Plato: Gorgias. James H. Nichols, Jr. translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Stauffer, Devin: The Unity of Plato’s Gorgias: Rhetoric, Justice, and the Philosophic Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

 

An English professor I knew, who had a rather broad sense of humor, amused himself (if not so much his students) by likening the name of the Greek sophist, Gorgias, to that of the professional wrestler, Gorgeous George. And I suppose that the pro wrestler of the last century, who insisted that his matches were actual contests and not theatrical performances, could be classified as a sort of gymnosophist: a man who contorted his body in ways that looked like it was engaging in a real struggle or ‘dialectic’ but was not, a self-promoting showman whose real business was to separate the marks from their cash. In ancient and modern India, the original gymnosophists (as they were called by their English conquerors) give every evidence of seeking wisdom, but the modern American version was less convincing.

And the ancient Greek Sophists? They taught for pay, to be sure. But were they wise in ways beyond the cash nexus? The philosopher Socrates—lover of wisdom but not professedly the possessor of it—famously doubted that they were. At the same time, philosophic argumentation, rhetorical declamation, and the sophists’ display speeches have some things in common, including the practice of making truth claims. And there may be more. As Plato’s translator, James H. Nichols, observes in his preface, “rhetoric is the crucial link between philosophy and politics” because “human beings must coordinate their activities with other human beings in order to live well” and, to do so, they will use not only force but also speeches—attempting to win consent, not mere assent. Living in the political community, the philosopher may well need to justify his way of life to his fellow citizens, and for this the philosophic way–the way of engaging interlocutors one by one, in small groups—may not suffice to persuade a majority of his fellow citizens that what he does is good for them, good for the country. Nichols asks, “In what aspect of political activity would the philosopher have some advantage in practice?”—if any, one inclines to add. This question leads the philosopher to converse with the sophist and the sophist’s students.

Five persons engage in the dialogue: in addition to Socrates and Gorgias, there are Socrates’ democratically-minded and slightly flakey friend, Chaerephon; Gorgias’ student and fellow teacher of rhetoric, Polus; and the mega-spirited if not magnanimous and somewhat mysterious Callicles, who left no other trace in the history of ancient Greece other than this dialogue, leaving readers to wonder if Plato made him up.

Callicles begins, and the first word out of his mouth is “war”—not only a harbinger of things to come in the dialogue but also a measure of Athenian and indeed Greek concerns generally in a time and place wracked by the great war Thucydides would narrate. Gorgias has just completed one of his ‘display’ speeches; Socrates had been invited to listen but arrived late because democratic Chaerephon has delayed him in the agora. Callicles offers to bring everyone to his house, where Gorgias is staying, to hear Gorgias give another speech, but Socrates, who has heard such speeches before, proposes a dialogue instead: “For I wish to learn from him what the power of the man’s art is, and what it is that he professes and teaches” (447b-c). Socrates wants to understand the power of sophistic rhetoric is, and the substance of Gorgias’ teaching, not by witnessing an example of his art but by finding out how Gorgias understands his art, his teaching, perhaps himself.

Like two great battleships circling one another, each man has a lesser vessel launch an exploratory mission. Socrates asks Chaerephon to ask Gorgias “who he is” (447d); Polus intervenes, saying that Gorgias is tired from delivering his oration, but he, Polus, will submit to questioning. Upon being asked what art Gorgias knows, Polus says not what it is but how much it should be esteemed: it is “the finest of the arts” (448c). Seeing that this gets him nowhere, Socrates cuts short the preliminaries, saying he would speak with Gorgias directly. Gorgias then says he is a rhetorician and also a teacher of rhetoric; he further agrees to Socrates’ request that he keep his answers short, “for indeed this too is one of the things I assert, that no one could say the same things in briefer speeches than I” (449b-c); he has mastered the art of making speeches long and short, a weaver of tapestries and doilies alike, if you will.

If the art of weaving consists of knowing how to produce cloth, then the art of rhetoric consists of knowing how to produce speeches but, as Gorgias observes, unlike handiwork rhetoric does not produce things but actions. To Socrates’ observation that arithmetic, calculation, geometry, even board games are equally not productive of handiworks, Gorgias replies, yes, the rhetorician addresses not just any non-material phenomena but “the greatest of human affairs, Socrates, and the best” (451d).

Very well, then, what are the greatest and best human affairs? A doctor will hold up those matters pertaining to health, a trainer beauty and strength, a moneymaker money. Gorgias regards the greatest and best of human affairs to be those pertaining to the political community, the polis; in this he anticipates Aristotle, who would argue that the political art is the comprehensive one, the one that in many respects determines the character of all the other arts practiced in the polis. Gorgias thus turns the consideration of rhetoric away from the kind of speech he had just given—a sort of high-end entertainment or show—toward forensic and political speech. He argues (as Aristotle would do) that such an art gives the rhetorician a kind of command over physicians, trainers, moneymakers, and other practitioners of the verbal arts.

But do not all teachers persuade? Socrates asks. Yes, but rhetoricians persuade men “in law courts and other mobs”—presumably he means democratic assemblies—about “those things that are just and unjust” (454b). Now a reader might expect Socrates to ask, ‘What is justice?’ and he does, indirectly: learning and believing, he remarks, are two different things; although both involve persuasion, learning is being persuaded about things the speaker knows to be true, whereas believing is being persuaded about things the speaker may or may not know to be true. This raises the perennial question all rhetoricians and professors of rhetoric face: How healthy is that pig you have wrapped in that well-embroidered verbal poke? Gorgias quite cheerfully concurs, admitting that rhetoricians produce belief in their audiences, and do not necessarily lead them to knowledge.

The admission has its contemporary implications. Although Gorgias and many of his fellow Sophists were cosmopolitans, moving from one polis to another as they displayed their wares to prospective clients, in 427 B. C. Gorgias accepted a diplomatic commission from his native city of Leontine, hoping to draw the Athenians into their desperate war against Syracuse. Although Athens’ disastrous Sicilian expedition was years away, Plato’s reader might well have considered this earlier foray as the beginning of Athens’ military overreach. The rhetorical expedition precipitated the military ones, the last of which ended very badly. The incident suggests that cosmopolitan intellectuals are not always as cosmopolitan as they say or even think they are, that they really ought to know what they are talking about, and that their audiences ought to consider carefully whether or not they do.

