Gorgias Signifies Nothing

Christine M. Maisto (University of California, Santa Barbara)

In his allegedly parodic treatise, On What is Not, the sophist Gorgias states the obvious: the word is not the thing. “That by which we communicate is Logos, but Logos is not the objects, the things-that-are. We do not communicate these to our neighbor, but Logos, which is different from objects.” (McKirahan, Philosophy Before Socrates, p. 386). Language does not transmit objects, but only words. Signs are not their referents; signifiers do not equal their signifieds. All words are necessarily empty signifiers, simulacra that are mere copies of themselves; they signify nothing, or nothing other than signifying itself. But while language is our only vehicle of communication, the only thing it communicates is language (itself). This tautological aspect of language that necessarily informs all discourse is taken to its logical extreme in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake where we have the image of Shem the Penman writing on his own body with his own shit. Although Gorgias seems to endorse a language-world isomorphism, at the same time he is asserting that communication is impossible because of the natural gap between language and reality which are two very different substances requiring different modes of perception and comprehension. Communication is impossible because of language’s unavoidably tautological nature and disconnection from material things, its inability to refer effectively outside itself.

The notion that a person can never communicate the objects of the world to another by using words, as words are not objects, has an interesting analog in a passage from Part 3, Chapter 5 of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. On the flying island of Laputa it is discovered that talking is bad for one’s health: speech gradually corrodes the lungs and thus shortens a person’s life. The simple solution is to refrain from speaking altogether and instead to carry around bundles of different objects to display as appropriate when desiring to communicate. This is viewed as only a minor inconvenience and a perfectly acceptable substitute for language which, as mere nomenclature, is dispensable. We could also perhaps compare Aristotle’s remark in the Metaphysics where we are told that Cratylus, a disciple of Heraclitus, ended up thinking that we should not speak---he instead simply raised his finger. (Met. 1010a 12-15). On a more abstract level, the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein posited in his conclusion to the Tractatus Logico-Philolosophicus that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Proposition 7.0) and he included in the things that cannot be said any discussion of language as language.

In the same treatise, however, Gorgias also states that Logos or language is “composed from perceptible things falling upon us” (McKirahan, p. 386). Objects are thus the origin of or stimulus for language. And the signifier is somehow informed by the object, and it would seem then that it must retain some meaningful residue linking it back to its material referent. As McKirahan interprets it, speech for Gorgias displays the object, rather being made intelligible by the object. (p. 386) Objects in Gorgias’ world, therefore precede language, rather than language being the shaping force of the world as we perceive it. Nevertheless, our sophist validates the materiality of the signifier in seeing language as a substance in its own right, derived from external reality, yet somehow separate from it and so impotent to communicate anything. Language is always signifying nothing; but nothing, after all, is for Gorgias the essence of reality, and in the words of Wittgenstein, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Proposition 5.6).

Topic Code: GO