Gorgias: Using the Rhetoric to Destroy the Rhetoric
On coercion through obfuscation
The Platonic dialogues have few more fiery arguments than those depicted in Gorgias. This is entirely intentional, as the dialogue is explicitly framed as a battle. But on a deeper level, I suspect Plato has a more subtle intention behind the dialogue’s unusually incendiary tone. Not only is Socrates playing rhetorician in his refutation of rhetoric, but he is demonstrating what it is he really believes rhetoric to be: a kind of violence of language.
Not violence in the sense of mere insults or offensive gestures, but rather a means of coercion, whereby one’s reason is inhibited, and beliefs can be deliberately formed by an external agent without your conscious consent. This is hinted at in the utterly paradoxical explanation given by Gorgias as to what rhetoric is:
Something, Socrates, that is in very truth the greatest boon, for it brings freedom to mankind in general and to each man dominion over others in his own country.
This seems absurd-but then, the real Gorgias lavished in the absurd, demonstrating his rhetorical innovations by presenting compelling arguments for deliberately ridiculous theses (his lost work On Nature or the Non-Existent argues, among others, the thesis that nothing exists). Rhetoric offers us freedom from the truth, and without the truth, it is implied, we can dominate one another in peace.
This doesn’t seem outwardly appealing, but Gorgias nonetheless offers one particularly compelling argument for rhetoric.
I have often, along with my brother and with other physicians, visited one of their patients who refused to drink his medicine or submit to the surgeon’s knife or cautery, and when the doctor was unable to persuade them, I did so, by no other art but rhetoric… The rhetorician is competent to speak against anybody on any subject, and to prove himself more convincing before a crowd on practically every topic he wishes, but he should not any more rob the doctors-or any other craftsmen either-of their reputation, merely because he has this power.
This is a totally sensible argument-rhetoric is a legitimate skill which makes a legitimate contribution to society, and to blame the art for the misuse of it by unsavory individuals is absurd. Socrates does not pursue the point, because it is obviously correct, but likely suspects it is made disingenuously-Gorgias may be able to find good uses for rhetoric, but knows that these are not the uses his students put them to, and doesn’t care. It is perhaps at this point that Socrates decides to abandon the usual elenchus for the rhetorical techniques he wishes to repudiate-speaking the language his interlocutors understand.1
Once Socrates has caught Gorgias in a contradiction, unable to clearly state whether a rhetorician can or cannot do evil, Polus, a new student of Gorgias, interjects. Socrates’ treatment of Polus is a display of vicious debate bro behavior seen nowhere else in the dialogues, and is our first sign that Socrates has taken a different tack in this setting:
Polus: What is it you say then? Do you hold that rhetoric is flattery?
Socrates: No, I said ‘a part of flattery.’ Can you not remember at your age, Polus? What will you do when you are older?
Polus: Do you think then that good rhetoricians are considered but poor creatures in the cities because they are flatterers?
Socrates: Is that a question, or the beginning of a speech?
Socrates subdues Polus, because Polus has not fully advanced through the teachings of Gorgias, and is not yet truly nihilistic. Engaging with the question of whether it is better to suffer or inflict wrong, Polus chooses the latter, but does allow that to inflict wrong is more shameful than to suffer it. Having acknowledged shame, he necessarily acknowledges some standard by which it is possible for acts to be judged shameful. Socrates appeals to this standard in suggesting that fair things are fair insofar as they are pleasurable or good (here used in connection with “useful”). This being true, the opposite of the fair, the shameful, must be either evil, painful, or both. Since it is not more painful to inflict wrong than to cause it, but it is shameful, this shamefulness must derive from the fact that it is evil. Polus was prepared to embrace a shameful act, but he cannot stomach an act which he himself acknowledges to be both shameful and evil, and therefore concedes that it would be better to suffer the wrong than inflict it.
