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Reading: Gorgias, Ecomium of Helen

The Encomium of Helen by Gorgias of Leontini

translated from the Greek and published on the Web by  Brian R. Donovan  (链接到外部网站。) , 1999

I

(1) The order proper to a city-state is being well-manned; to a body, beauty; to a soul, wisdom; to a deed, excellence; and to a discourse, truth--and the opposites of these are disorder. And the praiseworthy man and woman and discourse and work and city-state and deed one must honor with praise, while one must assign blame to the unworthy--for it is equal error and ignorance to blame the praiseworthy and to praise the blameworthy. (2) It being required of the same man both to speak straight and to refute [crooked speech, one should refute] those blaming Helen, a woman concerning whom the testimony of those who are called poets has become univocal and unanimous--likewise the repute of her name, which has become a byword for calamities. And by bestowing some rationality on the discourse, I myself wish to absolve this ill-reputed woman from responsibility, and to show that those who blame her are lying--and, having shown the truth, to put an end to ignorance. (3) It is not unclear, not even to a few, that the woman who is the subject of this discourse was the foremost of the foremost men and women, by nature and by birth. For it is clear that her mother was Leda and her father was in fact the god, but said to be mortal, Tyndareus and Zeus--of whom the one, by being, seemed, while the other, by speech, was disproved--and the one was the mightiest of men while the other was tyrant over all.

(4) Born of such parentage, she had godlike beauty, which having received she not inconspicuously retained. She produced the greatest erotic desires in most men. For one body many bodies of men came together, men greatly purposing great things, of whom some possessed great wealth, some the glory of ancient and noble lineage, some the vigor of personal strength, and others the power of acquired cleverness. And they were all there together out of contentious love and unconquerable ambition. (5) Who it was, then, who fulfilled the love by gaining Helen, and the means and manner of it, I shall not say; for to tell knowing people things they know supplies corroboration but does not convey enjoyment. Having now finished the first section, I shall advance to the beginning of the next section, and I shall set out the causes through which Helen's journey to Troy was likely to come about.

II

(6) Either by the wishes of Fortune and plans of the gods and decrees of Necessity she did what she did, or abducted by force, or persuaded by speeches, or conquered by Love. Now in the first case, the responsible party deserves the responsibility. For the will of a god cannot be hindered by human forethought. For it is not natural for the superior to be hindered by the inferior, but for the inferior to be ruled and led by the superior--for the superior to lead and the inferior to follow. And a god is superior to a human being in force, intelligence, etcetera. Accordingly, if one must attribute responsibility to Fortune and the god, one must acquit Helen of infamy.

(7) But if she was abducted by force, unlawfully constrained and unjustly victimized, it is clear on the one hand that the abductor, as victimizer, committed injustice--and on the other hand that the abductee, as victim, met with mishap. Accordingly the barbarian assailant deserves to meet with barbarous assault, by speech and custom and deed--deserves to be blamed in speech, dishonored by custom, and penalized indeed. She who was forced and bereft of fatherland and orphaned of friends--how is she not to be pitied rather than reviled? For he did terrible things; she was the victim; it is accordingly fair to pity her and hate him.

(8) And if persuasive discourse deceived her soul, it is not on that account difficult to defend her and absolve her of responsibility, thus: discourse is a great potentate, which by the smallest and most secret body accomplishes the most divine works; for it can stop fear and assuage pain and produce joy and make mercy abound. And I shall show that these things are so: (9) explanation to the audience, by means of opinion, is required. Discourse having meter I suppose and name (in the general sense) to be poetry. Fearful shuddering and tearful pity and sorrowful longing come upon those who hear it, and the soul experiences a peculiar feeling, on account of the words, at the good and bad fortunes of other people's affairs and bodies. But come, let me proceed from one section to another.

