A particularly amusing dialogue with lively characters and fine irony. Callicles is superb.

If leaders and politicians and all those other orators and sophists claim to be caretakers of men, and to cultivate justice and goodness in them, it is a hypocrisy then for those leaders to bemoan and decry how men act unjustly towards themselves, each other, or towards the leaders in questions; for this represents a failure on the part of the leaders, and indicates their own lack of justice. In truth, even the most powerful of leaders and politicians will be found to have only really fulfilled the immediate pleasures of men (if even that) through flowery rhetoric, bloody wars, and impressive projects; like pastry makers and fast food cooks appeasing the appetites of children, in contrast to the doctors that possess knowledge of what food is good for the body, what food is bad for the body, and of the medicines that improve the health of children.

Callicles is a great interlocuter to Socrates here, and gives what feels like a proto-Nietzschean argument regarding the natural right of the better to take a greater share of society and pursue pleasure, with its stifling in 'self-satisfaction' being nothing more than the life of a stone or a corpse, and a kind of moralising by the weak and many who create the artificial laws of the polis. But Socrates gets even Callicles to admit that there are good kinds of pleasure and bad kinds of pleasure, and so one might conclude that pleasure is subordinate to, or a means to, the good. This ties in with the important question of whether it is worse to inflict injustice or to suffer injustice, a question all the more pertinent if you really do have the power to inflict injustice. "For it is a difficult thing Callicles, and one that merits much praise, to live your whole live justly when you've found yourself having ample freedom to do what's unjust." All in all, a great dialogue.

I just re-read Plato’s Gorgias. This time, I read the translation done by James H Nichols, Jr. It was recommended by a friend.

Gorgias is a tremendously nuanced and layered dialogue. But it is also fair to say that it is the dialogue that presents Socrates' extended argument that it is worse to inflict an injustice than to suffer an injustice. (Spoiler: inflicting an injustice damages one’s soul. Suffering an injustice does not.)

I recommend Gorgias for readers of all stripes.

A Starker Dialogue

Gorgias is very similar in structure, content, focus and argument with the Republic. In fact, it comes across almost a half-formed version of it, and scholars argue that it is in many ways like an early sketch for Republic. But unlike the Republic, which forays into metaphysics and utopias, the argument in Gorgias is anchored very much in this world, and, again in contrast to Republic where everyone seems persuaded in the end, Gorgias leaves us in the dark as to whether Socrates has really persuaded his audience of what he values most.

Another significant difference with Republic is the absence of a narrator. Commentators argue that that the stark, uncompromising ‘frame’ this forces on the dialogue suggests that this absence of narrator may be an important factor in Plato's design; he may wish to avoid the softening effect of narrative mediation in dramatizing Socrates' lack of success in creating empathy with his interlocutors, his inability to teach them about goodness and justice, which, ironically enough, seems in danger of putting him in the same camp as all the failed statesmen he criticizes.

Gorgias concludes awkwardly and abruptly, almost painfully aware of the deficiencies in the method employed; and we just have Socrates' last words (527e): 'let us follow that way [practicing righteousness and virtue] and urge others to follow it, instead of the way which you in mistaken confidence are urging upon me; for that way is worthless, Callicles.'

What has Callicles (or the others, for that matter) to say in reply to the myth and the long argument that conclude the dialogue? We are not informed. The dialogue trails off inconclusively like one of the ‘aporetics’.

Another marked parallel with Republic is how Gorgias too 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.

Just like in Republic, the trial and the execution is hinted at… but in Gorgias, they loom large and threatening, Plato callously converting hindsight into foresight and charging Socrates’ sentences with prophetic doom and an early condemnation of the system that precipitates his own death in the near future. Socrates is made to relive a prophetic version of the trial and speaks as though it was all but inevitable in such a corrupt system that a man like him has an ending like that. It remind’s one of Jesus’s early (or similarly hindsight-foresight inversion) exhortations to his disciples about how the cross was waiting at the end of the road.

