One of Plato’s more mediocre dialogues — a deep dive into rhetoric and discourse, particularly the political kind. What does it mean to persuade? What should we persuade people of?

If you’re at all familiar with Plato’s other works, then Gorgias is largely more of the same. The interlocutors are maybe a little more obstinate than usual. Socrates’ roasts have a little more spice to them. (At times he really goes in for the kill. He’s like “mf can you talk less”)

There *are* some nice new Plato allegories to add to the display case: perforated jars, chefs, touchstones to shine gold, etc.

While some people argue this is like “Republic Lite,” I think the two books are targeting fundamentally different projects and audiences. Gorgias is for someone like Gorgias! It’s not about instructing ambitious young statesman how to construct and orient the ideal (soul or) city in speech. No, this is like the “little red pocketbook” of Platonic thought — I think it answers the question “What should we be talking about these days?” It’s for the normal, apathetic, value neutral type of guy.

We don’t get a massively intricate utopian ideal or even very clear definitions for many of these philosophical concepts (justice, virtue, good). Realistically, Plato presumes we work with what we got — it’s quite a practical approach. Socrates basically gives a simple piece of advice: “Do good things to live a good life. Help others do the same. Even if not readily apparent, good acts will make you a better person.” It’s a gentle prod and reminder to not be a dickhead for the average Joe.

In summary it’s like: doing bad things is bad even if you don’t get caught. Getting punished for bad thing is good even if it hurt. Pleasure isn’t always good. Pain isn’t always bad. We have to do the good pleasure. Discourse is not an art but a fake form of flattery. Most people say what the masses want to hear. Instead we gotta say the truth to give everyone justice in the soul. Justice is virtue moderation courage. We gotta have a ruler who does the good things so we can copy him. I (Socrates) am the only person who see the light and I do the real politic stuff. I know ima die young because the idiots aren’t ready for the wisdom I’m spitting. They’ll send me to trial and say why are you corrupting the youth. I will say that all cures need some pain. Finally I’ll do a little dance and give everyone a storytime about how you do good to have a pretty looking soul and go to an island which is basically heaven and live happily ever after. Philosophy rules and everything else sucks. Don’t forget that. (3.6 stars)

Diálogo sobre a retórica, onde o personagem Sócrates dialoga e desconstrói com habilidade o prestígio dos retóricos. Contra eles, ele constrói seu raciocínio que é melhor sofrer uma injustiça do que ser injusto, e atrela à vida boa a busca pela verdade e pela justiça.

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.

4.5*
I liked this one the best

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".

“No man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one's soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils.”

“...without social life, there can be no love.”

My first time reading Plato!
I really enjoyed this dialogue, I found it quite easily accessible - it left me thinking and turning over these ideas of pleasure, goodness, nature, art, flattery, justice etc in my mind and I tried not to rush this short book, but rather savour it. I can’t wait to continue on with more Plato!

It’s hard to say exactly which of Plato’s dialogues is the most relevant to the modern reader, but I think Gorgias would be a major contender. This Platonic dialogue takes place between Socrates and a small group of sophists as well as some other guests at a dinner party. What starts off as a defining of what rhetoric is and what its purpose is turns into a philosophical discourse on the Socratic view of natural morality, absolute truth, and self-control as opposed to relative morality, relative truth, and the pursuit of pleasure and excess as the ultimate good as held by the Sophists.

Socrates begins by comparing the techne versus what he calls a knack in rhetoric. He uses the example of medicine versus cookery to demonstrate this idea. The doctor uses pleasant and unpleasant means to bring about health in a person. Surgery is generally unpleasant and painful but brings about health. It is not about the gratification of one’s desires, but rather about one’s health. The Baker on the other hand makes cakes and sweet breads to fulfill personal gratification and desire, but does nothing for the health of the person. Socrates in this Dialogue is the doctor. He is the true politician and philosopher who is ready to use both pleasant and unpleasant means to bring about a healthy soul.

Socrates denies that pleasure can be equated directly to good. He argues that this is demonstrated by the natural world. There are good and pleasant things that can kill us, and there are unpleasant and painful things that can save our lives. In saying so Socrates is claiming that there is a natural morality at play here. That when something is good and pleasurable there is a point when that good and pleasurable thing reaches an excessive point where it becomes bad or harmful. A little bit of alcohol once in a while for example, gladdens the heart and is pleasurable to the body, but the excess of alcohol intake leads to alcoholism and destroys our body, life, and soul. A little bit of sugar here and there is good and pleasurable for the body, but excess causes obesity and disease. Socrates says that the one who places pleasure and desire as the end all goal is harming his own soul and other souls around him. He likens the person to a man with a bucket that has holes in it. That the more the man fills the bucket the more he becomes a slave to keeping it full, and the more he fills it the more holes appear and the faster he has to fill it. This is like the soul of the carnal or hedonistic man.