III

(10) By means of words, inspired incantations serve as bringers-on of pleasure and takers-off of pain. For the incantation's power, communicating with the soul's opinion, enchants and persuades and changes it, by trickery. Two distinct methods of trickery and magic are to be found: errors of soul, and deceptions of opinion. (11) Those who have persuaded and do persuade anyone about anything are shapers of lying discourse. For if all people possessed memory concerning all things past, and awareness of all things present, and foreknowledge of all things to come, discourse would not be similarly similar; hence it is not now easy to remember the past or consider the present or foretell the future; so that most people on most subjects furnish themselves with opinion as advisor to the soul. But opinion, being slippery and unsteady, surrounds those who rely on it with slippery and unsteady successes. (12) Accordingly what cause hinders Helen . . . praise-hymn came . . . similarly would . . . not being young . . . just as if . . . means of forcing . . . force was abducted. For the mind of Persuasion was able . . . and even if necessity . . . the form will have . . . it has the same power. For discourse was the persuader of the soul, which it persuaded and compelled to believe the things that were said and to agree to the things that were done. He who persuaded (as constrainer) did wrong; while she who was persuaded (as one constrained by means of the discourse) is wrongly blamed. (13) Persuasion belonging to discourse shapes the soul at will: witness, first, the discourses of the astronomers, who by setting aside one opinion and building up another in its stead make incredible and obscure things apparent to the eyes of opinion; second, the necessary debates in which one discourse, artfully written but not truthfully meant, delights and persuades a numerous crowd; and third, the competing arguments of the philosophers, in which speed of thought is shown off, as it renders changeable the credibility of an opinion. (14) The power of discourse stands in the same relation to the soul's organization as the pharmacopoeia does to the physiology of bodies. For just as different drugs draw off different humors from the body, and some put an end to disease and others to life, so too of discourses: some give pain, others delight, others terrify, others rouse the hearers to courage, and yet others by a certain vile persuasion drug and trick the soul.

IV

(15) It has been said that if she was persuaded by discourse, she did no wrong but rather was unfortunate; I proceed to the fourth cause in a fourth section. If it was love that brought all these things to pass, she escapes without difficulty from the blame for the sin alleged to have taken place. For the things we see do not have whatever nature we will, but rather that which befalls each. The soul receives an impression in its own ways through the sight. (16) For example, whenever hostile bodies put on their bronze and iron war-gear of ward and defense against enemies, if the visual sense beholds this, it is troubled and it troubles the soul, so that often panic-stricken men flee future danger <as if it were> present. For the strong habitual force of law is banished because of the fear prompted by the sight, which makes one heedless both of what is judged by custom to be admirable, and of the good that comes about by victory. (17) Some who have seen dreadful things have lost their presence of mind in the present time; thus fear extinguishes and drives out understanding. And many fall into useless troubles and terrible diseases and incurable dementias; thus sight engraves in the mind images of things seen. And the frightening ones, many of them, remain; and those that remain are just like things said. (18) But truly whenever the painters perfectly complete one body and figure from many colors and bodies, they delight the sight; and the making of statues and production of figurines furnishes a pleasant sight to the eyes. Thus it is in the nature of the visual sense to long for some things and for other things to give it pain. And in many there is produced much love and desire for many things and bodies. (19) Accordingly, if Helen's eye, taking pleasure in Alexander's body, transmitted to her soul the eagerness and struggle of Love, is it any wonder? If Love, <being> a god, <has> the divine power of gods, how could the weaker being have the power to reject this and to ward it off? But if it is a human disease and an error of the soul, it ought not to be blamed as a sin but ought rather to be accounted a misfortune. For she went, as she started out, in the clutches of fortune, not by plans of the mind; and by the constraints of love, not the preparations of art.

V

(20) How then is it necessary to regard as just the blame of Helen, who either passionately in love or persuaded by discourse or abducted by force or constrained by divine constraints did the things she did, escaping responsibility every way?

(21) By this discourse I have removed infamy from a woman; I have continued in the mode I established at the beginning. I tried to put an end to the injustice of blame and ignorance of opinion; I wanted to write the discourse, Helen's encomium and my plaything.