But do we not care whether the master of rhetoric or any art serves the good, and in the law courts and assemblies justice? Gorgias defends the art of rhetoric by saying that the art itself is good but, like all arts, it can be misused: “one must use rhetoric justly too” (457b). But he also describes rhetoric as “a competitive skill,” which provides Socrates with an opening: As a philosopher I am “refuted with pleasure if I say something not true, and who refutes with pleasure if someone should say something not true,” experiencing no less pleasure “to be refuted than to refute” (458a). I am not competing; I do not seek victory because I am not at war. Gorgias protests, “I say that I myself, Socrates, am also such a one as you indicate,” but then (seeing the need actually to show how this is so by, for example, saying what justice is and how his rhetoric vindicates it), suggests that we should not, out of courtesy to the others, prolong the conversation. But both Chaerephon and Callicles pipe up to say no, quite on the contrary, we want to hear this (458c). Socrates is all too ready to oblige, asking Gorgias if persuading a “mob” means persuading “those who don’t know” (459a). If so, then surely what the rhetorician has discovered is really “a certain device of persuasion so as to appear to know more than those who know” to those who don’t know. And if the rhetorician does not, and indeed need not know the just from the unjust, the shameful from the noble, the good from the bad, then where does that leave him and his hapless audience?

Gorgias maintains that the student of rhetoric does too need to know such things, but he must learn them either prior to learning rhetoric or while learning it. Socrates then gets Gorgias to accept a dubious analogy between knowledge of the arts (if you know them, you can do them) and knowledge of justice (if you know it, you will be just). This catches Gorgias in a contradiction because he’d earlier admitted that a rhetorician could be unjust. Socrates’ argument makes little sense; not only the analogy between “can” and “will” but the premise is doubtful, inasmuch as one might very well know how to perform an art without being able to perform it, due to sheer lack of physical coordination. I may know how to hit a fastball but that doesn’t mean I can stand in and do it.

All of this proves too much to Gorgias’ loyal student, Polus, who intervenes to complain that Socrates discovery of contradictions in his master’s argument is rude. Polus thus comes into the fray not so much as a man of intelligence as a man concerned with reputation, propriety, a man impressed with what modern Americans call ‘social skills.’ Socrates courteously gives him the choice of either asking or answering questions, with the proviso that he keep them short—the same proviso Gorgias had agreed to, as an expression of confidence in his own art. Polus agrees, challenging Socrates to offer his own definition of rhetoric. He may regret this, as Socrates denies that rhetoric is an art at all but rather a business based on exploiting the ability to produce “a certain grace and pleasure” (462c). Rhetoric “is not artful but belongs to a soul that is skilled at guessing, courageous, and terribly clever by nature at associating with human beings; and I call its chief point flattery” (463a-b). It reminds him of cooking and cosmetics; if these are arts, they don’t amount to much. “Rhetoric according to my judgment is a phantom of a part of politics” (468d), a thing of seeming not of being. But in politics the ones who rule (the “mob” or the many in a democratic regime) had better know the reality and not its semblance.

Socrates elaborates, saying that there are two kinds of arts, the one directed to the human soul, politics, which consists of legislation and judging, the other directed to the body, an unnamed kind consisting of gymnastic, which parallels legislation, and medicine, which parallels judging. But flattery “pretends to be” one of these arts, just as cookery pretends to improve the quality of the food the way medicine really does improve the body’s health, and cosmetic pretends to improve the body’s appearance the way gymnastic really does improve it. More, flattery “is not art but experience, because it has no reasoned account, in regard to the thing it administers or the things that it administers, or what sort of things they are in their nature, and so it cannot state the cause of each thing” (465a). Being a form of knowledge, an art can be given such a reasoned account of itself. In his brief interchange with Chaerephon, Polus himself had described rhetoric as an art discovered through experience; Socrates now schools him on the limitations of experiential learning. Continuing his drawing of distinctions or science of classification, Socrates adds that while sophistry pretends to the legislative art, rhetoric pretends to the judicial art. That is, sophistry confuses assemblies as they deliberate about law and policy, whereas rhetoric confuses juries as they deliberate about guilt and innocence. Plato’s readers know that Socrates himself will face such a jury and conspicuously refuse to engage it in the usual tricks in the rhetorician’s (wind)bag.

Despite this very ill headwind, Polus sails on in defense of rhetoric and rhetoricians. After all, his main audience in this competition is his master, Gorgias; he needs above all to show himself the loyal subaltern. Changing tacks, he points to the effectiveness of rhetoricians: “Do they not have the greatest power in the cities?” (466b). Not if “having power is something good for him who has it,” Socrates rejoins. But it is, Polus exclaims. Rhetoricians, “just like tyrants, kill whomever they wish, and confiscate possessions and expel from the cities whomever it seems good to them” (466c). Socrates questions whether “having great power is good for the one who has it” (466e); upon receiving Polus’ firm assent, he then picks up Gorgias’ own admission that a power might itself be good yet be used for bad ends and furthermore that doing what seems to be good is not the same as doing what is good. Does the rhetorician know what he’s doing to himself?

Socrates then sharpens the point. Although having had an injustice done to oneself is bad, “doing injustice is the greatest of evils” (469b). “The one who does injustice and is unjust is altogether wretched, but more wretched if he does not pay the just penalty nor meet with retribution when he does injustice, and less wretched if he pays the just penalty and meets with just judgment from gods and human beings” (472d). The thought is simply beyond Polus, of whom it can at least be said that he has been brought to the edge of wondering. “You are attempting to say strange things indeed, Socrates” (473a). Strange or foreign to a rhetorician-sophist, to be sure, and Polus states his counter-argument forcefully: “Many human beings who do injustice are happy” (470d); moreover, “If someone is caught doing injustice, plotting to attain tyranny, and having been caught is tortured on the rack and castrated and has his eyes burned out, and having beheld his children and wife suffer them, at the end is impaled or tarred and burned—this man will be happier than if, getting away, he is established as tyrant, rules in the city, and passes his whole life doing whatever he wishes, being enviable and accounted happy by the citizens and by other who are foreigners?” (473c-d). Not likely, he sensibly supposes. Socrates replies that neither man would be happier than if he had lived justly, but the successful tyrant is “more wretched” (473d-e). Why so?

