Gorgias was a Greek man from Sicily who visited Athens in 427 BC. Soon after, he discovered his life’s purpose and began telling everyone that reality was not what people thought it was.
Understandably, the individual had some serious nerve to say such things in an ancient society that was struggling to understand the purpose of the world. And yet, here he was, supposedly on a diplomatic mission from Sicily to beg for military help, instead ending up fundamentally challenging most of what the greatest minds of Greece had spent decades trying to figure out.
What’s even crazier? He made a fortune teaching people how to argue persuasively while simultaneously claiming that truth itself was impossible to know or communicate.
Quite the character!
Gorgias came from Leontini, a Greek colony in Sicily, Magna Graecia, which was constantly threatened and attacked by Syracuse. The city desperately needed Athenian military support, so they sent their best orator to make the case and persuade the great power of the ancient world to consider assisting them. What they got was probably more than they bargained for.
Athens in the 5th century BC was like Silicon Valley today—everyone was trying to disrupt something. Philosophers were everywhere, each claiming to have cracked the code of existence. Parmenides insisted that true reality is constant and perfectly unified.
Heraclitus countered that everything was constantly in flux. Gorgias entered the trending discourse with his treatise “On Non-Being” (Περί του μη όντως), from which our understanding primarily derives from Sextus Empiricus, a Pyrrhonist philosopher.
The work he produced was structured like a legal document—three main arguments, each more devastating than the last. First: nothing exists. Second, even if something existed, we couldn’t know it. Third: even if we could know it, we couldn’t tell anyone else about it. It sounds strange and almost comical when stated so bluntly, but Gorgias was not joking.
His first argument alone was a masterpiece of logical deconstruction. If something exists, he reasoned, it must be either eternal or created from nothing. If eternal, then it never came into being, which means it doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense. If made from nothing, well, you can’t get something from nothing—that’s basic logic even a child understands.
He applied the same ruthless reasoning to every possibility. Finite or infinite? One or many? Each option led to contradictions that made the whole concept of existence collapse like a house of cards, making his listeners question everything they knew.
The second part of his argument was even more unsettling for anyone who cared about knowledge. Gorgias pointed out something that seems obvious once you consider it: our thoughts aren’t the same as the things we’re thinking about. When you picture a horse in your mind, for example, you’re not accessing some universal image of a horse. You are merely shuffling around mental images that may or may not be real or correspond to an actual thing.
This insight was revolutionary for its time, though it wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with modern cognitive science. Gorgias was among the first to say that what humans perceive as real is shaped more by our minds and language than by any objective external truth.
However, his final point was the most shocking: language can’t transmit knowledge from one person to another. Words are just random noises in a specific order or marks on a papyrus. They’re not the things they supposedly represent. When I say “fire,” for example, I am not giving you fire—I’m making a sound that we have all agreed might refer to that hot, bright stuff that burns things.
Gorgias recognized the practical implications immediately. If objective truth were impossible to achieve or understand, then the real goal of communication between people had to be persuasion, not accuracy, as such a thing didn’t exist. Why waste time attempting to discover facts when you could focus on the more achievable goal of persuading people to do what you want?
The Athenians loved this approach. Suddenly, everyone wanted to study with the Sicilian who could teach them to make any argument sound convincing. Rich families paid lots of money to have their sons trained in Gorgianic rhetoric. The man quite literally became a local celebrity, touring the Greek world and charging premium prices for his lessons. Here’s where things get weird, though.
How do you teach people when you’ve just proven that knowledge can’t be transmitted? How do you become wealthy and famous by communicating ideas while simultaneously arguing that meaningful communication is not possible?
Gorgias seemed completely unbothered by this contradiction. He continued teaching, charging fees, engaging with students and rivals as if his philosophical arguments hadn’t just demolished the foundation of everything he was doing.
Some scholars believe the whole thing was an elaborate joke—a philosophical satire designed by Gorgias to demonstrate the ridiculousness pure reasoning could become when taken to extremes. Maybe Gorgias was the ancient equivalent of a comedian doing an over-the-top impression of pompous intellectuals. The fact that he continued living a normal life certainly suggests he didn’t take his arguments completely seriously.
Others argue that Gorgias was distinguishing between absolute truth and practical knowledge. Sure, the ultimate reality might be difficult, if not impossible, to grasp, but people still need to navigate the world somehow. Maybe his rhetoric was about developing useful tools for human interaction.
This interpretation makes him appear remarkably relevant to our time. We live in an era where different groups can examine the same evidence and reach opposite conclusions. Political parties now seem to exist in entirely different informational universes. Social media algorithms create intricate echo chambers where individuals only encounter ideas that confirm their existing beliefs, further isolating them from other opinions and perspectives.
Gorgias would have understood our era perfectly. He might have pointed out that since objective truth is impossible anyway, what matters is learning how to communicate effectively within whatever reality your audience happens to inhabit.
So was Gorgias the first nihilist? It depends on what we mean by nihilism. If you’re thinking of the existential despair that characterised 19th-century Russian literature or the modern anarchist ethos of destroying everything because nothing matters, then Gorgias doesn’t fit the profile.
He wasn’t preaching despair or encouraging people to abandon social norms. His students didn’t go around acting like nothing mattered. Instead, they became successful lawyers, politicians, and public speakers. Whatever philosophical ideas Gorgias was sharing, he was simultaneously teaching people how to thrive despite them.
But if nihilism means systematically undermining claims to absolute truth, then Gorgias qualifies. Every time someone argues that reality is socially constructed, that different cultures have incompatible worldviews, or that truth is whatever the powerful say it is, they are following paths that Gorgias created 2,500 years ago.
The irony is that his destructive philosophy became incredibly constructive. What’s most remarkable about Gorgias is how he managed to be simultaneously radical and practical. He was a man outside the system who knew how to function within it exceptionally well. He challenged fundamental beliefs about knowledge and reality while building a successful career.
So, whether he was a nihilist, a pragmatist, or just someone with an unusually developed sense of irony, Gorgias continues to inspire us with his legacy.