Translation ©1999 by  Brian R. Donovan  (链接到外部网站。) . This translation is offered by the translator (a Professor of English at  Bemidji State University  (链接到外部网站。) ) for the free and unrestricted use of students, teachers, and scholars everywhere, consistent with academic integrity. The translation may be non-commercially reproduced in full in any format, provided that such reproduction includes this copyright notice.  Quotations from this translation should be accompanied by due acknowledgment of their source.  Commercial publishers wishing to make use of this translation should contact the translator.

Reading: Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a NonMoral Sense

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense Frederich Nietzsche

1

In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.

It is strange that this should be the effect of the intellect, for after all it was given only as an aid to the most unfortunate, most delicate, most evanescent beings in order to hold them for a minute in existence, from which otherwise, without this gift, they would have every reason to flee as quickly as Lessing's son. [In a famous letter to Johann Joachim Eschenburg (December 31, 1778), Lessing relates the death of his infant son, who "understood the world so well that he left it at the first opportunity."] That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character.

The intellect, as a means for the preservation of the individual, unfolds its chief powers in simulation; for this is the means by which the weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, since they are denied the chance of waging the struggle for existence with horns or the fangs of beasts of prey. In man this art of simulation reaches its peak: here deception, flattering, lying and cheating, talking behind the back, posing, living in borrowed splendor, being masked, the disguise of convention, acting a role before others and before oneself—in short, the constant fluttering around the single flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that almost nothing is more incomprehensible than how an honest and pure urge for truth could make its appearance among men. They are deeply immersed in illusions and dream images; their eye glides only over the surface of things and sees "forms"; their feeling nowhere lead into truth, but contents itself with the reception of stimuli, playing, as it were, a game of blindman's buff on the backs of things. Moreover, man permits himself to be lied to at night, his life long, when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries to prevent this—although men have been said to have overcome snoring by sheer will power.

What, indeed, does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibers? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance—hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. In view of this, whence in all the world comes the urge for truth?

Insofar as the individual wants to preserve himself against other individuals, in a natural state of affairs he employs the intellect mostly for simulation alone. But because man, out of need and boredom, wants to exist socially, herd-fashion, he requires a peace pact and he endeavors to banish at least the very crudest bellum omni contra omnes [war of all against all] from his world. This peace pact brings with it something that looks like the first step toward the attainment of this enigmatic urge for truth. For now that is fixed which henceforth shall be "truth"; that is, a regularly valid and obligatory designation of things is invented, and this linguistic legislation also furnishes the first laws of truth: for it is here that the contrast between truth and lie first originates. The liar uses the valid designations, the words, to make the unreal appear as real; he says, for example, "I am rich," when the word "poor" would be the correct designation of his situation. He abuses the fixed conventions by arbitrary changes or even by reversals of the names. When he does this in a self-serving way damaging to others, then society will no longer trust him but exclude him. Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths. And, moreover, what about these conventions of language? Are they really the products of knowledge, of the sense of truth? Do the designations and the things coincide? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a "truth" in the sense just designated. If he does not wish to be satisfied with truth in the form of a tautology—that is, with empty shells—then he will forever buy illusions for truths. What is a word? The image of a nerve stimulus in sounds. But to infer from the nerve stimulus, a cause outside us, that is already the result of a false and unjustified application of the principle of reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. What arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty! We speak of a "snake": this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The different languages, set side by side, show that what matters with words is never the truth, never an adequate expression; else there would not be so many languages. The "thing in itself" (for that is what pure truth, without consequences, would be) is quite incomprehensible to the creators of language and not at all worth aiming for. One designates only the relations of things to man, and to express them one calls on the boldest metaphors. A nerve stimulus, first transposed into an image—first metaphor. The image, in turn, imitated by a sound—second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one. One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound and music. Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni's sound figures; perhaps he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear that he must know what men mean by "sound." It is this way with all of us concerning language; we believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. In the same way that the sound appears as a sand figure, so the mysterious X of the thing in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an image, and finally as a sound. Thus the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within and with which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and build, if not derived from never-never land, is a least not derived from the essence of things.

