NIHILISM GREEK STYLE

The title of this entry contains a joke for those familiar with “nihilist” Russian style, the word launched into its specific usage by Ivan Turgenev and further made famous by Nietzsche. However, the word nihilist was not original. The Latin word nihil has been appropriated on more than one occasion, and by more than one event. In the history of philosophy, one particular philosopher, the Greek sophist Gorgias, has been known as the nihilist, and this word as used in his case has no connection to Russian revolutionary anarchism, except for the core meaning of the word nihil, which means “nothing.” Later on in this entry we shall see why Gorgias has been called a nihilist.

Before we proceed, however, here is a short résumé of Gorgias’ life, offered mostly for reference. He was born in Sicily circa 485 BC, and died in Thessaly in 380 BC, which means that he had lived the longest life of all the pre-Socratics, and perhaps of all philosophers in history as well.

At the advanced age close to sixty he came to Athens in 427 BC as the ambassador of his native city, asking for Athenian aid against the city of Syracuse. His mission was greatly successful, while his astounding eloquence won him the admiration of the Athenians to such an extent, that he eventually made up his mind to make the city of Athens his home base, traveling all around Greece.

He was a master rhetorician, and his lessons for which he always charged a fee, were highly prized. Among his suggestions to students was, for instance, that you should respond to your opponent’s serious argument with a joke and always respond to the opponent’s mockery with utmost seriousness. He insisted that he was not teaching virtue and wisdom, but only the art of oratory. His fame was great all over Greece, and statues of him were erected in many places. The expression Gorgian figures, characterizing his bold innovations in rhetoric, had become part of the Greek language.

Like Protagoras and several other names, the name of Gorgias is easily recognizable by any reader of Plato as the title character of one of his dialogues. Plato is horrendously uncharitable to Gorgias, as he is to all “sophists.” Much of his, and later Aristotle’s, animosity is explained by them themselves, as they demolish the sophists for their practice of being paid for teaching their skills to students. Plato and Aristotle were, of course, what we can call “independently wealthy” and they could afford the luxury of teaching for free. The sophists were not as financially fortunate, as those others, and the money paid to them by their students was essential to their sustenance.

Contemptuously, both Plato and Aristotle dismiss Gorgias as a quack philosopher, but they are badly unfair to him. The philosophy of Gorgias is essentially a thoughtful repudiation of Parmenidean philosophy, taken to the extreme in his most famous, and in all probability the most important, philosophical work On Nature, or the Non-Existent, which has come down to us in just two paragraphs transmitted secondhand.

“How can anyone communicate the idea of color by means of words, since the ear does not hear colors, but only sounds?” asks Gorgias and our first impulse will most probably be to ridicule him from the elementary linguistic standpoint, yet, on second thought his question is by no means incompetent. It is easy to correlate words and colors to a person with normal vision, but it is a far more difficult task when the person is either colorblind or totally blind, and here we find our language communication skills failing us most miserably. Thus Gorgias is perfectly right in putting this question the way he does, and his philosophical depth here is already bearing fruit.

From the first question Gorgias leads us through a series of complicated logical acrobatics to the conclusion that Nothing exists; if anything existed, it could not be known; if anything did exit, and could be known, still it could not be communicated.

This nihilism of Gorgias is, naturally, absurd, but so was the Parmenidean denial of change, so were Zeno’s paradoxes, etc. Such nonsense only proves my point that, generally speaking, the greatest positive theories of the greatest philosophers of history are nothing, if they alone should become our objects of scrutiny, but what has the greatest merit here is their process of thinking, which is, how their minds work, in propelling their geniuses towards those supremely nonsensical conclusions. I am sure that all modern mathematicians and theoretical scientists will readily concur with this conclusion.