Because, as Socrates gets Polus to admit, doing injustice is more shameful than suffering injustice. But is it worse? Polus says no, but he then admits that the shameful is painful and bad. But if that is the case, Socrates remarks, “then whenever one of two shameful things is more shameful, it will be more shameful by surpassing in either pain or badness,” and since doing injustice is more shameful than suffering injustice, doing injustice must be worse than suffering it (475a-b). Further, if two unjust men suffer opposite fates—one succeeding and dying peacefully in bed, the other failing and suffering punishment for his crimes—the one justly punished is better off, because he has been “released from a great evil,” the shameful perpetrating of injustice, and, like the sick man who endures harsh but successful medical treatment, he may recover. So the punished criminal (at least, the one who survives his punishment) ends up not only less “wretched,” in a less shameful condition, than the criminal who gets away with his crimes, he is also happier, even if not so happy as the man who never committed any crimes in the first place (478d-e). And finally (bringing things around to the topic at hand) “what is the great use of rhetoric” if it leads to the exoneration of the guilty(480a)? The greatest punishment for an evildoer is to allow him to live a long time with his ill-gotten but shameful gains.

The argument’s effectiveness depends for its effectiveness on Polus’ profound aversion to shame. He had intervened in Socrates’ questioning of Gorgias by objecting to Socrates’ rudeness. The social proprieties mean the world to Polus. He loves honor, fears dishonor for himself and for his teacher. But Socrates’ argument would not necessarily deter a shameless man.

The dialogue immediately provides Socrates with one. Callicles abruptly (rudely?) objects, exclaiming to Chaerephon that Socrates “must be joking!” (481b).  Socrates responds to this new interlocutor by introducing a new theme—new to the dialogue, but assuredly not new to Socrates. Both Callicles and I are “lovers,” he observes: Socrates of Alcibiades and philosophy, Callicles of the Athenian demos and young Demos, son of Pyrilampes, a boy well-known for his beauty and stupidity. Socrates alleges that Callicles changes his opinions to suit the moods of these lovers, just as Socrates’ “boyfriend, philosophy” tells him what to say (482a). But because Socrates loves wisdom, and wisdom does not contradict itself, his love remains constant.

Callicles brushes this aside. By appealing to shame, he argues, Socrates points to “things that are not fine by nature, but by convention” (482e). And Socrates is tricky: “if someone speaks of things according to convention, you slip in questions about things according to nature, and if he speaks of the things of nature, you ask about the things of convention” (483a). Doing injustice is only shameful according to convention, but by nature only what is “worse” is shameful; conventional justice is for and by weaklings—’by’ them in the sense that the weak (who are the many) write the laws to hem in the strong, who are few. But in nature the strong animals rule the weaker, and the strong peoples rule the weaker; this is “the law of nature,” “by Zeus” (483e)! “I think, if a man having a sufficient nature comes into being, he shakes off and breaks through all these things and gets away, trampling underfoot our writings, spells, charms, and the laws that are all against nature, and the slave rises up to be revealed as our master; and there the justice of nature shines forth” (484a-b). Intrusive Callicles thinks of himself as out-ruding rude Socrates, especially if one considers that in English ‘rude’ means ‘close to nature’. He does not shrink from saying “something rather rude” to Socrates (486c).

Philosophy numbers among those spells or charms the strong man resists and overcomes. “Philosophy, to be sure, Socrates, is a graceful thing, if someone engages in it in due measure at the proper age, but if he fritters his time away in it further than is needed, it is the corruption of human beings” because it turns them away from “all those thing that one who is to be a noble and good man, and well reputed, must have experience of,” namely, the laws of the city, speechmaking, and “human pleasures and desires”—the things a political man must know and deal with (484c-b).  Older men who persist in philosophy deserve a beating.

We begin to see contradictions in the thought of this young, hard-nosed, would-be ‘realist.’ He loves the demos and craves their company, yet he sounds almost proto-Nietzschean and aristocratic in his contempt for the laws and conventions of the democratic city he would dominate. Socrates takes notice.

He likens Callicles to “one of those stones with which they test gold” (486d); as commentators have noted, such stones are themselves anything but golden. Courteously, Socrates continues: “He who is going to make a sufficient test of a soul’s living correctly or not must in fact have three things, all of which you have,” namely, “knowledge, goodwill, and outspokenness” (487a). Thus far, Callicles has demonstrated his possession of only one of those three things, but Socrates forthrightly says that the “two foreigners,” Gorgias and Polus, may be wise and friendly yet they are “rather too lacking in outspokenness and too sensitive to shame” (487b). This amounts to a very just summary of the weaknesses Socrates has just exploited, professional hazards for sophists and rhetoricians alike, men who depend on their reputation. They must go to excessive lengths to avoid being shamed. For pro wrestlers of the twentieth century, the rule for dealing with the marks was always ‘kayfabe,’ which is the word in carnival slang for ‘be fake.’ That is, never let on that wrestling isn’t real; protect the game. This logo-verbal necessity put wrestlers into verbal contortions as impressive as any they displayed in their gymnosophistic maneuverings in the ring. To speak ‘carny’ was to speak not just a few jumbled words but to speak a coded language. But the rhetorician must speak the language of the marketplace, the agora from which Socrates just came, while trying to keep his intentions secret.

So, then, Callicles, you (along with the poet, Pindar) “say the just stands—the just according to nature”—because “the stronger carry off by violence the weaker men’s things, that the superior rule the worse men, and that the better have more than the lowlier” (488b). Strong cities act that way against the weaker (here with a glance at Athenian imperialism). But this means, does it not, that “the many” are “stronger than the one according to nature,” inasmuch as they “set down law upon the one” (488d). Callicles agree that “the lawful usages of these people [are] fine according to nature, since they are stronger” (488e). This seems to catch Callicles in a contradiction between his aristocratic or even tyrannical side and his democratic leanings. But Callicles isn’t so easily caught. He says he means that “the superior and the stronger [are] the same,” not that “a rabble of slaves and human beings of all sorts” is superior to these “better men” (489c). Inasmuch as the many can easily overpower the one or the few physically, this can only mean that the superiority of the better men inheres in their intelligence and, he soon adds, their courage. “I think that the just by nature is this, for one who is superior and more intelligent both to rule and to have more than the lowlier ones” (490a).

