Existence and Rhetoric in a Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind is the story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who suffered from schizophrenia. While I don't doubt that a fair number of connections can be made between this movie and the readings of this week's readings [Protagoras' Truth or Refutations, Gorgias' Encomium of Helen, Gorgias' On the Nonexistent, Anonymous' The Dissoi Logoi, Isocrates' Against the Sophists, John Poulakos' “Toward a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric,” and Edward Schippa's “Neo-Sophistic Rhetorical Criticism or the Reconstruction of Sophistic Doctrines?”], my ability to draw these connections is limited by what little I remember of seeing only part of this movie years ago and by the 11 clips of the movie I found on Youtube.  (Sadly I do not have Netflix :P )

     My initial choice of this movie may have been a little more misguided in that I was focused on what Gorgias was saying about existence in On the Nonexistent instead of what this piece was teaching about rhetoric.  However, I think the connection does apply to rhetoric as Nash had to rhetorically reason with himself as well as others in order to keep his belief in the real existence of his hallucinations.  Now, I realize that at first this seems like a stupid thought because a schizophrenic is going to see things that he or she thinks is real without having to reason for it, BUT when people outside of the vision tell the schizophrenic that what he or she sees isn't real, they have to figure out why the person outside of the vision can't see what the schizophrenic.  Consider the following.  Closer to the end of the movie, after Nash has a relapse, Nash nearly drowns his son because he believes that "Charles" is watching the baby.  When his wife insists that Charles isn't there, Nash insists that he is there and explains that she just can't see him because Charles was injected with a cloaking serum that Nash could see through because of a tag the military had placed in Nash some time earlier in the movie.  

      To any of us, Nash's reason would sound like a poor argument as it's prepon and dynaton were inadequate (Poulakos), but when you measure all of the things Nash experienced at the hands of hallucinations against the notion that Nash's hallucinations are in fact a figment of his imagination, this seems a valid explanation.  As Protagoras says "of all things the measure is man, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not."  If Gorgias can absolve Helen of Troy from all probable blame for the Trojan war, the human mind can reason it's way out of just about anything--just about.  And actually--not to play on my own words but--soon after Nash nearly drowns his son, a piece of his sane logic reasons its way out of the delusion that his hallucinations were real.  Though who knows if we exist in reality?

     Ahem. Back to connections.  There are two other connections I can make to A Beautiful Mind and our readings.  They are considerably minor connections, and have little to do with rhetoric, but they are connections nonetheless.  The first is Nash's hatred for classrooms and teachers mimics the distaste Isocrates has towards Sophists.  The other connection is that Nash reexamines Adam Smith's "Governing Dynamics" (see clip), just as Schippa reexamines Poulakos' supposed definition of rhetoric by the Sophists.



-Michelle Tuten