You’ve still got time to join our Gorgias read-along, and I hope you do. Gorgias is a powerful piece that changed how I look at the world and conduct my life. Today, we look at the ominous first half of the dialogue.
The seemingly pedantic beginning of Gorgias is darker than it seems.
To see why, let’s play the WWWWWH game I used long ago as a newspaper reporter.
Who:
Socrates: Our “protagonist,” whom I describe here.
Gorgias: The nicest interlocutor of this dialogue. He’s happy to engage with Socrates and professes to seek the truth. Rich Athenians shower him with cash so he’ll teach their sons to make the Athenian Assembly dance to their tune. He’s like a famous TED-talk speaker who only reads the abstracts of the studies he cites, or a talented defense attorney for serial killers. His “Encomium of Helen,” survives, arguing that we shouldn’t blame Helen of Troy for causing the bloodshed of the Iliad — not because she’s innocent of wrongdoing, but because Paris used the irresistible power of rhetoric to “enslave her mind.” By the end of Gorgias he may have begun to suspect he’s unintentionally made his students into monsters (I’ll explore this in my second essay).
Polus: He’s fallen in love with the power rhetoric gives him, but isn’t as polished and charming as Gorgias. He blurts out what Gorgias will only imply, but isn’t totally depraved, and has some lines he won’t cross. Think of him like an up-and-coming political pundit with a large following on Twitter. He enjoys pushing boundaries.
When:
Scholars place this dialogue in the 420s BC, amid the ruinous Peloponnesian War pitting Athens against Sparta. By war’s end, one in three Athenian citizens were dead, the city’s famous democratic experiment had given way to the brutal rule of 30 aristocrats, and Greece lay defenseless before the growing might of Persia and Macedonia.
The war theoretically destroyed Athens, but the strategic mistakes leading to defeat were made by persuasive men who didn’t know what they were talking about. Their foolishness lies downstream of this dialogue.
Where:
Most Platonic dialogues involve a handful of participants; only twotake place before crowds. In Socrates’s Apology, Socrates defends himself before a jury of 501 Athenians and is sentenced to death by hemlock.
In Gorgias — chronologically earlier — the dialogue is eagerly observed by a crowd of young Athenians interested in paying Gorgias to teach them rhetoric. As a reader, you may decide Socrates “wins,” this encounter, but he failed to convince the Athenians that something is more important than manipulative speech.
Some of these observers could have later served on Socrates’s jury and been part of the rhetorically talented prosecution team leading the injustice. So in Gorgias, we’re observing a gunsmith making the case for firearms in front of the people who’ll later pull the trigger that kills Socrates
In a way, this is Socrates’s pre-defense defense. Socrates could have presumably talked to Gorgias in private, but decided to make a show of the encounter. His agenda may be breaking the hold of the rhetoricians and sophists on Athenian life. And while he certainly convinces individuals, his ideas fail to scale.
Why:
Plato is exploring why his beloved mentor died, grasping for a better alternative, and doing outreach to the masses. But given what we said above, Plato may be telling us that the masses will never choose wisdom when shiny pleasures beckon.
Teeing up Gorgias
An Ignorance of Craft
The dialogue starts with Gorgias struggling to define rhetoric. Socrates easily points out his claims’ flaws. Would Gorgias really make such incredibly broad claims about what rhetoric does, and even that it somehow bestows expertise? I doubt it.
I read this as Plato highlighting how even talented people may fail to understand the properties and ramifications of their craft. This seems pedantic at first, but it may matter. We’ll find out.
Not What He Thinks It Is
By line 454, Socrates gets to the heart of the matter. He says there’s a type of persuasion that confers conviction without understanding (rhetoric) and other arts that confer knowledge/understanding (Math, science, philosophy, etc).
Gorgias doesn’t bat an eyelash and embraces this distinction, but insists rhetoric “is responsible for personal freedom and enables an individual to gain political power in his community.” We’d be fools to ignore it! Gorgias calls rhetoric “the most important and valuable aspect of human life.”
