Gorgias

Overview

The Gorgias is about a hundred and ten pages and it is the angriest of Plato’s dialogues. The usual Socratic courtesies break down: people lose their tempers, refuse to answer, accuse each other of playing tricks, and threaten to leave. Callicles at one point stops participating altogether and has to be coaxed back.

The subject looks narrow, what rhetoric is, and widens rapidly into the largest question Plato ever asks. There are three interlocutors and they form a sequence, each harder than the last. Gorgias is a famous teacher of rhetoric, polite and evasive. Polus is his young follower, brash and out of his depth. Callicles is an Athenian with political ambitions who is not a professional anything, and who says what the other two are too respectable to say.

That escalation is the design. Socrates refutes each by getting him to concede something he is ashamed not to concede, and each concession is what defeats him. Callicles sees this happening and announces that he will not be ashamed of anything, which is what makes him formidable.

The dialogue is usually dated to around 385 BCE, and the shadow of Socrates’ execution lies over it. Callicles warns him, correctly, that a man who ignores public life will be helpless when somebody drags him into court on a worthless charge.

The argument

Gorgias: what is rhetoric? Socrates asks what Gorgias actually teaches. Gorgias says persuasion, and specifically the power to persuade a crowd in court or assembly, which he calls the greatest good since it gives a man control over others. Pressed, he concedes that it produces conviction without knowledge, that the rhetorician is more persuasive than a doctor on medical questions before a lay audience precisely because he knows nothing, and finally, when asked, that of course he would teach his pupils about justice if they did not already know it. That last concession is fatal, since a man who knows justice would not use rhetoric unjustly, and Gorgias has already admitted that his pupils do.

Polus: is the tyrant happy? Polus objects that Socrates has shamed Gorgias into an answer he did not mean, and takes over. He points out that rhetoricians and tyrants have the greatest power in cities: they can kill, exile and confiscate at will.

Socrates denies that this is power at all, since doing what seems good to you is not the same as doing what is good for you, and he argues that such men do what they want in the weakest sense while getting nothing they really want. Polus laughs. Socrates then states the two theses the dialogue is built on: that doing wrong is worse for the doer than suffering wrong, and that a wrongdoer who escapes punishment is more wretched than one who is caught, since punishment cures the soul as medicine cures the body. He produces the example of Archelaus of Macedon, who murdered his way to a throne and prospered, and maintains that Archelaus is the most miserable man alive. Polus cannot refute him and cannot believe him.

Along the way comes the analogy Plato is remembered for. There are genuine arts that care for body and soul, medicine and gymnastics for one, justice and legislation for the other. Against each stands a knack that produces gratification without knowledge and mimics the real art: cookery counterfeits medicine, cosmetics counterfeit gymnastics, sophistry counterfeits legislation, and rhetoric counterfeits justice. Each aims at pleasure rather than at the good, and cannot say why it does what it does.

Callicles: the case against the whole enterprise. Callicles intervenes to ask whether Socrates is serious, because if he is, human life has been turned upside down.

His argument is that Socrates has been trading on an equivocation between nature and convention. By convention, doing wrong is uglier than suffering it; by nature, suffering is worse, and only a slave would think otherwise. The laws are made by the many, who are weak, to frighten the strong out of taking what they could take, and to tell them that wanting more is shameful. Nature shows otherwise everywhere, among animals, between cities, and in the conduct of the men who actually rule. And then the personal attack: philosophy is charming in a young man and disgraceful in an older one, who should be out in the world; Socrates will one day be hauled into court by some nobody and will stand there gaping, unable to help himself.

Socrates engages him seriously and at length. He first gets Callicles to say what he means by the stronger, and pushes him from physical strength to superiority to intelligence to courage combined with intelligence, tightening it each time. Then he attacks the underlying identification of the good with pleasure, using the image of two men filling jars: one has sound jars and fills them and can rest, the other has leaky jars and must keep pouring forever, and Callicles says the second is living and the first is a stone. Socrates presses: does that mean a man endlessly scratching an itch lives well? Callicles will not retreat and will not answer, and eventually stops cooperating, leaving Socrates to argue with himself.

The myth. The dialogue ends with a story rather than an argument. Under Cronus the dead were judged while clothed and alive, and rich men brought witnesses; Zeus changed it so that judges are dead and naked and the souls they judge are dead and naked too, so that nothing can be hidden. A soul that has lived badly arrives visibly scarred. Socrates says he believes it, and that it shows the only preparation worth making is to arrive with a soul in good condition.

How to read it

Read the whole Callicles section carefully, from around 481 to the end, and make his case as strongly as you can before you look at the replies. Plato has given him the best lines on purpose.

Notice the pattern of refutation. Gorgias and Polus are beaten by admitting something they are ashamed to deny. Callicles refuses to be ashamed, and Socrates has to argue rather than trap, which is why the second half is harder and better.

Weigh the two theses on their own. That it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and that the guilty are better off punished, are not obvious and Socrates means them literally. Whether he has established them, or only shown that his opponents cannot say why not, is the question to carry away.

Read it next to the Republic, which takes up the same challenge from Thrasymachus and gives it four hundred pages and a theory of the soul. The Gorgias is the problem stated at its sharpest; the Republic is the attempt at a full answer.

The common misreading is that Callicles is a straw man. He is the most intelligent opponent in the dialogues, his position was a real one in fifth-century Athens, and readers from Nietzsche onward have thought he got the better of it.

Questions it raises

• Is Callicles refuted, or merely outlasted? He stops answering rather than conceding.
• Can it really be better to suffer injustice than to do it? Socrates argues it from the health of the soul. Does that analogy carry the weight?
• Punishment is said to benefit the person punished. Would you accept that about yourself?
• If rhetoric is a knack aimed at pleasure rather than good, what should replace it in a democracy where decisions are made by persuading crowds?
• Callicles predicts Socrates’ trial exactly. Does the accuracy of that prophecy count for or against his argument?
• The dialogue ends with a myth rather than a proof. Is that an admission that the argument cannot be closed?