Socrates then invites Callicles to do something he has never seriously done: to consider what it means to ‘rule.’ For example, does the superior man rule himself, or only the others? This catches Callicles off-guard, compelling him to wonder, however briefly: “What do you mean, ruling himself?” (491d). “Nothing complicated, but just what the many mean: being moderate and in control of oneself, ruling the pleasures and desires that are in oneself” (491d-e). Recovering quickly, Callicles avers that the moderate are fools, slaves to the many who valorize men who restrain their own desires in deference to the ways of the many. “The man who will live correctly must let his own desires be as great as possible and not chasten them, and he must be sufficient to serve them, when they are as great as possible, through courage and intelligence, and to fill them up with the things for which desire arises on each occasion” (492a). Shame is for the many, who secretly desire greatly but ashamedly know their own incapacity to attain those objects and so chastise those who can obtain them as intemperate. Given the “unmanliness” of the many, they can only seek to enslave the superior natures, hypocritically “prais[ing] moderation and justice” in the hope of keeping their superiors from ruling them (492a-b). But “luxury, intemperance, and freedom, when they have support—this is virtue and happiness,” and the “agreements of human beings against nature, are drivel and worth nothing” (492c). Callicles refuses to be caught in contradiction with respect to his stated shamelessness.

Socrates replies with a metaphor. By presenting an argument in an image, he shifts the dialogue into the realm of sentiments, inasmuch as imagery holds a picture up for consideration and tests both the intensity and range but also the limits of the sentiments it invokes. In this case he compares the desirous part of the soul to a leaky jar, an object that never gets filled, always ‘needing’ more. Callicles dismisses the image, as he must; it is a comical image, belittling the desires that Callicles wants to take as the natural guides to the good life. Like most young men, Callicles wants to be taken seriously, and his desires are part of himself. Socrates then shifts the metaphor away from the jar itself and toward two men who own jars; one man has jars that are sound, the other jars that leak. Is not the man whose jars are sound happier, less in need to work at filling his jars. The image now draws attention to the fact that the human soul has not only desires but also a part or aspect that oversees and rules the jars, tends to them. Again, Callicles balks: “that man who has filled his jars no longer has any pleasure” but lives “just like a stone,” neither “rejoicing or feeling pain”; “living pleasantly consists in… keeping as much as possible flowing in” (494a-b). Callicles defines pleasure not in satisfaction of desires but in the process of satisfying; he craves change and not completion, desire itself and not satiety.

Socrates then goes in for the kill, knowing that Callicles loves not only the many, the demos, but the boy, Demos. Is this not the life of catamites? A “terrible and shameful and wretched life” (494e) is the catamite way. The manly and dominant Callicles has argued in a manner that justifies not his own aspirations to mastery but instead the submissive, even slavish way of life he wants for his lover—shameful by Callicles’ own definition of shameful. Callicles is in fact ashamed of something, slavishness, yet his definition of pleasure is catamitic, not dominant.

Callicles never quite recovers from this (as it were) manly thrust. He tries to make Socrates ashamed of himself for saying such things. More, he attempts to counter Socrates’ suggestions that the desires are not to be taken seriously and worthy of being ruled and not of ruling but charging that Socrates’ arguments depend upon “small things of little worth” (497b), things by implication unworthy of the attention of real men. That doesn’t work; when Socrates engages in dialectic, when Socrates pursues the truth, he is a lot freer of shame than Callicles. From now on, Callicles will become increasingly reluctant to duel with Socrates, and will soon engage only because Gorgias, his honored guest, gently urges him to continue. Readers will also recall that Gorgias has returned the favor bestowed upon him, when he looked for an exit from his conversation with Socrates, only to be held to it by Polus and Callicles.

Socrates extracts from Callicles the assertion that the pleasant and the good are the same, yet “all needs and desires are painful” as well as pleasurable (496d). Socrates then observes that one stops feeling the pain of hunger and the pleasure of eating simultaneously, when satiated, but the good of having eaten continues. Ergo, pleasure is not the same as the good. What is more good and bad men feel pleasure “about equally” (498c). These observations cause Callicles to concede that some pleasures are good, others bad, and further that “the end of all actions is the good” (499e). An “artful” man selects from the pleasant things those which are good (500a). In so conceding, Callicles is edging his way toward Socrates’ image of the two men with the two sets of jars, sound and unsound. Socrates recalls his distinction between the “experience” but not-a-true-art of cookery and the art of medicine, the one aiming at pleasure and the other at the good. When distinguishing inferior from superior men, one must look at “what way one must live” (500c). This question of the best way of life addresses the question of what regime is best for political communities, but here Socrates concerns himself with individuals: which is better, the political way of life or the philosophic way of life. Callicles again professes not to understand what Socrates is saying, although of course he had been the one who had contrasted the political man very much to the disadvantage of the philosopher, saying that the political man is the real man and the philosopher remains locked in a sort of childhood.

Callicles had based that claim on a claim about nature, distinguishing nature from mere convention, that invention of the hypocritical and envious many. Socrates can now issue his counter-claim: the physician, who attends to the nature of his patients, can give a “reasoned account” of his activity, whereas the cook or any other pleasure-seeker “proceeds altogether artlessly”—that is, without the intelligence Callicles has repeatedly praised—”without having examined to any degree the nature of pleasure or the cause, all in all irrationally” (501a). The way of life of the desirous soul, while justifying its way on the grounds of nature, not only does not know nature what nature is, and does not know its own nature (mistaking catamitism for dominance, for example).

Socrates next makes Callicles admit that this applies to groups of men, not only individuals. Musicians and poets seek to give audiences pleasure, not to spur them to the good. They flatter. So do rhetoricians. In continuing the dialogue only because “your argument may be brought to an end [and none too soon, Callicles doubtless feels] and to gratify Gorgias here,” Callicles has been steered into listening to a devastating critique of Gorgias’ way of life, emulated by Polus and hosted by Callicles (501c and following). And when foreign rhetoricians come to our polis, Callicles, to persuade us of such things as wartime alliances, do they seek the good of Athenians? Callicles is now to the point of thinking: “What you are asking now is no longer simple: for there are some who care about the citizens when they say what they say, and there are also such as you say” (503a). Very well, then, Socrates can now argue, if a well-arranged body is healthy and a well-arranged soul is virtuous—not unrestrained or hedonistic but “lawful and orderly,” just and moderate—then a good rhetorician will valorize the virtues, not the desires (504c-d). Intent on salvaging his honor, Callicles insists that he will agree, but only to please Gorgias. He also would very much like to get out of the conversation altogether, having entered into it with such manly, confident self-assertion and having been humbled by Socrates’s superior shamelessness at the service of virtue. He invites Socrates simply to say what he thinks and cease asking (embarrassing) questions. With perfect courtesy and not a speck of rudeness, Socrates agrees to do so, while pointedly inviting Callicles to interrupt him at any time, “if something I say does not seem fine to you” (506e).