Let us still give special consideration to the formation of concepts. Every word immediately becomes a concept, inasmuch as it is not intended to serve as a reminder of the unique and wholly individualized original experience to which it owes its birth, but must at the same time fit innumerable, more or less similar cases—which means, strictly speaking, never equal—in other words, a lot of unequal cases. Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal. No leaf ever wholly equals another, and the concept "leaf" is formed through an arbitrary abstraction from these individual differences, through forgetting the distinctions; and now it gives rise to the idea that in nature there might be something besides the leaves which would be "leaf"—some kind of original form after which all leaves have been woven, marked, copied, colored, curled, and painted, but by unskilled hands, so that no copy turned out to be a correct, reliable, and faithful image of the original form. We call a person "honest." Why did he act so honestly today? we ask. Our answer usually sounds like this: because of his honesty. Honesty! That is to say again: the leaf is the cause of the leaves. After all, we know nothing of an essence-like quality named "honesty"; we know only numerous individualized, and thus unequal actions, which we equate by omitting the unequal and by then calling them honest actions. In the end, we distill from them a qualitas occulta [hidden quality] with the name of "honesty." We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond o the essence of things: that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemonstrable as its opposite.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are centuries' old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as red, another as cold, and a third as mute, there arises a moral impulse in regard to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As arational being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts, so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries—a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. Whereas each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore able to elude all classification, the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regularity of a Roman columbarium and exhales in logic that strength and coolness which is characteristic of mathematics. Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even the concept—which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die—is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept. But in this conceptual crap game "truth" means using every die in the designated manner, counting its spots accurately, fashioning the right categories, and never violating the order of caste and class rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as within a templum, so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each conceptual god be sought only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius of construction, who succeeds in piling an infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one constructed of spiders' webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material which he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired, but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal" I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation. Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man 's service and connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire universe in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one original sound-man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original picture-man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these things [which he intends to measure]immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.

Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his "self consciousness" would be immediately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available. But in any case it seems to me that the correct perception—which would mean the adequate expression of an object in the subject—is a contradictory impossibility. For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue—for which I there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. "Appearance" is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true that the essence of things "appears" in the empirical world. A painter without hands who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empirical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hardening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its necessity and exclusive justification.

Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no doubt felt a deep mistrust of all idealism of this sort: just as often as he has quite early convinced himself of the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and fallibility of the laws of nature. He has concluded that so far as we can penetrate here—from the telescopic heights to the microscopic depths—everything is secure, complete, infinite, regular, and without any gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other. How little does this resemble a product of the imagination, for if it were such, there should be some place where the illusion and reality can be divined. Against this, the following must be said: if each us had a different kind of sense perception—if we could only perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound—then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature—which, in turn, are known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence. All that we actually know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them—time and space, and therefore relationships of succession and number. But everything marvelous about the laws of nature, everything that quite astonishes us therein and seems to demand explanation, everything that might lead us to distrust idealism: all this is completely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from ourselves with the same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to comprehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs within them. The only way in which the possibility of subsequently constructing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves can be explained is by the firm persistence of these original forms That is to say, this conceptual edifice is an imitation of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor.

2

We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific truth with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art. Pascal is right in maintaining that if the same dream came to us every night we would be just as occupied with it as we are with the things that we see every day. "If a workman were sure to dream for twelve straight hours every night that he was king," said Pascal (链接到外部网站。) , "I believe that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours every night that he was a workman." In fact, because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people—the ancient Greeks, for instance—more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens, when even the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company of Peisastratus driving through the market place of Athens with a beautiful team of horses—and this is what the honest Athenian believed—then, as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in all these shapes.

But man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. With creative pleasure it throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions, so that, for example, it designates the stream as "the moving path which carries man where he would otherwise walk." The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage from itself. At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a servant who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence. In comparison with its previous conduct, everything that it now does bears the mark of dissimulation, just as that previous conduct did of distortion. The free intellect copies human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.

