File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0304, message 78


From: gvcarter-AT-purdue.edu
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2003 10:25:49 -0500
Subject: RE: Gorgias and the fragility of reality



Eric/Glen,

As may well be well known, Eric's axioms share a great deal with the sophist, 
Gorgias, from the latter half of the fifth century B.C.  He says,  

I.  Nothing exists
II. If anything exists, it is incomprehensible.
III. If it is comprehensible, it is incommunicable.  

On the subject of language, Gorgias says,

"Further, that which we communicate is speech, and speech is not the same thing 
as the things that exist, the perceptibles; so that we communicate not the 
things which exist, but only speech; just as that which is seen cannot become 
that which is heard, so our speech cannot be equated with that which exists, 
since it is outside us.  Further, speech is composed from percepts which we 
receive from without, that is, from perceptibles; so it is not speech which 
communication perceptibles, but perceptibles which create speech.  Further, 
speech can never exactly represent perceptibles, since it is different from 
them, and perceptibles are apprehended each by the one kind of organ, speech 
from another.  Hence, since the objects of sight cannot be presented to any 
other organ but sight, and the different sense-organs cannot give their 
information to one another, similarly speech cannot give any information about 
perceptibles. 

Therefore, if anything exists and is comprehended, it is incommunicable."

(From Kathleen Freeman's translation of the Ancilla to the Pre-Socratice 
Philosophers.)

I send this along as a point of comparision with Eric's "such a reality" and to 
point out--as if one needs to do so--that the stakes of this argument are far 
reaching.  Rhetorical studies vis-a-vis postmodernism have taken up Gorgias as 
(strangely) paradigmatic.  

Curious what everyone thinks about Gorgias and the pre-socratics.  

Best,

Geof  




Quoting Glen Fuller <g.fuller-AT-uws.edu.au>:

> Eric,
> 1.	Such a reality does not exist.
> 2.       Such a reality exists, but cannot be known.
> 3.       Such a reality exists and can be known, but cannot be described
> in language.
>  
> Sorry to go all pomo (it seems almost as bad as being liberalist (god
> forbid!) on this list), what about, "4. 'Reality' exists as a product of
> language."? And language in the sense of communication, including
> extra-linguistic. If you are thinking I am reducing it 'all' to a
> textuality, maybe I am but only in a radical sense.
>  
> Glen.
>  
> PS Check out: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2838.htm
> FWDed.
> 




   

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