Socrates now gives Callicles a way of salvaging his honor by proposing a new way of loving victory. Victory belongs to the man who seeks and finds the truth, the one who knows what he is talking about. Having already asserted the superiority of the intelligence of the few to the stupidity of the many, Callicles will now be shown more about what the rule of intelligence actually is. The name ‘Socrates’ itself, by happy coincidence, implies the rule of knowledge: ‘so-cracy’ can stake its claim against demo-cracy, to say nothing of Demo-cracy or catamitism. The moderate soul can love wisdom, undistracted by clamorous and foolish or mindless desires. Rhetoric can now come back in, be admitted into the right way of life, in a sort of forensic capacity: as the accuser of oneself, one’s son, and one’s friend “if he is doing an injustice” (508b). Give that malefactor, first of all yourself, a good ‘talking to.’ Not physical punishment (beating philosophers or even non-philosophers) but admonishment beginning with self-admonishment will strengthen the soul’s rational element possibly event to the point of bringing the desires to listen to it. To avoid suffering injustice (the stated worry of Polus, the secret worry of Callicles) one must have “prepared power” to resist it (509d); to avoid doing injustice, one must also “prepare a certain power and art against this” (510a). The power in question is a power of the soul, and rhetoric at the service of reason can now become an art, no longer a mere experience.

Knowing that warlike Callicles has been reduced to sullenness but not brought into agreement, Socrates draws him back into dialogue. The art of preparing oneself to suffer “no justice or as little as possible” must be “either [to] rule in the city oneself—or rule as a tyrant—or else be a comrade of the existing regime” (510a). Did he say “tyrant”? Callicles likes the sound of that: “Do you see, Socrates, how ready I am to praise, if something you say is fine?” (510b). But Callicles remains preoccupied with the body and the desires associated with it; Socrates, however, has already stipulated that justice has more to do with the soul. Such persons as ship pilots save our bodies, and we don’t regard them with great esteem; why should we then lavish our highest praise on politicians and generals who do the same? The “true man” should not be so concerned with self-preservation, “must not be a lover of life,” but rather one who concerns himself with how to “live best” (512e-513a). The true friend of the Athenian people will consider what is best for them. Appealing to Callicles’ apparent manly distaste for the conventions of the many, Socrates advises, “You must be not an imitator but like these men in your own very nature, if you are to achieve something genuine in friendship with the Athenian people” (513b). Callicles admits that he is still “not altogether persuaded by you,” to which Socrates replies, “Yes, for love of the people, Callicles, which is present in your soul, opposes me” (513c)—love of the desires of the people instead of the good of the people. “What human being will you say you have made better through intercourse with you” (515a), he asks, again reminding Callicles of his love of Demos. “You are a lover of victory, Socrates” (515b). But for Socrates victory is the residue of design, not its object.

Even the leading Athenian statesmen, Callicles’ heroes Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles, win little esteem from Socrates. They have “suppl[ied] the city with the things it desires,” but they’ve done nothing to improve the souls of the citizens (517b-c). “Without moderation and justice they have filled up the city with harbors, dockyards, walls, tribute, and such drivel”; they have learned from the sophists, the supposed teachers of virtue, but they neither exhibit virtue themselves nor transmit it to others (519a). Sophistry rules their rhetoric, making their rhetoric only seem to be artful when in fact it is as confused as, well, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles have proved to be, upon forensic examination in the court of philosophy.

As for the courts of Athens, if I, Socrates, am brought before some tribunal it will be because “some base man will be my prosecutor”; “it will be a base man killing a good one” (521b-d). But I, not Pericles, and surely not you, Callicles, “put my hand to the true political art and I alone of the men of today practice politics” (521d)—ruling with a view of the good of the ruled.

Callicles tries a subtle shift in argumentation, trying his hand at Socratic questioning in the bargain. “In your opinion, then, Socrates, is a human being in a fine state, when he’s in such a condition in the city, powerless to help himself? (522c). This might put attention on the circumstances in which the philosopher pursues his way of life, not so much on the way of life itself, or on the soul of the philosopher. Not about to be out-Socrateased, the philosopher stays focused on self-help as self-rule and the just conduct that self-rule engenders. His shame would be a conviction on the grounds of having truly “done anything unjust as regards either human beings or gods,” regardless of the regime that convicted him—whether “among many, among few, or alone by one man only” (522d). “For no one fears dying itself, who is not all in all most irrational and unmanly, but he fears doing injustice; for to arrive in Hades with one’s soul full of many unjust deeds is the ultimate of all evils” (522e). Socrates has returned to Callicles’ favored virtues, intelligence and courage, having shown that they are not what he has believed them to be, or what sophists say they are. He offers “a rational account, that this is so” (522e).

The dialogue concludes with this rational account, which turns out to be not an argument in the ordinary sense of the term but an argument stated in the form of a myth. It also turns out to be a long speech, a ‘display’ speech of the sort Socrates had avoided by arriving late to the Gorgias-fest. What had been intended as an event to leave Socrates speechless in the face of Gorgian rhetoric ends with Gorgias as the silent listener to a performance of Socratic rhetoric. But how can a “rational account” take mythic form?

The god Cronos had decreed a law that just and pious men would live on “the islands of the blessed” and that the unjust and godless would go to Tartarus to be punished eternally (523b). When Zeus overthrew Cronos and began the rule of the Olympian gods, he was told that many had been judged unjustly under the old regime. Base men appeared for judgment while still alive, before their lives were complete, and “clothed in fine bodies, ancestry, and wealth,” deceiving the witnesses to their lives, and the judges, too (523d). They must instead be tried “naked” of such external things, and after having lived their full lives (523e). No biased family members may serve as their witnesses, having been left behind on earth, still alive. The judges will be Zeus’s sons, one from Europe and two from Asia: no regional biases, either. The decisions rendered will be “as just as possible” (524a); Socrates’ Zeus does not assume full wisdom and justice even in his sons and fellow-gods.

