Gorgias: On Being or on Nature

In attempt to summarize Gorgias’s On Being or On Nature, nothing exists and Being is a tricky thing. But I’m not entirely sure I follow the argument. Since Being cannot be created and since it must come from something or it would be Non-Being, Being does not exist.

This foundation leads to the argument that if anything exists, it is incomprehensible. And the comprehensible things are all incommunicable. But doesn’t this render the entire argument incommunicable? I’m certainly struggling to comprehend it, but it is written down and thus communicated with me in some manner. But since speech does not equal existence, in this essay, and since our senses betray us, nothing exists.

Furthermore, because we perceive the world with thoughts, thinking is not enough proof for existence. So this answers, in a way Parmenides’s “whatever can be spoken or thought of necessarily is, since it is possible for it to be, but it is not possible for nothing to be.” Absurd thoughts (such as chariots racing in the sea—I wonder what he would think of airplanes racing through the sky, probably that they don’t exist) are simply objects of considerations.

In Undergrad, I took a class titled, “Sense and Perception.” Our main areas of focus were sight and vision. My professor was blind. So I had the unique advantage of learning how complex sight is from someone who literally lacked eyes but still believed in the anatomy of the process enough to teach its existence to her students. Throughout the course, my younger sister tried to convince me that colors are just a figment of my imagination. What if my purple is actually her green? Because we’ve been taught from such an early age that said color is labeled “purple,” we believe it and all call it the same thing. Thus, color (and everything else according to the argument this opens), aligns with Gorgias and simply does not exist.

I might betray my naiveté, but I tend to want to believe in Being. And though I understand that our minds are unique and I perceive things in different manners than anyone else with (or without) senses perceives something, there must be something we can agree on. Otherwise the plot of a Young Adult Literature novel unfolds; no one exists and everyone is a figment of thought alone, but then how does thought even exist? And if nothing exist, where does morality play into the debate? What is keeping anyone from ending anyone’s existence if no one exists? Are the only two options either everything exists or nothing exists? Why?

#GreekRhetoric #Gorgias #OnBeing #OnNature #Parmenides