There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by knowing how to meet his principle needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regularity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an "overjoyed hero," counting as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty. Whenever, as was perhaps the case in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles his weapons more authoritatively and victoriously than his opponent, then, under favorable circumstances, a culture can take shape and art's mastery over life can be established. All the manifestations of such a life will be accompanied by this dissimulation, this disavowal of indigence, this glitter of metaphorical intuitions, and, in general, this immediacy of deception: neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothes, nor the clay jugs give evidence of having been invented because of a pressing need. It seems as if they were all intended to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian cloudlessness, and, as it were, a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption—in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled. How differently the stoical man who learns from experience and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man, who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception: he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the other type of man executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and changeable human face, but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps himself in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.

-End-  

 

Handout: The Sophistic Model

Rhetorical Theory

Dr. Darrin Hicks

 

The Sophists

The Sophists were traveling public speaking teachers who taught people how to argue so they could prevail in the legislative assembly and the courts.

To understand Gorgias and the rest of the Sophists it is important to place them in the political context of ancient Greece. Two sweeping political reforms engendered the practice of rhetoric. 

1) By 450 the reforms of Kleisthenes established a democratic form of government. Two basic principles were inaugurated: (a) that power should reside in the people as a whole and not in an elite few; and (b) that high offices should be entrusted by lot to those among citizens (free white males) who were perceived as best fitted for them. The acquisition of power became less dependent on status and privilege (although these factors were still important) and more dependent on the ability to persuade fellow citizens to follow a proposed course of action.

2) By 462 the reforms of Ephialtes established a system of common courts (the Heliastic courts) in which decisions were rendered by juries (up to 200 members) chosen by lot from the citizenry rather than a board of magistrates. These reforms made it possible for any citizen to bring suit against any other citizen and mandated legal claims (with the exception of suits over sacrilege or certain kinds of homicide) should be decided by a jury.

These reforms opened up Athenian politics. All citizens were able, at least in principle, to become members of the assembly, to vote on public issues, and to bring lawsuits. This engendered an unprecedented social mobility. In both arenas of public action, the assembly and the courts, one had to be an effective public speaker in order to gain office and prevail in bringing lawsuits. This was especially true because the reforms did not eliminate the privileges of status and bloodline. However, these privileges could potentially be neutralized by the power of public influence a skillful speaker might possess. Thus, the ability to teach persons the arts of persuasive speech was in great demand.

3) These reforms also ushered in the agora: the open spaces where citizens came together to conduct business and to talk informally about civic concerns. It is the forerunner of what we understand as the public sphere, the unregulated discursive space where opinions are formed and debated (and, in some sense, the internet) A healthy agora is essential for the functioning of the assembly and the courts, for it is free from the formal constraints of those institutions and ideas can be formulated and challenged without having to be rendered in universal, disinterested terms.

In a modern political context you can think of Sophists as great speechwriters and powerful political advisors. They would stand at the ‘right-hand’ of powerful people, teaching them how to reason and act so as to maximize their own interests. The modern equivalent would be a chief of staff, or, if like me you love movies about the mob, they would be the consigliere (i.e. Tom Hayden in the Godfather or Silvio in the Sopranos).

In a legal context you can think of them as powerful lawyers, those who the rich and famous can afford, that are able to manipulate the legal system, and persuade juries, so their clients can escape punishment.

Or they could be focused in promoting a product or brand—advertising and public relations are modern forms of sophistry.

In sum, think of a sophist as someone who considers everything to be a game, and that key to winning the game is being able to think strategically and speak forcefully. Because Sophists were instrumental in assisting people to achieve great power in Athens, their services were in great demand.

A Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric:

Though the sophists did not offer a formal definition of rhetoric we can discern a definition by reconstructing their practice. John Poulakos (1983, 36) has offered this definition:

“Rhetoric is the art which seems to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible.”  

Before examining the central terms of this definition, let’s compare it to Hegel’s account of sophistic practice:

“. . . to show the manifold points of view existing in a thing, and to give force to those which harmonize with what appears to be more useful.”