What is more, rehabilitation will be possible for most of those judged. Their punishments will be soul-improving punishments, consistent with those Socrates had commended. But even the incurable souls, who cannot be rehabilitated, will serve justice by serving as examples for the living to avoid. No private man will be among them, but tyrants will be—a final warning to the ambitious Callicles. Politicians face especial dangers, as “it is difficult, Callicles, and worthy of much praise, that one who has come to have a very free hand to do injustice should pass through life justly. But a few such do come into being… who are noble and good with respect to this virtue of justly managing, whatever someone entrusts to them” (526a-b). A philosopher, by pointed contrast, gets ticketed for the islands of the blessed, having “done his own business and not been a busybody in life” (526c). It is noteworthy that Socrates now leaves off boasting of having been the only true politician in Athens, pointing instead to the self-imposed limits of his way. He tells his three listeners to prefer being good to seeming good, to use rhetoric for justice and not flattery of the one, the few or the many. The fact that so many teachers fail to do this evokes from Socrates a parting exclamation: “To such a degree of lack of education have we come!”

In his postscript to his translation, James H. Nichols, Jr. observes that although the last word in the dialogue, spoken by Socrates, is “Callicles,” coming after a parting shot—your way of life, your personal regime, “is worth nothing” (527e)—in an important way Socrates’ main audience is Gorgias, for whom Plato after all has named the dialogue. By showing the limitations and indeed the serious moral and political hazards of Gorgias’ way of life not only in conversation with Gorgias himself but most elaborately to Gorgias’ students and admirers, Socrates, far from being as rude as Polus had charged, shows the famed sophist the error of his way without embarrassing him as much as he might have done. Gorgias may or may not appreciate the grace and the civility of this, but he should.

Turning to the detailed and rich interpretation of Stauffer, the reader will see that he adds a great deal to this spare summary of Plato’s dialogue. In general, Stauffer explores the possibilities of reforming rhetoric, of making Gorgias (if not Callicles, who may be among Zeus’s incorrigibles) into a friend and even a defender of philosophy and philosophers. (In a subsequent review I will consider the alternative interpretation of Nalin Ranasinghe; concerned more with the degree of lack of education we have come in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, Ranasinghe emphasizes the gulf between sophistry and philosophy and the tendency of rhetoricians to live according to the sophistic way.)

Devin Stauffer wants better to understand the philosopher’s way of life and how it how that personal ‘regime’ relates both to political life and to human nature. His interpretative ambition also seeks the comprehensive view: How do Socrates’ dialogues with his three principal interlocutors add up to a unified literary work? “I have tried to reproduce something close to my own experience of reading and reflecting on the dialogue” (7). It may be that the careful interpretation of a philosophic text can itself form part of the way of life of philosophers, and of those who try to philosophize.

Stauffer remarks the links between the Gorgias and the Apology. In the Apology, Socrates, charged with impiety, recalls that it was his friend Chaerephon who asked the Delphic oracle whether there was any man wiser than Socrates; Chaerephon turns up in the Gorgias as Socrates’ friend and, briefly, as his designated interlocutor with Polus. Rhetoric looms large in both dialogues—as the topic of the Gorgias and as a theme in Socrates’ speech in the Apology. “Socrates suggests… that rhetoric might have helped to protect him, had he been more willing to practice it himself or had someone practiced it on his behalf” (10). Both dialogues portray Socrates and his way of life under attack: from Polus’ reproof and Callicles’ vehemence in the Gorgias; from a formal accusation of a capital crime in the Apology. And “most important, he argues in both dialogues that considerations of reputation and safety should be subordinated to considerations of justice” (11). Finally, the dialogues raise the question of Socratic rhetoric: As a sharp critic of rhetoricians, does he nonetheless practice his own kind of rhetoric? Stauffer argues that “Socrates’ critique of rhetoric… should be understood as a critique only of a certain kind of rhetoric, not as a critique of rhetoric as such” (13).

Stauffer understands the dialogue to be divided into three parts: the conversations with Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles, respectively.  Stauffer contrasts Gorgias with that other eminent sophist, Protagoras, who claimed to teach virtue. Gorgias claims only the ability to teach rhetoric. This hardly evidences humility; indeed, Gorgias, not unlike his twentieth-century gymnosophist near-namesake, Gorgeous George, “liked to appear on public occasions wearing a purple robe styled after the robe worn by the king of Persia. (Latter-day George was if anything more modest than antique Gorgias: George had his wife bleach and curl his hair, but the gold of Gorgias wasn’t in his hair; he offered “a golden statue of himself” to the oracle at Delphi [16]).

Socrates will reduce these pretensions by appealing to them. He proposes not a rhetorical display or defense of rhetoric but “a dialectical discussion” of it (20). He aims at Gorgias’ seeming-modest claim to teach an art, a technical skill only, and not virtue. Does a rhetorician not need to know what he’s talking about? And if not, does he not at least to know (and know how to play upon) “the passions of the human soul” (23)? And is not the primary trick of the rhetorician’s trade and craft the way in which he uses verbal techniques to “give the impression that [justice, injustice, and other such matters] are his primary concerns, although his deepest concerns or the true objects of his attention are the souls of his listeners and the effects his speeches will have on them”—an exercise of “deception and manipulation” (24)? To these questions, stated and implied, Gorgias responds by doubling down; rhetoricians speak to us about the greatest and best of human affairs. Stauffer observes that Socrates then reframes Gorgias’ claim “by acting as if his claim was not that rhetoric speaks about the greatest and best of human affairs but rather that rhetoric provides human beings with the greatest and best benefit” (25). And what is that benefit, exactly, he politely inquires. Gorgias takes the bait: it is the greatest good, the cause of freedom, and rule over others.  Especially the latter: Gorgias proudly claims that he teaches his students the way to power and success.