These two views battling it out here in this seemingly inconspicuous platonic dialogue have massive philosophical implications in the real world. Especially in the political sphere. In many ways this argument has echoed through the ages and continues to be an argument of great importance to anyone and everyone whether they know which side of it they’re on or not. It portrays two views of freedom. One, being freedom as liberty, and the other freedom as autonomy. The sophist view is that of freedom as liberty, that any restriction whatsoever on a person creates repression and unhappiness because true happiness is found in the accumulation and satiation of desires, (this view is represented by many thinkers responsible for the modern mentality in the west, Freud, Nietzsche, etc.) and the Socratic view of freedom as autonomy that argues that true freedom is man’s ability to know restraint and govern himself based on man’s ability to reason and seek virtue.

It portrays two views of truth and ethics. That of the sophist’s relative idea of truth and morality. That you can make an argument for anything by appealing to human emotion and desire. That you can persuade people to whichever view you want as a rhetorician because no view has actual truth. All truth is only perspective. Or the Socratic view of a truth that is true apart from rhetoric, and a moral law that can be found in nature by use of man’s ability to reason.

Plato’s dialogue asks us to consider then, which side of this argument are we on?
Will we take the side of Socrates and pursue knowledge and virtue?
Or will we take the side of the Sophists and pursue the accumulation and satiation of our personal desires?

I remember reading this a few years ago, but somehow I decided to rent and read it again and I have to say that I'm so freaking happy that I did. Now that I'm older and perhaps a little bit more mature, I now can digest the content and wisdom Gorgias (the book itself, duuuh) has to offer and I even enjoyed it more than I did back then. In the whole dialogue it's seems to me that it's pretty clear where I find myself, and sure some arguments took thinking as you go on(how could it not?), but it was so fascinating to see(or should I say read) how Kallikles turned the whole setting around with some here and there thought provoking and the kind of funny/bully way he puts it, in respond to Socrates way of thinking. I also think that Socrates shows a lot of his stoic thinking on this one and would not be surprised if he had influenced stoicism. Overall, this was a very good one and I sure have taken a lot more from it than I did a few years ago. I loved it!

I feel the need to point out that while my ISBN matches, my book only has 149 pages (as opposed to the supposed 224, according to goodreads). I dunno what I'm missing out on, but as far as I can tell my book contains all its parts.

This book makes a lot of complex arguments, and at times I found it hard to follow. There were several occasions where I had to read passages and even whole pages over again because I got lost in the arguments. I think the instances where Plato chooses to have Socrates restate previous arguments in the interest of clarifying his upcoming statements was very helpful, even if it wasn't deliberate (but I guess we'll never know, will we?).

The introduction and interpretive essay were both very helpful in my understanding of the text. It was nice to get to the end of the dialogue and then be able to read an essay that effectively summarized the arguments. It also helped with my confidence about whether I had properly understood/absorbed the text. These aspects make this edition of the Gorgias dialogue very worthwhile.

I find that reading this dialogue has helped with my understanding of rhetoric as a concept, an application, and a practice. I can see how this text is still part of contemporary conceptions of rhetoric. On the other hand, the views on justice are still a bit fuzzy to me, but that's to be expected from an intangible ideal.

I throw my token in with Callicles when he said
"By the gods, Chaerephon, I too have been present at many discussions, but I don't believe that any has ever given me so much pleasure as this. If you like to go on talking all day, you are doing me a favor".

I simply can't get enough of these dialogues! I know there are flaws in them, I know that sometimes as (especially in the one on oratory) the protagonist (Socrates) gets all the words in edgewise and our dear antagonists do not make a fun enough defense. But the language is clever and enjoyable. The tone is playful and yet still brings the points home. If Socrates was really like this I believe I really could have gone on listening to him talking all day, if only for the chance to jump in and run over some of his flawed arguments.

What I recall about Gorgias - again from my sophomore university philosophy class - was that there was a lengthy discussion of orators and how they are able to dupe audiences - even folks more technical than the orator him/herself. That sounds eerily relevant right now given that 1.7M people voted against the Commander and Thief who in 2012 criticised the very electoral college to which he owes his election. His campaign promises were all smoke and mirrors as Gorgias delightfully admits to in his dialog. Perhaps, along with The Republic, a critical read in our troubled times.

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