Gorgias by Plato
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GORGIAS
by Plato
Translated by Benjamin Jowett
INTRODUCTION.
In several of the dialogues of Plato, doubts have arisen among his
interpreters as to which of the various subjects discussed in them is the
main thesis. The speakers have the freedom of conversation; no severe
rules of art restrict them, and sometimes we are inclined to think, with
one of the dramatis personae in the Theaetetus, that the digressions have
the greater interest. Yet in the most irregular of the dialogues there is
also a certain natural growth or unity; the beginning is not forgotten at
the end, and numerous allusions and references are interspersed, which form
the loose connecting links of the whole. We must not neglect this unity,
but neither must we attempt to confine the Platonic dialogue on the
Procrustean bed of a single idea. (Compare Introduction to the Phaedrus.)
Two tendencies seem to have beset the interpreters of Plato in this matter.
First, they have endeavoured to hang the dialogues upon one another by the
slightest threads; and have thus been led to opposite and contradictory
assertions respecting their order and sequence. The mantle of
Schleiermacher has descended upon his successors, who have applied his
method with the most various results. The value and use of the method has
been hardly, if at all, examined either by him or them. Secondly, they
have extended almost indefinitely the scope of each separate dialogue; in
this way they think that they have escaped all difficulties, not seeing
that what they have gained in generality they have lost in truth and
distinctness. Metaphysical conceptions easily pass into one another; and
the simpler notions of antiquity, which we can only realize by an effort,
imperceptibly blend with the more familiar theories of modern philosophers.
An eye for proportion is needed (his own art of measuring) in the study of
Plato, as well as of other great artists. We may hardly admit that the
moral antithesis of good and pleasure, or the intellectual antithesis of
knowledge and opinion, being and appearance, are never far off in a
Platonic discussion. But because they are in the background, we should not
bring them into the foreground, or expect to discern them equally in all
the dialogues.
There may be some advantage in drawing out a little the main outlines of
the building; but the use of this is limited, and may be easily
exaggerated. We may give Plato too much system, and alter the natural form
and connection of his thoughts. Under the idea that his dialogues are
finished works of art, we may find a reason for everything, and lose the
highest characteristic of art, which is simplicity. Most great works
receive a new light from a new and original mind. But whether these new
lights are true or only suggestive, will depend on their agreement with the
spirit of Plato, and the amount of direct evidence which can be urged in
support of them. When a theory is running away with us, criticism does a
friendly office in counselling moderation, and recalling us to the
indications of the text.
Like the Phaedrus, the Gorgias has puzzled students of Plato by the
appearance of two or more subjects. Under the cover of rhetoric higher
themes are introduced; the argument expands into a general view of the good
and evil of man. After making an ineffectual attempt to obtain a sound
definition of his art from Gorgias, Socrates assumes the existence of a
universal art of flattery or simulation having several branches:--this is
the genus of which rhetoric is only one, and not the highest species. To
flattery is opposed the true and noble art of life which he who possesses
seeks always to impart to others, and which at last triumphs, if not here,
at any rate in another world. These two aspects of life and knowledge
appear to be the two leading ideas of the dialogue. The true and the false
in individuals and states, in the treatment of the soul as well as of the
body, are conceived under the forms of true and false art. In the
development of this opposition there arise various other questions, such as
the two famous paradoxes of Socrates (paradoxes as they are to the world in
general, ideals as they may be more worthily called): (1) that to do is
worse than to suffer evil; and (2) that when a man has done evil he had
better be punished than unpunished; to which may be added (3) a third
Socratic paradox or ideal, that bad men do what they think best, but not
what they desire, for the desire of all is towards the good. That pleasure
is to be distinguished from good is proved by the simultaneousness of
pleasure and pain, and by the possibility of the bad having in certain
cases pleasures as great as those of the good, or even greater. Not merely
rhetoricians, but poets, musicians, and other artists, the whole tribe of
statesmen, past as well as present, are included in the class of
flatterers. The true and false finally appear before the judgment-seat of
the gods below.
The dialogue naturally falls into three divisions, to which the three
characters of Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles respectively correspond; and
the form and manner change with the stages of the argument. Socrates is
deferential towards Gorgias, playful and yet cutting in dealing with the
youthful Polus, ironical and sarcastic in his encounter with Callicles. In
the first division the question is asked--What is rhetoric? To this there
is no answer given, for Gorgias is soon made to contradict himself by
Socrates, and the argument is transferred to the hands of his disciple
Polus, who rushes to the defence of his master. The answer has at last to
be given by Socrates himself, but before he can even explain his meaning to
Polus, he must enlighten him upon the great subject of shams or flatteries.
When Polus finds his favourite art reduced to the level of cookery, he
replies that at any rate rhetoricians, like despots, have great power.