On their face, these definitions seem to be the same: to examine all possible perspectives and to advocate for the one that is best responds to the needs of the speaker and audience.

But on closer inspection we cans see one glaring difference. In Hegel’s account the analysis of the thing occurs prior to the act of speaking and one advocates a position as a result of this analysis. Now there is nothing in Poulakos’ definition that says this is not a possible or even preferable way to define sophistic rhetoric, but Hegel’s account is clearly one that would be given by a philosopher (analyze and then advocate, if one must). The difference I want to emphasize is that in Poulakos’ account there is nothing that suggests the preferable order of analysis and advocacy. That is, one can advocate a choice and then proceed to show what becomes possible because that choice is made. The sophist asks the audience to reason counterfactually, to invent possible worlds and trace the potential consequences of acting in that world.

Now let’s take a brief look at how Poulakos’ fleshes out the central terms in his definition:

Art: “The Sophists conceived of rhetoric as a techne (art) whose medium is logos and whose double aim is terpsis (aesthetic pleasure) and pistis (belief).” (36)  “But if it is agreed that what is said must be somehow, and that the how is a matter of the speaker’s choice, then style betrays the speaker’s unique grasp of language and becomes the peculiar expression of his [sic] personality. If this is so the Sophists need no longer be misunderstood. As some of their artifacts reveal, they were highly accomplished linguistic craftsmen with a heightened sense of the nature of logos, their medium.” (38)

Opportune moments (kairos): “Clearly, speaking involves a temporal choice. The choice is not whether to speak, but whether to speak now; more precisely, it is whether now is the best time to speak. When a rhetor speaks, he [sic] responds to a situation. But the fact that he speaks now, the fact that he has chosen this moment over another reminds the listener that the situation is ephemeral, urgent, and by implication, significant.” (40)

Appropriate: A complement to the notion of kairos, to prepon[appropriate] points out that situations have formal characteristics, and demands that speaking as a response to a situation be suitable to those very characteristics. . . In distinction to kairos, which focuses on a man’s [sic] sense of time, to preponemphasizes his sense of propriety” (41)

That which is possible: “After he [sic] captures the appropriate and places it temporally, he moves toward the suggestion of the possible. The starting point for the articulation of the possible is the ontological assumption that the main driving force in a man’s life are his desires, especially the desire to be other and to be elsewhere. . . Even though he functions daily in the world of actuality, he often finds himself concerned with his situation not as it is here-and-now but as it could be there-and-then. Thus he participates at once in two worlds each which opposes the other.”

A look at each of the major Sophists illustrates this definition (while we will only read Gorgias for this class, I have sketched out the positions of two other important sophists).

Gorgias:

Gorgias was perhaps the most famous of the sophists. He was known for his infamous claim that he could speak on any topic in a persuasive manner.

The Encomium of Helen is a demonstration of not only his gifts as a speaker—he is able to defend the actions of one of the most hated traitors of the day--but of the power of speech. Speech has the power to conjure images of the past, to situate the present and to forecast the future. Thus, it has the power to make things appear as such and as so. That is, speech creates our understanding of what is real, good and just. Thus the person who can control speech can control people.

It is worth taking a look at the depictions of the power of speech he offers. He claims that here are four possible reasons the Helen went with Paris:

1) Chance—the arbitrary will of the Gods. We do not have the power to stop the gods, so we can’t be held responsible for bending to their will. What is more important, for us, is the phrase the “vote of necessity.” Here Gorgias is saying that we are not able to act against nature or against what is the “vote” of necessity, the way things are, how they have been established and the rules by which they operate (6)

2) Force—Physical force (rape) or the threat of force (coercion). Those who are stronger rule over the weaker. To blame Helen is to misunderstand the cause of her departure, which may have been the use of force and, hence, we should blame the person who exercises power, not the victim (MLK makes a similar argument in he letter from Birmingham jail, arguing that the real source of violence is not the victim’s reactions, but the oppressive environment in which the victim lives) (7)

3) Persuasion—she was moved by his words (logos). Logos is akin to a powerful lord, magic and drugs. Each of these work by either bypassing rational consciousness, they work directly on and through the body.