A Deeper Glance

Event though Gorgias is an earlier work (allegedly) and is sketchy in comparison to republic, it also allows us a closer look at one aspect of Plato’s concern: on Oratory. The method employed to condemn Oratory, by using the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘knack’ gives important clues on why Plato goes on to condemn all of Poetry in Republic. The reason, I feel, is that Poetry, like Oratory was a public art in Plato’s time - both intended to pursued without ‘true knowledge’. Hence the same method when extended to Poetry would allow Plato to conclude that Poetry and storytelling too are ‘knacks’ developed from experience and hence less than the ‘genuine arts’.



Here is a dose of the brilliant exposition:

n  

Pastry baking has put on the mask of medicine, and pretends to know the foods that are best for the body, so that if a pastry baker and a doctor had to compete in front of children, or in front of men just as foolish as children, to determine which of the two, the doctor or the pastry baker, had expert knowledge of good food and bad, the doctor would die of starvation. I call this flattery, and I say that such a thing is shameful, Polus—it’s you I’m saying this to—because it guesses at what’s pleasant with no consideration for what’s best. And I say that it isn’t a craft, but a knack, because it has no account of the nature of whatever things it applies by which it applies them, so that it’s unable to state the cause of each thing. And I refuse to call anything that lacks such an account a craft. If you have any quarrel with these claims, I’m willing to submit them for discussion.

So pastry baking, as I say, is the flattery that wears the mask of medicine. Cosmetics is the one that wears that of gymnastics in the same way; a mischievous, deceptive, disgraceful and ill-bred thing, one that perpetrates deception by means of shaping and coloring, smoothing out and dressing up, so as to make people assume an alien beauty and neglect their own, which comes through gymnastics. So that I won’t make a long-style speech, I’m willing to put it to you the way the geometers do—for perhaps you follow me now—that what cosmetics is to gymnastics, pastry baking is to medicine; or rather, like this: what cosmetics is to gymnastics, sophistry is to legislation, and what pastry baking is to medicine, oratory is to justice.

n



While this (the argument-from-analogy with Doctors is a favorite of Socrates) may be true to an extent, Plato does not give consideration to the possibility that the story-tellers (or, substitute Chefs/Docs, if you really want to!) might actually have a greater understanding than the philosophers about the mysterious workings of the human soul. It is blasphemy to conclude on this note but it is an exciting thread to pursue further in the reading of Plato.

A Note on the Translation

This translation gets the right mix of ponderous phrasing, elegance and readability - conveying the ancient mystique and the modern relevance. Also, it is broken up well into small parts, each with an introductory passage always initiating the reader into what is about to transpire in the dialogue. This might be irritating to the seasoned reader but is a pleasant respite for the novice and functions like the small interludes that Plato himself likes to inject into his dialogues.

It is also true that this acts like a spoiler and takes away from the thrill of the argument being developed by Socrates. I personally started coming back to the introductory passage after reading the actual text so as to reinforce instead of foreshadow the argument. I would advice the same course for future readers as well.

Disclaimer



As is evident from the review itself, this reviewer is still too much under the influence of Republic and this reading was conducted almost entirely in its shadow. Hence, the review is a biased and incomplete one that does no justice to Gorgias. Gorgias is a complex and lengthy dialogue that deserves independent study and cannot be treated as a mere appendix to Republic as this review may seem to suggest. That was not the intent.

This reviewer found the parallels and contrasts with Republic very fascinating and spent most time debating that, but the ideas expressed in Gorgias are as stunning and intellectually engaging and forays into territory left unexplored in Republic. The elaboration on techne might just be one of the centerpieces of Platonic thought. Gorgias is a must read among the ‘later Early period’ dialogues of Plato - an important step towards the 'middle-period' dialogues such as Meno, almost a point of transition. In fact, Gorgias is necessary reading for any serious reader of Republic. No excuses.

Postscript: I would love a T-shirt like that. Anybody?