It is here that the argument is taken up by Callicles, Gorgias’ more strident and radical student. Callicles emerges in Plato as a more able and ferocious advocate of the idea of “natural justice” than its more famous defender, Thrasymachus of the Republic, and this makes Socrates’ thrashing of him all the more satisfying. We can only imagine how giddy Plato himself was when he was writing this stuff.
For Callicles, natural justice is not at all far from the Nietschzean Will to Power, which he anticipates by more than two millennia, and through it he is able to negate the shamefulness of wrong acts which forced Polus to reject them.
For by nature everything that is worse is more shameful, suffering wrong for instance, but by convention it is more shameful to do it. For to suffer a wrong is not even fit for a man but only for a slave, for whom it is better to be dead than alive, since when wronged and outraged he is unable to help himself or any other for whom he cares. But in my opinon those who framed the laws are the weaker folk, the majority. And accordingly they frame the laws for themselves and their own advantage, and so too with their approval and censure, and to prevent the stronger who are able to overrach them from gaining the advantage over them, they frighten them by saying that to overreach others is shameful and evil, and injustice consists in seeking the advantage over others. For they are satisfied, I suppose, if being inferior they enjoy equality of status. That is the reason why seeking an advantage over the many is by convention said to be wrong and shameful, and they call injustice. But in my view nature herself makes it plain that it is right for the better to have the advantage over the worse, the more able over the less. And both among all animals and in entire states and races of mankind it is plain that this is the case-that right is recognized to be the sovereignty and advantage of the stronger over the weaker. For what justification had Xerxes in invading Greece or his father in invading Scythia? And there are countless other similar instances one might mention. But I imagine that these men act in accordance with the true nature of right, yes and, by heaven, according to nature’s own law, though not perhaps the law we frame. We mold the best and strongest among ourselves, catching them young like lion cubs, and by spells and incantations we make slaves of them, saying that they must be content with equality and that this is what is right and fair. But if a man arises endowed with a nature sufficiently strong, he will, I believe, shake off all these controls, burst his fetters, and break loose. And trampling upon our scraps of paper, our spells and incantations, and all our unnatural conventions, he rises up and reveals himself our master who was once our slave, and there shines forth nature’s true justice.
There is much to say about Plato’s depiction of the soul and why he recurrently depicts and refutes a naturalist position, held by the Sophists, which dismisses reason and law for pleasure and power, but for now it’s more important to focus on how Plato sets about doing so.
Quickly, Socrates works Callicles through two problems with his argument-that, firstly, the many are the stronger, and not only are they the stronger, but they are in agreement with Socrates, not Callicles, that it is more shameful to do a wrong act than to suffer one. Undaunted, Callicles specifies that it wasn’t sheer physical might he meant by strength, but superiority in wisdom. Specifically, we eventually find, he believes it is the wisest in the administration of the state who by nature deserves the most. This provides Socrates a neat segue into one of his favorite hobby horses:
Socrates: Tell me, my friend, what is their relation to themselves? Are they rulers or subjects?
Callicles: What do you mean?
Socrates: I mean that every man is his own master, or is there no need for him to govern himself, but only to govern others?
Callicles: What do you mean by governing himself?
Socrates: Nothing very subtle, but merely the popular notion of being temperate and in control of oneselve, and mastering one’s own pleasures and appetites.
To understand where the argument is going, we need to have some idea of the Platonic soul, divided in some way (either into multiple soul parts, multiple hierarchically ordered souls, or one soul with parts tethered to the body) between the rational (logos), the willful (thymos), and the appetitive (eros).
Depending on what dialogue we are drawing from, it may be claimed that all three of the soul parts have desires, or only the willful and appetitive, and the two are mediated by reason. But in either case, we have a problem for natural justice, and the naturally just man: these desiring parts conflict with one another, and their conflict must be adjudicated in some way.
