Gorgiasza meontologia vs. nihilizm

The purpose of this paper is to challenge Gorgias’s image of being a ‘nihilist existentialist’. Theoriginal thesis ouden estin, too frequently rendered as ‘nothing exists’, thus reducing the verb ‘tobe’ to denote ‘bare’ existence, and ouden to denote ‘nothingness’. On close inspection it turnsout that in Gorgias neither do we have a negation of reality nor an affirmative treatment ofthe word ‘nothingness’. Therefore, ouden should not be understood as a negation of all realityor a kind of affirmative ‘nothingness’, whereas estin should not be reduced to ‘bare’ existence.(When existence is negated, we obtain annihilation). Such practices still affect the varioustranslations of Gorgias’s treaty On the non-being or on Nature. Gorgias’s ‘sophist’ thought istypically interpreted as a joke or a parody of the dialectical thinking of the Eleatics. In fact, asit turns out, he made no parody of the dialectic but applied the elenctic, apagogic method inZeno’s masterly manner. He did so not for an artificial purpose but to prove the absurdity of thehypothesis of an absolute, transcendent (hence incognizable) one Truth-Being, which eliminatesthe non-being of becoming as an absolute non-being. Gorgias argued in earnest in favourof a relative being as such, Becoming like the only reality, which from the point of view of anabsolute being is after all a non-being, but not-this-being, or relative non-being but not a nonrelativenon-being, as the Eleatics had claimed. Gorgias’s positions appears to be an apologiaof non-being which is that of Becoming. We do not transform the ‘nothing’ into a ‘no thing’.The main question of the treaty is: what is predicated by the word ‘nothing’? Gorgias’s positioncan be recapitulated as nothing is sc. true, there is no criterion because, after all, everythingis opinion. It is reinforced further by Gorgias’s meontological, i.e. anti-eleatic emphasis: ‘Nothing is Being (substance)’, because everything is Becoming. Thus the title of Gorgias’s treatycan thus be seen as an antithesis to that of Melissos’s, which – in our opinion – is to emphasizethe ‘non-beingness’ of nature, the non-substantiality of things. Therefore, if Gorgias’s text waspolemical, and it questioned (while at the same time maintaining the positivity of Becoming asnon-being) only the immutability of things, and thus we cannot speak of the existence or thecognizability of natures or of the essences of things. In sum, the reasoning of Zeno and Melissoswas of a kind that is apt to cut both ways, and that is what Gorgias showed. The argument givenas peculiar to himself was to this