Plato on the virtuous life
7 August 2011 - Athens

tIt is difficult to put a date of composition to such a text, though internal comments can assist us with determining when it was written. While I do not consider myself an expert on Plato, I would consider this text to be one of his earlier writings as he seems to be recording an earlier conversation as opposed to using Socrates to be a mouthpiece for his own philosophy. A lot have been written on Plato's dialogues, which tend to be philosophical discussions with Socrates as the main speaker. However, Gorgias is a dialogue, as opposed to a single person sprouting philosophy, that is a discussion between a group of people. This, I find, works a lot better for a philosophical treatise as one tends to get a broader view of the argument, and one also gets the opportunity of hearing the other sides of the argument along with objections and counter-arguments. This is not what one tends to get with a single speaker (or even a text book).

tPlato's later works tended to be more of a diatribe, where he uses Socrates as a mouthpiece for his philosophy (as can be seen in the Republic) however, there is another text, the Timaeus and the Critias, which seem to fall into the later category, though because Socrates is not the main speaker in these texts, I am loathe to put them into Plato's later category, and consider these texts to be more like the earlier texts where Plato is reporting a conversation that took place years previously (though scholars tend to date them as being one of his much later texts since the Critias is actually incomplete – not that a part of it is lost but rather that Plato never finished it).

tAnyway, I am writing on the Gorgias, which is a more simpler text than some of his other writings. The main theme of the Gorgias is morality (which is the theme of a lot of Plato's writings) and explores the question of whether oratory is a useful skill or whether it is just used for harm. The closest that we would get to the Sophists of Ancient Athens (and it is a very close comparison) is that of a lawyer. The job of a lawyer is to argue the client's case to either the other side or an independent third party. The criticisms of lawyers are very similar to the criticisms that Plato lays down with the sophists. One example is that the find sounding speeches of the sophists can easily override the technical knowledge of a doctor (and this can also be seen in today's society).

tThen there is the question of injustice and doing wrong to people. The two conclusions that Socrates reaches with his arguments is that nobody willingly does wrong, and it is better be wronged than to do wrong (though his companions in this discussion object quite readily, particularly when they use the example of the Tyrant that does wrong to his subjects, but does not appear to be living a miserable life, though Socrates does manage to convince his audience that the Tyrant's life is in fact miserable, even if he might not know it).

tThe concept of nobody doing wrong intentionally (which is also something that I disagree with, though there are people that commit a wrong but justify the wrong that they are committing, for instance shop lifting. The store sells the products at outrageous prices, and also rip their customers off, therefore they are right in stealing the pen, or the sales assistant that takes money from the till with the intention of paying it back, but never doing so). The conclusion that Socrates reaches is that people who do wrong are ill (in the same sense of having a cold) and they need to be cured of this ill, and thus Socrates sees punishment as the purpose of curing the person of their wrongdoing.

tHowever, the discussion comes to a conclusion with the exploration of 'heaven and hell'. In the Greek text, Heaven is referred to as the Blessed Isles, and Hell is known as Tartarus. It is interesting that Tartarus was designed to imprison the rebellious Titans, and the Blessed Isles have been set aside for the heroic and the virtuous. However, it is also interesting to note that Odysseus does travel into the underworld in the Odyssey and there meets up with a number of heroes from the Trojan War. It seems like their heroic acts simply were not good enough for them to get to the Blessed Isles (though I suspect that Tartarus and the underworld are two different places). It is also interesting to see how our culture has adopted these ideas, not in the sense of the Jewish idea of Heaven and Hell (with Heaven being God's domain, and Sheol being the abode of the dead), but rather, to an extent, to have merged Greek and Christian Mythology (in that Hell has been set apart as a prison for the Devil and his Angels, which is almost a direct copy of Tartarus, and Heaven as being the destination of the good and virtuous). However, nothing is all that cut and dried, and it appears that this is explained by Socrates in the end. The conclusion, it is better to live the suffering and virtuous life and be rewarded in the afterlife than to live a wicked life committing wrong and thus facing eternal punishment. Ironically, this conclusion seems to have been lifted straight out of the Old Testament.

“what a bully you are socrates… argue with someone else”

One of the better dialogues in that it manages to raise most of the big issues of virtue and citizenship in way which does not feel to rushed or overly contrived. It's the first dialogue I've read which actually made me smirk when Socrates offered a witty retort or a brilliant condemnation of someone else's views. to someone. It's also a lot of fun to hate on Callicles

Is it better to commit evil or to have evil done to you?

