Kósmos e inteligência: as potências da alma no Górgias

Abstract

Based on approach of Water Burkert German structuralism, in this issue, I intend to point out the structural relations between the images of the judgment myth in Plato‟s Gorgias and apply them in Er myth of Republic. According to Burkert (2001b), myth is a program or a sequence of actions in a clear, distinguished structure, characterized by exemplarity of the mythical model and the timeless applicability. Going further on Burkert definition of myth, I put forward that the actions imply psychic images filled with feelings – audacity and ardor are erotic feelings through which the Socratic dialectics strikes against the rhetoric of that who became, at the same time, the most violent and the cleverest interlocutor to antagonize Socrates, Callicles. In addition, I must say that the whole interpretation presented here assumes that myth is thinking by images and mental images come before language. In Prometheus myth, language comes after the technical fire that stabilizes the sacrifice as the right rite for the interplay of divine and human instances and the ritual emergency of mental scheme that compound the causal intelligence that organizes experience and multiplicity: the infallible connection between two consecutive events in time, the intelligent projective deliberation, the choice of efficient means aiming a specific useful objective. In other words, it can be said that rites come before language and that not language, but images and rites give the bases to thoughts. In conclusion, staring at the expression parrhēsía – which first appears as an open speech that reveals the thought and the true beliefs of its speaker – in Gorgias, the word points out the ironic ambiguity with which Socrates refers to the Callicles free course of desires (which engender his lógos violence) and the psychic quality by which the dialectic investigation can come to an end. Sincerity (parrhēsía) is the guarantee by which a speaker agrees to an expressed thesis and also a sign that a certain psychic organization transfers its peculiar movement to the logos. The unchained speech imitates the scheme which intertwines the feelings in the beginning of the movement and the intelligence which psykhé is.