Gorgias: Sophist and Artist

Gorgias: Sophist and Artist, by Scott Consigny. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. 242 pp.

The appreciation and appropriation of the Older Sophists continues. Since Hegel undertook his "rehabilitation" in the mid-nineteenth century, the Sophists in general and Gorgias in particular have been rehabilitated, not for their own sake, but for the credence they might lend to current intellectual trends. For Hegel, Gorgias stood as ancient evidence for his thesis concerning the grand dialectic of history. Thirty years later, George Grote claimed Gorgias as a precursor to Aristotelian logic and Enlightenment rationalism. This appropriation has continued well into the twentieth century; Victor Vitanza has argued that Gorgias corroborates his "Third Sophistic," and Stanley Fish has argued that American Pragmatism is simply an updated version of sophistic rhetoric.

Scott Consigny's Gorgias seeks to claim the sophist as an ancient precursor to philosophical antifoundationalism. As such, Gorgias is read as an ally to the linguistic project of Wittgenstein, the deconstructive projects of Derrida and Lyotard, and the neo-pragmatic projects of Fish and Rorty. The appropriation is complex, proceeding on two levels through three sections. In the fundamental first section of the book, Consigny argues that Gorgias provides an antifoundational epistemology grounded in the "rhetoricity of logos" (60). This rhetorical epistemology grounds sections two and three, which argue for an antifoundational ethics and style, respectively. I will attend to each section in turn; before doing so, however, it is important to note Consigny's conspicuously developed and persistently foregrounded reading practice.

In the "Introduction," Consigny locates his own theoretical approach to historiography in the context of the Philosophy and Rhetoric debate between Poulakos and Schiappa. By adopting a neo-pragmatic hermeneutic, he seeks to position himself between what he sees as the objectivity of Schiappa and the relativism of Poulakos. To Consigny, Schiappa's approach represents a theoretically unsophisticated objectivity. In what must strike the informed reader as a narrow reading of Schiappa, Consigny accuses him of not recognizing his own "culturally biased assumptions and judgments" and of presuming to speak of the objective Gorgias (13). Poulakos fares no better. While Schiappa seeks objective meaning, Poulakos errs by denying the very possibility of meaning. In an equally narrow reading, Consigny argues that, for Poulakos, the attempt "to recover the meaning...