, “[W]e—supposed ‘knowers’—would turn out to have been pleasurably and deceitfully persuaded of Helen’s innocence; but then we could hardly take exception to her falling prey to the words of Paris, since we ourselves have been seduced by Gorgias. Perhaps in the last analysis, we who are persuaded are all more or less willing victims of persuasion; at the very least, the degree to which we cooperate in deception might remain permanently obscure” (37). In one of his most powerful statements, Wardy notes, “When we ourselves are made to pity Helen and execrate Paris, are persuaded (perhaps) that persuasion is manipulation, enjoy the deception with which Gorgias amuses us even as we discern it, we feel in our own soul the seduction of rhetoric” (51). Experiencing the pleasurable confusion of the Gorgiannic program, we learn that we cannot live comfortably in the traditional Greek polarity of persuasion and coercion, any more than we can live in the rhetoric/philosophy polarity.

As a final attempt to signpost Wardy’s circumspection, the epilogue is worth noting—though I will not dwell on it for fear of spoiling the climactic ending. Here, Wardy shows the ways in which considerations of gender are inextricably involved in the great debate between rhetoric and philosophy, a component that for too long has been bullied out of the debate by the “direct and elliptical misogyny” of the philosophical canon. Wardy shows how gender cannot be extricated from the debate. After all, at the heart of the Gorgias/Gorgias problematic stands Helen of Troy, who single-handedly gave Gorgias a reason to consider the possibility of logoi as manipulative persuasion.

Through Gorgias, Wardy writes of rhetoric as (in his own terms) the bewildering, exciting, terrifying, and exhilarating possibility of the power of persuasion. Offering a multitude of emotional and intellectual thrills, Wardy tempts his readers to read. And, with careful, circumspect attention to his subject and writing that reaches levels of both intensity and eloquence, Wardy does thrill his readers. But this is no cheap thrill. His arguments reveal the sophistication and complexity of nuance and subtlety. Moreover, Wardy leaves something more than the pleasure of a good read. He leaves a sense of urgency to explore rhetoric. His work calls his reader to attend to the plurality of responses about and related to rhetoric because of rhetoric’s potential to be ever present and never innocent in human experience. For this reason, Wardy’s work is of rare worth and importance, not only to rhetoricians, but also to philosophers, feminists, and all others whose general and/or technical interests lead them to think, and then think again, about the human condition.