Barbara Cassin

The sophists without Plato

Ever since Hegel called the sophists the masters of antiquity, many have tried to restore their reputation. Most often this ends with the Platonic verdict turned upside down: the sophists’ relativism is revalued and the theory of Forms dismissed. But for Cassin, sophistics then remains a Platonic problem, as handed down through Plato’s critique and philosophy’s own way of writing its history.

That is why Cassin does something else. She reads the sophists in a context before Plato and Aristotle, before Plato invented rhētorikḗ and before Aristotle formulated the principle of non-contradiction. A kinship then appears between the first and the second sophistic, and the sophists’ own texts can be used to rewrite the history of the conflict between rhetoric and philosophy.

Three key concepts

Logology

For Cassin, the quarrel does not begin with Plato and Gorgias but with Parmenides and Gorgias. Parmenides holds that being is, that non-being is not, and that being, thinking and saying are one and the same. Gorgias answers with his three theses: “Nothing is; if it is, it cannot be known; if it is and can be known, it cannot be communicated.” He thereby shows that being is an effect of speech, and that Parmenides’ poem is itself the foremost proof of it. “If Parmenides … then Gorgias”, as Cassin puts it. Against philosophy’s original ontology she sets the logology of sophistics.

The principle of non-contradiction

What Plato never managed, Aristotle finally achieved: he excluded the sophists. In the Metaphysics, the principle of non-contradiction means that whoever speaks must, simply by speaking, accept that words have one and only one meaning. Whoever refuses, like a sophist, is no better than a talking plant. At the same time, the sophist’s ambiguous, sound-based figures are pushed out of rhetoric, the very figures Aristotle accuses Gorgias of abusing in Book III of the Rhetoric.

Kairos against topos

Sophistical rhetoric is temporal: it rests on improvisation and the opportune moment, kairos. Philosophy’s rhetoric is spatial: it stores and orders its arguments in topoi, and prefers metaphor, where the word has a single meaning, over homonymy, where ambiguity works only in the moment. In kairos, an order taken for granted can suddenly lose its self-evidence, as when Gorgias, in his Encomium of Helen, turns a guilty Helen into an innocent one.

Why Cassin matters for rhetoric

Because Cassin works within philosophy rather than rhetoric, her work offers a different and more nuanced concept of rhetoric, not least for the question of how rhetoric relates to contemporary philosophy. She brings out the political side of sophistics, and through her interest in psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan she stands close to the political philosophy that has been called the Lacanian left, with Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Ernesto Laclau among others.

Yet she has a marginal place in a field of rhetorical studies that is largely Anglo-American, and her influence on Swedish and Scandinavian rhetoric has been slight.

My work on Cassin

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