Gorgias

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.

Well, if one was to sum up, it would be hard to go past Plato’s own summary:

“And of all that has been said, nothing remains unshaken but the saying, that to do injustice is more to be avoided than to suffer injustice, and that the reality and not the appearance of virtue is to be followed above all things, as well in public as in private life; and that when any one has been wrong in anything, he is to be chastised, and that the next best thing to a man being just is that he should become just, and be chastised and punished; also that he should avoid all flattery of himself as well as of others, of the few or of the many: and rhetoric and any other art should be used by him, and all his actions should be done always, with a view to justice.”

I’ve read this book as someone who is an atheist and therefore someone who can place little concern on the rewards or punishments of the afterlife. Much of Plato’s argument is supported by the idea that we should be moral in this life to avoid punishment in the next life. I would like to think that his conclusions still stand for an atheist, even if his arguments do not.

I’m not sure how well Socrates answers Callicles’ arguments – or rather attack. Nietzsche later says much the same things about Socrates and his arguments – his denial of life and how ugly Socrates is and how lacking in taste and common sense. It seems clear for much of the text that Callicles is bored by Socrates’ arguments and only agrees to continue listening to Socrates because Gorgias asks to hear the rest of what Socrates has to say – he abandons participation in the argument, which is not the same as him being silenced by Socrates’ argument. I would very much doubt that Callicles came away from this encounter feeling that Socrates was right and that one should prefer to suffer harm than to do harm.

The myth at the end was all very Christian – and it is easy to see why Plato was so easy to be used by the Church. I found it very interesting that at least two of what are taken to be standard Christian messages are clearly put forward by Socrates – turn the other cheek (literally in those terms, too) and the problem the rich and powerful will have in getting into paradise. The import of this dialogue seem to me to be an even clearer statement of the golden rule than that contained in the Christian message – (surely the idea that we must avoid doing ill, even prefering bad things to be done to us, is more virtuous than merely treating others as we would like to be treated ourselves).

So, the question for me is whether it is possible to establish this as a conclusion an atheist could follow. And, to be honest, I don’t know. I can’t see what an atheist could base the ‘good’ that is necessary to sustain this argument on. Socrates is more than willing to be prepared to die for his truth because he knows there is an afterlife in which the pleasures and sufferings of this life are as nothing.

His argument is that doing wrong harms the wrong-doer’s soul – I think this is true, even if I don’t believe in a ‘soul’ as such. If we know we have done wrong there is nothing worse than feeling we have been ‘rewarded’ for it.

When I was a child my mother caught me cheating at patience (or solitaire for my American cousins). I must have been old enough for her merely saying, “Are you cheating?” to not really count for much. But what did count was when she said, “You are only cheating yourself.”

I’ve often wondered if that is a good lesson or not. I still don’t cheat and try to avoid situations where I can cheat myself or others – but it does often seem that those who do cheat (perhaps both themselves and others) do end up better off. And people do seem to have a near infinite capacity to rationalise away their actions so that they always do tend to see themselves in the end as entirely justified. Plato’s myth at the end of this dialogue where the wrong souls are being sent to the wrong places because they were being judged in their worldly finery just before they die seems relevant here.

Perhaps a means of attack on this is that the benefits of doing wrong are generally short lived – you cheat and the benefit is rather fleeting – but the knowledge that you cheated, that you are the sort of person who would cheat, that can be something that lasts with you all of your life. Perhaps then this is the ground to support Plato’s conclusions without resorting to his arguments – that in the end one needs to be able to live with one’s self – and that is easier to do if we have been wronged, than if we have wronged others. That the punishments we inflict upon ourselves for wronging others are often worse than the punishments others would give us if they were to punish us.

I enjoyed this more than the last time I read it – the last time I read it I was much more concerned that Socrates did not really answer Callicles’s argument – I still don’t think he answers it, but I’m not as concerned now.

Eins meiner Lieblingszitate aus einem Platondialog:

KALLIKLES: Auch, und ebenso alle andern Begierden soll man haben und befriedigen können, und so Lust gewinnen und glückselig leben.
SOKRATES: Wohl, Bester. Bleibe nur dabei, wie du angefangen hast, und dass du ja nicht aus Scham abspringst. Wie es aber scheint, muss auch ich mich nicht schämen. Und so sage mir nur zuerst, ob krätzig sein und das Jucken haben, wenn man sich nur genug schaben kann, und so gekitzelt sein Leben hinbringen, ob das auch heißt glückselig leben?
KALLIKLES: Wie abgeschmackt du immer bist, Sokrates.

Socrates is pretty annoying in this. I don’t think he answers callicles well either, and this dialogue was too long.

What can I say about Plato that hasn't already been said: either here, or by the editor of my edition, who was generous enough to point out all the flaws in Socrates' arguments. I read this for its discussion of rhetoric, and came away somewhat enlightened, stimulated, and angry. If that helps.

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?

review for l'éloge d'hélène only :')
i paid 17 euros for 5 pages of analysis that i could have easily found online for free. and that's on bad decision making!! ;)
gorgias' essay was definitely interesting -- the arguments were well organised and the writing was convincing -- but i personally did not find his ideas to be groundbreaking in any sort of way. so it was good while it lasted but since i've been reading a significant amount of philosophy-typed-nonfiction for school in the past fews weeks, i must say that this essay was on the lower part of the "yay-i-love-humanities-reads" spectrum.

Arme Polus en Callicles, ze zijn een beetje zielig