This adjudication, in Plato’s well-ordered soul, is uncontroversially undertaken by reason, who best apprehends what is best for the whole person, and which is consistently identified in all the dialogues in which it is discussed as the most important, and immortal, part of the soul. In Platonic psychology, then, you are your reasoning faculty, more essentially than anything else. Thus, to have a well-ordered soul is to be fully consistent with reason, and to be able to hold these conflicting pleasures in check-not wholly abandoning them (at least during one’s life), but picking and choosing which to indulge, and which to dismiss.
Callicles’ natural tyrant fails to meet this necessary criteria for happiness, and is thus shown to be a fraudulent depiction of justice. Socrates adopts a style wholly unlike himself, delivering a diatribe to the assembled crowd that tonally verges on a sales pitch for a cult:
But amid all these arguments, while others were refuted, this alone stands steadfast, that we should be more on our guard against doing than suffering wrong, and that before all things a man should study not to seem but to be good, whether in private or in public life, and that if anyone proves evil in any way, he should be chastised, and next to being good the second-best thing is to become good and to make amends by punishment, and that we should avoid every form of flattery, whether to ourselves or to others, whether to few or to many, and that rhetoric and every other activity should ever be so employed, to attain justice. If you will listen to me then, you will follow me where on your arrival you will win happiness both in life and after death, as our account reveals. And you may let anyone despise you as a fool and do you outrage, if he wishes, yes, and you may cheerfully let him strike you with that humiliating blow, for you will suffer no harm thereby if you really are a good man and an honorable, and pursue virtue. And after such training in common together, then, at last, if we think fit, we may enter public life, or we may take counsel together on whatever course suggests itself, when we are better able to take counsel than now. For it seems to me shameful that, being what apparently at this moment we are, we should consider ourselves to be fine fellows, when we can never hold to the same views about the same questions-and those too the most vital of all-so deplorably uneducated are we! Then let us follow the guidance of the argument now made manifest, which reveals to use that this is the best way of life-to live and die in the pursuit of righteousness and all other virtues. Let us follow this, I say, inviting others to join us, not that which you believe in and commend to me, for it is worthless, dear Callicles.
Socrates thus dismantles rhetoric in the style of the rhetorician. It is an interesting choice by Plato-is it merely a dig at the Sophists, who’s best argument for rhetoric is that it’s a useful tool to get stupid people to act in their own best interests, knowing how to stir the emotions of those who literally can’t be reasoned with? Or, in doing so, does Socrates (and, by extension, Plato) admit that rhetoric is a necessary tool in a functioning society, a conclusion which seems at least partially inevitable if we are to believe that he is sincere in Republic, when he suggests that the guardians needs to be brainwashed to believe they all grew up out of the earth, that they are all immediate relatives of one another, and so on. If so, how can it be dismissed as an illegitimate art?
Like any questions about Plato’s actual beliefs, we can never really know the answer. What the dialogue does offer is picture of rhetoric as existing on a spectrum of coercion-a tool used to make people take leave of their reason and yield to the will of another, a kind of “flattery” offering a pale reproduction of the rigorous exercise of reason known as dialectical thought (noesis) which had the capacity to actually lead to new knowledge, as opposed to merely true belief. Among other flatteries is cooking, by the way, which Plato regarded as a pleasurable false substitute for medicine-real philosophers presumably live on cold barley porridge and dandelion greens.
Alongside that is a compelling argument for the contradictory nature of desires, necessitating some sort of criteria of choice between them. This criteria is, of course, the forms, particularly the form of justice, beauty, and the good, unchanging standards against which phenomena can be evaluated. But even in light of the strong arguments against the theory of forms, Platonic psychology remains the bedrock critique of the relativism introduced by the Sophists, in which truth is replaced by structures of language and a will to power which is, unfortunately, characterized as “natural justice”. The irony of Plato is that, in his repudiation of nature and natural philosophy, he laid the groundwork for a more fully developed naturalist ethics.
This interpretation of the dialogue is heavily influenced by Karen Burton’s study Formal Analysis of Plato’s Gorgias