Ok. How will his enthusiasm for conviction without understanding hold up?
Rhetoric’s Good Side, and Plato’s Failure
Around line 456, we see a more agreeable side of rhetoric. Gorgias recalls accompanying his physician brother, who was unable to convince some patients to endure painful but beneficial treatments. Gorgias used the power of rhetoric to persuade them.
I find Plato’s failure to grapple with this upside of rhetoric to be this dialogue’s greatest failure (along with small amounts of strawmanning). Yes, it’d be best to gain assent by conferring knowledge and wisdom, but that’s often impossible. Should the virtuous give up on using rhetoric for good ends?
It seems like Plato is guilty of rhetorical hypocrisy. In Alcibiades 1, he misleads Alcibiades about what he can teach to facilitate him having a positive revelation. He even denies a definition of justice which he endorses in The Republic.
If Plato is willing to use rhetoric camouflaged as dialectic in other works, his condemnation of rhetoric seems inconsistent, or at least more qualified than he admits.
I suspect Plato would be unyielding — conviction without true understanding is dangerous because the audience is still ignorant. Virtue is not about ends, but what we control. If Marcus Aurelius’s speeches are any indication, the later Stoics — who saw their philosophy as a branch of Socrates’s — thought things weren’t so cut and dried.
Don’t Blame Me
Around line 456, Gorgias insists rhetorical teachers can’t be held responsible for how their pupils misuse rhetoric any more than boxing instructors are to be blamed when rogue pupils punch the innocent.
But weirdly, by 460, Gorgias is claiming he can teach morality, perhaps because he realizes he’s left himself open to criticism. Gorgias then says rhetoricians can’t use their art immorally, which contradicts what he said before.
So it seems Gorgias won’t admit that Rhetoric is morally problematic, or is too biased to let himself see it. Unsure what’s up with Gorgias’s floundering answers? We’re about find out what his student thinks the problem is.
Enter Pollus, Stage Left
The problem with Gorgias, Pollus insists, is that he’s too embarrassed to admit that rhetoric teachers can’t make students virtuous, and that rhetoric can easily be used for immoral ends. No worries — Pollus will say what Gorgias won’t. Rhetoric isn’t about virtue, but power.
Pollus wants to make a long-winded speech, but Socrates stops him. He knows this is one of the most insidious elements of rhetoric, and a source of its power. Instead of slicing claims into short testable assertions, the whole thing washes over a crowd unchallenged, carrying them away.
For instance, this companion essay you’re reading must have flaws. If you’ve read Gorgias carefully and thought things through by yourself, I bet you could stop me and make me explain each claim, and we’d find I was wrong about certain things. One claim may be contradicted by another, or unsupportable.
But this is how all of rhetoric works — even the well-intentioned bits. Because speech and ideas are so rarely dissected and tested, they indoctrinate rather than inform.
What’s a Knack?
Around line 462, Socrates makes an interesting claim: rhetoric involves no real expertise. It’s just a “knack,” anyone can have if they’re good guessers, have courage, and are naturally charismatic. He says these knacks are contemptible.
And what’s a knack? My Waterfield translation defines it as anything giving pleasure rather than objective goods. An example is fashion, which gives pleasure, rather than utilitarian clothing construction focusing on maximizing warmth/breathability, fit, durability, and other elements of suitability.
Later, Socrates says rhetoric is similar to “cookery,” whose foremost aim is taste rather than nutrition, health, affordability, etc. Given my recent series on food and virtue, you might suspect I have sympathy for this argument. And I do.
But I can’t say that I find it convincing as a dichotomy
* I suspect Socrates accepts that food can be delicious and healthy, and that some nutritious elements (spices) enhance flavor and health. But he never lays this out.
* What about rhetoric’s role in making truth accessible?
* Maybe rhetoric is misleading, but eschewing it does marginalize people who can’t manage to keep up with Socrates intellectually. Is narrative, metaphor, and emotional appeal always wrong? Doesn’t this doom virtue in the broader civic sphere?
