Gorgias by Plato - Part 1

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PLATO'S GORGIAS (447 - 453)
Translated by ‎Donald J. Zeyl
Narrated by Jason Youngman

Gorgias was a famous teacher of oratory and the author of oratorical display pieces. He had served his native Leontini in Greek Sicily on embassies, including one to Athens in 427 B.C., when his artistically elaborate prose style made a great and lasting impression. We loosely consider him a ‘sophist’, like the intellectuals whom Plato gathers together at Callias’ house in Protagoras, but Plato pointedly reports Gorgias’ teaching as restricted to the art of public speaking: he did not offer to instruct young people in ‘virtue’ — the qualities, whatever they were, that made a good person overall and a good citizen. Nonetheless, as Plato also makes clear, he praised so highly the speaking abilities that his own teaching imparted that one could pardon ambitious young Athenians like Callicles if they thought that, by learning oratory from him, they would know everything a man needs in order to secure for himself the best life possible. And, as we learn from Meno, he did have striking things to say about the nature of, and differences between, virtue in men and women, old persons and young, and so on. So in the end not much separates him from the other itinerant teachers that, with him, we classify as ‘sophists’.

Socrates begins by skeptically seeking clarification from the elderly, respected Gorgias about the nature and power of his ‘craft’ — the skill at persuading people massed in assemblies and juries about what is good and what is right. Gorgias is trapped in a contradiction when he admits that the true, skilled orator
must know (and not merely speak persuasively on) his most particular subjects — right and wrong, justice and injustice in the lawcourts. When Gorgias bows out, a fellow rhetorician takes over his side of the argument — the young and rambunctious Polus, a real person. His name means ‘colt’—almost too
good to be true! Polus is intoxicated with the thought that rhetoric gives the power to do what one pleases, even injustice if that suits the situation. Against him, Socrates insists that in fact it is better to suffer injustice than to do it — and, unable to deny this consistently, Polus in his turn falls to Socrates’ dialectic. In the remainder of the dialogue—more than half—Socrates contends with Callicles, apparently also a real person, though we hear nothing about him outside this dialogue. The discussion develops into a contentious and sometimes bitter dispute about which way of life is best — the selfish, domineering, pleasure-seeking one that Callicles associates with his own unbounded admiration for rhetorical skill, or the philosophical life that Socrates champions, committed to the objective existence of justice and the other virtues and devoted to learning about and living in accordance with them. Socrates struggles and struggles to undermine Callicles’ views. He tries to bring Callicles to admit that some of his own deepest convictions commit him to agreeing with Socrates: Socratesthinks he knows better than Callicles what Callicles really believes. In giving vent to strongly worded assertions of his own moral commitments, he seems to adopt a conception of ‘irrational’ desires like that of Republic IV, incompatible with the views he works with in the other ‘Socratic’ dialogues. Callicles, though personally well disposed, is equally vehement and contemptuous in rejecting Socrates’ outlook — he refuses to succumb to the toils of Socratic logic. If the methods of argument Socrates employs here produce at best an uneasy standoff, the different methods of Republic II–IX may seem to Plato to offer a resolution.

Gorgias is so long, complex, and intellectually ambitious that it strains the confines of a simple ‘Socratic’ dialogue — a portrait of Socrates carrying out moral inquiries by his customary method of questioning others and examining their opinions. Here Socrates is on the verge of becoming the take-charge, independent philosophical theorist that he is in such dialogues as Phaedo and Republic. Like those two works, Gorgias concludes with an eschatological myth, affirming the soul’s survival after our death and its punishment or reward in the afterlife for a life lived unjustly or the reverse.

In Phaedrus Socrates makes connected but different arguments about the nature and value of rhetoric. Whereas in Gorgias Socrates paints an unrelievedly negative picture of the practice of rhetoric, in Phaedrus he finds legitimate uses for it, so long as it is kept properly subordinate to philosophy.

― John M. Cooper