4) Passion—she may have been moved by his beauty, her desires were so strong that she could not bring them under rational control

What Gorgias shows is that the three other reasons, ones that we do not associate with speech, are, in fact, really the effects of persuasion. It is through speech that we assert what is natural and necessary (this what is and is not chance). Force, to be effective in controlling future behavior, must be couched in words to be understood and felt. And passion is a product of speech, one is seduced through words and the images they conjure.

One of the most interesting, and important, questions we should raise about this speech is--whether or not Gorgias has committed a performative contradiction, using rational argumentation to argue that the effect of speech is not rational. That is, the style and content of the speech seem to be at odds. He uses a very sophisticated line of reasoning to make the case that speech acts beyond and underneath rational argument.

On one hand, Gorgias’ claims seem to suggest that the (so-called) truth is simply the product of a game whose rules have already been determined. Gorgias suggest that the (so-called) truth of a view is nothing more or less than what the audience can be persuaded to accept. The rhetor gains the audiences assent by speaking to what that audience already believes, and then claiming that what they propose is simply the natural extension of their already held beliefs.

On the other hand, his method of argument implies that the received wisdom of the crowd can be challenged by inviting them to reconsider their views in light of other possibilities. If the audience can be persuaded to consider alternative explanations for Helen’s betrayal, then they may be able to see that their judgment was in fact the product of a set of unacknowledged presuppositions.

So rhetoric, for Gorgias, is a complex game, where a speaker toggles back and forth between telling the audience what it expects to hear and getting them to imagine that something new will give them what they have always wanted, but had not put into words.

Protagoras:

A second important sophist, Protagoras, developed the practice of having one person argue for both sides of a question, at the same time. This was a powerful educational tool he called the Dissoi Logoi.

The Dissoi Logoi suggests that any object, situation or person can be seen and evaluated from multiple perspectives and, therefore, there will always be a disagreement as to the nature and quality of that object, situation or person.

By embodying multiple perspectives (through imagining what those perspectives are and then speaking as if you were seeing the issue through that perspective), the rhetor proves that he or she can argue for any side of the issue.

There are two methods he or she uses to do this:

1) Taking the perspective of different actors--learning how each sees and judges differently. We should never presume that what we see and value is what the other person sees and values. Our task is to discover the differences in our perspectives, and to understand how those differences leads us to disagree, or want different things. Only when we reach this level of understanding, can we say which choice is best given the circumstances.

2) The second method is to use the same description or evaluation on two different qualities of the same object (e.g. he is physically alive, but spiritually dead). The essential question becomes: does any object, situation or person consist of one and only one quality, or does any object, person or situation possess many? If this is the case, as Protagoras believed, then it follows that these qualities may in fact be evaluated differently with the same term.  

For Protagoras debating both sides of an issue was good. There are several benefits that result from debating against what you believe:

1) Switching-sides increases the rhetor’s understanding of the issue.

2) Testing each argument against its counter-argument helps the rhetor discover the best possible argument and adjust her or his beliefs accordingly.

3) By testing her or his beliefs it helps the rhetor avoids dogmatism.

4) The rhetor comes to see that there are many reasonable positions that can be held on any issue, thus she or he avoids discrimination based on the other holding different beefs than his or her own.

5) It forces the parties to a dispute to search for deeper principles, often based in the process of arguing and coming to agreement themselves, that each can live with. 

Isocrates:

Isocrates was a contemporary of Plato’s who wished to set himself apart from his fellow sophists. Isocrates believed that other sophists did not teach in a way that cultivated wisdom and a commitment to the common good. He felt that by divorcing speech from the common good, it would become a tool for doing wrong. Thus, it was imperative the teacher cultivate wisdom, a sense of justice and a civic commitment from his pupils.

