Only all the effete latecomers, with their overly clever wit, believe that they can be done with the historical power of seeming by explaining it as “subjective,” where the essence of this “subjectivity” is something extremely dubious.The Gorgias dialogue is widely recognized as the source of Plato’s harshest condemnation of rhetoric. In it, he ultimately concludes that rhetoric is not “a technē but a knack, because it can give no rational explanation of the thing it is catering for, nor of (...) the nature of the things it is providing, and so it can’t tell you the cause of each. And I don’t give the name ‘technē’ to something which is unreasoning”.1Perhaps less widely.. (shrink)

The Helen of Gorgias is designed to provoke the aspiring speaker to consider his relationship with society as a whole. The speech's extreme claims regarding the power of logos reflect simplistic ideas about speaker-audience relations current among Gorgias' target audience, ideas reflected in an interpretive stance towards model speeches that privileges method over truth. The Helen pretends to encourage this conception of logos and interpretive stance in order to expose the intense desire and naïve credulity that drive a coolly technical (...) appraisal of model speeches. The Helen thus manifests, with a playfulness suited to its liminal position, a concern for the ethical and social formation of those who might accept the invitation to study logos. (shrink)