Is temperance silly and hedonism sensible?

Does Socrates convince his listeners?

I was very intrigued by the idea of an afterlife. Socrates was close to the Christian view.

And much much more.

Gorgias is another Sophist (after Protagoras) with who Socrates interacts along with Callicles. The dialogue is interesting in its premise: Plato essentially says that morality is greatly tied with afterlife - a reward for being 'good' in this life. This is essentially the root of the argument or what Socrates tries to qualify it as one while Callicles comes after him viciously.

While Protagoras retires from the argument (which goes nowhere), Gorgias simply doesn't participate. Gorgias being the seventh dialogue I've read, this is the first time when an interlocutor has abandoned the ship. Callicles however continues (as directed by Gorgias) the argument which I don't see Socrates really addressing it.

The good and evil, justice and morality make an appearance again with Socrates' well timed responses. It is still unclear if his answers really addressed Callicles' argument as Socrates deflects from the original question.

This dialogue requires a definite re-read just to ingest several metaphors that Callicles throws at Socrates. Socrates holds his ground for all its worth and I believe Plato is essentially telling the readers to get on with it and formulate a better response to Callicles' arguments.

A thorough enjoyable read and possibly one of my favorites of the dialogues till now.

Che dire? E' grandioso!
Mi è venuto leggendo, da subito, un parallelo profanissimo, perdonatemi, tra i retori bollati da Platone e, un esempio tra tanti, i vari avvocaticchi di Berlusconi che ci vogliono far credere che Gesù è morto di freddo... (Lui che era il padrone della legna!), e a volte ci riescono. Per non parlare dei "politici" e della classe politica nostrana (senza far nomi, per carità!) che sarebbero da accostare in parallelo a Pericle, Temistocle, Cimone, Milziade, fustigati sempre da Platone. Ma mi facci il piacere!
Termino questo mio sconclusionato commento al Gorgia citando Gaber:
"Io se fossi Dio,
dall'alto del mio trono
vedrei che la politica è un mestiere come un altro
e vorrei dire, mi pare Platone,
che il politico è sempre meno filosofo
e sempre più coglione".

Plato’s Gorgias is one of the longer Socratic dialogues. Its principle topic is the examination of the merits of oration, or Sophistry, with Gorgias and Polus, two orators, arguing that there is no finer profession for a man. Socrates challenges them on this point, eventually exploring more interesting topics with Callicles, like morality, the pleasures, whether it is worse to do evil or suffer evil, how to follow the path of virtue, the pursuit of truth undaunted by shame, and the roles of discipline and punishment in righting one’s character.

The conversation between Socrates, Gorgias, and Polus only makes up about the first third of the dialogue. This exchange sees Socrates questioning the men on what is so good and important about their profession, oration, which they claim to be the greatest skill and art. Socrates exposes it for the shallow, false pandering that it is, revealing its misdirection, its ways of subverting the truth in favor of emotional manipulation. This topic is returned to throughout the dialogue, but eventually more substantial subjects are uncovered.

Once Callicles enters the fray, we get a more interesting study. Callicles proclaims the supremacy of might-makes-right moral principles, and praises the unquenchable appetites as the sign of a man superior to those who live in content moderation. He ridicules Socrates in a manner that seems realistic and modern, less patient and reflective than the usual figures Socrates talks with, but perhaps also more honest. His views are stated with such bold, emphatic confidence that Socrates sees in this man a worthy partner:

“I have noticed that anyone who is to form a right judgment whether a soul is living well or the reverse must have three qualities, all of which you possess: understanding, good will, and readiness to be perfectly frank. I encounter many people who are not qualified to put me to the test because they are not wise like you; others are wise but unwilling to tell me the truth because they have not the same regard for me as you; and our two foreign friends, Gorgias and Polus, though they are well-disposed towards me as well as wise, are nevertheless somewhat lacking in frankness and more hampered by inhibitions than they ought to be. How far these inhibitions extend is shown by the fact that each of them has been reduced by false shame to contradict himself before a large audience and on an extremely important subject.”