Socrates denies that they have any real power, and hence arise the three
paradoxes already mentioned. Although they are strange to him, Polus is at
last convinced of their truth; at least, they seem to him to follow
legitimately from the premises. Thus the second act of the dialogue
closes. Then Callicles appears on the scene, at first maintaining that
pleasure is good, and that might is right, and that law is nothing but the
combination of the many weak against the few strong. When he is confuted
he withdraws from the argument, and leaves Socrates to arrive at the
conclusion by himself. The conclusion is that there are two kinds of
statesmanship, a higher and a lower--that which makes the people better,
and that which only flatters them, and he exhorts Callicles to choose the
higher. The dialogue terminates with a mythus of a final judgment, in
which there will be no more flattery or disguise, and no further use for
the teaching of rhetoric.
The characters of the three interlocutors also correspond to the parts
which are assigned to them. Gorgias is the great rhetorician, now advanced
in years, who goes from city to city displaying his talents, and is
celebrated throughout Greece. Like all the Sophists in the dialogues of
Plato, he is vain and boastful, yet he has also a certain dignity, and is
treated by Socrates with considerable respect. But he is no match for him
in dialectics. Although he has been teaching rhetoric all his life, he is
still incapable of defining his own art. When his ideas begin to clear up,
he is unwilling to admit that rhetoric can be wholly separated from justice
and injustice, and this lingering sentiment of morality, or regard for
public opinion, enables Socrates to detect him in a contradiction. Like
Protagoras, he is described as of a generous nature; he expresses his
approbation of Socrates' manner of approaching a question; he is quite 'one
of Socrates' sort, ready to be refuted as well as to refute,' and very
eager that Callicles and Socrates should have the game out. He knows by
experience that rhetoric exercises great influence over other men, but he
is unable to explain the puzzle how rhetoric can teach everything and know
nothing.
Polus is an impetuous youth, a runaway 'colt,' as Socrates describes him,
who wanted originally to have taken the place of Gorgias under the pretext
that the old man was tired, and now avails himself of the earliest
opportunity to enter the lists. He is said to be the author of a work on
rhetoric, and is again mentioned in the Phaedrus, as the inventor of
balanced or double forms of speech (compare Gorg.; Symp.). At first he is
violent and ill-mannered, and is angry at seeing his master overthrown.
But in the judicious hands of Socrates he is soon restored to good-humour,
and compelled to assent to the required conclusion. Like Gorgias, he is
overthrown because he compromises; he is unwilling to say that to do is
fairer or more honourable than to suffer injustice. Though he is
fascinated by the power of rhetoric, and dazzled by the splendour of
success, he is not insensible to higher arguments. Plato may have felt
that there would be an incongruity in a youth maintaining the cause of
injustice against the world. He has never heard the other side of the
question, and he listens to the paradoxes, as they appear to him, of
Socrates with evident astonishment. He can hardly understand the meaning
of Archelaus being miserable, or of rhetoric being only useful in self-
accusation. When the argument with him has fairly run out,
Callicles, in whose house they are assembled, is introduced on the stage:
he is with difficulty convinced that Socrates is in earnest; for if these
things are true, then, as he says with real emotion, the foundations of
society are upside down. In him another type of character is represented;
he is neither sophist nor philosopher, but man of the world, and an
accomplished Athenian gentleman. He might be described in modern language
as a cynic or materialist, a lover of power and also of pleasure, and
unscrupulous in his means of attaining both. There is no desire on his
part to offer any compromise in the interests of morality; nor is any
concession made by him. Like Thrasymachus in the Republic, though he is
not of the same weak and vulgar class, he consistently maintains that might
is right. His great motive of action is political ambition; in this he is
characteristically Greek. Like Anytus in the Meno, he is the enemy of the
Sophists; but favours the new art of rhetoric, which he regards as an
excellent weapon of attack and defence. He is a despiser of mankind as he
is of philosophy, and sees in the laws of the state only a violation of the
order of nature, which intended that the stronger should govern the weaker
(compare Republic). Like other men of the world who are of a speculative
turn of mind, he generalizes the bad side of human nature, and has easily
brought down his principles to his practice. Philosophy and poetry alike
supply him with distinctions suited to his view of human life. He has a
good will to Socrates, whose talents he evidently admires, while he
censures the puerile use which he makes of them. He expresses a keen
intellectual interest in the argument. Like Anytus, again, he has a
sympathy with other men of the world; the Athenian statesmen of a former
generation, who showed no weakness and made no mistakes, such as Miltiades,
Themistocles, Pericles, are his favourites. His ideal of human character
is a man of great passions and great powers, which he has developed to the
utmost, and which he uses in his own enjoyment and in the government of
others. Had Critias been the name instead of Callicles, about whom we know
nothing from other sources, the opinions of the man would have seemed to
reflect the history of his life.
And now the combat deepens. In Callicles, far more than in any sophist or
rhetorician, is concentrated the spirit of evil against which Socrates is
contending, the spirit of the world, the spirit of the many contending
against the one wise man, of which the Sophists, as he describes them in
the Republic, are the imitators rather than the authors, being themselves
carried away by the great tide of public opinion. Socrates approaches his
antagonist warily from a distance, with a sort of irony which touches with
a light hand both his personal vices (probably in allusion to some scandal
of the day) and his servility to the populace. At the same time, he is in
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