Gorgias Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Gorgias (Person)
Gorgias (c. 483-375 BC), Greek sophist and rhetorician, was a native of Leontini in Sicily.
In 427 he was sent by his fellow-citizens at the head of an embassy to ask Athenian protection against the aggression of the Syracusans. He subsequently settled in Athens, and supported himself by the practice of oratory and by teaching rhetoric. He died at Larissa in Thessaly.
His chief claim to recognition consists in the fact that he transplanted rhetoric to Greece, and contributed to the diffusion of the Attic dialect as the language of literary prose. He was the author of a lost work On Nature or the Non-existent, the substance of which may be gathered from the writings of Sextus Empiricus, and also from the treatise (ascribed to Theophrastus) De Melisso, Xenophane, Gorgia. In this work he argued that 1. nothing exists, 2. even if something exists, nothing can be known about it, and 3. even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can't be communicated to others.
The authenticity of two rhetorical exercises, The Encomium of Helen and The Defence of Palamedes (edited with Antiphon by F. Blass in the Teubner series, 1881), which are attributed to him is disputed.
Gorgias also refers to the the last dialogue that Plato wrote before leaving Athens. It featured Socrates and Gorgias participating in what was a microcosm of the sophist-philosopher debate that raged throughout ancient Athens. Whereas the sophists were relativists who believed that rhetoric was a useful tool that could exploit the imperfection of human knowledge, Plato proposed the existence of a transcendental, perfect knowledge that was accessible only by a few gifted philosophers who had mastered the practice of dialectic. Rhetoric, Plato asserted, was a perversion of dialectic that created a false belief in its hearers and, consequently, harmed the soul.
It is in this dialogue that Plato offers one of the most famous critiques of rhetoric, calling it a "ghost or counterfeit of a part of politics" and a form of "cookery." In labeling rhetoric a form of cookery, Plato is intending to draw an analogy between care for the human body and the management of politics in a society. Just as a doctor who is familiar with the rules of medicine can offer better prescriptions to heal and protect the body, philosophers can utilize dialectical reasoning to arrive at just decisions that benefit the entire polis. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is a powerful tool that politicians use to delight and flatter the common people (or "demos") into acting out of ignorance against their own long-term interests in order to fulfill their lower, carnal desires in much the same way that a cook specializes in preparing food that is pleasing to the tongue but potentially detrimental to the body.
The purpose of politics being to establish justice and virtue throughout the whole of society, Plato believed that rhetoric, through its creation of falsehoods, was the root of evil in the Athenian state. His opinion of rhetoric was the logical corollary of his belief that ordinary people did not have the aptitude to recognize justice or to pursue what was advantageous for society, a sentiment that formed the basis for his masterpiece The RepublicGorgias (Dialogue)