Isocrates is best known for his views on education. We will focus on three of his principles:

1) True wisdom is the ability to assess a situation and see what is probable. That is, a wise person evaluates a situation and comes to understand what the probable causes, motives and consequences and from that judgment can select/advise on the best course of action.

2) Virtue cannot be taught to the person who does not possess it, but it must be cultivated if it is to be of any worth. That is, a teacher cannot make you good, but she or he can cultivate you innate sense of goodness. Moreover, even if you are born virtuous without cultivation that virtue will fade. The pupil cultivates virtue by emulating the speech of virtuous persons. By modeling virtue the student’s virtue is strengthened. The most controversial claim is that even those who only seek favor may in fact become virtuous because they will be constrained by the morality of the polis, thus to win favor they will have to speak ethically. Speaking ethically makes one ethical over time.

3) It is imperative that we unite rhetoric and philosophy, intelligence and judgment. 

Nietzsche

While Nietzsche did not write during the rise of rhetoric in Greece, his views are considered to be in complete harmony with the Sophists. Nietzsche taught courses in rhetoric and his essay On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense is considered as a masterpiece in rhetorical theory. This essay is often used to show that what we consider postmodern is, in fact, the return of sophistical principles.

Nietzsche’s primary claim is that all language is rhetorical inasmuch as it is designed to convey opinion and not knowledge. He argues that words do not simply stand in place of some absent to be recalled object or some private thought that is waiting to be made public, but, rather, words are a part of the reality that we inhabit and are the material in and through which we construct the world.

Like Gorgias, he believes that truth is a rhetorical construction. We believe that something is true by virtue of it fitting with our established conventions of naming and proof. There is simply no truth that lies outside of language, no eternal essence of things, or proper moral order (meaning there is no God who has fixed what is right and wrong, there are only social conventions, and laws we make up, to do so).

So a “nonmoral” sense is a perspective stripped of all social convention and moral dogma—it is to see clearly that anything we call true or right is just an expression of someone’s power. And the most powerful are those who we let say what they think and what they desire is true or right—we clamor to substitute their judgment for our own, because we don’t want to do the hard work of doing it for ourselves, which certainly would not make our opinions anymore true or right. They are still just our preferences, our ideas, our opinions, but at least they are our own (what he is getting at in that final image of walking in the rain).

It would be very easy to read Nietzsche as a nihilist, a person who sees no overriding purpose to anything. But that is not the only reading. He says that we use words to create social order—to make it so we can understand one another, that we can compare our experiences, and create laws that allow us to substitute argument for brute force. The key is not to forget that these are still words, and while important, they can and will always change. So we have the power to remake and reimagine our world through rhetoric.

Models of Rhetoric

There are four models of rhetoric that emerge in Ancient Greece and Rome. These models are named after the theorists who proposed them. These four models are Gorgianic, Platonic, Aristotelian, and Ciceronian. These models answer three basic questions: (a) what is the relation between rhetoric and truth; (b) what is the power relationship between the rhetor and the audience; and (c) what is the primary purpose of rhetoric.

The Gorgianic Model of Rhetoric (encompasses Sophists, Nietzsche and Postmoderns)

(a) Like all sophists Gorgias did not think that any standard of Truth (either from logical demonstration, the essence of the natural world, or from the Gods) could provide guidance in matters of moral and political controversy. Thus persons had to turn to each other to provide the measure of political and moral value. This was attainable only through the power of human speech aimed to persuade others.

(b) For Gorgias persuasion was the ability to bring others into alignment with the speaker’s opinion. Thus the relationship between speaker and audience was unilateral or asymmetrical. That is, the speaker had already formed her/his opinion and simply wanted to devise a method for getting the audience to assent. The audience does not possess any power in this model.

(c) For Gorgias speech was a tool that a speaker could use to ascertain the audience’s assent. Speech was akin to a drug or magic in that it placed the audience in a position where their defenses could be broken down and persuasion could occur. Hence, in a Gorgianic model there is a great deal of emphasis on style, credibility (ethos) and emotional appeals (pathos).