The later Stoics found a better balance here. Virtue is the only good, but that doesn’t make rhetoric contemptible. It’s just a tool that can be used well or poorly.
Physical Trickery:
I like Plato’s suggestion that “ornamentation” of the body is a counterpoint to exercise — it’s fraudulent, petty, and deceitful.
I guess this is like someone wearing “Spanx” to hide their gut rather than addressing the underlying cause of the gut or being honest about their state. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to condemn all body ornamentation, but it’s an interesting point. Much of human society is like this — we’re always addressing the symptom rather than the cause, and refuse to even be honest about it.
Subtle Maneuvers, Big Impact
“Nor does anyone love Caesar himself, unless Caesar happens to be a man of great worth, but it is riches that we love, or a post as tribune, praetor, or consul. As long as we love, hate, or fear these things, it necessarily follows that those who have power over them will be our masters.” — Epictetus, Discourses, 4.1.61
At 466, Socrates makes a subtle but powerful claim, and we should pay close attention. This is a foundation of the Socratic/Stoic paradox that “virtue is the only good.”
* Rhetoricians have the least power because they’re driven by the whims of the mob. They’re enslaved, and merely the mob’s bullhorn.
* If they had real power, they’d do what they wanted. And what does any person want? Their own good. And anyone acting for their own good prioritizes virtue, which means ignoring what the mob prefers and doing what’s right/just/virtuous.
Pollus counters that Socrates must find the power of life and death worth having. Socrates says no. Some people might need to be executed for justice to be done, but even justice-oriented executioners are in unenviable positions. (Dispreferred indifferent — aproēgmena — in the Stoic sense, perhaps).
Socrates insists it’s better to be executed unjustly than to do injustice to another, since the former person maintains their virtue and the latter doesn’t.
As noted, unjust rhetoric kills Socrates after the war. So Plato is signaling that Socrates made the right choice in the end; his killers suffered the most, even if they thought his death a great triumph.
Pollus tries to prove Socrates wrong by telling a story about a tyrant who wins his throne through wrongdoing. Isn’t this man happy? Socrates dismisses the idea because it’s just a story. All the stories in the world won’t “dislodge me from my inheritance, the truth.”
Can Criminals Be Happy?
Beginning around line 472, Socrates makes two bold claims:
* Criminals are all unhappy.
* Criminals are more miserable when they’re not caught and punished.
I’ve been thinking about this for years, and I still find it dicey. Successful criminals may have fewer problems, which removes stressors/impediments. But the worst people I know seem to be in a hell of their own making — a hell that exists entirely inside their skulls. Even when their exterior lives flourish, they carry an element of misery and unease around with them. We might think of exceptions, but we don’t know what it’s like in their heads. So the first claim makes sense to me.
But I find the punishment argument harder to square with my experience. Perhaps when the punishment is over people feel relieved, but how many people in US prisons are being bettered rather than hardened and corrupted?
I find myself ill-equipped to judge the matter. But I have reservations.
Get Your Family Punished!
Around 480, Socrates argues that the best use of rhetoric is denouncing ourselves and getting friends and family punished. This is akin to making sure they go through beneficial medical procedures they want to shirk.
Again, I find Socrates’s refusal to see rhetoric’s promise for defending the innocent against false accusations to be a major oversight. And Plato’s failure to put the idea in Pollus’s mouth seems like strawmanning.
Pollus Is Done
Round one of this dialogue is over. The last few paragraphs hint that Pollus can’t refute Socrates’s points, but he’s unconvinced. I suspect some or all of you feel the same.
The first time I read Gorgias I thought Socrates’s analogies comparing virtue and vice to medicine, exercise, and cooking, were interesting, but I didn’t feel like the dialogue was going anywhere at this point.
But what if Pollus and Gorgias are so inept because they have shame? What if a shameless man could set everyone straight?
That’s what we’ll see happen in part two. Everything we’ve read so far just laid the groundwork. Join me next time as we explore the thinking of the proto-ubermensch Callicles.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
If you liked this article, please like and share it, which helps more readers find my work. I’d also love to hear what you think in the comments below.