Socrates then gets Gorgias to agree to the distinction between persuasion and dialectic, the instilling of belief and the quest for knowledge. He can instill belief in ‘the many’ but leading them to knowledge would be impossible “in a short time” (455a, quoted on p. 28). But, Socrates next asks, don’t political communities need the experts who know what they are doing more than rhetoricians who know only how to persuade. Ah, but Socrates, all the great Athenian public works were successfully urged by Themistocles and Pericles, not experts; rhetoric, Gorgias claims, “is a kind of master ability” which gathers all other arts under itself (31). (Aristotle will make this claim not for rhetoric but for politics). Gorgias thus logically or dialectically commits himself to the assertion that the master ability is really an ability to master, regardless of the justice of the master’s recommended way. Seeing this, “Gorgias changes course and argues that rhetoric must not be used unjustly” (32); “a powerful skill,” it “must not be turned to an unjust use” (32). But this only means that practitioners of the “master ability” need to know what justice is, lest they use it skillfully but for bad purposes. “Perhaps if his art were indeed all-powerful”—if mastery were omnipotence—then Gorgias “would have no need to worry about its public reputation. But the power of rhetoric is not so great that it can overcome the need for concealment.” (33) And so Gorgias must backtrack along the lines Socrates offers: the student of rhetoric either needs “a prior knowledge of justice or be taught this as their first lesson” (35). What is more, he must not only know justice but be just.

Stauffer points to the gentle way in which Socrates has “humbled Gorgias’ pride” (37). He hasn’t “destroyed his precious reputation” (37). Why didn’t Socrates go for the throat? Stauffer suggests that rhetoric “can be reformed” if rhetoricians give up their claims to mastery and become more mindful of justice. To do that, they will need to see that rhetorical techniques alone won’t help them discover justice, but only to defend it. That would still be a lot. It might even provide the foundation for an alliance between Gorgias and Socrates, an alliance one hopes would turn out to be more constructive than the one Gorgias has proposed between Leontine and Athens.

The link between Socrates’ conversation with Gorgias and his conversation with Polus may be seen first of all in the fact that Gorgias stays to listen. Socrates has at least convinced the proud and eminent sophist that a philosopher might be worth hearing. The next conversation continues the line of conversation with Gorgias, now with his student, Polus, as the interlocutor. Stauffer identifies three remaining tasks for Socrates: to “introduce himself to Gorgias by making him aware of [Socrates’] own situation and activity”; to bring Gorgias “to a better understanding of justice and its power in the human soul”; to suggest to Gorgias what “a new, more just form of rhetoric” would be (41).

Socrates’ courtesy and gentleness toward Gorgias are lost on his too-loyal student. Polus complains of Socrates’ rudeness in a way that betrays the moral indignation of a soul with “a sense of justice,” however ill-conceived (42). In response, Socrates treats the young colt (“Polus” means “colt”) more rudely than he does Gorgias. He can do so, Stauffer suggests, because he needs to “shake Gorgias’ satisfaction with his own ways” by rattling his student; this will show Gorgias the consequences of his own teachings in the soul of his student and also show Gorgias the danger to his own all-important reputation from those who understand his situation and activity, which is more vulnerable than the rhetorician-sophist may suppose (44).

And so in this verbal wrestling match fewer holds are barred, as seen in Socrates’ harsh denial that rhetoric is an art at all, but only a phantom art, one directed not at the good, which can be rationally accounted for, known but at pleasure, which cannot account for itself but, if cut off from rational judgment, can only be experienced indiscriminately and therefore, in all likelihood, often harmfully. “The aim of rhetoric” as practiced by Gorgias and his students “is to please,” to “satisfy the audience’s desire for pleasure,” to tell the audience what it wants to hear, in part by seeming to justify those desires. (As, for example, it tells ambitious young men to exchange their money for this master-making ‘art’). Rhetoricians teach people “that they can be both satisfied and good” (48).

But “human beings inevitably draw a distinction between the pleasant and the good and thus can never fully embrace a practice that aims to entice them towards mere pleasure” (50). Most adults know that immediate pleasure can bring them to grief in the long run, and this puts a limit on the supposed master-art. Polus, however, doesn’t want to hear that. Rhetoricians in fact do enjoy “esteem and power”; “like tyrants, they kill whomever they want, seize other people’s possessions, and expel from the cities whomever it seems good to them to expel” (50). But if a rhetorician like Gorgias deserves the great respect and honor he has achieved, and yet he practices a sort of tyranny, does this not admit that the gratifications of rhetoric are anything but respectable?

Socrates continues with his strategy of rude contradiction of Polus’ claims. No, he tells the astounded Polus, rhetoricians are the least powerful men in any political community precisely because they confuse gratification with the good. Polus “assumes, as many do, that it is not hard to discern what is good” (53); he holds the good to be self-evidently the masterful acquisition of one’s desires, one’s pleasures. Socrates, as academics say nowadays, moves to ‘problematize’ this notion of the good for the greedy colt, lest he ruin his digestion by eating too much, too fast. Polus holds up the example of the Macedonian tyrant, Archelaus, as an object-lesson in the satisfactions of the tyrannical way of life. Socrates replies by calling attention not to the person but to the principle of justice itself. Polus would refute Socrates in effect by calling witnesses against him, as in a court of law; Socrates makes him notice that the witnesses, the jury, and the examples Polus calls all need to be able to say what justice is, if they are to judge and be judged accurately. The tyrant may get what he wants, but is what he wants just or good? Stauffer observes that Socrates’ dialectical way of arguing, inquiring about ideas, will always have less appeal to ‘the many’ than the ad hominem, forensic way of arguing of the rhetorician.

Polus’ intendedly crushing counter-example contrast of the unjust man who is tortured to death with the successful tyrant and Socrates’ insistence that the tortured man is better off invokes Socrates’ own version of an ad hominem argument, taking advantage of Polus’ powerful aversion to the shame of the unjust life and his complementary esteem for the noble. Stauffer very acutely observes that Polus would not associate shame with injustice if he did not have any sense of justice to begin with. For Polus, shame is painful, but living unjustly would shame him because he has “a buried concern for justice” (74), which Socrates has begun to exhume. But Socrates intensifies the argument, contending that “unjust men are better off if they receive punishment than if they escape unpunished” (75). For this, Socrates must rely on the assumption that punishment releases a soul from the shame it feels at itself—an instance of bringing out the human inclination for self-examination, which in Polus has been buried at least as deeply as his sense of justice. Polus cannot refute Socrates’ argument and, crucially, he no longer laughs at the philosopher. He remains, in Stauffer’s judgment, reluctant to concur fully in the thought that punishment for injustice is as genuinely desirable as Socrates contends; his intellect has surrendered, but his heart (and maybe his body) have yet quite to consent.

Here is where Gorgias might come in, in the future. Stauffer thinks that Socrates has shown Gorgias “a better and more just use for his powers. Rather than using rhetoric as a tool of exploitation, Gorgias ought to use it to help himself and others by accusing himself an those close to him whenever they stray from the path of justice.” (80)  Could Gorgias, in his own way a master of hearts, complete the moral reformation of Polus that Socrates has begun?