Socrates carefully unpacks Callicles’s beliefs and challenges them, logically laying them out for complete examination. He follows reason from fundamental principles, catches Callicles’s mistakes in confused language and misuse of words, and with clarity of mind shows how Callicles has arrived at wrong conclusions. Socrates uses a clever analogy to dispute the superiority of the immoderate appetites, by comparing a leaky and non-leaky vessel. Those with appetites always seeking new gratification and never able to be satisfied are like a man trying to constantly fill a leaking vessel, or always scratching an itch that cannot be satisfied, while the moderate who is able to find contentment in little and satisfaction in what he has is like the man who must fill a vessel once, but never worry about losing that water and thus always seeking new gratification.

Their dialogue goes in many directions, with Socrates taking the time to explore new ideas coherently. He looks at the importance of jobs as they compare to one another, often examining the differences made by doctors or engineers or statesmen in their work, and whether it is for the better or the worse. These are used as analogies for other, more basic questions. This leads to the discussion of moral significance and what makes a man good or strong or weak or evil, and what these terms really mean. He discusses the worth of goodness for its own sake, the character of vice and wickedness and how to deal with these in a person. Justice is reflected on, and the confusions that abound regarding it. He shares his thoughts on the wisdom of the ancients, the myths of their time, and what lessons can be learned about how to properly order one’s life.

As in other Socratic dialogues, difficulties in translation sometimes lead to imperfect representations of the arguments and logic Socrates is following. These are elucidated through numerous footnotes explaining when the intricacies of language come into play, which are lost in translation. It is an excellent, thoughtful dialogue.

Socrates’s conclusions are that oration is ultimately pandering, and should only be employed in the service of right, as is true of all other activities, rather than in the convincing of uneducated audiences to believe things that are untrue; if a man does wrong he must be punished, and paying the penalty for one’s faults is the next best thing to being good; one should avoid doing wrong more than one should avoid being wronged; opinions that are worth anything must be forged in the extreme heat of intellectual back and forth and the uncompromising search for truth; the ultimate goal of a man’s efforts must be the reality rather than the appearance of goodness; and that the life spent in philosophy and serious reflection is of more importance and is more in our interest than may be evident to those who abandoned philosophy long ago.

Socrates argues that it is better to be the victim of injustice than the doer of injustice. I wish I could take Socrates to a McDonalds today and ask him if he would prefer to be the chicken that ended up in the McNuggets or the restaurant patron who devours them. In the USA humans kill and eat billions of chickens every year, and I'd rather be one of the humans doing evil to chickens than one of the chickens having evil done to them thank you very much.

Of course Socrates did his thinking quite a long time before Darwin, so he couldn't have realized that a certain kind of evil - the weeding out of trillions of unfit individuals over the ages, called natural selection - is central to the process that actually created us and all our capacity for virtue. (How one might be virtuous enough today to justify all that past suffering, I cannot imagine.) To reshape an organism from a fish to a human required an incomprehensibly vast amount of pain. That doesn't excuse humans inflicting gratuitous evil on their fellow humans today, but quite a lot of evil is more or less unavoidable - such as all the things we do to fill our bellies every day. Even if we don't eat animals directly, we must still displace them, by force, to grow our crops. And we displace still more, gratuitously, when we pave over vast parking lots at shopping malls and so on.

The closing appeal to a divine scorekeeper was disappointing. I find it hard to take a person seriously who simply conjures up imaginary gods to prove a point, namely that if it seems tyrants are getting away with it in this life, they'll get what's coming to them in the afterlife. Granted, that was the dominant perspective 2400 years ago, but Socrates is supposed to still impress even by modern standards. Sorry, not impressed. Even if by some miracle Zeus et al. were to turn out to be factual, you have to show such beings are factual before you trot them out to support your argument.

It was interesting to watch Socrates lead his interlocutors around and drop them into traps, but the bloated, soporific writing style needs editing for clarity. (Hint: if you read a passage and find your mind drifting off, forcing you to go back and re-read, what you are reading is not good writing, let alone great writing.) I pity the generations of scribes who dutifully hand-copied all the unnecessary words over and over. Gutenberg's invention of movable type must have been as merciful as introducing anaesthesia to surgery.