Not so fast, says Callicles. He is Gorgias’ host during his visit to Athens, and Gorgias knows him well enough to see that he will prove a harder test for Socrates’ dialectics. Being Socrates’ fellow-Athenian, Callicles also poses a more serious personal threat to Socrates’ life, let alone his way of life. On their early exchange concerning the difference between superiority and sheer physical strength, Stauffer points not to the tension between Callicles’ aristocratic and democratic leanings but the problem with the way he distinguishes between nature and convention. If the many are “collectively stronger than any individual,” and if strength is a marker of nobility, then “doesn’t that mean that the laws an pronouncements of the many, when the many win out, are naturally noble and just?” (97)—not conventional at all but natural. Socrates’ criticism causes Callicles to maintain that he meant not physical strength but strength of soul, in particular prudence and courage.

Stauffer finds Socrates transition from discussion of justice to discussion of moderation and self-control to be abrupt. It seems to me rather to follow directly from Callicles’ own mention of ruling, which Socrates then proceeds to clarify. Be this as it may, Stauffer goes on to remark that “Socrates may mean to convey an important thought by indicating that the desires of the thoughtless are somehow more insatiable than those of the thoughtful, and that this makes the souls of the thoughtless somehow more fickle and persuadable” (106-107 n. 26). Perhaps not more persuadable, but surely more fickle: Callicles, Stauffer remarks several times, appears more resolute than he is, actually waffling from one thought to another, his soul often in contradiction with itself. For example, Callicles’ stout defense of hedonism contradicts his susceptibility to shame, and shame implies some standard other than the pleasures hedonists seek. Stauffer argues that this standard is justice, that Callicles’ hedonism forms “part of a serious effort by Callicles to deny, even to himself, that he is concerned with any kind of virtue and any form of happiness beyond the enjoyment of pleasure” (116), but I incline to think that the standard (such as it is) might really be the ever-changing demands of the demos and young Demos.

“To admit that one is concerned with virtue, and that one has a deep desire to see virtue triumph, is to open oneself to sorrow and anger when virtue fails or is defeated by vice” (117). This is precisely the sentiment Machiavelli will play upon, as he works the transformation of virtue into virtù. “Acknowledging those hopes would require him to confront his longing for an ultimate salvation from evils, and thus to face the fact that he yearns for something he fears is impossible” (120). This surely speaks even more clearly to Machiavelli’s situation in Christendom, as does Stauffer’s suggestion that Callicles’ hostility to philosophy really bespeaks a fear that the life devoted to dialectic cannot defend itself against either aristocratic ambitions or democratic suspicions. At any rate, Socrates has held Callicles up for inspection not to the democrats but to Gorgias. In shifting the discussion away from justice and to moderation and self-control, Socrates points Gorgias towards an appreciation of the philosophic life.

To Callicles’ patriotic invocation of such Athenian heroes as Themistocles, Cimon, Miltiades, and Pericles, “whose careers collectively spanned the period of Athens’ rise to great power” (128 n. 4), Socrates characteristically draws attention to the question of what patriotism is. After all, truly to love anyone or any thing is not so much to want to possess the beloved but to achieve the best for the beloved. Socrates begins with a small step, linking the good of the soul (and by implication the city) with law-abidingness. He then transfers the thought to the nature of the soul itself by giving an account of the virtues as “derivative from moderation” (135). But he soon brings in justice, placing it on “at least equal terms with moderation” (136). Further, “justice and moderation are good because they enable the virtuous to unite in friendship and community with other human beings with the gods”; “Socrates’ speech culminates in a vision of the cosmos—of heaven, earth, gods, and men—bound together by the ties of community, friendship, orderliness, moderation, and justice” (137). The “geometrical” or “proportional” equality that rules the cosmos provides a natural foundation for the moderation and justice that Callicles had begun by dismissing in the first instance and radically redefining in the other. Socrates gives no suggestion that he has proven that the cosmos has this order. Philosophic inquiry, as opposed to Calliclean assertiveness and Calliclean silence, leaves matters open for discussion. That is the philosopher’s way.

Callicles himself remains mired in his self-contradictory yearnings for some combination of aristocracy, democracy, and tyranny. But as the dialogue works its way to its conclusion, it’s clear that democracy has the upper hand in his soul. “By assimilating himself to Athens and submitting to its authority, while buring any doubts about the justice of the Athenian regime that may continue to trouble him, Callicles has found a solution that would seem to shield him from the anger and pain that he would have to confront if he embraced a purer notion of virtue that left the good more exposed to suffering at the hands of the wicked” (144). To recall a vivid image in the Republic, Callicles, for all his apparent antinomianism, remains chained in the Cave. Socrates, for all his defense of law-abidingness, does not. What Socrates calls the true political art aims at improving the souls of one’s fellow-citizens. “This is of course something that Callicles must admit he cannot do” (150). But neither can his heroes, such as Pericles, who in fact liberated Athenian desires, to the ultimate detriment of Athens, his beloved. Periclean imperialism “exacerbated a feverish sickness in Athens by inflaming the passions of the Athenians” (158), valorizing the desires in a way that Callicles admires, but should not.

Socrates’ philosophically-guided political art here emerges as the true master-art, not rhetoric. To truly serve the good of the political community, rhetoricians need to submit to “an alliance of sorts between rhetoric and the master art that knows what is good for the soul” (157). Stauffer regards Socrates’ claims to be deliberately overstated. “To accept Socrates’ argument, one would have to believe not only that education to virtue is possible but also that it is foolproof, and that political leaders can provide the entire populace of a city with an education comparable to the education provided to private individuals by the sophists” (159). That this will strike sensible readers as unlikely will lead them to reflect “on the limits of politics” (160)—just as the implausibility of Socrates’ plan for the perfectly just regime in the Republic should do.

The philosophic life, too, has its limitations, limitations demarcated by the dangers posed to it by political necessities. Despite his protestations of piety and law-abidingness and moderation and justice, the philosopher remains a suspect figure in the city, often seen as a corrupter of the young or a questioner of the city’s claims about the gods. Gorgias might help to defend the philosopher, but in the end he did not. Only Plato turned out to be the one who could present Socrates to generation after generation of citizens as a good man unjustly accused and executed.